Maximum PC

If we took Wiki's chart on processors and their recorded Dhrystone MIPS seriously, Qualcomm's Krait (Cortex-A15 based dual core) @ 1.5GHz beats a Pentium 4 EE @ 3.2GHz.

Of course that's still a long ways from even touching an Athlon 64 X2.

I want to know more things.

Should be noted, that Intel did not get to where they are today by pursuing the netburst architecture, but by pursuing power consumption and form factor. They developed a promising low power CPU meant for mobile, and it took over in the desktop space.

Story time!

Back in 2003, we were mostly using pentium 4 and athlon xp-m in laptops. The pentium 4 at this time was hot and heavy. Many here remember prescott - and successor to the reasonably loved northwood core.

Intel (Israel branch) developed Banias - a pentium iii (tualatin) derivative that would be known as Pentium-M. They optimized power efficiency in various ways but one that struck me was they actually slowed down sections of the chip that were running faster than necessary. Keep in mind tualatin was being beaten by the old Athlon, the predecessor to Athlon XP.

Dothan followed Banias, and quickly gained popularity in laptops - marketed as a low power processor, the truth of the matter was the IPC was also better than Pentium 4. It slowly started getting noticed that it wasn't really much slower. by this time, northwood and prescott were out and Pentium-M had a little catch up to do, as the clock speed advantage (and mindset) needed to be overcome.

Several PC makers, and sites like SPCR (silent pc review) brought to light Pentium-M Banias desktop builds that would satisfy most. With mini-itx boards starting to show up, enterprising home builders were starting to take advantage of this chip. At this time, popularity was still low. Motherboards with AGP/PCI-e were rare/expensive/both, and this put a damper some plans.

Yonah (Intel core) seemed like Intel was finally noticing that they had a little darling of a CPU all this time while fighting the main front with Pentium 4/D. In 2006 with the lauch of Intel "core" architecture, apple's iMac also started using it. It still wasn't readily available to most. But by this time the community was abuzz with it - here's a chip that came from the laptop line that's capable of making it in the the performance arena. Being a laptop chip, buying a motherboard and CPU wasn't the easiest thing to do.

Core 2 cpus was the nail in the coffin for netburst. Packing 64bit instructions, and being marketed finally as not just a laptop chip but a desktop CPU as well, it quickly gained popularity. Intel multiplied cache, and front side bus speeds, and with a few architectural tweaks finally started giving it more love ($$$$) than netburst.


Intel learned that sometimes it pays to revisit an older architecture. It would be interesting if AMD will do the same. Stars core wasn't bad, and certainly had better IPC than bulldozer, and piledriver. Problem is AMD's resources are much less, and AMD is already pushing 2 architecutres - bobcat and piledriver, while selling off what's left of regor/stars with the athlon ii line. And now we're hearing about them making an ARM cpu.

It's nice to look back at fundamental problems with such architectures.

A good chunk of the reason why the Pentium 4 failed was because Intel was focused on clock speed alone (even though it was them who wrote about the formula P = CV^2f as early as the P4). Not to mention that their pipeline was really deep by the time Prescott came out.

As for AMD, I touched upon this. Basically given a fully threaded loaded, Bulldozer/Piledriver has enough resources to deliver the throughput. But since each integer core only has two execution units (I can't find the equivalent for Intel, but it looks like Sandy Bridge had 3 or so) versus the three that 10h had, it makes sense that Bulldozer didn't perform much better than the Phenom II. AMD's mistake was just not giving the cores enough resources

Beo, you are so...so wrong. That's a nice opinion though and should play MLP with SpongeBob. Everyone has opinions and it's fun to watch how they play out.

Want to hear something from a double E that has worked for Intel? Just sit and freaking listen.
You too LatiosXT...you're a voyeur and just spouting off randomly. You made a CPU? oh...I did a couple.

AMD is out of the game and not even worth a post. Did we not read the OP or are we just fans trying to blow wind?
Qualcomm? Intel and AMD;yet Qualcomm isn't mentioned. Look at your phone and see what processor it uses.

IF we are to survive, we don't need this random crap just posted on the forum. It's about your agenda and not the OP. I'll start digging our grave...thanks dude.

Well, Chumly, I'd welcome a constructive discussion

Which part is incorrect? That Intel switched gears form deep pipelined netburst to something more closely tied to Pentium III? or that AMD's jump from stars to bulldozer wasn't as big?