AMD-Intel war

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cathy

AMD vs. Intel - eternal war

AMD and Intel are two worldwide companies in digital integrated
circuits fields. Their competition originated from 1980s, and continued
till now. Firstly, Intel kept leadership in the war, but now , AMD
seems to be going ahead of Intel.
Because of their competition, people use better and better digital
products with good performance /price ratio.

If you want to know detail about this, please visit
www.mochima.com/net/AMD-Intel

Explaination:
This is my assignment of PC support course. The purpose I post it here
is to receive the comment from readers, which is also part of my
assignment.
 
cathy said:
If you want to know detail about this, please visit
www.mochima.com/net/AMD-Intel

Explaination:
This is my assignment of PC support course. The purpose I post it here
is to receive the comment from readers, which is also part of my
assignment.

Is mochima.com some sort of educational institution? You're the second
one asking to have their papers marked by us.

Yousuf Khan
 
Yousuf said:
Is mochima.com some sort of educational institution?

Yes and no. Mochima.com is basically me (that is, my home-based
company). Through the company, I provide training (mainly in the
area of software development) as well as development and consulting.

In this case, I am the instructor in a "PC Hardware" course taught
at John Abbott College (as part of a 1-year certificate in Network
administration).

If you're curious about this particular course, I invite you to take
a look at the course's web page:

http://www.mochima.com/net

For one of their assignments, I though of researching and writing
a paper/essay on a particular subject (related to PC hardware, but
specific enough that wouldn't be appropriate as part of the material
that I cover in the course). Also as part of the assignment, I asked
them to post their report (a link to it, with a brief summary) in a
related newsgroup, hoping that people would read it and discuss it
(contributing with ideas, comments, criticisms, or whatever additional
information they may find appropriate).

Also here, if you're curious about the assignment (the rationale
behind my asking them to do this), I invite you to read the following:

http://www.mochima.com/net/paper_presentations.html

You're the second one asking to have their papers marked by us.

That's not really accurate. First of all, it's more like the fifth
one, not the second one ;-)

And secondly, it's not really "their papers marked by the newsgroup".

I want them to research on a subject and write something interesting
enough and with high enough quality that would encourage others to
participate and discuss the subject. Given that newsgroups are an
excellent source of experts, I thought it would be a good opportunity
for learning (certainly they will learn more from this than from
answering some boring review questions from chapter whatever of the
book), and mainly, a learning with better chances of having real-life
value (the information they get here reflects other professionals'
real-life experience, and so their comments and discussion is likely
to be much more valuable than whatever they could read in a book or
what I could hope to cover in the course with a limited amount of
time.

You actually *have* been quite helpful with some of the other groups
(well, the "Apple dumps IBM for Intel" thread comes to mind -- IIRC,
you did contribute with interesting comments that they certainly
appreciated, and that I think were quite helpful for them to improve
the quality of their report and their presentation on the subject)

Cheers,

Carlos
--
 
AMD vs. Intel - eternal war

AMD and Intel are two worldwide companies in digital integrated
circuits fields.

Really? I could have sworn there were dozens of others... Including
some VERY large companies. Top two companies for x86 processors, yes.
But there are many other digital ICs out there.
 
Found a few errors in your story. In the section where you state,
"Intel devised 80386 and 386SL, and it kept top in the war temporarily.
But, after that, AMD devised 386SX, which is cheaper and faster than
Intel". This is wrong. Intel devised all of those processors, including
the 386SX. The 386 (which later became the 386DX) came first, then the
386SX, and the 386SL which was a mobile part. AMD copied all of them
directly, except for the 386SL and just renamed them to Am386DX and
Am386SX. These chips weren't just workalikes, but direct copies, right
down to various microcode bugs. AMD continued to copy Intel's designs
right into the 486 era; again the only difference was the name given
Am486DX and Am486SX.

AMD's first original processor didn't arrive until the K5 and then
later the K6. The K5 was shortlived, almost immediately followed by the
K6 which lasted for several years. The K5 and K6 were workalikes rather
than copies of the Intel Pentium processor. However they were also
compatible with the Pentium's bus, therefore they were hardware
workalikes too. It wasn't until the K7 (which became the first Athlon)
that AMD used a different bus than Intel's.

Yousuf Khan
 
YKhan said:
directly, except for the 386SL and just renamed them to Am386DX and
Am386SX. These chips weren't just workalikes, but direct copies, right
down to various microcode bugs. AMD continued to copy Intel's designs
right into the 486 era; again the only difference was the name given
Am486DX and Am486SX.

The one exception is that AMD did at least one mhz bump; as far as I know,
Intel never produced a 40mhz 80386 part, while the AMD 386/40 was the best
price/performance part for cheap folks for a while in there.

Prior to the AMD K5/Cyrix 6x86 (Socket 7 clone) generation, there were also
some speedbumped 486s that competed with Intel's Pentium and DX4 offerings;
I don't recall for sure whether AMD was in that game, but I'd be surprised
if they weren't. IIRC IBM was the first to scoop Intel on a clock-tripled
486 ("DX3") leading to Intel's calling their clock-tripled part the DX4
instead.

Once the socket 7 clones came out, these pretty much disappeared.
 
The one exception is that AMD did at least one mhz bump; as far as I know,
Intel never produced a 40mhz 80386 part, while the AMD 386/40 was the best
price/performance part for cheap folks for a while in there.

Prior to the AMD K5/Cyrix 6x86 (Socket 7 clone) generation, there were also
some speedbumped 486s that competed with Intel's Pentium and DX4 offerings;
I don't recall for sure whether AMD was in that game, but I'd be surprised
if they weren't. IIRC IBM was the first to scoop Intel on a clock-tripled
486 ("DX3") leading to Intel's calling their clock-tripled part the DX4
instead.

Once the socket 7 clones came out, these pretty much disappeared.

Yes, these processors were called AMD 5x86 and were sort of "486 on
steroids", with double L1 cache and 4x multiplier. At the speed of
133 MHz, they were more than competitive against Pentium 75 (except
for FPU-intensive stuff like Quake 1 ;-)). Easily overclockable to
3x50=150 or 4x40=160, they were just as fast as P100 for general use
apps. Some (very few) lucky folks boasted even 200, but my mobo
didn't even post with the bus set to 50, so I had to settle for 160,
which was also good enough to carry me with my 486 system over socket5
and socket7 generations right into the world of super7 and K6/2. Not
sure how many, if any, new systems with 5x86 were sold to end users,
but it was a great upgrade chip extending the useful life of old 486
system way beyond what it was ment to be.
 
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