Michael Dell on Intel's Core Achitecture - Conroe/Merom/Woodcrest
David Kirkpatrick did an interview with Mickey on Alienware, and here is what Dell had to say about Intel's NGMA chips(Conroe/Merom/Woodcrest):
"Intel [recently] showed a bunch of new parts. They're making good progress, but that only means there will be better competition between the two leading processor suppliers, which is good for their customers."
David was thinking aloud : "I would not call that a ringing endorsement of Intel from its biggest customer".
AMD's Dr. Ruiz said previously in a BusinessWeek interview that Dell "have a pretty damn good idea where we are and where we are going". (Emphasis added)
posted by Sharikou, Ph. D. @ 3/24/2006 12:16:00 PM
16 Comments:
From the interview:
Dell risks serious market share losses if it can't sell servers with the power and coolness of those from Hewlett-Packard, Sun and many others that are increasingly using AMD.
I pressed Dell repeatedly about whether he was concerned about the server competition, given his company's reliance on Intel. "We think we have the right products planned for the future that will keep us competitive," he said cryptically, adding with a chuckle, "That doesn't tell you much."
Thank you for adding more to your blog. I thought I was going to through the whole day without reading something new.
Keep up the good work!
amdsince1997
I agree with amdsince1997. I really appreciate your devotion and the effort and time you put into your blog.
As for this post, is this good for AMD? You have said that Dell using AMD would not be good, but how about Dell owning a seperate company that sells AMD? Alienware also doesn't(or at least it hasn't before it was bought) go for the lowest price like Dell does with Intel, so if Alienware's prices remain about where they are, they'll probably gain more business because Dell will promote them, but they won't drive out other sellers with lower prices. Or do you think that Dell will push them to drop their prices and sacrafice quality and support to force other sellers out of the business? Also, what do you think Intel's responce will be? Will they continue to give Dell discounts?
There are two factors that DELL is beneficial to AMD right now
1) Draining Intel by paying low prices for Intel chips
2) Driving others out of Intel business and into AMD
Item 2) is the most important, as long as a AMD-DELL relationship doesn't cause others to leave AMD, it should be neutral for AMD. This can be achieved by making sure that Dell is not getting any favoured pricing from AMD.
I said long ago Intel must get rid of its special treatment to Dell. It's a matter of survival for Intel.
Both Dell and HP are killing Intel.
Dell is draining Intel and driving others away from Intel. HP has Intel hooked on Itanic while selling most Opterons.
Intel must seek a level of survival that matches its tech underdog status. It has to give up any thought of monopolising the market. It needs to quickly downsize and preserve resources. The alternative is extinction.
sharukou, never under-estimate the stupidity of the Intel managment! Intel is proud of its 10X manufacturing capacity camparing to AMD, and it is going to build more Fab.
Intel has five 12inch fabs and 7 8inch fabs, AMD took 21.4% market with one 8inch fab. I estimated that Intel's yield is only 1/3 of AMDs, assuming FAB utilization is the same. That's why Intel uses a dual die approach with Pentium D. If yields were good at Intel, putting the two dies on the same piece of silicon would definitely save some cost of packing and soldering two dies.
"sharukou, never under-estimate the stupidity of the Intel managment! Intel is proud of its 10X manufacturing capacity camparing to AMD, and it is going to build more Fab."
Why would intel put more money into building more fab when their current fabs need reconstruction? They are stupid in engineering, doesn't mean they are stupid in finance.
Intel tries to outplay AMD with its manufacturing engineering. Intel is leading AMD with its engineering 6-12 months in 65nm FAB and wants to keep its lead by going to 45 nm. That is why Intel have to keep building more Fab, otherwise, Intel has no chance to close the performance gap from AMD. This helps, but far from that is far from enough.
Or Intel is buying time to wait from its REAL next generation CPU with proper architecture. Before that, anything are quick fixes only.
A note about Intel's shared cache design:
A small shared L2 cache may be prone to cache thrashing. If you look at the Horus, which is esentially a large shared L3 with ccHT intelligence, it's about 20MB. ccHT merges distributed caches/memories into one.
Intel's shared L2 is a hack for a very special case of 2 cores on die, it doesn't even scale to 2P. With Intel's design, even with shared L2, as soon as you go to 2P, you have to hit the FSB for cache coherence, dejavu all over again.
Cache coherence between two amd cores is handled inside the CPU. There is no FSB in AMD64.
In last October, Michael Dell's mood was different:
21 October 2005
Michael Dell predicts Intel dual-core victory
By Tom Krazit, IDG News Service
...
Speaking at ITXpo yesterday, Dell was responding to questions over whether his company would consider using AMD processors. "Intel takes a very definitive lead in performance and power management at 65 nanometers. If we thought AMD was going to be super-competitive in the spring and fall of next year, we'd be introducing AMD products right now," he said.
Maybe Intel's CPU is so good that Dell bought Alianware a few days ago.
Apple on AMD. Poor Intel, getting backstabbed?
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30545
Apple should have chosen AMD beforehand - as with the Core Duo chips Apple went back to frontside buses and 32-bit procs. AMD's chips uses HyperTransport (which is also used by the PowerPC, as well by Cray supercomputers), and are 64-bit, just like PowerPCs.
Can you realitically asses whether Intel can make 64bit into their Conroe chip family ? Intel cannot make it in P4, can they make it in P3 ?
I know you have vast knowlegde on the subject. Can you provide it objectively ? I cannot get the answer in the AMD board. If you can provide an objective one, it is good to post it in the AMD and Intel board. Thanks.
Before 2003, four Intel teams studied the Pentium and found it impossible to add 64 bit. In June 2005, Mooly Eden, the person who led the Conroe/Merom project claimed that enterprises don't need 64 bit for years. During the recent spring IDF, there was zero sign of 64bit capability with the Conroe. I immediately projected a delay in Conroe's launch. Then Vista got delayed.
It took a very long time for Intel America to get 64bit emulated using two 32 bit cores in Pentium 4. AMD released its Opteron specification and programming guide in 2001, and Intel started the Yamhill project in that year. Hammer (Opteron) was sampled in 2002, initially at 800MHZ. As of today, Intel has not gotten AMD64 correctly implemented on Pentium 4.
Can Intel Israel be so much smarter than they can do native 64 bit in one year? I don't think so. So far, they haven't shown more than patching the Pentium 3.
Apple could have become the AMD of OS world but lacked the gutz and the foresight to see that OSX-X86-64 sold separate from hardware would be a
real alternative for MS.. now its too late Linux desktops supported by
RH, Novell and SUN and Google will be OS's of choice. Now that Apple records is going to rip any success out of Apple computer.. It the end of the road Steve.
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