AMD to "gain four years lead" over Intel - Barron's

The INQUIRER ^ | Monday 05 August 2002, 08:52 | Mike Magee:

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Intel says nothing these days

THE EDITOR of the High Tech Strategist claims that AMD's Hammer chips will give the firm as much as a three to four year lead over competing technology from Intel.
Fred Hick is quoted in the the August 5th edition of the Wall Street financial weekly, pushed out by Barron's.

His argument is that the AMD Hammer family is backward compatible with 32-bit applications as well as having the ability to run specially compiled 64-bit code.

Intel's Itanium, by contrast, has a special instruction set and while it will run 32-bit instruction code this is through an emulator that cannot run these older applications at full speed.

The magazine says AMD will release its first Hammer processors during this third quarter, while the Opteron is the chip that runs 32-bit applications at full speed.

When you ask Intel about this – when Chipzilla talks to us these days, that is – spindoctors claim that the Itanium should be considered "big tin" and Opterons should be compared with Xeons.

It's almost like Intel has lost the will to live. Aggression? They've heard of it.

The big difference between Opterons and Xeons, however, is that the former has 64-bit capabilities while Xeons don't.

Unless, that is, Intel is just about to switch in Yamhill-like features in Nocona – which doesn't look likely at all.... µ

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

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[Genesis defender]

THE EDITOR of the High Tech Strategist claims that AMD's Hammer chips will give the firm as much as a three to four year lead over competing technology from Intel.

Three to four YEARS? That's a lifetime in the computer world. AMD will probably have that 3-4 year lead for about 6 months.

[boris]

Intel has a 10-GHz pentium running in the lab.

If that hunk of silicon hits the market anytime soon, I think we can dispense with the "Hammer."

[Orangedog]

I've been an owner of AMD chips since the Pentium I days. They can do anything that chipzilla's chips can do, and usually does it faster and cheaper. I was worried after the socket 7 format died out and you could run AMD chips on the same motherboards as Intel, but the board and chipset market has managed to come through with the product to support AMD. Now if they would just say no to MS's plan to move digital rights management to hardware.....

[lelio]

Hammer: the chip of the future, and it will always be. I'll believe they have a 3-4 year lead when it comes out.
Anyone see the article in Scientific American about asynchronous CPUs? Interesting concept, and it should save on power as the clock sometimes takes up to 30% of the power needed in a chip. The guy from Sun, of course, was all over it saying that it is the chip of the future.

[Ford Fairlane]

I have been doing an unscientific local survey, and discovered something interesting. While all AMD users seem to love their machines, I have discovered that NONE of the people I know that is running an AMD chip has experienced the dreaded "Blue screen of death".

I always assumed that this was a windows problem, but maybe it is an intel / pentium problem instead.

Any thoughts / experience with this?

[det dweller too]

Anecdote: I have an AMD K6(2) 500Mhz at home [running Win 98SE] and, while not frequent, I have had BSODs. I have another PIII 700Mhz Celeron with Windows ME and have had many many BSODs, but I generally attributed that to the ME.

I use the resource meter in the systray and if I watch that I don't let the resources drop below 10% I can pretty much avoid BSODs on the AMD.

At work I have a Dell 1Ghz P3 or P4 and I get sudden BSODs without warning or low resources.

[Rockitz]

And introduction into the currently flat chip market will gain them absolutely nothing. Intel has a superior marketing organization. Case closed. Say good night, AMD.

[dyed_in_the_wool]

NONE of the people I know that is running an AMD chip has experienced the dreaded "Blue screen of death".

Definitely had lock-ups and crashes and I'm almost certain I've had the BlueScrod on my AMD box. Have to go try to lock it up...

[js1138]

I have discovered that NONE of the people I know that is running an AMD chip has experienced the dreaded "Blue screen of death".

I always assumed that this was a windows problem, but maybe it is an intel / pentium problem instead

I doubt this is true, but it makes me think.

The last time I saw the blue screen I was starting a video capture program while scanning a photo. Apparently a bit too much.

Before that it was due to memory chips that had come unseated while moving a motherboard to a new case.

I've been using Win2000 and XP for the last two years, and don't see many blue screens. But I've also switched to Athlons for all new computers -- 6 in the las year.

[js1138]

Which version of Windows? I don't have many crashes with 2000 or XP, except when I have installed the wrong hardware drivers.

[dyed_in_the_wool]

Intel has a superior marketing organization.

What they don't have is the one word EVERYONE looks for in technology releases: Compatability.
If Intel is smart, they'll start selling it on compability whether it is or it isn't (look at MicroSoft's record, how many apps died in 16-bit land.)
The organization doesn't mean crap if it isn't used correctly.
AMD has watched market share grow slow and steady (low price, high stability). They're not to be taken lightly.

[The KG9 Kid]

No-one's good enough to predict the product placement of the tech sector four years out. Sheesh.

Talking processor power is silly to begin with: If the dynamics of personal computer-based processors were based solely on comparative performance, we'd all be using G4 Macs with Motorola processors running OSX code.

[dyed_in_the_wool]

Which version of Windows?

It used to be Windows 98, now it's Slackware ;-)

[AZLiberty]

At work I have a Dell 1Ghz P3 or P4 and I get sudden BSODs without warning or low resources.

The purpose of a PC (at work) is to provide jobs for Windows system administrators -- who in turn make the decision about what computers to buy. This powerful ecosystem has led to proliferation of Windows computers. If Macs failed more often, there would be more of them.

[Lowcountry]

Hey, I'm not a techie and I don't pretend to know a lot about this subject, but I was listening to a national Technology radio talk show last week and the guy was talking about this very subject. His spin was that the new Intel chip would not be able to run all the previous applications, but that the AMD would. This means that the 64 bit chip by Intel would not run all your old programs and would require a complete update of your software base. With the AMD chip this would not be necessary.

That being said, most people get their machines with new software anyway, like a new OS and all the office suite stuff. But think about all the software boxes on your shelf in your office or home that did not come with your box! Try running your old games on the new machine and you are suddenly the proud owner of an Atari game machine playing PONG.

Anyway, thats what the guy said......

[beaware]

Considering that the mhz increase that Intel has to go through lately to get performance increase compared to AMD, sounds like that would be comparable to a 6 GHZ AMD chip...

[dheretic]

Hardly. Intel has to find a way to reliably keep such a massive beast of a x86 processor cooled. In the initial benchmarks of opteron prototypes vs p4, the 800mhz opteron almost matched a 2Ghz P4. Now imagine that it takes Intel 2 years to release that 10Ghz P4, that means the first opterons it goes up against won't be 800Mhz, but more like 3-3.5Ghz opterons. Add in the wordlength difference (32 versus 64) and you have a major problem for Intel. Dual 3.5Ghz Opterons would rip the 10Ghz P4 a new one and you know AMD is adding SMP support, right? The opteron is a workstation/server proc.

[cinFLA]

The "hammer" is old news. Analysts were saying last week that INTC had a BIG lead over AMD and they knew about the hammer.