Ali,
If you note my language I say "the race is lost atleast until Wilamette". All I am (and architectural folks at and outside of Intel are) saying is that Wilamette provides a chance to pull ahead.
To be sure only the exact performance potential is only known to a small set of people who understand all the trade-offs. However, it is clear that Intel is trying some interesting stuff that has nothing to do with superpipelining - like multi-threading, split-speed Integer/FP units, dynamic frequency changes, and some very interesting analog circuits to precision tune the pipeline frequencies. From what I understand, this "neat stuff" has already cost the program a lot in terms of time-to-market and there is good chance that it will cost some more at verification time. There are some mixed signal elements here that are not too conducive to simulation. The rubber needs to hit the road before the impact is clearly known....
Now, by the time Wilamette sees the light of the day, Athlon core would have progressed and there would likely be some compelling advantages in terms of smaller die, lower power, potential to build in massive amounts of cache or put a second processor on same die, etc., that could help AMD. But, that is probably more than a year away and usually there is not much point looking that far out. Right now, I am sticking with the "no contest until Wilamette" line.
Chuck |
