The Pentium 4 was an attempt to win via marketing (look! 3.06 GHz!) and features (look! SSE2!) rather than by pure performance. Not only was Intel competing with AMD, but they were competing with themselves, avoiding moving x86 to 64 bits because they really, really wanted Itanic to succeed.
After Itanic did nothing in the market (cue crickets), Pentium 4 being outperformed by Pentium 3 and AMD, and 64 bit being dictated by AMD, Intel reacted to those swift kicks in the ass by finally releasing something actually relevant. Competition is good!
The Core, then Core 2 lines, were significant and finally showed us that Intel was taking things seriously. They brought Apple to Intel. The fact that they were based on the P6 shows that Intel can acknowledge mistakes and can go back to what works when necessary. However, Intel never stopped trying to win by marketing, as evidenced by the fact that even in to 2009, they were still selling single core CPUs. The Core and Core 2 lines only went to four cores from marketing pressure. Luckily they kept improving with the Core i lines.
The swinging pendulum has AMD now on top and Intel trying desperately to catch up. They can only compete by throwing hundreds of watts at the problem. But the historical accounting of Intel's reaction to a good walloping does a decent job of informing us what we might see now. Fun times!
As I commented in another thread a few hours ago, Intel does best when it remembers that its customers care about the ability to run their software without issues rather than having their vendor shovel the latest architectural hotness down their throats.
I wonder if Intel will rebound. I thought it was in good hands with Jim Keller, but then he left for personal reasons (were there too many road blocks within Intel, or perhaps he just wanted to work on AI with his friend?). Then came Patrick Gelsinger, and he succeeded at bringing back a few of his friends, but then a few of them left again after a while. I don't know. But we're lucky that AMD is back in the game (the current leader).
Considering AMD is also starting to "throw hundreds of watts at the problem" to keep place, I'd say the pendulum has started swinging. Intel still has the better power consumption numbers at idle and low usage too, if I recall.
Intel ARC is a sign that Intel realizes their audience are people who just want to Get Shit Done(tm) at a reasonable price point. Here's hoping as an Intel fanboi(tm) that they come back to take the crown soon.
Why would you want either of them to win I want them to spend the next 10 to 15 years and knocked down drag out fight continuously pushing everything forward and cheaper. Everything was the best when they were throwing haymakers every year at each other.
real question, what makes you want to support a company that's mostly rolled over all the staf? I mean as I say that I do the same for a baseball team... but... that seems different to me which is likely unfair :)
I owe my love for computers and thus who I am now to Intel (and Microsoft).
The first ever computer I interacted with was a 386 or 486 of some description that my parents bought to crunch paperwork and other such computer things. Knowing my dad, I'm 99% certain it was an Intel CPU of some sort in there. It ran Windows 3.11 For Workgroups and the sheer possibilities I could see were mindblowing for me.
The next computer, the first computer I got to have to myself (thanks mom, dad!) was an Intel Pentium. I think it was clocked at 166MHz? It ran Windows 95, I even installed it myself from like two dozen floppies. That really kicked off my love for computers.
So when someone asks why I support Intel? It's because they were and are a fundamental part of who I am, I owe a great deal of my computing passion and who I am today to their passion for amazing computing hardware. My childhood would not have been what it was were it not for Intel (and Microsoft).
In short, you could say there's an Intel Inside me.
> There, AMD still held the advantage because their HyperTransport point-to-point interconnect let them scale to large multi-socket configurations. Intel still primarily used a Front-Side Bus (FSB) architecture to connect CPUs to memory and each other, and a shared bus does not scale well to high core counts.
Notably AMD's new chips are a bunch of core-complexes chiplets (CCDs) around a shared memory controller (IOD). Still, scales up per socket, which is the killer.
Oh yeah, around that time when I was finally getting paid my first paycheck was spent on upgrading my CPU. Such a great time for performance gains.
I feel like we have it again now with the race between AMD/Intel, I really hope this generation brings about more competition.
ARM (for desktop/laptops) being a serious contender thanks to AWS Graviton and "Apple Silicon", Intel entering the dedicate GPU market (and finally improving their drivers/software), PCIE-5 drives going to be crazy fast (I'm sure there are going to be issues with the launch drives), DDR5 being great.. let's just hope prices go down (which they won't in the short term, I'm sure).
I was using a Q9550 around 4 years ago to play modern games. Really an impressive processor for its time, I only stopped using it because I moved away and couldn't take a desktop with me.
Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out.
The Pentium 4 was an attempt to win via marketing (look! 3.06 GHz!) and features (look! SSE2!) rather than by pure performance. Not only was Intel competing with AMD, but they were competing with themselves, avoiding moving x86 to 64 bits because they really, really wanted Itanic to succeed.
After Itanic did nothing in the market (cue crickets), Pentium 4 being outperformed by Pentium 3 and AMD, and 64 bit being dictated by AMD, Intel reacted to those swift kicks in the ass by finally releasing something actually relevant. Competition is good!
The Core, then Core 2 lines, were significant and finally showed us that Intel was taking things seriously. They brought Apple to Intel. The fact that they were based on the P6 shows that Intel can acknowledge mistakes and can go back to what works when necessary. However, Intel never stopped trying to win by marketing, as evidenced by the fact that even in to 2009, they were still selling single core CPUs. The Core and Core 2 lines only went to four cores from marketing pressure. Luckily they kept improving with the Core i lines.
The swinging pendulum has AMD now on top and Intel trying desperately to catch up. They can only compete by throwing hundreds of watts at the problem. But the historical accounting of Intel's reaction to a good walloping does a decent job of informing us what we might see now. Fun times!
Intel ARC is a sign that Intel realizes their audience are people who just want to Get Shit Done(tm) at a reasonable price point. Here's hoping as an Intel fanboi(tm) that they come back to take the crown soon.
The _consumer_ should be the one that wins.
I'm an Intel fanboi?
The first ever computer I interacted with was a 386 or 486 of some description that my parents bought to crunch paperwork and other such computer things. Knowing my dad, I'm 99% certain it was an Intel CPU of some sort in there. It ran Windows 3.11 For Workgroups and the sheer possibilities I could see were mindblowing for me.
The next computer, the first computer I got to have to myself (thanks mom, dad!) was an Intel Pentium. I think it was clocked at 166MHz? It ran Windows 95, I even installed it myself from like two dozen floppies. That really kicked off my love for computers.
So when someone asks why I support Intel? It's because they were and are a fundamental part of who I am, I owe a great deal of my computing passion and who I am today to their passion for amazing computing hardware. My childhood would not have been what it was were it not for Intel (and Microsoft).
In short, you could say there's an Intel Inside me.
Notably AMD's new chips are a bunch of core-complexes chiplets (CCDs) around a shared memory controller (IOD). Still, scales up per socket, which is the killer.
I feel like we have it again now with the race between AMD/Intel, I really hope this generation brings about more competition.
ARM (for desktop/laptops) being a serious contender thanks to AWS Graviton and "Apple Silicon", Intel entering the dedicate GPU market (and finally improving their drivers/software), PCIE-5 drives going to be crazy fast (I'm sure there are going to be issues with the launch drives), DDR5 being great.. let's just hope prices go down (which they won't in the short term, I'm sure).
Edit: I like rom-antics explanation more :)