It’s hard to draw any real conclusions from the numbers, as the clock speeds for the two CPUs aren’t listed. Without knowing that it’s hard to compare the processors to current products in the market, but the Ontario is looking a lot more “ready” than the Llano. The only numbers on offer is measured floating point and integer speeds in million ops/sec, The Ontario comes out with 1,351 million ops/sec for floating point and 3,047 million ops/sec for integer performance running Windows Server 2008 of all things.
The total score is adequate to the spirit of the times. Multicore solutions are favored, even with a smaller cache. Now without peculiarities, though: 16 benchmarks out of 57 preferred fewer cores and larger L2 cache. We are tempted to say that certain programmers are to blame for not being able to fully use the resources of modern CPUs. But we're still optimistic, because such benchmarks are in the minority. As for practical recommendations, in case of Athlon II CPUs, three cores are definitely better than two.
The problem lies in that StarCraft II will only utilize two cores and as a result a Phenom II X4 965 will not be any faster than a Phenom II X2 555. This proved to be a real issue for older quad-core processors like the Core 2 Quad Q6600, which delivered very poor performance even when overclocked to 3.0GHz. When testing we found that a minimum frame rate of 30fps was ideal, sadly the Q6600 only allowed for a minimum frame rate of 22fps when coupled with the mighty GeForce GTX 480.
Well that sucks. Come one Blizzard. Take advantage of more than two cores. This is not console.
On the performance side of things we don't see anything new out of the driver. It's funny, but when talking to people it seems that most are sitting on the 10.4 drivers still, which seem to have been the best this year. To be honest, if there's nothing that stands out for you in the release notes, there's no real reason to upgrade.
AMD's ATI graphics unit took 51 percent of the standalone, or "discrete," graphics chip market compared to Nvidia's share that was just shy of 49 percent, according to Mercury Research, a Cave Creek, Arizona firm that tracks graphics chip shipments. This is a sharp reversal from the same period a year ago when Nvidia had about 59 percent of the market and AMD had just under 41 percent.
So it has not been the best week over at Nvidia. The GeForce 460 should help stop the bleeding a bit.
As it turns out, that's baloney. Apple just updated its computer systems, and the new iMacs and Mac Pro systems now come exclusively with AMD graphics inside. Apple already offered AMD's ATI Radeon chips as either standard or upgrade graphics on some system models, but the difference now is that you can't get an NVIDIA (Nasdaq: NVDA) GeForce card in your desktop Mac even if you wanted to.