Stefan Mileschin

Former pony express outfit Wells Fargo has been looking at Intel's latest server processor, Romley, and claims that it should see off AMD's finest.

According to Barons, Wells Fargo analyst David Wong dashed off a note to clients that data from the industry standards group SPEC (Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation) show Romley chips having 60 to 70 percent better integer performance than Intel's previous Westmere family of server processors, and 75 to 85 percent better floating point performance than anything AMD has.

Wong thinks that Romley should give Intel a boost from chip sales this quarter.

He was expecting Romley to be about a third faster than previous offerings. But he was surprised by the final spec. It means that Intel has "finally overtaken AMD in floating point performance."

This means that with Romley, Intel now has a clear performance lead over AMD's Bulldozer-based server chips, admittedly at a higher price. It seems that Intel receives a benefit from its Advanced Vector Extension (AVX) instruction set.

As a result, he is telling people to buy Intel shares, claiming that the company will outperform its own predictions.

http://news.techeye.net/chips/romley...floating-point