3 ms·

... It was exactly that. In the following decade, Intel comprehensively beat AMD. But then they let up, and started spending all their money on idiotic acquisit

• adgjlsfhk1 1y ago
  yes and no. A lot of why they comprehensively beat AMD was because they illegally bribed Dell and the other main PC makers to not use AMD cpus.
  • bcrl 1y ago
    The Core CPUs were excellent designs that didn't sacrifice performance while hitting a much lower power target than the P4. Intel was saved by the fact that the design team in Israel didn't go down the path of the P4 aiming for 10 GHz and then wildly missing the mark due to power constraints. AMD's Bulldozer was their attempt at a P4 style core: increase clocks at all costs. Again, aiming for ridiculous clock rates without considering the power cost was a mistake. However, some of the design techniques AMD came up with to hit higher clock speeds live on in today's Ryzen designs (just as ideas from the P4 live on in today's Intel CPUs). Tabula made the same design mistake in their FPGA fabric: the thinking was that registers are cheap and memory blocks can be run at ridiculous clock speeds in order to share, multiplex and reuse transistors across LUTs. Great in theory if it wasn't for the ridiculous cost of power and the complexity of the software to make it work. The power wall is real. Not every hardware design team makes the right choices early in a design when estimating power use and constraining the design space appropriately. The difference is that the tools used to estimate power consumption of a hardware design today are far better than they were 20 years ago as a direct consequence of these (and other) failures.