Intels New Vision: Finesse over Brute Force
February 27, 2006Intel’s New Vision: Finesse over Brute Force – Part 1 : An Introduction
Only a few years ago Intel’s roadmap was aimed at failure. Many comments regarding Intel’s ill-witted trajectory were made by analysts, investors, consumers, as well as traditional and online press publications. Intel took the backlash, but by the Fall of 2004 Intel had announced plans for a complete roadmap change, perhaps the most profound roadmap change in the last decade from the chip giant, that would allow it to better compete with other processor manufacturers – namely Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD).
Today we look at the market and we see AMD grabbing a large chunk of the server and desktop processor market – and finally making inroads into the laptop market with it’s Sempron and Turion family of processors. When the market-share reports came out a few weeks ago (you can read our report on that here) the public was in awe, we all knew that AMD was eating away at Intel’s bottom line and slowly stealing market-share away from the industry goliath, but I don’t think the vast public knew the extent of AMD’s recent success.
The question we must ask ourselves now is how could this have happened? How could Intel, who is set to invest over $6 Billion this fiscal year in research and development, falter to a company seven times smaller than itself; to a company that most thought would be bankrupt by now? Well, the answer, at least partially, can be attributed to Intel’s brute force strategy.
Intel, which is a marketing monster, spends over two billion dollars a year on marketing alone and many regard the Intel Inside marketing strategy as one of the most succesful advertising campaigns of all time. Intel has brand recognition that consumers look for when purchasing products. However, the average consumer has very little computer knowledge, and as such the main metric used by most consumers who enter their local CompUSA or Best Buy is that a bigger MHz value means more performance. We have all had that one friend, who strived for computer enthusiast superiority by purchasing Intel’s latest and greatest performer and only finding out weeks later that he or she could not play the latest high-end games because the $3,000 computer setup included only integrated graphics (and of course no AGP slot). Intel, hoping to leverage this mentality, as well as retain the performance crown, decided that the NetBurst architecture we find prevalent in Pentium 4 processors would be the future for Intel – enough that Intel initially expected the architecture to last for a decade. Alas, the NetBurst architecture only lasted six years, as Intel was reaching the limits of the NetBurst architecture due to power leakage and heat issues. Intel proved that bigger isn’t always better.
While this debacle was hurting Intel’s high performance reputation (as well as giving AMD an entry point into the enthusiast market), Intel’s mobile offerings were actually lauded by consumers. Intel’s Centrino line brought Intel’s vision of an integrated platform to life – as well as the future of the company’s processor roadmap. Intel decided to switch gears and pull a 180 degree turn in 2004, announcing that they would focus on dual-core and low-energy parts instead. This method, which carries with it much more finesse than Intel’s initial brute-force attack at the market, was met with confusion and acceptance. 
The press and consumers all loved the Pentium M processor, but how was Intel actually going to carry that over to their desktop lineup while retaining the performance crown. Well, the fruits of Intel’s labor are finally being realized with their Core Duo offerings, as well as upcoming chips such as the Merom processor. Intel may have faltered last year due to a lackluster roadmap and shortage problems, but with Intel spending almost as much on R&D as AMD makes in sales we should see the fruits of this giant investment from Intel shortly.
Stay tuned for Part Two where we will discuss how Intel has attempted to lower power consumption and develop a more efficient processor.
Comments»
Intel may have started its full 180 degree turn, but it is far from completed and AMD is far from staying in place.
Switching from a fast, MHz and power hungry, architecture to a slowest one with multiple parallel cores has emphasized another bottleneck of Intel’s platform: the front side bus.
The FSB was barely keeping up with the netburst architecture and could just feed the one processor it was plugged to, but with multiple cores, the IO and especially memory become the biggest bottleneck of the platform. This proves particularly true in multiprocessor (hence server) settings, where the AMD offering scales much more linearly than Intel’s.
Intel has started the revolution, but their roadmap show it: they wont be ready to compete until 2007 at best. 2006 will be a painful year for Intel. One where they need to regroup and focus their strategy. It is not a real risk (they are big enough to survive easily, unscarred), but AMD may take advantage of it.
The new architecture will hardly be slower. I mean it’s not really that hard to trump a turtle in a race is it? The primary problems of the NetBurst architecture asn’t so much a fault of the FSB, as it was a fault on the reliance on pure-transistor power. As we’ve all
seen, these tactics produce alot of heat. Intel would have been able to scale their FSB to produce a solid 4gHz had it not been for a heat problem.
But regardless of what NetBurst COULD have done, they were still on a front side bus. AMD themselves didn’t have the resources or the researchers necessary to produce the HyperTransport Technology that they are so well known for, instead they were a large contributer to the HyperTransport Consortium (sounds devious, I know), a mish-mash of many big names (and some you’ve never heard of). Intel, on the other hand, has definitely got the money to spare.
Intel has mentioned that their next generation architecture will be released under the codename Merom (Merom being the desktop version). What changes will they make? What exactly will their next-gen architecture feature? We have to consider a number of guidelines: Intel is gunning for low-power, high IPC, and multiple processing units. You can see that is practically a description of what AMD is running now. How will it compare to HyperTransport? HTT definitely has the right ideas, and it itself is a very good product. I bet Intel will seek to integrate more than just a memory controller into their CPU’s.
Take a look at their 9xx series of chipsets. Terrible cross-compatability, it was like a chipset was only good for 4-6 months before it was rendered obselete by a new CPU that demanded a new chipset with it. The 915 and the 925’s couldn’t support dual cores. The 945 and 955 could support SOME dual cores, but not all, and only had a single-graphics card solution.
This is definitely an area that Intel will seek to improve on, potentially by creating an omni-chipset that is, for the lack of a better word, modular. They have a single line of chipsets (mobile/entry, enthusiast), and all CPU’s that are released will conform will the chipset, the CPU’s themselves will carry the necessary coding and mini-chipsets that will let it slip in to fit with the chipset. How technically feasible this idea is, all depends on how far Intel is willing to look, and plan ahead. Because it is trying to avoid another NetBurst fiasco at all costs.
R&D (in millions of $)
2000 642
2001 651
2002 816
2003 852
2004 935
http://www.reed-electronics.com/eb-mag/article/CA6287342
That is a huge difference in R&D spending between Intel and AMD. Most of Intel’s spending I would assume goes towards die shrinks, fab updates, and many of their side businesses and the slew of technologies they are promoting and developing not directly related to the processor market.
Well like DASQ said Terrible cross-compatability with Intel & AMD. The beuty of AMD is if you have a enough resources to get the top of the line mobo, you can go ahead and get the cheap mobo and then upgrade later with out even loosing your OEM of Windows, aslong you go with the same chip sete eg Nvidia. That is the beuty of AMD & Intel and nobody on all the reviews and concerns about M2 cant compare with the set marks of Intel that all the time you want to upgrade you have to upgrade almost everything ( Sorry Spanish background).
mean dont have enough resources
Intel, I’m sure, is aware of their chipset inflexibility. However, I’m not as sure as many that they will ever fix it. Chipset and motherboard sales account for a good chunk of Intel’s sales and I’m betting that forcing OEMs to purchase new products often allows them to keep their prices up on high-end chipsets and motherboards. I don’t see them changing this personally but I have heard many reports of otherwise.
Intel will have to improve their chipset situation, because sooner or later AMD will become a popular choice even among the casual user crowd, and with Intel killing their own product lines (what manufacturer wants to keep a motherboard in stock when it will be replaced within a few months? That’s just a waste of money), eventually OEM builders will just reduce the number of Intel packages for sale, while featuring more AMD-based systems (Almost never before seen chipset flexibility: One chipset, lasting the entire life of the socket! nF4 was a definite key to the success of Socket939).
Intel’s accelerated fabrication technology is a heavy investment for future performance, they’re hoping sooner or later their fabrication plants will leap two or three generations above AMD (or a similar competitor). While this may bode well for the future, it’s certainly not helping Intel much now…
AMD has almost no advertising, almost all their advertising dollars goes into pamphlets, AMD shows and the like. I can’t recall the last time I saw an AMD CPU ad that wasn’t from a retailer (i.e. NewEgg.com)
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