Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[Dan3]

the McKinley L3 uses a highly dense hand designed sub-block architecture that Intel claimed was denser and had higher cell efficiency than the best commercial SRAMs.

No doubt a few readers won't be able to accept that Intel engineers came up with a new and innovative way to do something and will continue to grope around looking for process-based excuses and explanations.

Intel spent close to $4 Billion on R&D last year - an order of magnitude more than AMD. I suspect that Intel came up with a lot more good stuff than just one cache design - they better have, for that money.

But the fact remains that despite that laudably dense cache, and despite all those Intel R&D dollars, AMD has produced and is selling superior server chips and a superior server platform:
http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/techinfo/planning/2000/perfscal.asp
http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=55000258
http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1816&p=7