Son Goku
No lover of dogma
- Joined
- 14 Jun 2004
- Messages
- 1,980
One can be guarenteed that if AMD does something, Intel will aim to do it next, and vice versa... And looking at the situtation, Intel does have the advantage in terms of fabs. AMD's advantage comes with the ex-DEC engineers they managed to soak up. OK, 2 seperate instances with DEC's business going under, which relate to this.
In the first instance, Intel purchased DEC's fab (which added to their own mfg capability), though DEC kept their R&D team. Intel however, as I remember acquired some of their employees involved with the fab itself (outside the development area, per the agreement). Some of those employees however, had decided to leave Intel and went to work for AMD of their own accord...
Following this, Compaq for a time acquired the Alpha, until they dispenced with it, chosing instead to go with the IA-64 platform for their high end servers and what not... The former Alpha dev team, largely got soaked up by AMD again... In fact, even before this happened (aka hyper-transport being used on the AMD Irongate chipset), DEC and AMD had been business partners of sorts (hyper-transport was developed by DEC)...
But when it comes to actual manufacturing, AMD has Dresdan, and they might be in the process of developing another fab. Otherwise? Intel, and it's undeniable has the manufacturing capability that AMD could dream of...
I think AMD did catch Intel with their pants down when they came out with the 1 GHz Tbird, having beat Intel to the 1 GHz mark first, and with the Athlon arch (fairly new) could continue to clock higher. The older P6 arch, introed with the PPro and carried up through the PIII just didn't have much more room for clock increases, without a die shrinkage they weren't then ready for.
As such, it was probably a business decision to rush the P4 out (with Willemette) before it was arguably ready (and included many of the things planned for it). Unfortunatetly for Intel, having a 1.5 GHz Willy that under-performs a 1 GHz PIII in benchmark after benchmark doesn't look good, and really does epitomize to customers what AMD told people for years, clock isn't everything...
But since then the P4s got better (Northwood, and then the 3.0c) and AMD was left playing catchup. Then the Athlon 64 came out... You can be pretty assured they'll try to stay kneck in kneck with each other. AKA, AMD plans quad core, Intel will plan something to compete (or one up it). AMD will respond to one up that... Further, Intel is going to know what has been anounced that we're aware of, so will have that edge in terms of planning they're next chip...
In the first instance, Intel purchased DEC's fab (which added to their own mfg capability), though DEC kept their R&D team. Intel however, as I remember acquired some of their employees involved with the fab itself (outside the development area, per the agreement). Some of those employees however, had decided to leave Intel and went to work for AMD of their own accord...
Following this, Compaq for a time acquired the Alpha, until they dispenced with it, chosing instead to go with the IA-64 platform for their high end servers and what not... The former Alpha dev team, largely got soaked up by AMD again... In fact, even before this happened (aka hyper-transport being used on the AMD Irongate chipset), DEC and AMD had been business partners of sorts (hyper-transport was developed by DEC)...
But when it comes to actual manufacturing, AMD has Dresdan, and they might be in the process of developing another fab. Otherwise? Intel, and it's undeniable has the manufacturing capability that AMD could dream of...
I think AMD did catch Intel with their pants down when they came out with the 1 GHz Tbird, having beat Intel to the 1 GHz mark first, and with the Athlon arch (fairly new) could continue to clock higher. The older P6 arch, introed with the PPro and carried up through the PIII just didn't have much more room for clock increases, without a die shrinkage they weren't then ready for.
As such, it was probably a business decision to rush the P4 out (with Willemette) before it was arguably ready (and included many of the things planned for it). Unfortunatetly for Intel, having a 1.5 GHz Willy that under-performs a 1 GHz PIII in benchmark after benchmark doesn't look good, and really does epitomize to customers what AMD told people for years, clock isn't everything...
But since then the P4s got better (Northwood, and then the 3.0c) and AMD was left playing catchup. Then the Athlon 64 came out... You can be pretty assured they'll try to stay kneck in kneck with each other. AKA, AMD plans quad core, Intel will plan something to compete (or one up it). AMD will respond to one up that... Further, Intel is going to know what has been anounced that we're aware of, so will have that edge in terms of planning they're next chip...
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