...two years ago the 650Mhz Athlon was probably the fastest performing desktop CPU on the planet. Can you say the same thing for the P4 today?
Sure. It's called leapfrog. Very often, the small fry does a skunk works project, or just overexceeds, and comes out with a product that is superior to the gorilla's. The gorilla generally comes back by putting extra resources to bear, and takes the lead back. Besides Intel/AMD, Cisco/Juniper comes to mind. With the 2.0 GHz P4, the leapfrog back over AMD will be complete. Recently the benchmarks that AMD has mainly been winning were office productivity types: the, like, how fast do you need your Excel spreadsheet to update types. Palomino/Northwood? We'll see. I would bet that Intel's had enough time with their chip improvement to keep the lead. Plus, it's on 0.13 from the getgo. In my experience, the small fry generally have one or two products in the limelight, and then they fall back. Sometimes they get bought out, or just plain disappear.
Tony |
