Intel Reacts to AMD

NoWhere Man writes "Raging Bull has an article which states that Intel is having to shrink its die size earlier than expected to keep up with AMD's Athlon. "Intel couldn't afford to wait on developing a mainstream desktop Willamette chip," McComas said. "They've returned to the old tried-and-true Pentium III core as a quick fix." The new Pentium III speed grade will be among the first to use Intel's new 0.13-micron wafer processing with copper interconnect. At the same time, Intel is said to be readying a 200-MHz frontside bus to support the faster Pentium III."

Comments

Heh

[Greyfox]

It's really amusing to watch Intel scramble to keep up with AMD. Intel was obviously resting on its laurels, perhaps trying to squeeze additional profits from the current generation of processors before moving on to the next one. Apparently the one thing they didn't expect was competition.

AMD's doing a lot right, but there are a couple of additional things they need to do. One is to get the damn SMP chipsets out. They're not going to break into the lucrative server markets without a strong SMP offering.

Another thing they really should do is devote an engineer or two to hacking AMD specific optimizations into GCC. Intel realizes the value of this and is quietly working toward getting heavily optimized compilers in place for Itanium. AMD is sadly lacking here.

AMD is going to have to scramble if they're going to stay ahead of Intel in this race.

Re:Heh

[Shadow99_1]

Actually AMD has no coders that can create compiler optimizatiosn right now and frankly can't afford it for amny reasons (among those it would lower those nice profit margins that are pulling them up to almost where the were before Intel started forcing them to drop prices years ago). AMD relies on telling programmers how to optimize for their chips and leaves everything in their hands. Optimizations have been very very weak because of this. I think this is partly because they (programmers in general) tend to be lazy (Why botehr adding optimizations for that when I automatically get it with otehr chips? It's not my job) and the other part is because a vast array of people still consider AMD to have weak offerings in cpus.

I'd love to see optimizations go into the compilers. Things that have had optimizations (I mean real optimizations not what you see in most games) for the Athlon as well as for the Intel systems show the Athlon chips being 50% faster than the Intel system clock for clock.

Yes, but... (warning, long)

[trims]

...honestly, I could give a damn about Intel and AMD ramping their core speeds up (which is really what is driving the move to a smaller die size).

In a modern PC, the processor isn't the bottleneck for 99% of the work you're doing. Unless what you're doing can fit in the L2 cache, the processor is going to sit and wait for it. Now, modern L2 cache architectures are getting pretty good, and the hit rate is now approaching 90-95% for most stuff, but think of it this way: a L1 cache miss (which is quite common) incurs a 4-6 cycle wait, while a L2 cache miss can incur a 50-70 (to as much as 100-200) cycle wait. Ouch!

Realistically, virtually all "CPU-bound" applications these days are also memory-bound, too. Quake, Photoshop, file-compression, and others typically thought of as relying on the CPU exclusively actually suffer greatly from the constricted pipe into the CPU core. Only stuff like crypto-cracking and maybe batch rendering are truly CPU-only-bound.

Also, especially with graphics (which is one of the most CPU-intensive operations left, and for which higher-speed CPUs are generally targeted first), the trend is to specialized co-processors (the GPU), since the I/O and memory limitations of the current PC architecture make improvements in the CPU of limited help to the graphics subsystem. Take a good look today: it's a far better thing for your Quake performance to replace that 2-year-old video card than it is to replace the 2-year-old CPU. And, given which is cheaper, which do you think people will do?

I'd love to see Intel and AMD quit spending all their money (or the vast majority of it) on speed improvements, and dump a huge amount of it into redesigning the PC architecture. Honesly, I think there is a huge amount of $$ to be made in the chipset integration market. Intel has done this to a certain extent, and now owns probably 60% of the primary MB chipset market. However, nobody is doing anything interesting.

AMD has made a step in the right direction with the adoption of the EV6 bus, but Intel is still running the GTL+ bus, which sucks. I'm talking about as a bus architecture, not comparing MHZ of the bus.

I'd love it if I could buy a 600Mhz PC with an advanced memory and I/O subsystem (maybe like that on the SGI O2 or VisualWorkstion series). The key here is that the push has to come from Intel or AMD. They're the only ones who can design the CPUs to take advantage of such a design. SGI's problems (besides internal ones to the company (like no clue about how to sell into the NT market)) were that the CPU was still a "typical" CPU, and the custom chipset had to work around its limitations.

If AMD or Intel really wants a leg up on the other (and I'm not talking about "My latest CPU is 3% faster than yours, for the 1 month until you introduces your next one" crap), they should:

• Make sure that they can sustain 10 GByte/s throughput from main memory to the caches to the CPU.
• Get the latency down. Having a multi-pipelined CPU stalled as it waits for data hurts everything.
• Look at methods for allowing non-core devices to tap directly into the memory system. AGP is sorta-kinda there, but not even close to some of the state-of-the-art stuff I've seen out of SGI, HP, and Sun (particularly the first two).

If AMD and Intel ever want to do something besides make desktops and small servers, they have to change the PC architecture. Maybe Merced and Sledgehammer will do that, but I'm not optimistic.

Hell, even the high-end UNIX vendors could take a page from the Mainframes. Ever wonder why the 'frames haven't died? Batch-processing my good chap - I can get a 'frame with equivalent CPU power to a vanilla Pentium that will go through 100,000 jobs/hour, where a 8-way Sun E3000 might do 10,000/hour, and a quad Xeon maybe 4,000/hour. It's all about the I/O throughput.

I'm looking forward to the day when my PC isn't of an identical design to the one I bought in 1990.

-Erik

Let's clear up some things

[Stradivarius]

The Williamette is a LOT faster than an Athlon

It's *way* too early to say this for sure. Willamette isn't even in production yet, and won't be out for a few months. This means it's not terribly meaningful to compare it to the Athlon, since the Athlon is out *now* and will be out in even faster versions by time Willamette ships. Now, I happen to think that Willamette will *probably* be a decent amount faster than the Athlons once the part is actually shipping. But it's a little early to say whether it will be a "lot", or just a bit.

Also consider that AMD and Intel's product schedules are offset by several months, such that they are playing leapfrog. AMD's jumped ahead with the Athlon, and Intel is likely to hop ahead with Willamette (once it actually comes out, which isn't for a while since they are moving the P3 down to .13 micron first to get out any manufacturing process problems before moving to the new core). But AMD may very well jump ahead again with the Mustang, which is their next 32-bit CPU.

Sledgehammer IS AMD's next chip. It will HAVE to save it in the 32 bit market. It is simply a 64 bit x86 chip, not a new architecture like Merced. As such, it has a similar place to the Athlon as the Athlon did to the K6

AMD has a couple of new chips in the works. One is aimed at the desktop, and the other at high-end workstation/server environments. The desktop chip is code-named Mustang, and is a 32-bit x86 chip. The server chip is Sledgehammer, which is a 64-bit extension of the x86 instruction set architecture. Sledgehammer is NOT their next desktop CPU! Sledgehammer is designed to compete against Intel's Itanium (formerly Merced), a 64-bit VLIW-like CPU. The Mustang will be AMD's competition to the Pentium4 (aka Willamette).

First, it take full advantage of SSE

Well, OK, but this requires special processor-specific coding in the software to reap any benefits, and so you only get SSE in certain apps that choose to support it (like Photoshop). Whereas the Athlon has a significantly faster FPU without need to recompile the software. Plus AMD has 3DNow, which offers many of the benefits of SSE. Granted, 3DNow isn't as powerful as SSE, but since the regular FPU on the Athlon is faster the advantage may swing in either side's favor.

Additionally, it runs the ALUs at 3 GHz

The double-speed ALUs may not provide a really large benefit, since that's only one pipeline stage of about 20. If the other stages can't keep up, you may not see the benefit at all, or maybe only partially. You certainly won't be getting the equivalent of a 3GHz CPU. Besides, the ALU often isn't the bottleneck, memory accesses and waiting for results of previous instructions often are. I suggest we all wait and see for benchmarks once Willamette/P4 is actually on the market before we speculate much on this one :-)

And keep in mind the leapfrog effect I mentioned above. AMD is by no means out of the race once Willamette comes out, even if Willamette does do the 30% better than the P3 like Intel claims it will (which it may, it's got some really new and cool features, such as the "trace cache"). Should be a fun battle to watch (almost as much fun as watching those prices drop :-)

Competition is good

[techsupersite.com]

AMD has in the last year forced Intel's hand in both price/performance, FAR sooner than they'd planned. This is obvious because of the i820 chipset fiasco, etc that Intel was forced into releasing the Coppermine and the 133 MHz FSB FAR sooner than planned. I don't think that a yet another Pentium Pro (686) core facelift is going to be able to keep up with the newer Athlons, especially with the 64-bit "Sledgehammer", which won't suffer from Itanium's speed and 32-bit app problems. Intel is desperate, they lost the "bleeding edge" market lead in performance a year ago and they still don't seem to be able to recover. Why did this happen? Complacency. After they went to the Slot-1 (more to keep AMD/Cyrix from making clone chips than any technical advantage, hence their latest move BACK to the socket) Intel killed their competition off. In 1998-9 Intel basically became a monopoly. But thankfully, due to superior engineering, AMD has been able to thru innovation, to level the playing field against a vastly larger compeditor. The fact that HARDWARE standards are mostly (at least to the extent that is important), OPEN, is why hardware continues to outpace the Operating Systems in development. It took Microsoft 5 years from the development of the first mainstream 32-bit CPU to produce a (sorta) 32-bit mainstream OS. Now that we are on the cusp of 64-bit CPU's, anyone care to guess how long it will take MS to produce a 64-bit `Doze? Which is another reason why the AMD Sledgehammer will likely beat the current IA-64 "Itanium", as it will likely be years before there are enough 64-bit apps and OS's (except Linux which is already available) to make it's 32-bit performance handicap a non-issue. in other words: CPU/Hardware market: NON monopoly, developemt speed VERY fast OS market: virtual monopoly, development speed FAR slower than hardware. Which is harder, do design hardware or software? Clearly, the lack of the ability of software to keep up with the hardware is the fault of the complacent, M$ monopoly.

200MHz FSB...Everything is going according to plan

[Gregoyle]

Hmm... It may not be in Intel's best interest to introduce a new processor with a 200 MHz FSB to counter an AMD proc. Until this point, the AMD chips have been competing at lobotomized speeds with respect to how fast the processor gets to talk to the RAM. Once they can actually get the PC200 SDRAM that is bound to come out with the release of a new Intel processor at that speed, they will also recieve a large performance increase. Will the .13 micron die size of the new intel chips be enough to counter? Especially now that the Athlons have an L2 cache that runs at full proc speed, and a LARGER L1 cache

It doesn't seem like Intel is having a good time right now, or will be any time in the future. Anyone care to speculate on what kind of processor AMD will develop by the time Intel actually releases Willamette? I was thinking that Intel would break away with the new Willamette chips because they'd be undeniably faster, but now that they're delaying them again... AMD must be seeing Sugar Plum Faeries.

-----------

Amd is good for the industry.

[JohnG]

I have a friend (who doesn't know very much about computers at all and only goes by what other people tell him) that won't buy anything but AMD. I have another friend who won't buy and AMD because someone told him there were compatibility problems. Either way AMD is making a name for itself and the result is that Intel can't go on uncontested. What that means is that we are going to see computers progress at an even faster rate. The race for the gigahertz machine, the race for the first computer above a gigahertz, etc.

This could be a great example of how competition actually gets things improved. Of course it could turn ugly if either one of them starts pushing products to market before they are ready, still if one does that we'll always have the other, right? ;-)

Re:Lovely.

[be-fan]

Quality doesn't seem to be suffering here. Both the Athlons and PIIIs have been 100% stable, especially since most manufacturers cool their high power systems very well. Of course, the Athlon has been plauged by power constraints, but in general, those are the fault of cheap components. For example, the problems with the GeForce had nothing to do with the Athlon or its infrastructure, but crappy motherboards that didn't meet power specifications. You spend the extra ducats and buy a good motherboard, or suffer with poor quality just like with every other cheap product in the world. As for speeding up the manufacturing process, Intel has hardly every had problems with bad microprocessor cores, and its recent problems have everything to do with RDRAM rather than anything else. As for AMD, it to hasn't had manufacturing troubles since the K6 days, and its new 1.5 GHz chips will be based on the same .18micron copper process that has been flowing smoothly for some months now.

Re:Assorted rantings.

[cheetah]

I would just like to point out a few things myself...

Point A) A senior VP at Intel Corporation, Albert Yu, indicated that Willamette would only be 30% faster than the Coppermine. The Willamete will not be that much faster than the Pentium III at the same clock speed. The most important thing to remember about the Willamette is Intel has decided the way to increase performance is to raise the clock speed and sacrifice IPC ( instructions per clock ) efficiency. So you can't compare this transient from the P III to the Willamette to the transitions of the 486 to Pentium. The Pentium had a much better IPC than the 486, the Willamette will most likely have a lower IPC than the P III. But the Willamette is designed to scale to very high clock speeds. You only have to look at the Willamette's pipeline to see this design philosophy. The pipeline has 20 stages; this will make it easy for Intel to raise the clock speed. For more info on how a pipeline length affects CPU performance check out this web page. http://www.aceshardware.c om/Spades/read.php?article_id=50. I would also like to point out that the double clocked ALU is only one stage of the 20 stage pipeline. You do have a good point about the Sse2 instructions, if Intel can get a lot of developers to use them it will make it much harder for AMD to claim they have the fastest FPU. But AMD shouldn't be afraid, they have just rolled out a new architecture that has a lot of room for growth. And I can't see Intel getting that far a head of AMD. I would expect that title of the fastest x86 CPU will change hands many times in the next year, but Intel is not about the totally destroy AMD.

Point B) I am not going to say I disagree with you it's just that I think 3d rendering is not a good example, the average computer user will never do 3d rendering outside of a game. I think that speech recognition is a much better example... something that many people would use if it worked better...

Point C) The Ppro was expensive because they had bad yields. This is the same reason that Rdram is much more expensive today when compared to Sdram.

Re:Lovely.

[intrico]

Actually, competition inherently produces better quality products at a lower price. We, as the consumers are reaping the benefits of this rivalry. These comanies have huge incentives to produce good quality products, and they pour huge amounts of money into researd & devleopment to ensure it can be done at such a rapid pace. I guarantee you that Intel and AMD understand that people are going to buy the rival's product if they are not up to par in quality. I mean, can you name ways that quality from both of these companies has suffered because they are, "making new products too fast"? Chips have to be of high quality for the technology to progress as far as it has. This is also why the government quickly dropped their anti-trust actions against Intel - they realized that there is healthy competition and the consumer is indeed benefiting by getting better products at lower prices.

Assorted rantings.

[be-fan]

Just some points that come to mind due to this story.

A) AMD is in serious trouble. It still has the sheer clock speed advantage, but doesn't have a next-gen architecture to compete with Willamete. Now if Willamete is delayed long enough, maybe they will be able to get their 64 bit Sledgehammer chip out in time, but that seems doubtfull. The reason they should be so scared of Willamete is that it is truely a new architecture. Remember the transition from 486 to Pentium, and how the 60MHz Pentiums beat even 100 MHz 486s? Well, this promises to be just as big. Not only does this signal the arrival of ultra-high bandwidth memory to the mainstream (RDRAM on high-end, DDR-SDRAM on lower end) but the Willamete architecture boasts a number of improvemnts. Most importantly, the ALU's are clocked at twice the core speed, so you have your integer and FPU units running at 3+ GHz. This promises to be an even bigger jump than the switch from 1 integer unit in the 486 to 2 in the Pentium. Additionally it introduces new instructions, and it seems that the new instruction set idea is genuinely working, since SSE actually DOES help out a lot in apps like Photoshop and 3D renderers. AMD should be afraid, very afraid. (Buyer Tip: Don't buy a new computer before the Willamete comes out. I have a friend who purchased a Pentium 233 just before the PII came out, and I remember laughing at him for quite awhile.)

B) Preemptive strike against those saying that new CPUs are useless. Go run 3D Studio on you Pentium-60 and then come back begging for forgiveness. The truth is that the bandwidth problem is just not that important for many applications. Additionally, bandwidth is getting a major shot in the arm with the coming of dual-channel RDRAM, and DDR-SDRAM. (Buyer Tip: Get DDR-SDRAM if you're going anywhere near 3D. Latency is KING!)

C) Buyers beware. If AMD can't match the Willamette in sheer performace, we may again revert to a situation like the PPro era when Intel's power proc was really expensive, and with no competition on the high end, they had no incentive to lower prices.