Why Intel?

[ovvldc]

I just saw CNet's dual head-to-dual head comparison between Intel's Pentium D and AMD's Athlon X2 processors...

Glorious Steve had better have seen some really nifty stuff on the Intel roadmaps because they are sure getting the short end of the stick at the moment.

[val1984]

Well, basically, Pentium D sucks. I mean it is only 2 cores on a single chip with no internal communication between them : it's like a dual processor but with half the bandwidth for each core.

Intel had to introduce such beasts because its next gen processors are not ready yet. But those will be based on the Pentium M efficient architecture and the cores will share the same L2 cache to improve communication speed.
Pentiums 4 will be superceded by this new architecure

You can read more on Hardmac for example and have a look at the presentation Intel did during the Intel Developer Forum 2005 at x86secret.com (but comments are in french sorry).

[OPENSTEP]

Yeah, I'm an AMD fanboy myself for my homebrew hardware. The big factor, IMHO, is really the Pentium M line. For mobile processors Intel has been the leader for some time. For performance processors (e.g. desktop/server), I think AMD has been the leader (arguably) since Athlon.

Still, they're both little endian which is a crime. Makes examining memory contents a PITA.

ed

[ovvldc (away)]

Well according to Anandtech, Intel is now making progress with their new release. But it is still slower than AMD's offering and does not come with EMT64...

More to come, probably..

[jakeOSX]

well, if i remember right, AMD farms a bit of its production to... IBM.

so why would you ditch IBM to put a third party in and get back with IBM?

also, AMD, though great chips, have had supply issues before. apple needed a chip designer that could produce good chips and meet demand.

and a side note, Intel needed a computer maker that would let them make nifty stuff. microsoft hasn't exactly been putting out drivers to fully support some of intel (or AMD)'s newest.

-j
(subject to correction, retraction, debate, or general arg!ness)
[/code]

[OPENSTEP]

I think they farm out production to fabs, but the design is still done by AMD (IIRC). One of the big reasons that it was thought AMD was not chosen was supply issues. Intel's big enough that there's generally a good chance they won't have any supply issues like AMD has had in the past. Also, Intel has an array of chips for other embedded and mobile applications that Apple might be able to use (StrongARM was in the Newton...which I hope would come back, but that's another story...) so discounts and bulk purchases becmoe attractive.

ed

[ovvldc]