Is Intel eating its future?
Having ridden the Rambus bandwagon to a 10% to 15% drop in market share, and the elimination profitability, Intel looks set to do it again. Despite everything it could do and despite spending a fortune on subsidies and advertising, AMD's DDR standard has clearly triumphed over Intel's RDRAM standard.
The next 12 months will see the beginning of the battle for the next generation of computer architectures - 64 bit systems.
As with Rambus, Intel is first to market, and, as with Rambus, Intel's solution is obscure and expensive. AMD, once again, will be following Intel by about 6 months. Once again, AMD has extended the existing installed base, and kept costs low. As performance numbers begin to leak for DDR equipped P4 systems, it is clear that one DDR channel is as good as or a little better than two RDRAM channels - making it quite clear that it is latency and not bandwidth that is the constraint to performance as chip speeds increase.
AMD's 64 bit solution has two key differences compared to Intel's: the first is the on-chip memory controller that cuts latency, just as using DDR cuts latency relative to RDRAM. The second is that it is fully performance compatible with IBM-PC standard that has come to dominate the industry over the past 20 years.
Intel's 64 bit solution maintains the old off chip memory controller, and requires software different from anything that has been used by the installed base - it is, like Rambus, an obscure platform.
With its on chip memory controller, Hammer architecture chips won't need a northbridge and won't need the motherboard real estate that used to be used by all the traces needed to connect the CPU to the northbridge.
Hammer systems will be very inexpensive to build, and fit in small cases - desktop, mobile, and rackmount.
It is looking more and more like Intel could finally lose its franchise as the industry moves to 64 bits. |
