Slashdot Mirror
Intel to Spend $2B To Stay In The Game
hexed_2050 writes "AMD has declared dominance in the gaming and server microprocessor market in 2004, and Intel needs to respond.. fast! This is why Intel has planned to spend 2 billion dollars to upgrade their eight year old, Fab 12 plant in Arizona. "Part of what I do is put the emphasis on how fast we respond," explains Robert Baker, Intel's top manufacturing executive."
The only thing that saved AMD in this regard is that AMD64 chips run 32-bit code faster (for most software) than any of the Pentiums. Microsoft seems to have helped out it's old partner Intel by delaying Win64 until Intel managed to clone AMD64. Heh, that is quite a switch - Intel cloning AMD. ;-)
At least Linux for AMD64 has been available for some time...and it's great to see Sun pushing Solaris for AMD64 also.
Now fast forward a year or two, and AMD is on top, and Intel is trying to play catch up. I never would have dreamed this would happen. I really have to tip my hat to AMD.
Yes, all this and lower power consumption (than P4) to boot. There should be some sweet notebooks and servers coming out over the next few months also, as the true low-power Athlon64s and Opterons roll out.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Yes, they really did a quite incredible job with the Athlon 64. Not only does it run 32-bit code, but it runs 32-bit code better than their 32-bit-native processor? That is EXACTLY what's needed in the 32-to-64-bit transition, and they executed it excellently.
What is this "make shit up for the headline" hour? Lets see what a professional news organization has to say: http://olympics.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type =technologyNews&storyID=6960222
In that case you should be rooting for AMD as long as it doesn't break 50% marketshare. It's currently at 15%. Competition is a good thing.
In the meantime, I say buy the better product - AMD. :-)
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
I don't mean this in the "News for Nerds" sense - it's just that this is part of the normal business cycle. If you all recall, AMD took a lead during the "MHz wars" a few years ago when they hit 1 GHz first with the Athlon. Intel ramped up and recaptured that lead, but with an architecture that wasn't as efficient (the P4), but even though AMD retained the performance lead the little bit of momentum they brought into the mainstream desktop war was dissipated.
Plus, Intel had bet the farm on Rambus back then, and when that panned out they had to play catch-up. They eventually caught up. Then AMD hit a nive niche with the Athlon 64, but it's still a blip relatively speaking. Gaming is a niche market, and so are servers (though a bigger niche). Sure, AMD is the leader in gaming, but Intel has the volume, overall market share, and roadmap to compete where most of the dollars are. Plus Intel sells everything including the motherboard to vendors - AMD doesn't.
So Intel revamping a fab isn't really that big a deal. Heck, at the volumes they deal in, $2 billion is almost play money for them. We'll see how both companies manage the next transition - for market share to change appreciably towards either company will require either a major leap forward (not likely) or a major misstep (much more likely). Meanwhile, both companies will keep on pouring money into the fab for each now generation of chips, and continue until someone blinks.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
I think they might respond by pulling legacy 16-bit support completely out of their chips (which I'm led to believe is costing them about 30% of their chips' "capacity" (as measured by power consumption and real estate) and replacing it with an emulator.
... Intel has been doing something like that since the Pentium Pro, and all out that since the P3. The instruction set you put in and the instruction set it actually runs are totally different beasts. The internal micro-ops even get access to more registers (check out "register renaming")
Um
Hey guys ... Intel has been working on that rehab for quite a while. It's not in response to AMD's anything, it's just part of the plan.
The moment the dollar loses that unique place, as a pillar of financial stability, economies around the world swap dollars for euros at an ever dropping rate. The dollar is 1.36 euros now, while two and a half years ago it was 0,85 or less, I cannot remember. Generally speaking, this trend has not been worse only because the Chinese (of all countries) are supporting the dollar buying enormous amounts of it on the markets.
The way your economy is going, and the way the euro guarantees its own stability through various WORKING mechanisms of the ECB, it is undeniable that in the next twenty years or so the Euro will be where the dollar is today. And since your whole economy is supported by outside economies, it is very probable it will collapse. Why? Well, its exchange rate will hit the floor and will bring huge price hikes to anything that is not made 100% in the US. Which is, everything.
So, when you vote for "less taxes", you put one more stone in the end of the great American empire. I, as a European, shake my head and wonder whether you Americans have any idea what is happening in your country...
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
Surprisingly, in all the comments, hardly anyone has given importance to the one amazing card that Intel holds: Dothan.
a spx?i=2308
Anandtech review on Linux performance on Dothan:-
http://www.anandtech.com/linux/showdoc.
Yes, everyone agrees that Prescott is too hot and doesn't quite match up to the FX-55 and its descendants. Shut up already.
Dothan's a different cheetah though. With it's mind-bogglingly cool thermal envelope, a moderately overclocked Dothan holds up to a FX-55 (which is a pretty hot processor, albeit not in the Prescott level) in most cases. Best of all, Dothan delivers GAMING performance almost as good as the top of the line AMD offering: FX-55. There's also tons of headroom for overclocking a Dothan to further increase its performance. All this when Dothan is not even running DDR2, PCI-E, or a performance optimized (as opposed to power optimized) mobo! Come Alvisio, things will get even better.
If Intel sheds a bit of Prescott ego, and it's already showing signs of doing so, and adopts Dothan variants for its upcoming desktops, it will whup some serious ass. Believe you me.
The only sadness is that current Dothans and especially their desktop mobos are horribly expensive. I'm just waiting for the prices to come down in the next 6 months. Can't wait to get my hands on a passive cooled, super silent Pentium M desktop that delivers the same performance as all these over-hyped FX-55s and Prescotts. Heck, i'm even willing to take a 10-20% performance hit, as long as i don't need to use an industrial exhaust fan or liquid nitrogen coolant. I can always make up for the processor performance by spending more on a graphics card anyway.
I love processors, not brands, btw. Hats off to the Israeli design team that pulled the P-M rabbit out of their hat!
Many AMD chips are made in Austin, TX
Just to point out, Fab25 is a FLASH plant now, not CPUs. Those are Fab30 in Dresden.