AMD vs. Intel: Different to the Core

If the CPU war were a football game, AMD would be playing ball control while Intel is gambling on a big-play. If it were basketball, AMD would be applying a full-court press to stall Intel’s fast break. This is all just another way of saying that AMD and Intel are following different strategies to develop their x86 processors into champions.

Intel is the former champ that’s losing games, so it’s switching to a more aggressive strategy. In addition to introducing its new Core microarchitecture this year, Intel says it will henceforth roll out a new x86 microarchitecture every two years. That’s a doubling of the rate Intel used to introduce significantly new microarchitectures. (A microarchitecture is a specific implementation of a CPU architecture—a core design that distinguishes different processors sharing a common architecture.)

Of course, it remains to be seen how truly significant Intel’s biennial core revamp strategy will be. But it wouldn’t surprise me if the revamps are genuine advances. Intel has multiple design teams working in parallel, and I suspect that the engineers will have more leeway to experiment with different ideas than Intel’s infamously regimented corporate culture used to encourage. That’s because a design team in Israel recently saved Intel from total humiliation by AMD.

While Intel’s U.S. designers were melting transistors in their futile pursuit of a 4.0GHz Pentium 4, the Israelis created the cooler-running Banias core for mobile processors. When the Pentium 4’s NetBurst microarchitecture flamed out, Intel was forced to adapt Banias and its successors for its desktops and even servers. Banias was so impressive that Intel relocated the leader of the Israeli design team to Silicon Valley to work his magic on the home front.

While Intel is shaking things up, AMD may be turning more conservative. We now know that AMD’s next-generation microarchitecture won’t deliver the big performance boost some were hoping for. Of course, AMD doesn’t need an extreme makeover right now—incremental improvements are sufficient. AMD says it’s saving its really big play for the following generation, due in another year or two. But AMD’s recent withdrawal of future roadmaps is worrisome. Does AMD really have a big play? If so, it better be more than just a Hail Mary pass.