- Nov 5, 2011
- 5,855
The Past, Present, and Future of the CPU, According to Intel and AMD : http://www.gamespot.com/articles/the-past-present-and-future-of-the-cpu-according-t/1100-6421514
Ten years ago, if you were to buy the best CPU for gaming or otherwise, you'd have chosen AMD's Athlon 64. My, how times have changed. While AMD has struggled to rekindle its glory days as the CPU-performance leader, Intel's CPUs have gone from strength to strength over the past decade. Today, Intel's CPUs perform best, and use the least amount of power, scaling admirably from powerhouse gaming PCs all the way down to thin and light notebooks and tablets--segments that didn't even exist a decade ago. But this return to CPU dominance might never have happened had it not been for the innovations taking place at AMD back in the early half of the 2000s, which makes the company's fall from grace all the more galling.
The 64-bit extensions of AMD's Athlon 64 meant it could run 64-bit operating systems, which could address more than 4GB of RAM, while still being able to run 32-bit games and applications at full speed--all important considerations for PC players at the time. These extensions proved so successful that Intel eventually ended up licensing them for its own compatible x86-64 implementation. Two years after the launch of the Athlon 64, AMD introduced the Athlon 62 X2, the first consumer multicore processor. Its impact on today's CPUs cannot be overstated: everything from huge gaming rigs to tiny mobile phones now use CPUs with two or more cores. It's a change that even Intel's Gaming Ecosystem Director, Randy Stude, cited when I asked him what had the biggest impact on CPU design over the last decade.
"So, the answer to the question is cores," Stude tells me. "I was here at Intel through the Pentium IV days. We hit a heat issue with that part and took a big right turn and introduced a very efficient product out of Israel [the Core CPU] that helped us take over performance leadership that--for the most part--we've enjoyed for the better part of a decade. We've been able to add cores quite efficiently, and that's led to some substantial performance gains for the PC in general."
This focus on cores has dominated the last decade of CPU development. Prior to the introduction of multicore CPUs, the focus was very much on increasing clock speeds. This gave games and applications an instant performance boost, with very little effort required from developers to take advantage of it. Moore's Law--which states that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit would double around every two years--was in full swing in the 90s and early 2000s. In the period from 1994 to 1998, CPU clock speeds rose by a massive 300 per cent. However, by the mid 2000s, power consumption and clock speed improvements collapsed, with both Intel and AMD fighting the laws of physics. The solution was to introduce more cores, so that multiple tasks could be executed simultaneously by individual CPUs, thus increasing performance.
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Read more on gamespot.com, please ..
Ten years ago, if you were to buy the best CPU for gaming or otherwise, you'd have chosen AMD's Athlon 64. My, how times have changed. While AMD has struggled to rekindle its glory days as the CPU-performance leader, Intel's CPUs have gone from strength to strength over the past decade. Today, Intel's CPUs perform best, and use the least amount of power, scaling admirably from powerhouse gaming PCs all the way down to thin and light notebooks and tablets--segments that didn't even exist a decade ago. But this return to CPU dominance might never have happened had it not been for the innovations taking place at AMD back in the early half of the 2000s, which makes the company's fall from grace all the more galling.
The 64-bit extensions of AMD's Athlon 64 meant it could run 64-bit operating systems, which could address more than 4GB of RAM, while still being able to run 32-bit games and applications at full speed--all important considerations for PC players at the time. These extensions proved so successful that Intel eventually ended up licensing them for its own compatible x86-64 implementation. Two years after the launch of the Athlon 64, AMD introduced the Athlon 62 X2, the first consumer multicore processor. Its impact on today's CPUs cannot be overstated: everything from huge gaming rigs to tiny mobile phones now use CPUs with two or more cores. It's a change that even Intel's Gaming Ecosystem Director, Randy Stude, cited when I asked him what had the biggest impact on CPU design over the last decade.
"So, the answer to the question is cores," Stude tells me. "I was here at Intel through the Pentium IV days. We hit a heat issue with that part and took a big right turn and introduced a very efficient product out of Israel [the Core CPU] that helped us take over performance leadership that--for the most part--we've enjoyed for the better part of a decade. We've been able to add cores quite efficiently, and that's led to some substantial performance gains for the PC in general."
This focus on cores has dominated the last decade of CPU development. Prior to the introduction of multicore CPUs, the focus was very much on increasing clock speeds. This gave games and applications an instant performance boost, with very little effort required from developers to take advantage of it. Moore's Law--which states that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit would double around every two years--was in full swing in the 90s and early 2000s. In the period from 1994 to 1998, CPU clock speeds rose by a massive 300 per cent. However, by the mid 2000s, power consumption and clock speed improvements collapsed, with both Intel and AMD fighting the laws of physics. The solution was to introduce more cores, so that multiple tasks could be executed simultaneously by individual CPUs, thus increasing performance.
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Read more on gamespot.com, please ..
