End of an Era, Off to the Unknown

The endgame is here. Intel and AMD are now standing on the abyss with the final releases of the Pentium 4 3.2Ghz and the AMD XP 3200+ with Intel's 800Mhz FSB vs. AMD's dual channel 400 MHz FSB. The future of course is AMD's 64bit Opteron and the Pentium V from Intel. I've read about 6 reviews this morning but I really think that 5 of them are just "here's the benchmarks thank you" the one that stands out is from Toms Hardware and you can read it here.

Things are coming to a head in the next phase of the processor war. With testing finishing up on the Opteron in Dresden Intel is sitting back ready to fire off its Pentium V and all this is just in time for the Christmas shopping season. With the advent of new games, many that require clock speeds in excess of 1 GHz now days many people are waiting for the latest to come out to upgrade. I'm definitely looking at the 64bit Opteron's which are supposed to show great performance with 64bit programs and your 32bit OS's and software will still work just like the days when everyone moved from the 16bit 286 processor to the 32 bit 386 processor. This is something Intel decided not to do and I think they're going to regret it.

The market is not exactly jumping on the 64bit software at the same exact time as their release of the Opteron but if you don't have backwards compatibility then you have to wait. And since the Opteron can run both software designers can still write 32bit applications and possibly put in 64bit optimizations to speed up their favorite applications. I'm extremely interested in any 64bit graphics compression programs such as DVIX that may come out because they will show great performance. And some games such as DOOM III have also been written for 64bit processors so if you get one of these your buddies better watch out!