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Intel Roadmap
Karl "Kielbasa" Wise sent us an excellent article that showed up on Sharkyextreme detailing Intel's CPU stuffs planned out for future. RDRAM, Socket 370, and other tidbits.
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Q3 00: Release faster processor. Trumpet it as 'great for internet'. Maybe call it the iCPU? Leave prices for current CPUs untouched, continue to make 50MHz improvements cost $200 over previous models.
Q4 00: AMD is at it again. Squish them, and pay off the FTC. Athlon really heating up. Engage in mudslinging campaign. Switch to smaller micron process to decrease die size. Ignore Transmeta's protests that their CPU has lower power consumption. Power is good. Suck lots of it.
Q1 01: Caught modifying CPU to make SPECint run faster. Damn. Use PIII ID feature to track down creators of SPECint and issue corrective measures. e-commerce is starting to wind down, start investing in hardware companies again.
Q2 01: Bunny suits aren't having the impact we want in the market. Find a pop rock band and rip off a new song - show competitor's CPU on fire.
Q3 01: Get posted to slashdot. Site crashes. Rob Malda mysteriously disappears
Q4 01: Can't do any marketing, Microsoft trial finally ended and DOJ needs a reason to keep their budget up. License out some worthless tech to competitors, later sue them for contract violations.
Q4 02: New SPECint benchmarks show our chips as fourteen times faster than the competition.
Q1 03: Another revolutionary new processor is created. Trumpet it as being Windows 2001 compatible (which was just released last week).
Q2 03: Bah, this far out, who the hell cares what we're planning on doing?
... and why it's not that great after all. At Tom's Hardware .
Intel make great chips. There, I said it. They also have a history of making good decisions. So why are they acting like a rabbit caught in the headlights?
For a long time Intel had the highest clock speed chips on the market. Their FPU kicked any part of the anatomy you care to sit on. Their chipsets were awesome. They drove Cyrix into a *very* small corner.
Then, AMD finally gets it's act together with the Athlon. Athlon is faster/better/cheaper (pick two:) than the Pentium 3. And Intel seem to go to pieces. This is not cause and effect, but I honestly believe that losing bragging rights to AMD has caused Intel to mismanage a series of problems that would have been merely embarrasing.
The Camino chipset had/has problems. Merced is so late it may be entirely overtaken by Willamette. Etcetera (it's not a long list of problems, but they seem to be screwing them up so badly I thought I'd say 'etcetera')
Then AMD beat them to the punch with a 1GHz processor. That must have hurt. Even though the Athlon was running it's cache at 1/3 clock rate, AMD got there first. By all of two days.
The (pass me another bucket of 'allegedly's) rumour is that Intel are having difficulty supplying demand for their faster chips (850MHz+), while AMD are happy to ship by the truckful. (More 'allegedly's please...) Other rumours say that some of Intel's second-tier customers are abandoning their Intel loyalty points and buying Athlons just so thay can ship some boxes. Fast boxes. They would love to buy from Intel, but their customers want the boxes today.
And Intel are *still* making stupid decisions. Backing RDRAM is daft. Nobody makes it in serious volume, it's five times more expensive than 'conventional' RAM, and it's proprietry. You can't make it without a licence from Rambus (Who don't have any fabs themselves). And it is at best marginally faster, and at worst astonishingly slower, than SDRAM.
To end the rant: Intel is a great company with great products. But Andy Grove should go and read his own book.