Replies to post #9568 on Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[Haddock]

- 286 buyers bought 286 primarily because of compatibility with 8086
- 386 buyers primarily bought 386 because of compatibility with 286 and 8086
- 486, Pentium 1, 2, 3, 4, K5, K6, K7, Cyrix, Via, Centaur, Transmeta, they all bought these CPUs primarily because of compatibility with existing code.

And of course in every case there were alternatives available that were faster (sometimes much faster, sometimes also much more expensive) but these alternatives never managed to challenge the dominant instruction set architecture.

In fact the last time the mainstream microcomputer instruction set architecture was changed in a non-backwards comptaible way was the Z80-CPM -> 8086-MSDOS transition. As far as I recall there was no 16 bit version of the Z80 to replace the popular 8 bit version (the Z8000 was very late and quite buggy).

[chipguy]

Do you think Itanium 2 performance is so compelling that this cycle will be broken? Hardly, as far as I can tell. less than 10% lead on SpecInt, and even that is mainly because of > 300 mm^2 die and 6MB of L2, not because of the miraculous Itanium core.

Was 286 the highest performance processor ont there? Not really, but it was picked because it was compatible. You get the picture.

You not only don't have the picture but you are looking in the
completely wrong direction. Intel developed the IPF family to
compete in the high end, high value system market against RISC
processors, not to replace x86 (duh). That is why Intel has
never stopped developing new generations of x86 products. Let's
see how I2 stacks up against the fastest RISCs in SPECbase2k:

(percent faster int / fp)

106% /253% faster than HP PA-8700+/0.875
106% / 92% faster than Sun US-III/1.2
66% / 89% faster than HP Alpha EV7/1.15
23% / 33% faster than IBM POWER4+/1.7

With the exception of IBM who is hanging tough with POWER (for
now at least) Intel has the RISC market on the run and it is
only a matter of time and a bit stronger economy before IPF
starts taking significant chunks of market share away from RISC
in high end servers and workstations. Did you catch Sun's 4Q
results yesterday? Their product sales were down 20% YOY and
it is only going to get worse for them.