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Intel's New Architecture Too Late?

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the day-late-and-a-dollar-short dept.

rts008 writes to tell us that TG Daily has an interesting interview with Randy Allen, AMD's vice president of the server products division, about (among other things) AMD's recent stellar fourth quarter numbers. From the article: "Responsible for that shrinking lead is especially AMD's server products group. Intel's CEO Paul Otellini recently acknowledged that Intel had to give up market shares to AMD and will likely be forced to hand over more shares until the next generation of server chips arrives. [...] AMD's Randy Allen explains in this conversation with TG Daily why he believes that Intel will need much more than a new processor to be able to slow AMD's growth."

4 of 226 comments (clear)

  1. TechWeek: AMD Wakes the Sinking Giant by $exyNerdie · · Score: 4, Informative

    Another perspective here:

    http://www.thestreet.com/_yahoo/tech/semis/1026311 3.html

  2. Re:Here's the short answer... by bersl2 · · Score: 5, Informative
    I heard from someone that the Pentium-M is better than any of AMD's offerings for mobile CPUs; is there any truth to this?
    Yes

    You don't say in what way, so I will. IIRC, The Pentium M is ever-so slightly better in integer ops, but it gets creamed in floating point. Yes, this is fixable.

    I know that the new MacBook is running on the Core Duo line, and I understand that's a whopper of a mobile CPU, but I thought that AMD had a strong competitor to the Pentium-M?
    No

    You are giving a very incomplete answer. AMD has a line of very low voltage K8 chips called Turion (yes, the name's questionable, but that's nothing new when it comes to brands in the processor world). The most efficient run at about 25W, but unlike with the P-M, this figure includes AMD's on-die memory controller, while Intel defers that extra power cost onto the board logic. Also, one of them (I can't remember which) reports wattage at peak value, and the other at typical value.

    The only way you are at all correct is that Turion adoption was slow, because IIRC laptop manufacturers, for whatever reason, do their redesigns at the beginning of the year, and they missed this opportunity last year (or the year before, whichever) because they couldn't introduce the Turion in time.

    Roughly, Turion laptops get 3:30 to a comparable Pentium M laptop's 4:00.
  3. Re:All I want to know is... by asbjxrn · · Score: 5, Informative
    I wish I could say I remember but I am probably imagining reading people talkinga bout quad core processors eventually. Could that be the next step in the march forward?

    Uh, Sun have a 8-core cpu for sale right now. See their t1000/t2000 servers.

  4. Re:question by Bloater · · Score: 5, Informative

    > The only difference is the AMD laptop chips use more power ...

    No they don't. They have a higher quoted TDP, but that number is an engineering choice, AMD typically quotes a higher TDP for the same power consumption. AMD is crrently shipping two versions, one of which has a TDP of 25W that under typical use comes in at about 17W (slightly better than the equivalent Intel part even though the AMD part has its memory controller counted in that while the Intel part doesn't). Practically this means no difference to battery life given that the rest of the system is the same (except the northbridge, of course). And you get better performance with a Turion 64 processor for everything except video transcoding. When we see 64 bit optimised encoders, I expect that to change too. It is pissing me off how long it is taking to get hand-optimised AMD64 routines for tight inner loops in various common algorithms.