Completely off topic but...
Althlon64 was a swift kick in the nuts for Intel, but AMD really didn't followup until Ryzen. I wonder if they're going to stick around and fight this time.
Althlon64 was a swift kick in the nuts for Intel, but AMD really didn't followup until Ryzen. I wonder if they're going to stick around and fight this time.
This time, AMD may have stepped up with a steel pipe. We'll see how well they can use it...
:-))))
NetBurst was a bust. IA-64 flopped too. Both were attempts to progress from the P6 architecture - which they felt had reached its limits.
In the end, the market spoke, they want the P6. No one was willing to rewrite software (or even recompile). So back to the P6 in the form of the Pentium M followed by the Core /Core dual series and finally the i3/5/7/9 that we use today - which you would notice hasn’t improved much per core; as mentioned the P6 style design is pretty much tapped out and all they can do is “squeeze blood from stone” for a few percentage improvements here and there.
AMD recently caught up but frankly, they aren’t doing much better. Performance per core is just on par with Intel. Their main selling point is that they made it cheaper by splitting the L3 cache in 2 - the Ryzen is basically 2 quad-cores glued together for better yields.
Not sure which data you refer to? I just made a comparison on a single-threaded integer-heavy code between my old Core2 Duo and a Skylake, and just got x16 normalized perf improvement (from 2.5-cycles/byte to 0.15). Same code, same compiler.
So sure, progress have slowed down and they are adding more and more specialized stuff (AVX-512, AES-NI...) but still.
Edited for clarity.