Failure by design

AMD is currently dominating the performance, server and making inroads into the OEMs in the CPU industry. They have been taking market share since the introduction of the K7 Athlon and pushing Intel toward costly mistakes. AMD had long been relegated to making value oriented processor, but has recently been able to charge more for their processors due to the performance gain seen in the recent generation. Their biggest move has been releasing a 64-bit architecture (AMD64) which is both backwards compatible with current 32-bit systems and provides the performance benefits of 64-bit in the future. This differs greatly from the method employed by Intel with Itanium , a 64-bit only processor, which requires specially written software. AMD is currently planning to release Barcelona a native quad core processor in quantity in early 2007, as a response to the pending release of Core 2 Duo.

Core 2 Duo is a native dual-core processor like AMD’s X2 processors. Core 2 Duo does not have HyperTransport or an integrated memory controller. It improves performance by shortening the pipeline from the netburst architechture, and increasing the frequency of the FSB. Core 2 Duo is shown in initial benchmarks to provide a substantial increase in performance from Pentium 4 and a 10-20% improvement on current AMD products. It is made on a 65nm process which is a generation ahead of AMD, which plans to ship 65nm products in October.

Thiago Avila

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