Intel takes wrong turn

[jmiller]

Intel Takes a Wrong Turn on Dual Core Highway

Here’s the cold, hard truth. Careful, it stings a bit. Intel, though seeming to finish first in the release of multicore processing, rushed itself to the market on the wrong racetrack.

On Monday, Intel unveiled its Pentium Extreme Edition 840 in order to be the fabled “first on the market.” But even this was a change in plans, a panic-driven move riding on the rumor winds left by AMD’s Opteron dual core series impending release on Thursday.

But the Opteron is for servers. Athlon series for desktop computing won’t be released until next month.

According to various sources, the demand for multicores rests mainly in the server and workstation markets. Intel doesn’t plan to release dual-core Xeon until 2006.

It seems Intel’s boasting of “we were first” was a bit premature. In a month, there will be two desktops on the market with dual core processors, but only one dual core server processor. AMD will then have two chunks of the market, while Intel is still pregnant, awaiting the birth of Xeon in the next nine months.

[Conficio]

You are right in this one.

It is a bit ironic, that the need for dual core is born out of hitting the speed bump and Intel needs that even more than AMD. The current issue in processor technology is heat. CMOS processors produce the more heat, the higher the clock frequency. Intel thought it can outfox AMD by setting on the customers' believe more MHz equals more processing power.

However most users really need no more processing power in the first place to surf the net, or write their letter, or do their accounting on a PC. Even videos and audio run pretty well on a cheap middle of the road PC.

AMD did invest in improved processor architecture and kept the MHz rating of their processors ~30% below similar powerful models from Intel. That means Intel needs the dual core desperately to grow their processor power (they even mothballed a very high clocked model), while AMD just does the right step with out technological pressure.

AMD is ahead of the curve these days. Still they do not have the marketing power or capacity to just sideline Intel. And Intel is a force to reckon with.

Good for us consumers, that can use more than existing processing power.

K<o>