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Originally Posted by jaguar
Demos of the latest chips I saw were spanking AMD. AMD is also now a generation behind in fabs and Intel will have it's next gen out before AMD does.
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Those demos were a new Intel design verses an existing AMD product. Then AMD announced their new processors. Whereas Intel is already doing 65 nm chips, AMD is still testing that technology. Again, a crown jewel in the Intel product - superior material processing designs resulting in faster transistors.
AMD is currently winning at the upper end (server) market. Their HyperTransport has been successful and may even eliminate the North bridge. HyperTransport is on the board signalling at gigahertz - which should raise your eyebrow IF you appreciate the details.
Too many recent Intel designs - which once rarely happened - are missing design deadlines. Mistakes have been found too late in the design process. Intel equivalent to HyperTransport, called Coherent Scalable Transport, has been delayed for both Pentium and Itanium architectures. This by itself means little. But lately Intel had been making too many such mistakes - far more than the Intel that was run by Grove, Moore, and (forgot his name).
These details today are what cause spread sheet to reflect those realities four and ten years later.
Cray has recently assessed AMD and Intel products. Their bottom line is that the long term projections from both companies means AMD wins. It suggests what is happening in upper end product markets. But then Cray has never been a successful company once the MBAs decided to use GaAs technology rather than innovate - massive parallel architectures. For example, Cray lost $200million in 2004. They have repeatedly been close to bankruptcy because MBAs took over the company. Cray is playing catchup even to their own employee, Stephen Chen, who proposed a massively parallel architecture (that MBAs rejected) and who is now running a Cray competitor - Galactic Computing. What Cray is calling a major innovation - blade processors - well, if you have a grasp of details, then you appreciate why that may be more hype and less innovation.
IOW when Cray choses AMD, well, one must also look at who might be doing the choosing - another detail.