We computer enthusiasts have been the spectators in what I like to think of as a grand race. Leaving all the David and Goliath analogies aside, I like to think of the computer revolution like a car race. Different technologies race around the track - if one pulls a little too wide on a turn, it falls behind, only to make it up on the straightaway later. One "spinout" and you can be permanently out of the race.
There have been some grand reversals in this past year, quite unlike what I've seen in any other business. Quick and decisive changes leading to huge differences in market share. When I first started to play with computer hardware, Intel was king. For 35 years AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) was the "Beta" to Intel's "VHS": a lot of people would only buy computers with Intel chips even though in many ways AMD was the better value. The problem that Intel ran into was the buildup of heat, and the gamble by AMD on the 64-bit processor. Intel ran their chips as close to 4 GHz as they could, but they couldn't seem to crack the 4 GHz ceiling. A lot of gamers did, by going to water cooling, but nobody in the mainstream wanted to deal with water cooling.
Then, multimedia computers came in as the next best thing. With Microsoft wanting to make headway into your living room, they came out with a new operating system, XP Media Center. Now we had an operating system strictly for a media center PC in your living room, but without a solution to the heat problem, we had water cooling, or a computer with a CPU fan that sounded like a leaf blower. You don't want to watch a movie when the computer running all of your media devices sounds like someone starting a two-cylinder motorcycle!
The other problem is obvious - you don't want laptops that will scorch the gonads off anybody foolish enough to use it on their lap (and eventually you won't be calling it a "laptop" anymore)! Intel found a solution in the Pentium M for the laptop, reducing clock speeds and heat, and increasing battery life. AMD focused on 64-bit computing. When AMD presented 64-bit architecture, there weren't going to be any applications to really take advantage of 64-bit computing for a long time and no operating system in sight, but the AMD chips had immediate and substantial gains in performance for gamers and they started to trounce the Intel chips in any performance face-off.
Also, clock speed doesn't remain as important when you have a 64-bit pipeline. Instead of continuing to increase clock speeds, 64-bit computing doubles the amount of data that can be processed per clock cycle. 64-bit architecture also means exponential amounts of memory that can be addressed. The best home computers can address 4 GB of RAM if the motherboard can handle it, but with 64-bit computing you can run 1 terabyte (1,000 GB of RAM). RAM is very fast and this adds substantial gains to the whole package. AMD then went to a true dual core processor which put two chip cores on the same die, the equivalent of two microprocessors in one. Then you need fewer clock cycles to process the same information - speed can remain the same with double the processing power and running 250 times the RAM.
With the addition of dual core processors and the expected increases in performance that come from splitting the processing of information between chips, AMD has again raised performance without increases in heat. These three things: 64-bit architecture, larger amounts of RAM, and splitting the processing between dual lower clock cycle cores have, for the moment, catapulted AMD from a distant second to an over 50 percent market share in personal computers. AMD is in first place for the first time in their 35-year history.
Does this mean the end for Intel? Not anytime soon, with Intel being seven times as large as AMD and with 34 billion dollars in revenue. Intel earns in 11 days what AMD will earn all year. Intel also sits on 14 billion dollars in cash, to AMD's 1.1 billion. This gives them a huge advantage in research and development and in building state-of-the-art production facilities. AMD's surge in market share is due as much to the stumbling of Intel as it is to its own genius. The only thing that seems to be holding AMD back is the refusal of Dell to use AMD chips. If consumer demand becomes great enough for AMD chips and Dell makes a reversal, it could mean huge gains for AMD. It remains to be seen if Intel can soon regain the summit on which it once stood firmly!
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Date Revised: 15 April 2006
