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Comment by happycube | Hacker News Reader

At this point, does intel need that function to make AMD's CPU cores look bad?

The thing that's sad is that if Intel hadn't taken so many unethical approaches to keeping AMD down when it actually was competitive with Intel on performance, the market could look totally different today. Back in the Athlon XP and early Athlon 64 days AMD was routinely ahead in benchmarks as well as power consumption, while P4 blustered along with higher and higher clock speeds. If they had gotten the market share their performance "deserved" (in some abstract sense, of course), they could have put more money into R&D and developed better follow on products. Instead, their market share grew only slowly, and eventually when Intel got back to improving performance AMD just fell behind and never recovered.

Intel's engineering prowess has to be respected, but how they got there by abusing their market position is deplorable. At this point I don't think there is any rational reason to buy AMD at any price point, they've been dominated so hard. (Buying ATI may not have helped, but these days that's the only part of AMD that's even still competitive.)

You're talking about a company whose motto is "only the paranoid survive". Why win when you can utterly dominate?

I don't think that's been their motto since Otellini took over. Look where they are now in the mobile market. Otellini put the profitability of their Core chips above improving Atom in the first few years, even when it came to netbook performance, which was already terrible. Combined with the fact that they forced OEMs to not buy AMD alternatives during the same time, Otellini just didn't think it's necessary to improve the performance of Atom too much.

They only started caring about power consumption when it was already obvious to everyone that ARM is going to pose a threat to them eventually. I think if everyone sees something that's by definition not "paranoia". To be paranoid, you have to see and believe something before others see it.

  They only started caring about power consumption when 
  it was already obvious to everyone that ARM is going to
  pose a threat to them eventually.

I'm being a bit pedantic, but it seems to me they refocused on power consumption beginning with the launch of the Pentium M (forerunner of the Core and Core 2 lines) which was released in 2003 and was surely in development several years before that.

Or do you think they were thinking ahead to ARM already in ~2001 or so? Maybe they were... although I think they were thinking about targeting laptop sales in general at that point, not ARM specifically.

That's true, the NetBurst syncope made them redesign toward efficiency, but still, the rise of ubiquitous mobility forced another inflection in their TDP curve. And they're still sweating over it since the PC market is shrinking and they need to get their foot in the smartphone/tablet market (see the bay-trail subsidize effort http://liliputing.com/2014/01/bay-trail-tablets-cheap-intels...)

I think he came from marketing. Remember the Intel 487SX?

AMD has 10-16 core server CPUs that are very price competitive with Intel's Xeon performance. They generate more heat however, so they are not economic in datacenters for energy usage reasons, but they are ideal for getting the most powerful workstation possible.

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