johnnymk

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news...urrentPage=all

Excerpts from Article:

In terms of system design, however, AMD does have some advantages. The company uses something called HyperTransport technology and an integrated memory controller to achieve better multicore integration and energy efficiency. Nevertheless, Intel's dual-dual chips still achieve respectable performance numbers, and the company itself has said it will move to single-die quad-core designs, like AMD's, within the next year.

But the question remains: Does quad-core really even matter enough at this point to make any difference in terms of business? Not surprisingly, AMD says it does matter in the server market, but admits the average PC user still has little to no use for a quad-core system right now. That's largely due to the dearth of multithreaded workloads, a problem the industry as a whole faces.

Aside from enthusiasts (the name chipmakers give to gamers and people who run media-intensive applications), the general public does not seem to be ready for quad-core systems.

"You're not going to type twice as fast if you're running four cores instead of two," says Phil Hestor, AMD's chief technologist. And while he does admit that having a quad-core offering will help AMD in certain areas, the common user running standard applications simply won't see any advantages, Hestor says.

Indeed, Hestor has been vocal about the so-called core wars between AMD and Intel, saying that simply offering more cores to the public is as misdirected as the megahertz wars of several years ago. Because Intel's quad-core chips have been on the market for a year now, Hestor also acknowledges that AMD must deal with a peculiar PR situation: Trying to explain to the public why two cores is actually better than four.

So where does this leave AMD and its new quad-core processors? Early indications are that Barcelona will at least be competitive with Intel's Xeon server processors, providing the chipmaker with a little bit of breathing room before Intel releases its Penryn family later this year.

AMD has also historically led its larger competitor in areas such as power efficiency, and that leadership is expected to continue with the quad-core Opteron, McCarron says. It's important to note too that Intel dwarfs AMD by most measurements, so merely keeping up with its larger competitor is a kind of success for AMD. In fact, Intel spent more on research and development last year, $5.87 billion, than AMD's entire annual revenue stream, which came in at $5.65 billion.

To compete, AMD says a large part of its business plan is tied to a project it calls Fusion, which will combine a graphics processing unit, or GPU, and a CPU on the same chip. The first step toward that goal was realized when the company acquired ATI last year.

"A couple things became clear to us a few years ago," Hestor says. "First, in the client space, we realized that GPU and CPU marriages had to happen." This recognition came about because the GPU started being used increasingly as a general purpose processor, Hestor says, referring to Stanford's Folding at Home project as just one example of what can be done by freeing up the GPU.

"Moore's Law is clearly continuing to work and because of that we're going to see a lot more rich and complex application stacks in the near future," Hestor says. The embedded architectures that have typically been good at running those apps are, at some point, going to get swamped, he predicts, and companies are going to need more powerful embedded architectures to tackle that problem.

Fusion will be AMD's answer. Expect it, in one form or another, in late 2008. In the meantime, AMD can at least say it has true quad-core technology -- before telling people why it's not all that important.

DarkFury

Sounds like someone is making excuses for their current lack of competition...

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johnnymk

Yes, that may be true.

But the one great thing about AMD is that their presence has not allowed Intel to be a monopoly. Imagine what progress has been made because of their competitiveness and their ability to keep processors affordable.

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Napoleon54

Well-said.

And I agree with them on the point of utility/ necessity. The vast majority of users don't have any real need for even a dual core processor. Vista was supposed to be the next big thing to spur upgrades but it has turned out to be a major turd. A lot of people are going to hang on to their old XP boxes for a while longer. The enthusiasts will always be willing to throw their money down for bragging-rights improvements, but the rest of us really don't care until there's something our current boxes can't do, and that point hasn't come yet.

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Maarchk

It seems like he is making a truthful statement. The average person will not be able to notice the difference and so why should they pay for it.

Its like getting a 700 hp engine for your granny mobile. Kind of pointless.

Edit: I know i sounded like i was trying to pick a fight. I wasn't. Intel does good and is ahead. AMD is usually cheaper and almost as good if not sometimes better, especially if you OC. But i agree with all the above that it has been good to have competition. And yes, AMD without intel would also be bad.

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DarkFury

I agree that competition is good...

HOWEVER... that guys STILL sounds like "Oh... we can't keep up right now... but that's ok because it isn't really NECESSARY right now, so why should we bother trying to compete in that area." As far as "truthful"... well that's just an OPINION that can be truthful to those to whom it applies. It's not a fact... just an opinion.

Sure is a far cry for when AMD was ahead and all the AMD folks were crowing about about it. The pendulum swings both ways and right now, AMD is on the backswing making statements like the above.

The AVERAGE person WOULD notice a difference if they had the additional horsepower under the hood, however they just aren't willing to pay the price for said benefit. Some folks don't mind taking an hour for a task that only takes 15 minutes or less with a newer setup. Just like some folks will say that Broadband internet is necessary while others are happy with dial-up.

Lots of mainstream people don't even have decent computers... so what about them? To them, ANYTHING is unnecessary (as witnessed by the multitudes of people I've come across that are still using old Pentium 2 technology, yet they complain when it doesn't work all that good... but they don't want to spend any money to improve.

Either way... with dual and quad cores selling for under $300, they are within striking distance of even the slowest retail available CPUs... if you have the other parts to support them. And if you were in the market to buy a new PC now, you'd kinda be silly buying anything that wasn't dual or quad core these days considering what they are going for now.

I can show you several vendors selling Dual and Quad core PCs for under $500... yet this guy is basically saying, "hey... why not spend that money on a single core PC, since you don't really need the advantages of a dual or quad. Personally, I'm calling BULLSH@T on that kind of statement.

Now if duals and quads were grossly more expensive than singles... then I'd go along with the sentiment, however as it stands, with the price points they are at now, buying old outdated tech, just because it can surf the web satisfactory just isn't acceptable by me personally.