Pentium D - Comparison To Athlon 64 X2

Comparison To Athlon 64 X2

The competing Athlon 64 X2, although running at lower clock rates and lacking Hyper-threading, had some significant advantages over the Pentium D, such as an integrated memory controller, a high-speed HyperTransport bus, a shorter pipeline (12 stages compared to the Pentium D's 31), and better floating point performance, more than offsetting the difference in raw clock speed. Also, while the Athlon 64 X2 inherited mature multi-core control logic from the multi-core Opteron, the Pentium D was seemingly rushed to production and essentially consisted of two CPUs in the same package. Indeed, shortly after the launch of the mainstream Pentium D branded processors (26 May 2005) and the Athlon 64 X2 (31 May 2005), a consensus arose that AMD's implementation of multi-core was superior to that of the Pentium D. As a result of this and other factors, AMD surpassed Intel in CPU sales at US retail stores for a period of time, although Intel retained overall market leadership because of its exclusive relationships with direct sellers such as Dell.