Shifra said:AMD's 64 architecture isnt new. Go ask in the AMD forums or look up a nice chart of advancments. You'll find more work from intel then AMD in an architectural standpoint.
HeavyH20 said:Intel actually designed their 64 bit core to incorporate AMD's 64 bit architecture. Not the other way around. Itanium is dead. They are playing catch up. I know the AMD 64 is not new, but Intel ignored it and continued down a path of smaller dies, some new features, and higher clocks until that well dried up. The FX-53 represented the actual turning point where AMD gained ground against the Intel P4. It is just a hop scotch game. Intel will catch up. They have too much resources to be left behind.
If you take a sort of historical look at AMD's and Intel's processor architectures, you'd realize that almost all the improvements have been evoluntionary, not revolutionary.
For AMD, let's go back to 1996. Their K5 (Pentium clone) didn't perform as well as the Intel chip, and they needed a new design to compete with the upcoming Pentium Pro / PII. So they bought out NexGen, whose next-generation chip became the AMD K6. They then added the 3DNow SIMD extensions (K6-II) and an on-die L2 cache (K6-III). To remain competitive with the Pentium 3, AMD brought in some refugees from DEC's Alpha team, who reworked the design to improve the floating point performance and use the Alpha's EV6 bus (K7). After several revisions, the K7 core was once again reworked, adding the on-die memory controller, hypertransport, and the x86-64 extensions (K8), which is where we stand today.
Intel took a bit of a diversion, but their future also lies with a basic design that was established a decade ago. The P6, or Pentium Pro, was a very advanced design for 1995, featuring sophisticated out-of-order execution and speculative execution. It had poor performance on 16-bit code though, so Intel reworked it to improve that aspect, while moving the L2 cache off-die to make it cheaper (Pentium II). Another revision added SSE instructions and an improved L1 cache controller (Pentium III), which was later revised to put the L2 cache back on-die. Then Intel decided to make the Pentium 4 in order to capitalize on the megahertz myth (though the P4 is certainly not without interesting architectural features). Later, a team at Intel reworked the P6 design again, improving its power consumption dramatically, adding a greatly-improved branch predictor, compatibility with the Pentium 4's bus, and SSE2 and SSE3 instructions, resulting in the Pentium M. Intel has since ditched the Pentium 4, and future processors will have in their heritage the P6 core from a decade ago.
Phew. Now back on topic.
banGerprawN said:Yes, I'll agree, there is definite changes, and they are for the better, but is there anything that is really different? I mean, truly groundbreaking, and totally standing apart from last generation? There's new features, but it seems to me that nVidia has just built on the 6xxx series, and fixed up the problems that were inherent in that architecture (FP16 support, most noticeably. Could anyone really use that to a playable degree with the processing power of the 6800? No, not really.)
Therefore, I view the G70 as more of an evolution than a revolution.
Yep, the Geforce 7 is an evolution of the Geforce 6, they improved the pipelines a bit, added more of them, and came up with a way to do AA on textures with transparency. ATi did basically the same thing with 9700 -> X800, improved the pipelines a bit, and added more of them (and I think they included SM2.0b as well). Evolution is cheaper and easier than revolution. And when you do need a revolution, it's easier and cheaper to buy out somebody that's already doing it than to do it yourself (just like AMD with NexGen, ATi with ArtX, and probably nVidia with 3dFX to some degree).
As for ATi being behind nVidia, I think history is repeating itself. ATi released the 9700 while nVidia was working on the Xbox, and nVidia took forever to release an ultimately inferior (in most people's eyes) product, the FX series. And things are still the same, the company that's working on the next Xbox is late releasing a competitive design, and there's speculation that it might not be as fast...