Intel's New Architecture Too Late?

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."

Comments

question

[B3ryllium]

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?

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?

Re:question

[yoda133113]

The only difference is the AMD laptop chips use more power, but you can always plug in somewhere and recharge so really this is no disadvantage. Spoken like a true desktop user. As someone that uses a laptop exsclusively, and precisely because it is mobile, that diference in battery life really matters. The fact that i can get 4 hours out of my 8 cell battery, and 6 out of my 12 cell battery on a computer that can play HL2 on max settings is something that I find rather convient. Finding a plug in my classes, and plugging in while in most of the business conferences I go to aren't options, so having over 10 hours of battery life at my disposal, and still have a viable computing option when I'm plugged in is a very, very nice thing. That battery life thing really matters. Unlike other Intel processors the pentium M/core series is vey good, and I'm glad they are phasing out their horrible excuse for an oven element, the P-4

Re:question

[man_of_mr_e]

All the statistics i'm seeing show that the Core Duo beats the Turion hands down by as much as 25%. Also, the Pentium M outperforms the Turion as well. For example:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/01/16/will_core_d uo_notebooks_trade_battery_life_for_quicker_respon se/page16.html

Re:question

[CaptnMArk]

I have a T43P laptop with 2.13 GHz Pentium M cpu and as far as I am concerned that CPU is already overclocked.

The fan more or less never stops despite me setting the CPU speed to be adaptive even when plugged in.

I have a desktop AMD machine with 2 hard drives that is quieter than that.

I must say that I am slighly disappointed in the Pentium M.

Re:question

[carl0ski]

shocking who would have thought a dual core
would beat a single core Turion
i'm shocked and bewildeered my life has been thrown upside down.


I'm guessing AMD is holding off for DDR2 before releasing Dual Core Turion
dont forget Toms Closing Statement

Microsoft's new Vista operating systems and Office suite, because both should include massive 64-bit enhancements. And who wants to be stuck with a notebook twelve months from now that can't handle 64-bit programs?

Re:question

[d99-sbr]

The only difference is the AMD laptop chips use more power, but you can always plug in somewhere and recharge so really this is no disadvantage.

Right. I take it you've never used a laptop? Power usage is everything in todays laptop processors, as their speed is generally more than ample. My ThinkPad has a 1.2 GHz Pentium M, but according to the Gnome CPU speed panel it usually hovers around 600 MHz.

Personally, I'd trade speed for lower power usage any day of the week, and I'm sure many feel like I do.

Re:question

[ponos]

In terms of absolute performance, I believe AMD's chips are fine. But in terms of performance per watt, they are absolutely horrible. Intel-based machines will run much cooler and quieter, and last a lot longer on batteries, simply because the CPU is enormously more efficient.

Works like "horrible" or "enormously" are a bit excessive, don't you think? It's not like the AMD notebooks run for 30 mins and the Intel ones for 8 hours. This review (http://www.mobilityguru.com/2005/09/06/the_turion _64_inside_story_part_ii/page13.html) for example shows competitive performance from a Turion notebook. As a matter of fact, the Turion has a longer battery life when playing games even though it carries a slightly smaller battery. I am prepared to accept that the "Centrino" architecture has been polished (and this includes the design of the whole notebook, battery selection, accessories etc) and Centrino notebooks may be better overall--not just because of the chip. Furthermore, I even expect intel chips to have slightly longer battery life (despite the review that I linked above!). But the difference is slight, not enormous, and may change in the future.

P.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

I'm a huge AMD fan but....

[theheff]

You have to give Intel credit for ruling the mobile CPU market. AMD doesn't even come close in this area. And with everything becoming lighter, smaller, more portable, and dependant on lower power consumption... you can't count Intel out at all. Perhaps we're starting to see two companies that used to compete directly with the same kinds of chips begin to specialize at what they do best: performance for AMD and mobility for Intel.

Re:I'm a huge AMD fan but....

[Ulrich Hobelmann]

Where do you think AMD doesn't come close in mobile offers?

The only difference between the Pentium-M and the Turion is that the P-M is designed specifically for mobiles, so it has a much slower FPU, for instance, and eats a little less energy.

But most power consumption is related to voltage, and a volted-down Turion has 25W, just like an Intel (well, new Intels have up to 35W). The difference is that because the Turion is just a good scaled down CPU, it's a bit slower than the P-Ms @ 25W. Ooooh, is that the huge difference?

Seriously, AMD is lacking in mobile offers. That's because you don't have a choice of laptops with AMD CPUs. It's marketing, nothing else.

Of course part of that is due to AMD's fault in never telling you WHICH Mobile Athlon or Turion you got. Stores never advertise if it's the 25W or the 35W or another version. I'd only ever buy 25W CPUs in mobile devices.

(I went for a G4, by the way; 15W is even nicer :D)

Re:AMD doesn't have a response to Core

[Lonewolf666]

Depends on how much AMD will gain from going to 65nm.
The Conroe is indeed quite promising. Assuming it will have the same performance per clock speed as the Core Duo and be clocked a bit higher, it will match the best AMD dual cores existing now in performance. And it might be cheaper due to the smaller die size.
But AMD also made a nice step ahead when they went from 130 nm to 90 nm. If they can repeat this with their upcoming 65nm process, they might be able to stay ahead.

Few things...

[BrookHarty]

The Turion 64 ML-40 is 1/2 the price of the Pentium 780, around 350-400 dollars more (via froogle and pricewatch) The core-due also has 2 megs cache per core of cache.

Also where is benchmarks and battery life when each cpu is clocked at its lowest power saving? If you are going to do a benchmark for batterylife, how about actually doing the most important tests..

And, AMD laptops are opendesign to OEM vendors, so they can use any hardware and save money. Intel wants to control this to more of a degree for the centrino name, thus higher costs.

Now, I'm not bashing Intel, I cant wait for the 900 chips with dual core and virtualization. But that article could use some more info and less "Intels new chip is awesome compared to Old hardware on different platforms, blah chipset etc.."

price - not very important

[nido]

and MOST IMPORTANT OF ALL on the PRICE - AMD is slowly giving up the most important weapon they had against Intel and without some cuts on price for the X2 line AMD might seriously loose market share to Intel in 2006 !!!

Real world experience with marketing demonstrates that there are much more important things than 'price' in selecting a product. Wally World puts their cheapest "microwave" in the main trafficways. Mesmerized Customer says, "hey, good idea, I could use a new 'microwave', and damn, this thing's dirt cheap. But it's probably a POS, so I wonder what else they have..." Then they go into the isle and pick out a more expensive microwave, which has a significantly higher profit margin for WW, which is probably cheaper elsewhere (source: Frontline documentary on WalMart).

If price is all you push, your company will end up like General Motors ("We just lowered the sticker price on EVERYTHING!"), mismanaged into the ground, and have to give away your product at a loss...

Re:An analogy.

[akhomerun]

well, except for a couple things:

1. AMD sells less of every product than intel. but this is expected - they are worth 11% of intel
2. sony is a bunch of assholes, and AMD really isn't. also, AMD actually makes superior products, which sony doesn't (anymore).

I would actually express it the other way around.
Intel is like Sony (in gaming) because they use marketing tactics to gain mindshare, and pack in gimmicks that win over consumers (such as dvd playback in the PS2).

AMD is like Nintendo because they are focusing on what really matters most to people (even if they don't even know it), which is the performance of what their product does. Nintendo relentlessly talks about improving game quality and innovation, and AMD does the same thing by saying "you know what, marketing gimmicks don't work as well as better performance/watt and overall performance in the desktop and server market"

on another note, I think the fact that AMD is really killing intel in the desktop and especially server market right now, if AMD were to continue and totally win over those markets, I think by saying that Intel has the all important laptop market is total crap if (in the hypothetical situation) AMD were to take a huge share of both the desktop and server market.

and turions are pretty nice. I'd rather have a 64 bit mobile chip and sacrafice a little battery life. and when Vista comes out, you know which chip will run faster. Any battery life > 3 hours is perfectly acceptable. Whenever you go for a battery life higher than that, you either get a huge battery (and slow recharge times), or you simply end up sacraficing performance.

Re:Dear Intel,

[Thundersnatch]

A serious flaw with your logic is that corporate customers control a significant majority of the buying dollars in the processor market.

And that $100 extra doesn't mean sh*t to a company. Corporations want reliability above all else.

I stopped buying AMDs for my company several years ago after having about 10 Athlons melt on us, usually because of clogged fans. No termperature failsafe logic on those old Athlons. Sony money we saved on AMD on the front end was quickly overwhelmed by suppoort costs and user downtime on the back end. Yes, I know AMD solved this particular problem a few years back. But, after being burned on the K7, I was seriously cautious about buying from AMD again.

We have only recently started buying Opterons for the server room. The performance/watt is wonderful compared with our Xeon boxes; reliability has been great. But we still chose Intel for our laptop standard this year; perhaps AMD might win for our desktop standard. But you know what? Laptops represent about 60% of our hardware budget... and Intel is getting all that money.

Re:I am an AMD fan BUT ...

[jafuser]

3. more important AMD seems far behind Intel in the 65 nm transition

I read recently that using SOI effectively gives the performance of one "scale generation" down. Is there any validity to this?