Dell to use AMD Chips in Desktop PCs

bain writes "MarketWatch reports that Dell has decided to use AMD chips in its Dimension desktops due next month. The move to use AMD chips signals a break from its long standing reliance on Intel chips. The information slipped out of Dell's quarterly earnings report." From the article: "Before the announcement, which had been speculated in the financial community and the press, Morgan Stanley analyst Mark Edelstone wrote in a research note: 'It should have a negative impact on Intel and it could be a large offset to the expected benefits from Intel's restructuring efforts.' AMD, which has become a more formidable competitor to Intel, has been expanding its manufacturing capacity, a sign that it expects to be shipping more chips. Its chief goal is to put itself in position to supply 33% of the global microprocessor market by 2008. "

Comments

Hyperthreading and multicore are different idea

[DrYak]

Hyperthreading was a precursor to multicore processors, idea-wise

While in the end, both hyperthreading and multicore enable you to run more task concurrently without buying extra chips, they don't have anything in common. HT isn't Multi-cores precursor, it's completly different idea.

The basic idea of HT is to fill-in the hole that happen in the pipe. Very often, the CPU waits a few cycle, while instruction are comming through the pipeline stage. The basic idea of HT is instead of a given stage stay idle, wainting on the previous to complete, we can feed it with data from another thread. 1 logical unit, but 2 threads run in parallel, the first one as usual, the second only serve to avoid staying idle each time a prediction turned out wrong. Over-all speed : almost the same, but background task "feel" more responsive.

The basic idea behind multicore is to try to takae the advantage of 2 CPU, but sharing some part : 1 packaging, 1 interface, 1 socket on a single-socket motherboard some times even 1 of the lowest level cache (and some times it is just two chip packaged together and using 1 interface), except from that sharing, it behaves mostly like two CPU. Over-all speed : doubled.

So the idea are basically different : HT is "try to keep the CPU busy even in case of pipe-line stall (and thus avoid wasting time)", Dual-Core is "try to make SMP by making two-processors-on-a-chip (and thus increasing theoretical max speed)".