Originally posted by: abomb
Alright, I?m going to try to field this question the best I can. Once upon a time Intel had a processor called Tejas, it had an integrated memory controller that integrated with RAMBUS ram. Bad idea, RAMBUS went the way of the dodo and Intel got burned. I was actually told that even back in the days of the 386 Intel had dabbled in integrated memory controllers. So just to let everyone know, Intel has been there done that. The reason Intel continues to stick with the FSB is obvious, so there cannot be a repeat of the RAMBUS and I would say that is a smart choice. AMD has really lucked out that a new type of memory has not taken hold, although they are now (finally) going to support DDR2, about a year or so after Intel first supported it. As its been covered above integrated memory controllers can be a very bad thing, if memory changes the controller has to change, I don?t need to get into that further its obvious. As for hypertransport I really hate you burst everyones bubbles, but to my knowledge it has not changed since its inception on the T-Bred Athlon? (Feel free to correct me if I?m wrong) As it is FSB technology will catch up to any benefit that hypertransport has minus a little latency very soon, thanks to DDR2.
With that covered let us summarize for the uniformed AMD zealots out there. AMD?s integrated memory controller was a gamble and it worked. Hypertransport has not changed since its inception. FSB continues to evolve pretty consistently. Intel has made 65nm chips, and is currently working on the 35nm manufacturing process. AMD has yet to even manufacture 65nm chips.
The next point I will make is Netburst. Now to everyone who says it is ?inferior? to AMD?s architecture. I hate to rain on your parade but your wrong, unless of course you provide a scope to your criticism. The Netburst pipeline is designed for a different kind of programming then the AMD (?short pipeline?) processors. Today?s programs are much more efficient on the ?short pipe? processors, but there may come a time when the longer pipeline will be an advantage and Netburst might show its ugly face again. If someone would like to explain exactly how that works they can go ahead.
Also I am not an Intel fan boy. In fact I own both brands of processors. In the past I had owned an Athlon 2400+ and I absolutely loved that box, which sadly recently died. In fact come to think of it as I upgrade I alternate company by some happenstance, so I am really not partial to either company.
I would like to also point out I do not want AMD or Intel to go out of business. I do like seeing the market share even out, that?s a good thing. This shift of market share requires that Intel be competitive and that requires them to innovate. Look at AMD for example, they haven?t done anything since 2003. Intel is even worse, and AMD capitalized by not innovating and just churning out the same old thing to make profit, a possibly cause why they have not switch to 65nm a possible cause why they wont support DDR2 until their next processor is near ready? I would hazard a guess to either they have trouble with these technologies or that?s the answer.
The last thing that troubles me is the extreme anti-intel attitude that certain technology review/preview services have taken. Misrepresentation of facts, and a lot of journalistic license have really started to irk me. That and the simple irrelevant comparisons that I see benchmark wise and the conclusions people draw from them. One recently brought to my attention was a 2.0 ghz P-M vs. 2.0 ghz Turion. All seems well correct? Nay my friend, The Turion laptop was running DDR 400 (very nice DDR400 if I may add), and the P-M laptop was running DDR2@533. Now I think most of you will know that DDR 400 is significantly faster then DDR2. So how can this be a ?comparison? of the two processors. I would say it would be a good comparison of the two notebooks, but not of the performance of the processors. Feel free to correct me if I?m wrong by saying the DDR is significantly faster then the DDR2. Unless I?m mistaken and I could be DDR2@800 should be pretty equivalent to DDR400.
Thank you and I hope you appreciated this small tome of mine, I did enjoy writing it as well.
🙂
I was silly to not to comment on something significant. AMD has really done one thing to note significantly better then Intel and they launched a mainstream consumer grade 64 bit processor. I do give them that, they accomplished that very well. They are by no means the first, I believe either Motorola or IBM hold that crown. But that is one accomplishment I give to them, while Intel only slapped on their 64bit support rather lackadaisically only because AMD did first.
i think actually tejas was a much more next gen cpu.
i believe the cpu you are talking about was called the timna. it was supposed to be celeronesque and have an integrated rambus controller and even work with integrated graphcis for really low cost PCs.
had rambus not completely failed it was basically going to be a pentium M like cpu. probably was a good idea too as it would have made for very simple motherboards (with a serial ram type and no memory controller on the northbridge the board would have been very simple).
unfortunately rambus sucked (not from a technical standpoint, but from a we are a bastard company patent standpoint, because technically it was a good idea).
and you do make a very good point about netburst. the main problem with netburst was that people at intel had not anticipated that leakage current would well become such a problem. the netburst architecture is really made for things like streaming media which really doesnt brand much, which well are just finally starting to take off. and had prescott say scaled to 5ghz, i think intel would still be in an ok position where no one would be bashing them at every turn.
even apple did not know that the 90nm architecture would not scale well (hence the g5 never hitting 3ghz) yet no one bashes them (thena gain most hardware sites do not cover macs).
yes it is very popular to bash intel now (i'm assuming because they are large and goliath-like, unlike say apple or amd), i mean it is easy to in hindsight, but in general they are a really good engineering company. they do sometime do things that area little "ahead of their time" such as netburst with streaming media (hence the not coincidental arrival of sse / sse2/ sse3 which is designed for decoding those things). but i still believe had it not been for the leakage issue that it wasnt that bad an idea.
i mean another thing that intel did that was "ahead of its time" was the 386. at the time of the 386 almost NO ONE used 32bit apps. at most people ran windows 3.0 which was all 16bit (i think only windows for workgroups 3.11 was 32bit at all, and that was basically the "PRO" version at the time, thus the "workgroups" part). so yeah.. the 386 was 32bit before anyone needed it, and that may have played a part in intel NOT putting out 64bit right away since they thought mabye they could wait a while and release itanium first and let it trickle down. i am not sure itanium was the ideal architecture either, but it is probably better than x86 from a general "not a kludge" perspective, and as a software engineer i tend to feel much less awful about that since x86 is pretty awful at this point and extending it yet again is even more awful.
it probably would have been BETTER had amd not extended it, so we could finally get rid of all the total garbage that x86 has. not to mention no one in the consumer desktop space even uses it still. the itanium now if it was manufactured at 65nm would actually be fairly small and economical if it did not have say 6mb of cache. a 2mb variant at 65nm would actually be affordable but it never took off obviously. i suppose intel is a bit more forward thinking than amd, since well in a way what AMD has done has somewhat set back cpus though they gave the public what they wanted.
so yeah i think all the intel bashing is unjustified, but well people like to jump on bandwagons and be part of the "winning team" so to speak. oh well whatever. and like the last poster who i applaud for also taking this unpopular stance i'm trying to be a little bit objective here. i know i know, wtf right?
also i'd like to say i have had both types of cpus. my first own computer that i got when i was 14 was a p100. my 2nd computer after that was a k6-200 engineering sample. after that a k6-2/450, a bunch of athlon, some p3s, some p4s, an athlon 2500. i have even had an athlon 64 2600 engineering sample. i've had an athlon 64 3000 as well and a pentium D 820 currently (the board in the amd64 actually shorted out, and i didnt bother to replace that machine). the last guy is right again on the AMD hasnt done anything since 2003 (whcih is when opteron came out). they may fall behind soon, as intel has a LOT of new stuff on the horizon and amd just has many more varients of the same architecture on a more antiquated production proces. so it will be interesting to see if people start jumping bandwagons again. and well based on that conclusion i actually just bought some intel stock as a long term investment.
