What if Intel had no competition

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dajet24

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Just curious lets assume for a minute that AMD never became more then a Via or cyrix type cpu company. Never came out with a processor like athlon or a64 to take perfoamance crowns.

Instead of Conroe in July how far back in the history of Intel processor do you think we would be.

I would guess P4 may just be coming out this july instead.

Maybe even less?

wonder how the gaming world in general would look if Intel had been as dominate as say microsoft.

scarry how bad tech could possibly lag in history without wars/profit to push it.

Anyone else think we be held this far back ? really just curious what other think
 
we'd still be using the preshot processor.
smile.gif
 
RDRAM would be dominate

edit: i love rdram

edit2: i still have a 1.7ghz willy with rdram :cool:
 
rysher said:
we'd still be using the preshot processor.
smile.gif
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no, we wouldn't even have info on it yet, and it would be a godsend compared to what we are using ;)
 
dajet24 said:
I would guess P4 may just be coming out this july instead.

Maybe even less?
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Yeah imagine that, going back to 1995 when AMD had a tiny market share...

Intel had the PPro (and other chips based on the P6) by the time AMD got around to making their own designs (bleh, the late/slow 5x86). The PII and PIII would almost certainly have still existed even without AMD competition. After that, who really knows. The P4 might have succeeded the P3 anyways since Intel was clearly going for some misguided target. ;)

The P3 wasn't a bad chip aside from the slow FSB. I think we all wish Intel had continued down that road instead of going with the P4. The Willamette P4 did look bad compared to the Athlon XP and barely the Cedar Mill/Presler P4s started to look good again vs A64 and low end X2s.

It's hard to say how much different things would be from how they are turning into in the next few months for Intel. For as long as I can remember, Intel has been saying they wanted to use a common architecture for mobile, server and desktops. The Northwood core came close (Pentium 4-M, NW P4 desktop and Prestonia Xeon). And manufacturing advancements to make cool and fast x86 chips are pretty recent. It's not like Intel hasn't made radical advancements before.

I don't think current performance would be as good without the competition between AMD and Intel. But it pretty much looks like Intel got all the x86 extensions they wanted besides x86-64. :p Intel probably would either have stayed with 32-bit, or made a new 64-bit architecture (no, not necessarily Itanium... it's in a different class from desktop processors).
 
454Casull said:
I remember prices for Intel P2/P3 processors back in the day...
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No kidding, back when Intel had no competition, Intel was gouging prices very very badly.
 
Met-AL said:
No kidding, back when Intel had no competition, Intel was gouging prices very very badly.
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Intel had competition when the P2 and P3 were out. The K6 processors were cheaper than Pentium MMX chips, but they weren't exactly cheap either. I paid $200 for my first K6, which was $30 less than the similar Pentium MMX model at the time (the K6 was a better chip on some things, of course).

I remember back in the late 80s when I worked for a small custom computer shop (386 era, and actually the first time I overclocked CPUs: 386-25 -> 33MHz, no heatsink just a fan blowing on the chip :cool: ). The prices were pretty comparable to prices today on non-EE processors. Highest models were in the few hundred dollar range and prices were cut on older models until they hit around $130 before being discontinued.

There were a few Intel desktop CPUs (excluding EE and SMP PPros) that were expensive, but I don't remember a general trend of price gouging in the last 17 years. Even my first Pentium (75MHz, top available was 120MHz at the time) in the mid-90s was only $125. The creation of the Celeron during the P2 era was definitely not a sign of gouging. Those Mendocino chips were great.
 
Intel is in competition with itself. It has to get people to replace their old processors, so I doubt progress would be any slower.

Maybe without AMD, Intel would have never released the Netburst and it's massive pipeline. Who knows? edit: meaning, they would have stuck with a more conservative pipeline and evolved the P3, instead of chasing clockspeed.
 
I can't say I agree with slower progress along the lines of "Oh we'd still be using P3's", but I absolutely agree that prices would be much much higher than they are now. There is always demand for faster processors, and the price premium for such is where we see the difference.
 
VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVI said:
Intel is in competition with itself. It has to get people to replace their old processors, so I doubt progress would be any slower.

Maybe without AMD, Intel would have never released the Netburst and it's massive pipeline. Who knows? edit: meaning, they would have stuck with a more conservative pipeline and evolved the P3, instead of chasing clockspeed.
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The Netburst concept originated back in the mid '90s and it was and still is quitte sound.

The whole problem is software :

The premises :

-software has low IPC and it is very difficult to create SMP friendly SW.
-the SW of the future will be multimedia

If you combine the 2 above you end up with a result : narrow and high frequency implementation : Netburst.

What killed it prematurely was that process tech didn't advance as fast as Netburst needed and SW industry had little love for it.

Nowadays you have under 80w 3.8GHz 65nm SC P4s and 95w 3.6GHz DC PDs..I'm pretty sure that with a 130w TDP Cedar Mill could have reached arpund 4.5-5GHz.
Sad part is a Conroe at 2.66-2.93 could have beaten it.
 
pxc said:
Intel had competition when the P2 and P3 were out. The K6 processors were cheaper than Pentium MMX chips, but they weren't exactly cheap either. I paid $200 for my first K6, which was $30 less than the similar Pentium MMX model at the time (the K6 was a better chip on some things, of course).

I remember back in the late 80s when I worked for a small custom computer shop (386 era, and actually the first time I overclocked CPUs: 386-25 -> 33MHz, no heatsink just a fan blowing on the chip :cool: ). The prices were pretty comparable to prices today on non-EE processors. Highest models were in the few hundred dollar range and prices were cut on older models until they hit around $130 before being discontinued.

There were a few Intel desktop CPUs (excluding EE and SMP PPros) that were expensive, but I don't remember a general trend of price gouging in the last 17 years. Even my first Pentium (75MHz, top available was 120MHz at the time) in the mid-90s was only $125. The creation of the Celeron during the P2 era was definitely not a sign of gouging. Those Mendocino chips were great.
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The K6 was trash, it's performance was weak and the chipsets were alright when AMD was making them, but third party support was awful all the way till the early K7 days. The K62 was a little better but with VIA leading the way I felt like it was a step backwards in technology.
 
pxc said:
Intel had competition when the P2 and P3 were out. The K6 processors were cheaper than Pentium MMX chips, but they weren't exactly cheap either. I paid $200 for my first K6, which was $30 less than the similar Pentium MMX model at the time (the K6 was a better chip on some things, of course).
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Ahh those were the days, I had a K6-233 running at 525mhz with a peltier, which back then was insane. Course back then windows wouldnt idle cpu cycles and that kept condensation down, and I foolishly ran linux overnight, boom short :p
 
No competition eh? Lets see now...an apt analogy: OPEC (oil people) and oil/gas prices due to no alternative energy sources....How's your oil/gas bill coming along?
 
I expect the progress would have been much slower if Intel didn't have to compete with AMD. Think about buying a dual core 64-bit processor for 150$ back then and people would laugh at you. My guesstimate is that we would still be using the p3 ark somehow and 64-bit extensions and dual core would obviously be out of the picture.
Intel didn't have to push up MHz so badly if there were no competition, compare how long it took them to reach 2 GHz from 1 GHz and how long it took from 2 GHz to 3 GHz and how long it took them to reach 1 GHz in the first place. All progress on this front is quite accelerated because AMD was there to challenge them. I believe if the competition wasn't there all three milestones would've skipped a couple years at least.
 
Off topic, but didn't AMD win the 1GHz race?


On Topic. All you have to do is take all the decisions that Intel made because of AMD and rule them out. Then you'd have a decent idea of where we'd be today.
 
If Intel were the sole monoploy, we would not have the excessive and sloppy computer systems we have today. Instead of making faster processors, Intel would be improving the overall product. Without excessive ammounts of speed, Microsoft would have to actually optimise Windows a bit. Instead of the sloppy, bloated software we have today we would have clean, optiised, power-effecient systems.

Look at the PS2 if you want proof. It's actual hardware specs are pitiful (I think it's comparable to a Pentium 2), but since the software is so advanced it runs great.

Fast Software > Fast Hardware, but the industry has completley lost sight of that with the speed wars between AMD/Intel and Green/Red.
 
If no AMD, competition would have come from someone else... Cyrix, IBM, TI, NEC, Nexgen all wanted a piece of the Intel pie.

If no competition at all, we could still be experiencing the situation from the 80s with multiple platforms and generations within each platform still being viable computers. Heck, I had an 8086/8 until 1989 (i386 was top of the line), then a 286 for a few more years until I picked up a 486 (using a student loan).

Actually, come to think about it, the whole reason for the MHz race was the GUI specifically, Windows 95. It rendered everything up to through the 386 obsolete overnight. In a four month span (8/95-12/95) I saw Computer City go from selling pentium 60/66s to 166's in mainstream computers.

edit: forgot to add DEC to the list
 
dajet24 said:
Just curious lets assume for a minute that AMD never became more then a Via or cyrix type cpu company. Never came out with a processor like athlon or a64 to take perfoamance crowns.

Instead of Conroe in July how far back in the history of Intel processor do you think we would be.

I would guess P4 may just be coming out this july instead.

Maybe even less?

wonder how the gaming world in general would look if Intel had been as dominate as say microsoft.

scarry how bad tech could possibly lag in history without wars/profit to push it.

Anyone else think we be held this far back ? really just curious what other think
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Intel may have been better off and Conroe might be the natrual progression of the P3 as many AMD Fanb0iys say it is. Maybe we'd be at @ least Pentium-M by now. Of course it would cost more, simple supply and demand would have taken over, Economics 101. AMD's X2 pretty much showed they're no different than Intel.
 
pxc said:
Intel had competition when the P2 and P3 were out. The K6 processors were cheaper than Pentium MMX chips, but they weren't exactly cheap either. I paid $200 for my first K6, which was $30 less than the similar Pentium MMX model at the time (the K6 was a better chip on some things, of course).
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I am sorry, but the K6 was not competition for the P2. I owned a K6-2 333, 550, and a K6-3+ 500 and I can assure the P2 was far better then the K6-2, the K6-3+ was alright though and held it's own, but that was at the end of the K6 series and the Athlons were out at that time.

The P2 of the same speed K6-2 was almost 2x more expensive. Intel was price gouging because of lack of competition, plain and simple. That was what turned me away from Intel and towards AMD. I have seen no reason to switch back since.
 
Met-AL said:
I am sorry, but the K6 was not competition for the P2. I owned a K6-2 333, 550, and a K6-3+ 500 and I can assure the P2 was far better then the K6-2, the K6-3+ was alright though and held it's own, but that was at the end of the K6 series and the Athlons were out at that time.

The P2 of the same speed K6-2 was almost 2x more expensive. Intel was price gouging because of lack of competition, plain and simple. That was what turned me away from Intel and towards AMD. I have seen no reason to switch back since.
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Yep, just as AMD got greedy as hell with X2 and their Opteron counterparts but that's OK, right?
 
Met-AL said:
I am sorry, but the K6 was not competition for the P2. I owned a K6-2 333, 550, and a K6-3+ 500 and I can assure the P2 was far better then the K6-2, the K6-3+ was alright though and held it's own, but that was at the end of the K6 series and the Athlons were out at that time.
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Um, at least read what you quoted. I said K6, not K6-2, and Pentium MMX, not Pentium 2. I never said anything about K6-2/3 vs P2 performance, just that Intel had competition (at least according to AMD ;)). But since you brought it up again, it's was AMD's strategy to offer CPUs 25%-30% cheaper vs Intel's prices. When Intel lowered prices, AMD lowered prices. I guess that can somehow be twisted into "gouging prices very very badly." :rolleyes:

The K6 wasn't great at FPU code, but it was a decent processor compared to the Pentium MMX otherwise. I liked my K6-2 at the time. It offered reasonable performance for the price when low speed P2s were current. My next chip after that was the Celeron 300A, which was of course much better at 504MHz.
 
Microsoft would take over the desktop with their bloat and computers would be slowing down to a crawl.

Let me get a coffee break while I boot up this machine.

My computer just crashed, I think I'll go get a sandwich downstairs while it reboots.

Actually, Vista might not be launching soon.
 
I have to agree that Innovation can be driven by competion . But there are other things that drive it as well . I here a lot of people slam netburst. What if you run in to a roadblock and competition makes you go off in another direction . When maybe you were on the right road already . But because of the road block and the competition you go down another road . That in the long run stifles innovation
 
Donnie27 said:
Yep, just as AMD got greedy as hell with X2 and their Opteron counterparts but that's OK, right?
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AMD might have gotten greedy lately but Intel has always been more expensive and less bang for the buck as far back as I can remember. They sold overpriced junks with early prescotts and almost everybody replaced their shitty 775 prescott with 64-bit versions or cooler running ones. They were clearly beaten by AMD yet still they sold prescotts at higher prices than athlon64s if I'm not mistaken. I am not defending AMD for their prices right now but you must remember that this was Intel's world to begin with, AMD is just living in it. Everybody is trashing AMD because Intel dropped their dual core prices and AMD didn't. I would drop my prices too if I had next gen products waiting round the corner which would sweep my current gen products. Once conroe's are out many people will feel bad about the 200$ they spent on a 9xx anyway so why not drop prices now while you can still sell them.
 
VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVI said:
Intel is in competition with itself. It has to get people to replace their old processors, so I doubt progress would be any slower.

Maybe without AMD, Intel would have never released the Netburst and it's massive pipeline. Who knows? edit: meaning, they would have stuck with a more conservative pipeline and evolved the P3, instead of chasing clockspeed.
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agreed, intel needs to produce new products so people feel the need to upgrade and buy another processor.
 
uniwarp said:
AMD might have gotten greedy lately but Intel has always been more expensive and less bang for the buck as far back as I can remember. They sold overpriced junks with early prescotts and almost everybody replaced their shitty 775 prescott with 64-bit versions or cooler running ones. They were clearly beaten by AMD yet still they sold prescotts at higher prices than athlon64s if I'm not mistaken. I am not defending AMD for their prices right now but you must remember that this was Intel's world to begin with, AMD is just living in it. Everybody is trashing AMD because Intel dropped their dual core prices and AMD didn't. I would drop my prices too if I had next gen products waiting round the corner which would sweep my current gen products. Once conroe's are out many people will feel bad about the 200$ they spent on a 9xx anyway so why not drop prices now while you can still sell them.
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Sorry, I have to disagree. Prescott has been Intel's only real* screw up. While folks in this market complain about Dog-Willy, it fragging killed AMD in real world sales because it had a much superior platform. Performance, hell, only folks in this market noticed. Noobs called AMD "Crashlons" at the time.

AMD and Intel are NO different. When AMD launched Athlons, they did the same thing Intel would have Done, and the same thing their stockholders expect and hell, I expect them to do, cash in and go yellin' Mo Money Mo Money! Or have we forgotten the $999 Athlon 700's?

Feel bad? Look at the folks running out and buying FX-62? Is any 9xx processor in that price range? No, I'm not talking about the XE's meant for folks with more money than brains. Intel sales tanked for them in this market because INTEL posted the prices for Conroe. So as Duby asked me to cut AMD some slake, why in the hell is Intel never cut any slake for Posting Conroe Prices and Performance so folks (Here) could say, Damn, I may as well wait for Conroe. NOT HIDE every damned thing they're doing like that other company. Feel bad? Everyone who bought a higher priced AM2 K8's should feel suckered. Intel guys knew about price cuts on Presler for how long now?
 
InorganicMatter said:
Hell, yout think? :rolleyes:
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I just asked the question?

I see no differnce in how Intel or AMD squeezes consumers. They are in business to make money and both have done good and bad jobs of doing just that.
 
I have nothing against Intel, it's just that every time I wanted to buy a new system to upgrade I could buy the AMD system for slightly better prices and it performed quite better in gaming. When I bought my last gaming system from scratch it was gonna be either preshott or amd64 With my budget and the preshott, I had to buy a shitty mobo because of high processor and ddr2 price. So I bought AMD instead. It was the case before that as well. I am just taking my experience as example and I know that AMD processor prices are not competitive lately but that doesn't change the fact that I bought excellent proc/mobo combinations with AMD systems for many years before and I am not going to start trashing them now that they didn't reduce their prices on dual core the same exact moment Intel did. AMD might be greedy but Intel is still the bigger pig IMHO...
 
uniwarp said:
I have nothing against Intel, it's just that every time I wanted to buy a new system to upgrade I could buy the AMD system for slightly better prices and it performed quite better in gaming. When I bought my last gaming system from scratch it was gonna be either preshott or amd64 With my budget and the preshott, I had to buy a shitty mobo because of high processor and ddr2 price. So I bought AMD instead. It was the case before that as well. I am just taking my experience as example and I know that AMD processor prices are not competitive lately but that doesn't change the fact that I bought excellent proc/mobo combinations with AMD systems for many years before and I am not going to start trashing them now that they didn't reduce their prices on dual core the same exact moment Intel did. AMD might be greedy but Intel is still the bigger pig IMHO...
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Sure I can go with slightly better price, but not half the price as was said.

I've went Intel from time to time because AMD 750, KX-133 and 133A + 686B. Or when I had some of the POS boards and had crap loads of problems with AGP and sucked for Games.

What you got and call excellent, I can't argue with ya', but I can say I got more crappy none Intel chipset products than good. Yet, I've NOT bought any bad Intel platforms. The bad ones have been SIS, VIA and NVIDIA, sorry but IMHO, they're not in Intel's class=P Yes lately they've been pretty good though but that's just lately. Before that it was more like which Revision works best?

Intel is the bigger Pig because they are 6 times larger than AMD. Intel doesn't have backing or a Safety Net from the German Government and the European Union that have backed AMD with about 6 billions in loans to pay for Fab-30, 36 and to upgrade Fab 30 to 38 status, or did we miss this?

I don't have any personal feelings for or against AMD or Intel but folks misrepresenting either is not right. Both companies have been good, bad and sucked at one time or another. If I bought computer Parts on moral grounds or morality, I'd not have a frackin’ computer.
 
Donnie27 said:
Intel is the bigger Pig because they are 6 times larger than AMD. Intel doesn't have backing or a Safety Net from the German Government and the European Union that have backed AMD with about 6 billions in loans to pay for Fab-30, 36 and to upgrade Fab 30 to 38 status, or did we miss this?
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I call that smart investment by the german government, looks like someone understands the importance of competition. Not to mention the billions AMD will pay in tax money over the years + exporting revenues + employment... They're not backing AMD for no reason you know.
 
Donnie27 said:
What you got and call excellent, I can't argue with ya', but I can say I got more crappy none Intel chipset products than good. Yet, I've NOT bought any bad Intel platforms. The bad ones have been SIS, VIA and NVIDIA, sorry but IMHO, they're not in Intel's class=P Yes lately they've been pretty good though but that's just lately. Before that it was more like which Revision works best?
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I've been told that this is arguable, but I do agree with you. I've never had any problems with any Intel system I've built for myself or my friends and family. But, building an AMD rig is like a crap shoot. Even if you go with a popular AMD mobo that every enthusiast is buying, you're still stuck dealing with buggy chipsets and drivers. I want a platform that is solid from the ground up rather than deal with some struggling, fake ass one.
 
pxc said:
Um, at least read what you quoted. I said K6, not K6-2, and Pentium MMX, not Pentium 2. I never said anything about K6-2/3 vs P2 performance, just that Intel had competition (at least according to AMD ;)). But since you brought it up again, it's was AMD's strategy to offer CPUs 25%-30% cheaper vs Intel's prices. When Intel lowered prices, AMD lowered prices. I guess that can somehow be twisted into "gouging prices very very badly." :rolleyes:

The K6 wasn't great at FPU code, but it was a decent processor compared to the Pentium MMX otherwise. I liked my K6-2 at the time. It offered reasonable performance for the price when low speed P2s were current. My next chip after that was the Celeron 300A, which was of course much better at 504MHz.
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Only difference between the K6 and the K6-2 was the addition of 3dNow! and if I am not mistaken, the K6 ran at 3.3volts, where the K6-2 required two diffent voltages...1.5v on the core, and 3.3v on I/O.

Like I said, the K6 series, was not competition for the P2 series, and Intel new it and if you wanted a P2 you paid threw the nose for it. With the weak FPU of the K6, it suffered in games that did not support 3dNow!.
 
dark_reign said:
I've been told that this is arguable, but I do agree with you. I've never had any problems with any Intel system I've built for myself or my friends and family. But, building an AMD rig is like a crap shoot. Even if you go with a popular AMD mobo that every enthusiast is buying, you're still stuck dealing with buggy chipsets and drivers. I want a platform that is solid from the ground up rather than deal with some struggling, fake ass one.
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Yep! That's pretty much what most folks say and I have no reason to doubt them either.
 
uniwarp said:
I call that smart investment by the german government, looks like someone understands the importance of competition. Not to mention the billions AMD will pay in tax money over the years + exporting revenues + employment... They're not backing AMD for no reason you know.
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Of course not. Sure it's smart but is it fair? Intel invested in one. They only get tax breaks.

http://www.semiconductor-technology.com/projects/intel/

In 2005, Leixlip failed to attract a new US$3bn 45nm investment, which instead went to Arizona. The Irish government had previously been refused approval to pay Intel €100m in grants towards the construction of Fab 24-2.
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Proves the Germans are smarter as well. But Fabs 30 and 36 has not other competition within AMD.

Just in case some may question these folks, here's their AMD view.
http://www.semiconductor-technology.com/projects/amd/

They're sort of like Dragnet, "Just the facts mam, just the facts?"
 
Intel's business model is based on them selling more processors. That's really all there is to it.

They can readily sell more processors and chipsets by adding features and performance: that's what convinces people to upgrade.

Why would they stop innovating just because they didn't have competition? It's in their interest to do so because it moves more chips.
 
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