Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[mmoy]

I never believed this. While Dothan is a step forward for Intel in lower power and IPC, it's a step backwards in terms of a number of other features, including EM64T and SSE-3. I'm thinking that Dothan's successor, Merom, will get these features. That is what the Inq reported months ago, and other reports came out later to confirm this. The desktop version of Merom, called Conroe, will be the desktop version, and Whitefield will be the server version. Until then, AMD has the low power advantage, and possibly a performance advantage as well. Now is a good time to be invested in AMD.


AMD doesn't support SSE3 yet and I don't know that it's all
that important a feature. These small feature dribbles are the
bane of software engineers. SSE2 was nice in that there was a
ton of stuff added and there's something for everyone there.
Having a few features in the chip which the Operating Systems
and applications software probably won't compile in anyways
as they want to run on all Pentium 4s and all A64s/Opterons
isn't really much of a win except for the guys that build
their own software and can afford to do processor-specific
optimizations. At the moment, MSVC++ doesn't even have an
SSE3 architecture switch for their release version. I haven't
checked 2005 Customer Preview Edition.

GNU's compilers do a better job at supporting stuff like this
though. I imagine Intel's compilers do too.

It would be nice if Intel and AMD could get the latencies down
on some instructions.