The Near Future of Intel

wh0pper wrote to mention a Design Technica story about the near-term future of Intel. They've been getting beaten in the press pretty soundly by AMD of late, and at the Intel Developer's Forum they did their best to convince attendees they were on the comeback trail. From the article: "It wouldn't be IDF if there wasn't a solid performance message. This time, Intel clearly had AMD in their sights. By a series of their products' massive performance improvements, Intel hit the ball back into AMD's court. With Microsoft's Vista operating system coming out at the same time, Intel showed how they have the higher performing solution. Clearly, we won't know until final systems ship. But Intel presented their case strongly, suggesting they can match AMD, if not beat them."

Price war

[Ginger Unicorn]

hopefully this means AMD will revert to trying to compete on price and so i can afford to get a modern setup ;)

Re:Intel has been catching up lately...

[WhiteWolf666]

I'm a big AMD fan, but this is true.

Lately AMD's development rate has slowed. Initially, I suspected they did this to hold better product back until Intel became competitive again, but after a year or so I believe they started to sit on their laurels.

The new intel designs will push AMD to work harder, which is a good thing. AMD's developers are very, very talented. It's sad to see the business side of the operation (even though its very practical for them) to tell the developers to slow down a little bit.

Expect AMD to start going full-tilt again.

Fluff?

[Zebadias]

I actually read the link and found it dull and lacking in any real excitment.

So if you have not RTFA then don't worry your not missing anything!

Irony!

[SolitaryMan]

The page showed me an AMD ad with this article. Was enough for me to know "near term future of intel" :)

Welcome to slideware

[ookaze]

Heh, I guess this is another example of slideware, vaporware through slides, presentations, articles...

AMD - Time to wakeup

[Anonymous Coward]

While AMD has clearly have a better processor now, it looks very complacent now. Especially when they should be looking at being more menacing by aggressive Research.

Alas nothing of that sort is happening. Still resting on the glory of the on-die memory controller, the core is now 7 years old!

Every other chip company is doing interesting things.
1. Sun Niagra T1 is amazing
2. IBM Cell rocks!
3. Intel Itanic may have failed, but was no doubt interesting.

Well ... AMD please move on. We acknowledge you have won. But the next battle is starting this week.

Re:TFA is weak, Here is Anand's updated benchmarks

[Billosaur]

From AnandTech: The performance picture with regards to Conroe hasn't really changed all that much - on average we're still seeing a bit over a 20% increase in performance over an overclocked Athlon 64 FX-60. While it's worth noting that these results should be taken with a grain of salt, we really were not able to determine any cause for suspicion based on Intel's setups. The machines were as clean as they could get, with the BIOS oversight having no tangible impact on most performance.

So Intel is finally catching up to and beating AMD in some regards. Mind you this is only one set of tests, but it may be indicative of a tightening of the processor battle.

Re:Yay go Intel!

[mapmaker]

Intel's BRAND NEW processor can outperform a 1+ year old AMD X2?

It's even worse than that. This isn't a brand new processor, it's a future processor that they hope to have out in 6 months.

Improvements?

[Kilz]

But Intel presented their case strongly, suggesting they can match AMD, if not beat them. Im waiting to see an independent head to head comparison. That Intel can beat AMD using 2 computers they set up is not a shock. Its possible to do all sorts of low underhanded tricks to make one computer run better than another.

Re:Yay go Intel!

[Courageous]

This isn't a brand new processor, it's a future processor that they hope to have out in 6 months.

Indeed. This is a new situation for Intel. What they have done is given out copies of early silicon to reviewers, to publish reviews of a product that they don't plan to have out of their fabs at any significant production level for quite some time. Quite embarrassing that Intel has been reduced to this, really. We're getting reviews of a product that no comsumer can buy, and won't be buyable for quite some time.

Nonetheless, I'm happy to see them moving forward with decent x86 plans. The additional issue width, the microop bundling, the power enhancements-- all neato. Now they just need to address their goddamn bus topology.

C//

Re:Intel has been catching up lately...

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel are increasingly developing technology that work *against* the customer rather than *for* them... and this is their future direction.

Everything done by Intel in the last 5-8 years has been driven completely by Digital Rights Management, and ensuring that the PC platform is completely locked down -- even if they so desperately want to avoid talking about it publicly. Remember the fuss over the "Fritz chip" -- it was a bill intended to force all electronic manufacturers to include a security chip to guard "digital rights" within a year to two or the government would impose one -- Intel was one of the companies that stopped that bill... because they, behind the scenes, made it quite clear that they were working on their own solution in conjunction with the rest of the technology industry. Any imposed solution would be half-assed at best.

Part of that solution is Le Grande (their trusted computing chipset), but also a raft of other technologies including stuff like EFI and HDCP, and rengineering software protocols to include DRM measures... all initiatives either created or primariliy driven by Intel... all guided by the principle of security used against the owner of the computer... and all intended for DRM. Intel isn't looking at selling to PC makers in future, they are looking to getting their chipsets into TV, DVD players. Not to mention such future tactics as their deal with Skype to cripple it unless running on Intel -- such future deals will be watertight once you cannot patch binary code and still have it work the same way.

It's a shame really. Intel, for all its faults, used to be in the business of making computers more and more capable. Now they are just in the business of building hardware that is deliberately crippled.

Re:Article is drivel.

[tpgp]

What he's talking about is a feature of Vista, called SuperFetch.

The idea is that the OS predicts what pages of what files you're going to need based on it's analysis of your usage of your computer, and caches those on any faster-than-disk-but-not-RAM storage you may have, like a flash drive.

Yes, I figured out he was talking about SuperFetch, but it's still drivel. SuperFetch is unproven and overhyped

Microsoft Exec : "I just plugged in this USB memory stick, any USB memory stick, and as soon as it recognized it, we just got another 500 megs of memory on this machine.)" [microsoft.com]

Wow! Thanks Jim, 500MB of extra memory by plugging in a usb stick.

In addition, it's not likely to be any good for games. I can imagine loading system libraries, etc onto flash at boot... but games? It doesn't really work. Flash write time is still waaay to slow, and games manufacturer's are still going to want everything loaded off CD to attempt to prevent copying.

Re:Yay go Intel!

[Surt]

Well, they've shown they can beat an overclocked X2 running at the clock speed that AMD predicts they'll have in their own roadmap in 6 months by more than 20%, running at the low end of their (intel's) expected clock range, using 6 month early hardware. This suggests that they'll be delivering a significant performance advantage over amd in 6 months, barring amd delivering a new architecture, which is not on the amd roadmap right now. AMD will deliver DDR2 at that time, which may have some small performance advantage, but they've said nothing to suggest that DDR2 will deliver more than a 5% performance advantage, if any (it may even be a slight performance disadvantage early on, but will cost less).

Re:Check the source its Rob Enderle

[samkass]

Agreed. The Mac community often calls this guy "Rob 'Microsoft wrote the original MacOS' Enderle" because that's one of the claims he stands by to this day.

The last time AMD coasted...

[NivenMK1]

If memory serves correctly, the last time AMD was fairly absent in the processor market and "resting on it's laurels", they rocked the world with the XP-class processor

Anyone who has been keeping tabs on AMD knows they are in the process of expanding their manufacturing capability/capacity.

I think AMD is playing the part of "lion in the weeds"...... ....again.

AMD is waiting (profiting)

[shummer_mc]

It's expensive to continually upgrade fab facilities, marketing material, etc. Sitting on a successful product with inflated prices is a serious profit maker. AMD is simply reaping the rewards for kicking the hell out of the P4. Congrats to them. I don't blame them a bit. They've been skating on razor thin margins for quite awhile. I hope that AMD has addressed the majority of their production issues in the last year (they're gonna need it).

OTOH, Intel has been fattening (and has expanded into MANY other markets) and until recently hasn't had to really work to keep a nice lead on AMD in the processor market. So, now they will have to turn around processors faster than AMD (which is likely why they just switched to 65nm processing before moving into Merom processors). That's just business.

It shapes up as a nice fight (finally). I can't wait. I want a dual core CPU for around $100. Maybe then I'll get off of my 3000+XP processor. Yes, the consumer wins in a competitive market (FWIW, I've never built an Intel system... but I've built a LOT of AMD ones (and one Cyrix)). I only hope that AMD has enough designs stable and in reserve to keep ahead of Intel for another 5 years. AMD is still the serious underdog here.