INTEL's postmortem
Unlike my modern history of AMD-INTEL, which started from 1GHZ Athlon, Jakub Wojnarowicz at FiringSquad traced back from the K6-II and 3DNow!, and pointed out that INTEL started to merely reacting or responding to AMD's moves since 1998.
However, the seemingly frustrated author failed to discuss INTEL's intrinsic defects that led to its forseeable demise.
I wrote two articles on the root of problem: Intel's defective gene and the inbreeding that perpetuated the defects.
The last time INTEL brought in some new gene pool was Bob Colwell, who took some RISC ideas into the x86 and designed the Pentium Pro, which is the basis of all INTEL Cores today.
AMD may also have some defective genes, but it kept bringing in new blood: first new tech talent from NexGen, DEC, then management from Motorola (Hector) and more talents from IBM, SUN and INTEL. Opteron is Alpha EV7 for x86, and I am sure the IBM, SUN folks will bring fresh ideas. AMD is constantly evolving.
posted by Sharikou, Ph. D. @ 2/14/2006 10:54:00 PM
2 Comments:
But the dude Jakub has a point about Intel's crappy plan to adopt the Techincal word "Core" as a
brand name.. The word also has technical meanings like a magnetic flux 'core' or a Nuclear Reactor 'Core'.
I am surprised why no one is speaking up about the BAD use of the word 'Core' in a Brand Name. A recent
DELL catalog calls these 2 X P-3 chips as "Centrino Duo" ..instead of Core Duo ..looks like Dell dude is still
milking 'centrino'.
Corino instead of 'Core' probably would have made 'Paul the dick ' happy...
I would comment on Intel's leadership. Intel started as a group of "traitors" who took Fairchild Semi's CMOS idea and made the DRAM chip. Andy Grove was a device physicist, Gordon Moore was a top engineer at Fairchild, Craig Barret was a semiconductor physicist, none of them know anything about processor design or deep understanding of computing. Intel doing CPUs was by accident. It was asked by a Japanese company to make some calculators. One Intel guy worked on DEC PDP-8 thought they could create one processor and then write software to do all the calculator work, instead of making different kinds of special circuits. But the Intel guys couldn't really do it. Then Intel hired a guy from Fairchild, and he designed the CPU, the 4004.
So it's not surprising that Intel execs know zip about CPUs, it started as a DRAM company, CPU knowledge had to come from outside. All Intel Core stuff today is pretty much
Bob Colwell's P6. Bob Colwell worked on VLIW architectures in a startup and joined Intel in 1990.
As I wrote here, Intel suffers from defective genes which has been perpetuated thru inbreeding.
Intel's Core design team in Israel are
newbies compared to AMD's top guys from DEC, IBM and SUN.
AMD's Opteron is basically Alpha EV7 for x86. The Athlon MP was basically Alpha EV6, and Intel's Bensley is an imitation of Athlon MP.
As for Craig Barrett, I found it surprising that being a device physicist, he was touting about 30GHZ CPUs in 2001 -- we all know CMOS power consumption is proportional to the sqaure of frequency.
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