It happens to the best of us!
Now that critics are hailing AMD dual-cores over Intel, the latest in chip wars is largely following a victorious pattern architected by a rejuvenated AMD over the last few years. For a good 6 years AMD have been waxing eloquent on the superiority of their architecture, winning awards by the dozen and have quickly changed a 30-year-old perception of being an Intel clone into that of a chip design leader. Although that has not translated into moolah, it sure has brought them on the threshold of a breakthrough in processor market share. Yes, Intel still has a monopoly (a whopping 83%) but they now have to use their powerful marketing engine in top gear to keep AMD in check.
The sub starts and the star player is benched!
The foreseeable future of processors definitely lies with 64-bit technology because unlike 32 bit processors that support 4 GB of memory, 64 bit chips can theoretically support more than 1 trillion TB of memory (1024 GB = 1 TB). AMD64 technology based chips made this possible as early as 2003, which was a good year before Intel! Intel’s response was in the form of the Intel EM64T technology, an innovation that was ridiculed by critics as an AMD64 clone.
Comparisons etched between the two chip-manufacturing rivals reveals a technological advantage pointing in AMD’s direction. Their hyper-transport technology ensures that all their processors receive superior input and output speeds from the memory irrespective of the FSB on the motherboard - which translates to great speeds at minimal costs! Contrastingly, Intel’s performance advantage greatly depends on a system’s peripherals like better quality memory (DDR3 as opposed to DDR2) and motherboards with faster buses (800 FSB) that cost a great deal more and that’s just to keep pace with AMD!
At this point perception amongst the benchmarking community was clearly in favor of AMD. However, there was still the war of multi-cores (two processors on a single chip) to come. Intel went one-up on AMD by introducing them a few weeks ahead of their competitor. Intel’s rush job showed in the quality of the processors and although the introductory ceremonies opened in blue splendor the benchmarks continued to shine in green.
The Missing Thread
Are we missing something here? Surely, Intel couldn’t be all beat up and still maintain their monopoly on sales, right? The missing piece is obvious- AMD has always fallen behind in multi-tasking benchmarks and the reason has been Intel’s Hyper-Threading (HT) technology.
In the age of multi-tasking and parallel processing on computers Intel’s HT feature is king. This feature helps a processor to behave as two logical processors at any given time and hence maximizes the use of idle CPU capacity. The HT feature gives these processors a distinct edge among threaded applications and the performance benefit tops at about 20% under ideal conditions. It is here that HT technology’s benefit is felt strongly as it complements the long pipelined structure of Intel chips.
The Hyper-threading Avalanche
Hyper-Threading is the reason why Intel wins those multi-tasking and multi-threading benchmark rounds but there might just be more to that story. While HT enabled single core processors support two logical processors, HT enabled dual-cores support 4 logical processors and this could expand to 16 logical processors on an eight-core system for Intel while other processors use just the 8 - How about that for an avalanche effect! Few of today’s software are coded with an eye on using the HT technology but that changes every year and 5-6 years from now all software could be HT enabled- paving the way for a Hyper-threading avalanche!
The last laugh
A pack of Hyper-threaded processors does indeed predict a triumphant future. Surely, there can’t be more twists to this tale, right? True but that’s only if you ignore an old patent filed by AMD in the year 1999 entitled "Microprocessor configured to execute multiple threads including interrupt service routines". Funny ‘cos Intel calls a very similar technology Hyper-Threading!
