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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: hmaly who wrote (20517)	11/25/2000 7:21:20 PM
From: fyodor_	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 275872

<hmaly: But, the PII and then PIII were monsters when they were introduced.> Neither the PII nor the PIII were new architectures, so they hardly constitute a reasonable comparison. Neither the P5 nor the P6 "were monsters when they were introduced", yet both demonstrated superiority over their predecessors. <Besides AMD is on a roll.> I did not mention AMD or the Athlon!!! I was debating only PIII vs P4. I think there is little doubt that AMD is positioned better now than when Intel introduced either of the two other cores (P5 and P6) - although you could argue the P5 case, since AMD had some very "hot" 486 chips. <hmaly: but in the end the chip doesn't perform any better than the PIII even with another 400 mhz> Let's start of with the "mhz doesn't matter"! Performance matters: Performance = Frequency * IPC The P4's performance (on a given process) varies compared to the PIII - sometimes it's lower, sometimes higher (mostly lower, esp. if you consider the added bandwidth of the P4 platform). However, there is little doubt (in my mind anyway ;)) that the P4's potential performance is significantly higher than the P3's. Virtually all current software is fairly well optimized to the P6 architecture. AMD requires its designs to run P6-optimized software well, Intel usually doesn't [require its architectures to run "legacy" code well]. You saw the same thing with the P5 and the P6 intros. In a way, you could say that Intel focuses on potential performance, whereas AMD focuses on actual performance. The reason Intel's strategy works is that its potential has a way of becoming the actual fairly quickly. This then leaves Intel with the ability to start from a cleaner slate (as clean as x86 compatibility allows). You may well argue that AMD's current strength will make the transition from to actual performance fraught with peril. I would tend to agree with you, albeit for somewhat other reasons, but in the end only time will tell. FWIW, my "other reasons" are related to Intel's use of a non-compatible instruction set to achieve much of its potential. -fyo