Quote Originally Posted by JumpingJack View Post
However, it is one thing to say Intel does not scale as well it is quite another to say AMD is better because they scale better. The better scaling afforded to AMD does not overcome the absolute difference, and again the data shows this. So (and this is just an example with numbers, no meaning really) if Intel shows 30% better performance single threaded, it may only show 15% better multithreaded over AMD because they don't scale well, however they are still 15% better overall.
I am talking about scaling tiny (relatively) small functions in one application. This type of scaling needs much more talk between threads. You don't have time (that will make the scaling worse than single threading) to allocate memory for each thread etc. it is also possible to use threads for fetching memory for other threads so that the memory is located in the cache when they want to use it.
I think a saw somewhere that nehalem had about 5 times the performance compared to Core 2 in that type of scaling for one sample. Intel is soon going to release tools for developers to make it easier for them to scale there apps.