Tony Hill said:
I seem to remember that AMD actually competing very effectively in the
late 386s days with their 40MHz 386DX chip while Intel was just
starting out with the (at the time) very expensive 486s. And back in
the 286 days there were quite a number of competitors (including AMD
back then).
In the 286 days, there were two non-Intel 286 processors, one from AMD, and
one from Harris. I think both of them were endorsed by Intel as
second-sources to its own 286s. AMD did push the speed of their 286 out to
16Mhz, higher than Intel's 12Mhz maximum, but that seems to be the only real
difference between them at that time.
It was with the 386 processor generation that AMD and Intel first began
having their legal troubles with each other. AMD began bringing out its own
386's towards the end of the 386 generation and the beginning of the 486
generation, which was very late 80's, 1989 as a matter of fact. So for the
majority of the 80's, it had really no competition, even its competition
were simply partners which produced the same chips as Intel with their full
permission.
Also very early on, Intel had some competition in the form of the NEC V20
and V30 processors which were 8086-compatibles, but a separate design. They
never really took off greatly. IBM definitely only bought from Intel and its
official second sources at the time, so it wasn't going to buy any NEC
work-alikes.
I'd say that it's a bit of both there, particularly if you look at
4-way servers. The Opteron seems to smack totally smack the XeonMP
around any time you start playing with 4P systems. On 2P systems the
shared bandwidth of the Xeon doesn't seem to hurt as much, though the
Opteron does almost always win here as well.
The only way they seem to know how to make Xeon win here is to create a
custom chipset that turns Xeon into a ccNUMA architecture. Opteron already
does this out of the box without anything special required.
The glue around the Itanium is currently allowing it to perform a lot
better in very large servers than anything we've seen from the Xeon.
Of course, we haven't really had a chance to see what the Opteron can
really do in large servers since no one has made anything more than a
4P system.
Yes, again, with Itanium, they need special chipsets to take it out of the
shared-memory domain and into the ccNUMA domain. If people are going to be
spending money to develop chipsets around Itanium just to make it perform
well, then spending money on something else that already performs well out
of the box, may net you better results.
I guess once Cray Strider systems become available, I guess we'll know how
well an external interface performs for Opteron then.
Hehe, I'd like to see that Toyota notebook, complete with non-descript
styling and a boring paint job :> Actually a Centrino Toyota notebook
might just work, "sure it doesn't look very exciting, but it's
extremely reliable and gets excellent millage (low power
consumption)".
I think Intel is pretty well positioned in the laptop market for the
time being. AMD/Acer might have a bit of a win on their hands with
the Ferrari notebook, but really Intel has a great base of technology
in their Pentium-M and i855 chipset.
AMD also recently started sponsoring the Ducatti motorcycle racing team. Yet
another avenue of marketing available for them now.
AMD does have some options here,
particularly if they can do something with the AthlonXP-M line on a
90nm fab process. If they could combine some of the features of the
Athlon64/Opteron and the very low power consumption of the AthlonXP-M
(that chip is actually in the same basic power range as the
Pentium-M), they could have a decent competitor. I'm just not sure
that AMD has the resources to develop two completely separate cores
like Intel does (err, I guess Intel develops 3 cores).
I think power-savings is important, but I don't think anybody cares if it
gets to an extremely high level. I doubt anyone would notice too much
difference between a 5 hour battery life vs. a 7 hour one.
Of course, VIA could start eating into the low-end here if they can
follow through on their plans effectively. Their chips are getting
some pretty impressive power consumption numbers and, perhaps more
importantly, combining that with VERY low costs. VIA has yet to get
the marketing going well, but the opportunity is there. VIA could
potentially start leading a low-cost notebook revolution in much the
same way that the K6 did on the desktop. I'm sure there are a lot of
people who would be willing to sacrifice some performance for a $500
laptop instead of a $1000 one. Intel's Celeron-M seems to be a
non-starter so far (though it's still early), while the Celeron Mobile
consumes a fair chunk of power while offering terrible performance.
Are you talking about VIA chipsets, or the VIA processor?
Yousuf Khan
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