Inside Intel

z71offroad writes: "There is a really interesting article at Anandtech right now showing what goes on inside Intel Labs. Although it doesnt break any NDAs, it is still a facinating look at what goes on inside the chip giant's labs."

Comments

Intel Labs

[topside420]

You can get much of this info (and more), plus related info on Intel's labs by visiting the Intel Labs website.

It has some pretty interesting info regarding what goes on around Intel.

Did we really need a /. article on this?

Re:Intel's approach

[s390]

The reason the Athlon proccesors are so much faster in benchmarks isn't the clock-speed, but the memory bottle-neck. Athlon's run with half the level2 cache yet they still are faster. Why? 233 MHz front-side bus speed.

Bzzzt, wrong! Athlons are faster in terms of useful work done per clock because they have a shorter instruction pipeline. Thus their branch mispredict penalty is lower and they have a higher instruction-throughput-rate (ITR) than Intel chips of equal clock speed. Other factors (exclusive L1/L2 cache, lower memory latency, better die space allocation to ALUs and FPUs) influence AMD's higher performance too, but this is the main one. It's just a better balanced processor design, and it certainly yields higher performance for price.

BTW, current DDR memory speed is 2 x 133 Mhz = 266 Mhz, not 233 Mhz.