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Upside interviews Jerry Sanders of AMD
An Anonymous reader writes "Titled The Last Man Standing, this Upside interview offered an inside view of the bloody war between the two CPU makers from Sanders' point of view. He also talks about upcoming Hammer, flash memory, Transmeta and telecomm bubbles. Somehow I get a feeling that both companies are living under the heavy cloud of Microsoft. Pretty lengthy, but an interesting reading.""
Having an architecture that scales its performance beyond 2 GHz is also better design and engineering. Athlon cores won't get there. They're doing all they can to step them by 66 MHz, pouring R&D money into massaging the timings. If they could keep up to the 100-MHz/step rate, and get ahead of Intel, you bet your ass they would. And they know it won't last as long as Intel's streamlined long-pipeline system.
AMD is being forced to go to 64-bit just to keep up, while Intel has plans to clock 32-bit P4 to 6GHz and maybe beyond (there are rumors of 10 GHz, but a few 2 GHz parts have overclocked to 3.5 GHz; the trick is doing it to 40% of your yield).
And then there's the simple fact that AMD cheats on the quiz, getting a look at Intel's innovations in the field before it makes its designs. Anyone can improve on a technology. Creating one is the hard part.
Before anyone goes cheering about AMD's forthcoming Hammer, remember that it's brand new, and the compilers for it haven't had the same sort of burn-in that Intel's IA-64 compilers have been getting for a year and a half. AMD may get its 64-bit solution to the mass market first, but it won't be stable when the new features are used to their fullest.
My money is still on Intel.
--Blair
"What's that noise?"
"It's the wailing and gnashing of teeth of /. wennies."
"Wennies have teeth?" "Why the wailing and gnashing?"
"Put on your teflon/asbestos suit first then I'll tell you"
"OK so tell me... hey what's that... it smells like flamebait... Whoa... so that's why the wailing, gnashing stuff."
Microsoft (MSFT) rules. They won. In case you missed it, their operating system drives all of the volume in PCs and is now moving into network servers
a 64-bit processor called the "Hammer." That's the internal code name, [and it has] a remarkable capability in that it is based on a Microsoft-supported instruction set developed by AMD
"Yes... the /. wennies are upset because AMD was their shield, the ageis under which they fought the evil, Redmond beast and if your shield tells you it's over in the OS dept then it's over. But now we have to placate them."
"Why are we gonna placate the /. wennies?"
"We're Karma Whores. It's what we do."
AMD would do well to remember the outcome of MicroSoft's deal with IBM that lead to the development of OS/2.
Yes. I really do have far,far too much time on my hands.
heuristic algorithm seeks stochastic relationship