Originally posted by: bradley
Intel is just too firmly entrenched where it counts for their marketshare to erode so quickly; it's going to take years, not months. But certainly, one has to admit, AMD is really starting to enjoy the fruits of their labor. I'd even say Intel's decision to take a brute-force approach is starting to hurt them, while AMDs elegant efficiency is increasingly relevant.
But guess what? As consumers, we must hope Intel is able to get back on track. Otherwise, without fierce competition from both AMD & Intel, you can expect the timing of price decreases and technology increases to slow down..... considerably.
Actually, correct me if I am wrong, Intel is one with the elegant approach, and AMD has the brute force approach.
AMD's current product line A64 is a rehash of the old Athlon, which incorporates the same design philosophy as Pentium3, Pentium 2 and Pentium Pro

now that s a long way back. IIRC, they all have pretty much the same stuff, IF, trnaslate (CISC -> RISC), decode, OOO engine and executiion engin, follow by a some type of reording buffer and a write. now they can slice and dice to any stage they want, but its pretty much the same design way way way back.
Pentium 4, on the other hand, is a totally different beast, its a new design, fresh, never been done before, intersting, and their thread level parallel procesing (HT) is just wicked cool. uops, super super long pipline (how did they route that thing?), OOO engine that are based on uops and their simple ALU does 2 cycles per clock...how did they manage to track all that? And I think thier ILP and TLP are very well implemented.
personally I have A64. their on-die memory controller is what gives those super fast framerates in games