There are 25 years of PC industry and 40 years of computer industry history that says there is never enough performance. My article in faith is that you will never have enough computing performance for things you want to do. Having said that, there are clever software people somewhere who are thinking of even cleverer things to do. |
There's an interesting trend just starting to emerge that could change things for the Itanium. |
These different firmware environments will separate OS X and Windows environments almost as effectively as instruction set architecture did when Macintosh software ran only on PowerPC chips. |
They clearly are at the tail end of what has been a pretty painful period for Intel. They had to tear up their road map and scramble to find new products to drop into the places where the old products were going to appear. |
This is a big step forward. And if you're going to build in the capability for this I/O virtualization into devices like graphics cards, you're not going to want to do it twice. So if AMD can get the industry to close in around its standard, it could create a problem for Intel. |
This is a far more controlled and less radical approach. |
This is going to end the vacation that AMD and Cyrix have been having at Intel's expense at the low end (of the market), |
Tualatin is a dynamite server chip, ... One of the reasons (Intel) decided not to go forward with the Foster-based Xeon chip was because Tualatin, with its larger cache, had better performance in server environments. |
Tualatin is a dynamite server chip. One of the reasons (Intel) decided not to go forward with the Foster-based Xeon chip was because Tualatin, with its larger cache, had better performance in server environments. |
What I'm hearing today is that AMD's performance advantage is going to narrow in the next six months or AMD may even lose its performance advantage. That doesn't necessarily mean they're going to lose market share. |
What I'm hearing today is that AMD's performance advantage is going to narrow in the next six months, or AMD may even lose its performance advantage. That doesn't necessarily mean they're going to lose market share. |
What Intel is trying to do is put some distance between multiprocessor configurations, which will be Xeon-based, and Pentium 4 chips for the desktop and low-end workstation environments, |
What Intel is trying to do is put some distance between multiprocessor configurations, which will be Xeon-based, and Pentium 4 chips for the desktop and low-end workstation environments. |
When they did the Pentium M, they were under tight constraints on power. Now, desktop and server are facing similar kinds of constraints. It's not so much battery life as it is noise, just the physics of cooling a really hot, small chip. |
You won't see a Cell server. You'll see a blade center that has some x86 blades in it, and they will have a few Cell blades to handle the number crunching that is best done using a Cell. |