Risky Business a la Intel
Intel is doing well, maybe too well for its sake. The 45nm CPUs own everything, AMD can’t really compete for now and Nahalem is gloriously prefiguring in the clouds. What more could you ask for, Intel? What’s that, a self-challenging move that could ruin your future? Easy now...
Nehalem is considered to be the most significant and yet most dangerous micro-architecture move that Intel made in the last five years. Basically, Intel is trying to fuse the best of their own architectures with the holy grail of AMD’s ideas that have been already implemented in their CPUs for some time now.
This means that Intel has to put the integrated memory controller and L3 cache in a single processor and that could as well have “WARNING! ERRORS AHEAD!” written all over it. In fact Intel is clever enough to deal with those problems but that might mean that Nehalem could get released at a later date. With Nehalem, Intel is risking like never before, only to integrate what AMD’s CPUs have been sporting for years.
They really want to crush AMD? But, what’s the real deal? Intel’s CPUs are speedy enough the way they are now. The only big advantage Nehalem would have over Denab is its Hypertheading support, in this case.
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Integrated memory controllers are the only thing keeping AMD alive right now, at least in the server market. I know of many corporations who are still using dual core Opteron processors due to the integrated memory control instead of going to the much higher speed quad core xeons. If Intel figures out how to get the same level of memory efficiency, they’ll be unstoppable.