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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.'"
The question remains, though, if more throttle is more speed, too, or just more smoke? Or rather, if that smoke generated is warranted by the speed increase. More horsepower only equals more speed if you manage to get it onto the ground, if your traction sucks because you try to run metal tires instead of rubber, you will generate a lot of heat, noise and some quite cool FX, but you won't pick up more speed.
To get out of bad analogies, of course more MHz == more speed. The question is, though, if there are not more fruitful ways to pump speed out of your CPU. With some really innovative features added, you can actually maybe generate more power output instead of generating just more waste heat.
For example the invention of branch prediction and multiple pipelines were something that DID increase performance considerably, even though the MHz didn't. So was adding the math coprocessor to the core. Or the increase in cache ram. All very good ways that speeded up calculation speed considerably, without increasing waste heat.
I blame the clueless customer. He only looks at "Wow, XX GHz!" and buys the crap, not caring if it's the equivalent of running his engine in first gear at 15.000 rpm. Remember that inane "2500+" labeling by AMD? A result thereof.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.