Is Intel victorious?

Pat Patla, director for server product marketing at AMD, agrees that even the chip-level x86 innovations aren’t really new. “64-bit computing? We certainly didn’t invent that,” he says. “Neither did Intel. 64-bit addressing was simply something that lived on RISC platforms or even other proprietary CISC platforms. Our whole philosophy, our whole strategy with Opteron is to take all of the great features of higher-end systems, ... cherry-pick the best features, and put them in x86.”

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Head-to-head with AMD
Indeed, so successful has AMD been at incorporating high-end chip engineering into x86 that for the first time Intel is in the position of playing catch-up on its own platform. Besides being first to market with both 64-bit and dual-core x86 processors, AMD has made other improvements at the chip level.

Unique to AMD’s design is a proprietary architecture called Direct Connect, which uses HyperTransport technology to create an architecture with extremely fast I/O performance between the CPU and the rest of the system. More importantly, Direct Connect allows the two cores of a dual-core chip to communicate with each other more efficiently than Intel’s current designs allow.

“Direct Connect architecture eliminated all the bottlenecks of a front-side bus. We integrated the memory controller directly onto the CPU core and then directly connected the CPU connectivity bus,” AMD’s Patla says.

But Shannon Poulin, enterprise marketing director at Intel, says many of AMD’s advantages are overstated and that Intel’s decision to stick with existing x86 technologies was a conscious one, designed to reduce customer expense.

“If you have an internal memory controller, every time you switch to a new memory architecture you have to re-qualify the processor, and thus the server,” Poulin says. In addition, he says Intel’s new E8500 chip set also addresses the advantage of Direct Connect by providing a separate front-side bus with dedicated bandwidth for each core of a dual-core Xeon processor.

According to Poulin, Intel customers also reap the benefits of its advanced manufacturing. Intel will be first to market later this year with production parts manufactured using a 65-nanometer process. In addition, Intel is now using 12-inch silicon wafers whereas some of its competitors are still using 8-inch wafers, giving Intel an advantage when producing larger, multicore chip dies in volume.

For its upcoming product releases, Intel will close the gap with AMD further by adapting lessons learned from its low-power Pentium M laptop CPUs. A new server chip code-named Woodcrest, due in late 2006, will incorporate dual low-power cores in a design expected to offer five times the performance of the first Xeon chips.

But not everyone takes Intel’s road map completely at face value. According to Graham Lovell, senior director for x64 servers at Sun Microsystems, lingering questions remain as to Intel’s ability to execute on its ambitious plans.

“When you go along to a meeting with AMD, there are usually no surprises in terms of the road map,” Lovell says. “There’s nothing going backwards. It’s not a case of, ‘I know we told you we were going to have this on our road map, but it’s slipped back by a quarter,’ and then you go to next quarter’s meeting, and it’s slipped back by another quarter. We don’t have those meetings with AMD.”