"So in why on earth does IBM want to abandon Intel and embrace AMD, I might ask, it seems a losing proposition for big blue and they want winning propositions"
Why would this be a losing proposition? Sure Athlon will probably not be able to match the peak speed grade of P4, even with Athlon being produced using SOI, but I suspect Clawhammer will be able to match P4's peak speed grade.
Additionally, while Athlon will not be able to match P4's peak speed grade, for many applications it will be able to exceed P4's performance.
And, for multiprocessor systems, LDT, ccNUMA, and point-to-point memory accesses will be better suited for servers and many other classes of machines than Xeon's shared bus. Hammer will be better for these systems than Xeon, even if P4 has higher IPC than Hammer.
Finally, who said anything about IBM abandoning Intel. IBM would be foolish not to offer their customers what their customers want, and many customers will insist on Intel for years to come. |
