| Thursday, June 15, 2006 |
10:43 - Glove's on the other foot now
http://www.haibane.info/2006/06/15/intel-is-dooooomed/
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Hey, look—someone's doooooomed again, and this time it's not Apple!
At least, that's what seems to be the gist of the current scuttlebutt in the x86 hardware camp, as Aziz Poonawalla covers here. Apparently AMD's performance is beating Intel's all up and down the village square, and that means people are saying Intel will be out of business by 2008.
Where have we heard stuff like that before?
Now, this issue hardly matters much to me—if Intel were to get hit by a really huge bus tomorrow, I'm sure Apple could switch to AMD without any fanfare. (They wouldn't even have to reshoot any ads, because Apple doesn't use that DING! bong-bung-blong-bling chime thing with the Intel logo that would get Intel to pay for half their advertising budget, or whatever the deal is.) Competition would suffer, but if AMD's speed is better anyway, well, we'd still all come out ahead, at least for a while.
But just as with all the Apple-is-doooomed scenarios, it's pretty silly to imagine that a company the size of Intel will be dead within two years just because it doesn't have the favor of gamers. Considering how much bigger Intel is than AMD, and how much bigger and more diversified their market is, it would be a huge manufacturing increase for AMD, just to step into Intel's shoes in the market. Even if they stopped making their own chips altogether, Intel would always have business—even if just as a contract manufacturer for AMD chips.
And Aziz is certainly correct in noting that the Intel-is-doomed guy puts way too much stock in the importance of 64-bit computing. Guys, we've had 64-bit on the Apple side for three years now, and it hasn't even fazed us that we've had to drop back to 32-bit in the Intel switch. I don't think anybody has even noticed.
Intel's doing dandy, thank you. And it sounds like Cornrows will do just fine when it gets here.
UPDATE: Apparently the Core Duo is 64-bit-compatible anyway, sort of. Via Chris.
UPDATE: Then again, I'm reliably informed that the "64-bit-compatible" source above is confused:
Sossaman adds dual-processor capability but nothing else. Yonah
already has VT support. There's definitely no 64-bit support; Yonah and
Sossaman share essentially the same core that was in Pentium M, which was
only slightly different from that in Pentium III.
Interesting. Still I don't think it means anything to us everyday users; even on the high end you have to work to find someone who runs up against an 8GB limit in Photoshop.
I've long suspected that the "gotta have 64-bit" impulse is driven by people who grew up steeped in the notion that 16-bit game systems had better graphics than 8-bit game systems, and 32-bit systems were better still, so obviously a 64-bit computer will have really cool graphics compared to a 32-bit one... right?
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Brian Tiemann
