Intel Unveils New Chips to Battle AMD

An anonymous reader writes "Reuters is reporting that chip giant Intel hopes to get back on track in their continued market share war with AMD when they unveil a new line of chips at their upcoming twice-annual developers forum. From the article: 'AMD, once content to mimic Intel's advances, has set the technological pace in recent years with innovations such as putting two processing cores in a single chip -- moves that have helped it gobble market share from its much-larger rival.'"

Comments

Which innovation?

[hyc]

Of course, IBM had multicores years ago, so AMD wasn't really the innovator on that front.

Re:Which innovation?

[cfx666]

>Of course, IBM had multicores years ago,
So did SUN with their UltraSparc platform. But for the consumer market this really was something new.

Cfx

Innovative dick comparison

[Opportunist]

Where's the innovation? And I'm not talking about AMD, Intel is just as guilty for equaling innovation with "make that damn thing run faster". Instead of shifting gear, they just basically upped the engine speed. 100 MHz, 600 MHz, 1 GHz, 4 GHz... now that the ceiling is more or less reached and enough waste heat is generated to heat a medium sized home, they change the measurement. Instead of length, we compare circumference. One core, 2 cores, 4 cores, 8...

Where is that innovation?

Re:Innovative dick comparison

[cfx666]

The innovation is that the good old software you are running does not automatically profit from cpu upgrades any more. So you need some new which is a good thing for me, cause Im a software developer.

Cfx

Re:Innovative dick comparison

[khellendros1984]

I'm guessing that the gp is referring to picking a single aspect of processor performance, and equating that single aspect directly to performance of the machine, i.e. "1200Mhz will always perform faster than 1000Mhz". No manufacturer says this (that I know of), but so many consumers take it as a given, when the only number quoted to them concerning a processor is clock speed.

That isn't to say that I agree with the grandparent, though. Intel's Pentium-m processors are pretty nifty...lower power usage, high performance (compared to a P4).

So, while it may not be some amazing quantum leap, I'd say that Intel is showing plenty of innovation, at least from the standpoint of the consumer market.

Pretty light reading, but...

[porkThreeWays]

It's a fluff piece, but there was nothing mentioned in there to make me believe Intel is really doing anything new. All I saw was mention of 4 cores. Are cores the new mhz race? 2 cores is all 99% of people will see benefit from right now. The 4 core race is moot because it's like a race for automakers to produce the first production 16 cylinder family sedan. It's not going to really benefit anyone. Really only a marketing gimmick. I'd rather see Intel clean up their current 2 core chips.

Here's what most consumers need in a computer...
A low latency desktop that can handle about 2-3 running applications with no slowdown that runs cool and doesn't use a lot of power.

Here's what we are getting...
A high latency desktop with fat pipes that run hot, optimized for running 7-8 cpu intensive applications at once, and idles at 200 watts. Because it should take 10+ seconds to open a basic program on an out of box pc.

Re:Too Little, Too late?

[10Ghz]

The dual-cores of this generation have been bought already, and the upgrade cycle won't start again until 2007-2008.

Dude, WTF?!? Are you saying that everybody who is going to buy a dual-core processor has already bought one, and next such CPU's wont be sold until 2007-2008?? What if someone decides to upgrade his computer in the summer (for example) to a dual-core machine? By your logic, he does not exist and/or he should wait until 2007/2008 because "that's when the next upgrade-sycle is in, you can't upgrade before that"?

People are upgrading their computer all the time. People are buying new computers all the time.