Inside Intel

z71offroad writes: "There is a really interesting article at Anandtech right now showing what goes on inside Intel Labs. Although it doesnt break any NDAs, it is still a facinating look at what goes on inside the chip giant's labs."

Intel Labs

[topside420]

You can get much of this info (and more), plus related info on Intel's labs by visiting the Intel Labs [intel.com] website.

It has some pretty interesting info regarding what goes on around Intel.

Did we really need a /. article on this?

10 Ghz ALU = 5Ghz CPU

[kawaichan]

All the Pentium 4 ALUs are double pumped, that means a Pentium 4 running at 2.2 Ghz's ALU is running at 4.4Ghz.

And you are still wondering why Pentium 4 is still slower than the Athlon (or awfully close)

Imagine what would happen if the ALU is only running at the same speed as the CPU.

Personally, Intel is losing little ground at a time right now, but remember, Intel can afford to make a couple of mistakes but AMD can't even afford to make on. One mistake will push AMD back to the bottom, again.

AMD Still Has Upper Hand

[citking]

Intel chips, while more commonplace in store-bought computers, still do not measure up to the performance and reliability of AMD. I started long ago with an Intel Celeron 300 slot chipset (hey, I was new to this computer thing; please be gentle!). Later, when I wised up, I built a whole new system around a Duron 750 Socket A. Much better. Even when I ran comparisons on my Duron 750 to faster Intel 3 chips the results were very similar: The Duron outperformed the Intel in just about every aspect! Not only that, but when you consider what clock speed one gets for their dollar, the AMD series has always been faster for cheaper. Reliability is also a factor that goes against Intel. I have heard many horror stories of chips that had great heatsinks and excellent fans, but they still overheated with no overclocking involved. My co-worker, however, runs an awe-inspiring water-cooling system that has leaked many times (poor guy is great at computers, lousy at plumbing) but despite water sitting literally on the chip, the AMD Athlon he was running showed no signs of damage. But, to be fair, I can't just compare prices and reliability. Intel and AMD chips have many, many differences to set them apart. The whole deal breaks down to this, though: When I wanted to upgrade recently to the Athlon XP, I didn't have to go out and buy a new motherboard, different memory, and a special power supply. Actually, all I needed was the chip. Until Intel can effectively compete with AMD's performance, reliability, and cost, I will never, ever own another Intel board again.

Re:Intel's approach

[s390]

The reason the Athlon proccesors are so much faster in benchmarks isn't the clock-speed, but the memory bottle-neck. Athlon's run with half the level2 cache yet they still are faster. Why? 233 MHz front-side bus speed.

Bzzzt, wrong! Athlons are faster in terms of useful work done per clock because they have a shorter instruction pipeline. Thus their branch mispredict penalty is lower and they have a higher instruction-throughput-rate (ITR) than Intel chips of equal clock speed. Other factors (exclusive L1/L2 cache, lower memory latency, better die space allocation to ALUs and FPUs) influence AMD's higher performance too, but this is the main one. It's just a better balanced processor design, and it certainly yields higher performance for price.

BTW, current DDR memory speed is 2 x 133 Mhz = 266 Mhz, not 233 Mhz.

Re:at Intel

[Anonymous Coward]

Those are clean-room suits, not radiation suits.