Drafted Box Art for 4 and 8 Core Bulldozer CPU's

[drizek]

(they had to cross-license x86 as a matter of law, but not EPIC).

Funny that Intel then had to license amd64.

 

[Makaveli]

I like the first one also.

 

[Phynaz]

Oh boy. Somewhere on the planet a Phynaz just shuddered uncontrollably.

Lol, I didn't see this until Cookie Monster put this in his sig.

 

[Anomaly1964]

Cool art work, always fun to mess around like that...

 

[nyker96]

I personally like the second one, nice and classy for a high end product.

 

[wahdangun]

Having been "in the thick of things" at the time of Merced's pre-launch planning, etc, I would say that there is no way you can convince me that Intel invested as much as they did in Itanium with the plan being to capture no more TAM than that presented by the big-iron markets.

I was distinctly given the understanding the plan was for EPIC to be Intel's "way out" of the limitations that come with x86, both microarchitectural and economic (they had to cross-license x86 as a matter of law, but not EPIC).

AMD saw this handwriting on the wall and did everything they could to erode the possibility of Intel (and thus the market) abandoning x86...AMD's very existence depended on them preventing Itanium from becoming successful in the desktop arena.

To that end we saw AMD escalate the timeline for 64bit insertion into x86 processors.

Once it became obvious that Itanium was not going to penetrate the desktop/consumer space the focus of Itanium changed, naturally, as did the focus of the desktop x86 lines. Itanium was redirected towards securing only the very top-end while the P4 was given 64bit and a handful of minimalistic RAS features to compete with the 4S and less workstation and mini-server space.

What we can say is that the Itanium that is in the market today was most definitely not the Itanium we would have in our desktops had Intel's original plans that motivated the funding for the creation of Merced had come to fruition. The Itanium of today is intentionally tuned/engineered to serve the big-iron market.

So we can't really look at it and say "I am so glad AMD saved us from that!" because "that" is not what we'd have had AMD not initiated their drastic maneuvers to secure their future in selling x86-based CPU's by ensuring the market itself would continue to exist.

no, if there was no AMD we will still in single core gigahertz monster and it will be a nightmare for software developer and we will have very expensive CPU.

 

[videoclone]

no, if there was no AMD we will still in single core gigahertz monster and it will be a nightmare for software developer and we will have very expensive CPU.

If AMD wasnt around we would still be using 800Mhz Celeron's today ( 2011 ) They would cost about $600 dollars. and the 2-3Ghz CPU's would cost about 5 Grand. $5000

The market would have moved over to GPU compute and intel would be almost dead in the water with x86 and Itanium becomes the new CPU couldnt hold a candle to the new GPU's power as the many years of ATI Vs Nvidia would have created GPU power houses and with no AMD to puch intel for faster chips they would have fallen way way behind. Giving the Graphics cards the room to grow..
but mind you without a fast CPU the graphics cards may have also stoped advancing as every game would of been cpu limited so would of been no point upgrading your graphics card

so who knows either way i am very glad we didnt live in that alternat world without AMD

 

[Makaveli]

If AMD wasnt around we would still be using 800Mhz Celeron's today ( 2011 ) They would cost about $600 dollars. and the 2-3Ghz CPU's would cost about 5 Grand. $5000

The market would have moved over to GPU compute and intel would be almost dead in the water with x86 and Itanium becomes the new CPU couldnt hold a candle to the new GPU's power as the many years of ATI Vs Nvidia would have created GPU power houses and with no AMD to puch intel for faster chips they would have fallen way way behind. Giving the Graphics cards the room to grow..
but mind you without a fast CPU the graphics cards may have also stoped advancing as every game would of been cpu limited so would of been no point upgrading your graphics card

so who knows either way i am very glad we didnt live in that alternat world without AMD

Ok ms cleo,

No one knows what would have happen if there was no AMD.

You don't that someone else might have stepped up to the plate.

And I think its ludicrous to think we would have ever seen a $5000 cpu in the consumer market even with one player.

 

[videoclone]

Think about how costly server cpu's would be! $10,000 a pop i would say!