Dueling CPUs

6/15 - It seems that all one cares about these days in a CPU is performance. Case in point, AMD's new Socket AM2. Socket AM2 represents a marvelous feat of engineering. AMD was able to add virtualization, and lower the power envelope, both at the same time.

That being said, nobody seems to care much. The reason is that the chips do not perform all that much better than their predecessors.

For years, Intel and AMD have competed head to toe, making CPUs. AMD had solid product. It's just that Intel seemed to be the one pushing the technology envelope, for the most part, and AMD struggled to keep up, and keep up it did. Then a funny thing happened. AMD pulled ahead in certain areas. This was most visible in games. "The Athlon 64 line was notably faster in PC games than Intel".

But that was just games. I mean, who cares? Business is where it's at. Everyone knows that.

It didn't help Intel that AMD chips catered to the overclocking crowd. However, geeks have always been despised by the masses, by both sexes. Sure they are useful to have around sometimes, when something breaks. Every business ought to have at least one or two of them. Just don't get caught hanging out with them.

Then along came the Athlon 64 X2. It wasn't that Intel had a bad chip. The Pentium D outperformed previous chips. It was that Intel's chips were beaten in most benchmarks by AMD. "Intel's tenuous lead on non-gaming applications evaporated".

That brings us up to right about now. AMD claimed the performance crown, and hasn't relinquished it since. "Since then, AMD has been riding high".

There's a new chip on the horizon, however. AMD's recent good fortunes "may turn out to be the high water mark for AMD".

It is common to read in the literature how AMD was the first to mass produce dual-core chips. This is a good example of how once something gets started it gets taken up and repeated time and again in the literature. However, "Intel actually beat AMD to market by a few weeks in shipping this first dual-core desktop CPU".

Hindsight is alway 20/20. Almost everyone thought that Intel would first bring to market a dual-core chip based upon its notebook processor, the Pentium M. It was a good guess, and in a way not far off. In point of fact, Intel shipped a Pentium 4 based chip as its first dual-core. However, Intel was also hard at work on Pentium M based dual-core products. Intel wasn't aiming at a frivolous dual-core adaptation of the Pentium M. Rather it was after a complete rehaul.

Two hall-marks of the Pentium M were, one, good performance and, two, low clock speeds, comparatively speaking. The codename for the first Centrino microprocessor was Banias. "It wasn't long before people figured out that Banias was faster than most Pentium 4s in some applications, even though it clocked considerably slower".

Yonah, the first Core Duo, shares the same microarchitecture with the Pentium M. Presumably this means that Intel took the Pentium M and enhanced it. However, it is not based upon the Pentium M in the same sense as the Core microarchitecture.

The Core microarchitecture is supposed to be something entirely new. That means that it was mostly developed from the ground up. However, the primary ideas upon which it is based go back to the original Pentium M. The implementation is presumably a bit different. The result is the Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Extreme, and the Xeon 5100 series.

Along the way, as Intel developed the Core microarchitecture, they included some features from the Pentium 4. They "added much of the Pentium 4's useful legacy".

And some of the Core microarchitecture is brand new, belonging to neither the Pentium M or to the Pentium 4. "Core adds a few twists of its own".

Preliminary tests of the new chips bode well. What is interesting, however, is people's reactions. What these reactions show, more than anything else, is that people are almost exclusively concerned about performance. In a way, this is too bad, because there is so much more to these chips than performance. Even so, people "who have been staunch AMD supporters over the years are now really looking forward to the new Intel CPU. It's startling to see how fast the mindshare has switched over".