AMD Cleaning Intel's Clocks 6721

On Tuesday 06 December 2005 19:57, William Poaster stood up and spoke the following words to the mbuttes incomp.os.linux.advocacy...:

Both Intel and AMD have great CPU's out, and both Intel and AMD CPU's have shortcomings.

The main shortcoming of Intel x86-64 CPU's at this moment is that unlike AMD CPU's, they still use an external memory controller and that the CPU's in their SMP systems have to communicate with eachother at FSB speed, while AMD's use the HyperTransport bus.

The main shortcoming of AMD's x86 CPU's at this moment is that they're still stuck on the older DDR standards and that they lack hyperthreading.

AMD's are far more power-efficient than Intels and are generally faster at the same clock speeds, but the latter applies to single threads. In today's IT landscape, multi-threading is a necessity.

AMD's also lack Intel's overheating protection which shuts down the CPU to protect it when the core temperature goes up too high. On the other hand, AMD's seem more resilient at higher core temperatures, but since the protection mechanism is absent, you could end up frying an AMD.

My personal gripe with AMD-based systems lies with the chipsets used. AMD-platforms almost always have to make use of third party chipsets such as nVidia, ALi-ULi or VIA, and I'm not a fan of either of those. Conceptually, the nForce chipset is very promising, but it also seems less stable, and in general, that's also what applies to AMD-based computers in general - my guess is that this is because of the chipsets used.

Lastly, Intel has already had the Itanium out for a long time, while AMD still focuses on the x86 architecture. The 64-bit extensions to the x86 platform were first developed by AMD, and Intel has only countered that by doing the same thing on the Xeons and Pentium 4's. It's all market-driven.

What I would really like to see from AMD and from Intel is the commitment to really new 64-bit CPU architectures - e.g. something ^ la UltraSPARC, MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC, et al - that are far more efficient than the x86, and to provide reliable chipset solutions for them.

But then again, what either Intel or AMD do is purely market-driven. They are eachother's sworn enemies and that's what influences their decisions to the highest degree.

In the meantime, truly innovative CPU designs seem to come from other sources, such as the IBM-Toshiba cell-CPU, or the newest developments regarding multi-threaded and multi-cored CPU's at either Sun or HP - I forgot which one actually, but it was posted here (?) earlier this week.

-- With kind regards,

*Aragorn* (Registered GNU-Linux user #223157)