A lot of it is down to the Pentium 4 turning out to be a dead end. Intel designed it to scale to 10ghz, with a massively long pipeline. That turned out not to be possible, so all the design sacrifices that were made (primarily a ridiculously long pipeline) turned out to be bad bets.
When Intel introduced Core 2 Duo, performance per clock in many cases doubled, on the same socket and process node. I'm unaware of a precedent for that, at least in recent history.
Then Intel a couple of years later rolled out Nehalem, with an integrated memory controller and hyperthreading, cementing their advantage in the server market. AMD has been playing catch up ever since.
If Intel's chips were half the performance today, AMD would be winning; though not by quite as much.
>Then Intel a couple of years later rolled out Nehalem, with an integrated memory controller and hyperthreading, cementing their advantage in the server market. AMD has been playing catch up ever since.
Before intel essentially copied HT from AMD with their QPI, (I believe that Nehalems were the first QPI xeons) AMD servers nearly always came in dramatically lower power than the FBDIMM using Xeon-based servers.
Also note, in the early days of hyperthreading, it was a great way to run your two active processes on one core, while your second was idle. My understanding is that even now, in the best case, it's not a particularly huge boost.
I mean,yeah; between the release of the QPI xeons and now, for most things, intel has had the superior chip. But before QPI? man, if you paid for your own power, AMD was dramatically superior for high-ram applications.
Hyperthreading is better now. They even had to add another instruction to fix some of the issues. Plus a lot of work on the scheduler. Not worth disabling now!
It's interesting to wonder if Intel went down the P4 path knowing AMD would follow them into oblivion. For years after Intel turned the ship around, AMD continued selling hot power hungry chips (now with 900 watts of power!).
Until very recently, AMD basically conceded the entire mobile market to Intel, which it turns out is also a profitable market to dominate.
When Intel introduced Core 2 Duo, performance per clock in many cases doubled, on the same socket and process node. I'm unaware of a precedent for that, at least in recent history.
Then Intel a couple of years later rolled out Nehalem, with an integrated memory controller and hyperthreading, cementing their advantage in the server market. AMD has been playing catch up ever since.
If Intel's chips were half the performance today, AMD would be winning; though not by quite as much.
Core 2 Duo review (compare it to the Pentium D, which is dual core): http://www.anandtech.com/show/2045/11
i7 3770k review (the FX 8150 is AMD's flagship 8 core Bulldozer CPU): http://www.anandtech.com/show/5771/the-intel-ivy-bridge-core...