Re: Intel vs AMD x86-64

[Bill Davidsen]

Timothy Miller wrote:

> I've been reading some people's comments relating to this, and it 
> reflects a glimmer of an idea that occurred to me initially.  To begin 
> with, I completely agree that it was unethical for Intel to imply that 
> this was their innovation, giving no credit to AMD.  It was wrong, and 
> they should be ashamed.

Actually, it is unclear enough to me if the Intel chips will have any 
technical advantages that I have postponed buying the dual Opteron I was 
 planning for 1Q04 until I read the Intel specs more carefully.

These are the issues of interest:
- hyperthreading

  will Intel offer it and will it be in some way better than the 10-30% 
gain I see from HT on a P4.

- cost

  If Intel follows the previous price models for new chips they are not 
in any way going to be competitive on cost/performance. On the other 
hand they know that, they know they are playing catch-up in this market, 
and they might be aggressive for a change.

- SSE3

  what does it provide, is it in any way useful for anything I ever do, 
and will gcc or the free for personal use Intel C compiler support it?

- availability

  will this be a product or just a product announcement? I can wait 
until 2Q04 if there's a reason to do so, after that I assume it's just FUD.

- will it work

  or will it follow Itanium and take another generation before it runs 
faster than the hardware emulator? Speaking of which, I would like Intel 
to release the hardware emulator so I can do benchmarking now.

Having HT in a single package has some advantages, but talk is cheap, 
and AMD is shipping. I personally hope it works really well and keeps 
prices down.

--
bill on the road
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