Yousef,<they have better process technology which leads to faster CPU's>. You are again in your "dead loop". The process technology is NOT a major part of the equation for microprocessors. The technology itself was developed by Sematech and transferred to all the participating companies - Intel, AMD, TI ... long time ago. Now it does not matter too much who's steppers are better adjusted and who cleans better their hands when dancing with wafers. And the raw wafers they buy from the same vendors...
The major part of the CPU performance is the logic complexity of the chip. For any pipelined logical block (ALU, decoder, etc), the logic complexity translates into some number of gates in sequence. More gates = slower design.
Intel made it simplier and can get to higher frequencies; however, the number of instructions per CPU clock is not very high.
AMD made it more complex and can execute more instructions per clock.
But due to increased complexity they cannot get to higher frequencies. However, the overall performance is about the same. Cyrix made it even more complex, they can execute instructions even more effectively, but it comes again at the cost of clock frequency.
Therefore, we can see that there is something fundamental over here:
for the same data path width, same technology = same performance.
Of course, execution for mass production can make some difference,
but we know that AMD did make better and faster 486 processors, and
in quantities. I do not see any difference today.
Ali. |
