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

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

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.

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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: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.