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AMD did some interesting things. Another I'd point I'd add is taking RISC vs CISC off the table with the x86-outside, RISC-inside K5. This opened up the field f
by jwilliams 14y ago
AMD did some interesting things. Another I'd point I'd add is taking RISC vs CISC off the table with the x86-outside, RISC-inside K5. This opened up the field for a lot of innovation in the core.
What Intel did best was learn well from both AMD's success and their own stumbles. I'm sure Netburst & Itanium yielded great learnings about branch prediction.
I'm not sure if it was luck, but Intel also benefited from a shift to mobile. iirc, the original Intel Core line was for mobile, but ended up dominating the Intel roadmap. At the same time, AMD was trying to make inroads into the server market, mostly because it was lucrative.
Perhaps that stifled their innovation in some key ways. Anecdotally all the "big iron" architectures are dying off. Certainly if you wound back to 2000 and said ARM is the upstart in the server industry, you'd get laughed at.
- InclinedPlane 14y agoInterestingly both Intel and AMD pulled the same trick at about the same time with regard to CISC vs. RISC. The Pentium Pro was also a RISC core that used micro-op translation to present an x86 exterior, and it was introduced about half a year prior to the K5, though it didn't hit the consumer market for a while. Also, as you point out, Intel has been good at cross-pollinating between different development lines and teams. The Core architecture was a ground up redesign but it was heavily influenced by the work on the Pentium M design done by the Israeli division. And previously there was a lot of influence on the Pentium-III design from the work done with the low-budget Celeron line.