The following is based on valid references, and its not a story written by me.

First, consider that Intel has a revenue of $35.7 billion USD, net income of $5 billion USD, aprox 94,000 employees and more than 11 plants.

AMD on the other hand, has a revenue of just $7.471 billion USD, net income of just $574 million which is going down steeply, aprox 16,000 employees and 1 plant.

- 1. Thus, there is no comparison between Intel and AMD ground realities, i.e. on resources.

- 2. Yet, one's prodcuts cannot be stated better than the other except for a short period of time, considering AMD has 1 plant compared with Intel's 11, AMD seems to be doing good, everybody knows about it.

- 3. As far as the copying of pre Pentium 8086, 80286, and 80386 are concerned, it must be noted that AMD and Intel were partners at that time, as in February 1982, AMD signed a contract with Intel, becoming a licensed second-source manufacturer of 8086 and 8088 processors. IBM wanted to use the Intel 8088 in its IBM PC, but IBM's policy at the time was to require at least two sources for its chips. AMD later produced the 80286, or 286, under the same arrangement, but Intel canceled the agreement in 1986, and refused to convey technical details of the i386 part.

AMD challenged Intel's decision to cancel the agreement and won in arbitration, but Intel disputed this decision. A long legal dispute followed, ending in 1994 when the Supreme Court of California ordered Intel to pay over $1 billion in compensation for violation of contract.

- 4. In the face of uncertainty, AMD was forced to develop "clean room" versions of Intel code. In this fashion, one engineering team described the function of the code, and a second team without access to the source code itself had to develop microcode that performed the same functionality.

Thus, the simple statement that AMD copied Pre-Pentium processors from Intel is based on a false assumption of facts.

- 5. AMD's first completely in-house x86 processor was the K5 which was launched in 1995. The "K" was a reference to "Kryptonite" which from comic book lore was the only substance that could harm Superman (a clear reference to Intel which was dominant in the market).

- 6. In August 1999, AMD released the Athlon (K7) processor. The Athlon had a novel performance oriented micro-architecture, backed by a powerful FPU. The Athlon attempted to reduce bottlenecks that AMD viewed as inherent in the Intel P6 design. The Athlon had a higher average execution-per-clock throughput. The increased throughput versus the i686#Intel|P6 was possible because of fabrication processes permitting increases in transistor density for the Athlon processor. Early samples of the Athlon had branch prediction problems and lower clock rates than the P6. The final production chips fixed these early problems, and offered performance increases over Intel's architecture.

Intel immediately engaged in a near complete re-design of the P6 core, to eliminate the pipeline stalls that had reduced its performance. The result was the "Coppermine" series. However, the sudden revision and necessary line re-tooling put pressure on Intel's manufacturing facilities. Early availability of Coppermine chips was limited.

By working with Motorola, AMD was able to refine copper interconnect manufacturing to the production stage about one year before Intel. The revised process permitted 180-nanometer processor production. The accompanying die-shrink resulted in lower power consumption, permitting AMD to increase Athlon clock-speeds to the 1 gigahertz range. AMD found processor yields on the new process exceeded expectations, and delivered high speed chips in volume in March 2000. Intel announced a 1-GHz Pentium a few days after AMD did, but was unable to ship the part in volume for several months. Intel's attempt to leapfrog AMD with a 1.13-GHz Pentium III resulted in a product that worked reliably only on certain motherboards and was panned by prominent industry critics.[5] The chip was withdrawn from the market, having been installed in only a handful of OEM systems.[6] A revised stepping of the Intel chip wasn't released until 2001.

- 7. The K8 is a major revision of the K7 architecture, with the most notable features being the addition of a 64-bit extension to the x86 instruction set (called AMD64), the incorporation of an on-chip memory controller, and the implementation of an extremely high performance point to point interconnect called HyperTransport, as part of a Direct Connect Architecture. The Opteron, released on April 22, 2003, was the first product to come out of this architecture. It was followed by the Athlon 64 on September 23, 2003.

It is arguable that at the time of its release 64-bit was not yet needed by mainstream users. However the fact that the architecture offered high performance 32-bit application compatibility made it feasible for home users. It was so popular in fact, that the AMD64 standard was adopted by Microsoft and Sun Microsystems and quickly supported by the GNU/Linux and BSD communities. This left Intel in a position where they were forced to license the AMD64 extensions for their own 64-bit (EM64T) processors and possibly signalling the end for Intel's IA-64 platform.

The K8 is marketed under many names, depending on the targeted end-user: Athlon 64 (and FX), Opteron, Turion 64 and some Semprons are based on the K8. The Opteron is the server version of the K8. AMD designed the Opteron to compete against Intel's IA-64 Itanium architecture, but the failure of the IA-64 project to leverage volume sales means that the Opteron now competes with Intel's AMD64-compatible Xeon processor series.

- It must be noted that AMD released the first dual core x86 server chip as early as April 21, 2005.

From 1995 to 2006, AMD released several technologies to cater its customers and fulfill their needs with different processors for different applications, there are about 9 different processors.

While on the other hand, Intel was producing the same old Netburst based Pentium 4 from 1995 to July 2006, with the same sonic jingle that you have heard so many times.

The so called Pentium D's production was ceased on 9 March 2007. The Core2Due/Quad processor architecture, can have the same fate if Intel is not up to designing something which could offer some comparison for the coming AMD K10.

You see a logo on Microsoft products which says "Designed for Intel Pentium 4" and Intel's products have a logo that says "Designed for Microsoft Windows XP".

The word Athlon is a mistake under Microsoft word, whilst Pentium is a proper word?

AMD has to develop AMD Athlon XP because Windows XP do not support AMD Athlon's features to their full.

Since I left the usage of Intel's products in 2003, I cannot say much about its products, the i850 chipset that you are using for system (a) is very reliable and robust package, I have used it for more than 5 years without problems. I can just advice that you should not use Windows 98 Second Edition for the system listed under (a). Because Windows 98 cannot even understand many of its features, and this OS is highly vulnerable to internet threats. Its good that you're using Seagate's products.

There is nothing like extreme performance when you just speak of MHz and GHz, you must consider software when speaking about speeds, as if you consider that insanity levels on which the automobile industry had once stepped: having created wonderful, powerful, and fast autos, with engines in displacements of thousands of cubic centimeters and as many as 16 cylinders in V formation.

Automobile Manufacturers were surprised to see that there were few places where these autos could have drive at full speed — because autos move on roads, they do not fly. If you compare megabytes of code and data with kilometers of roads, then programs are the roads where CPUs drive. Programs should be optimized, leveled off.

In fact, we live in the era of "engine/cpu power raising" decline. Yes, the sluggish race for gigahertz and teraflops of the peak performance will endure some more time, but the victory communiques like "now 200MHz more!" do not excite the past optimism. Especially when all this results in another poor 2-3% performance gain in real applications. Poorly optimized programs are obviously easier to develop than the well-optimized, so an "external impact" is needed to make programmers obligingly agree to develop good programs. Slowing down of the peak "dull" CPU performance growth will serve as such impact. Thus, accepting the responsibility to dictate their will (or "come out with suggestions" if you please) to hardware designers, programmers in their turn will undertake for using hardware features to full extent.

You can have a look at the current system I use under my scraps [link]

I can also show you the pictures of its assembly if you're interested.


- Ahmed Nayyer

--
_{Art is the triumph over chaos. - John Cheever}