AMD ahead of Intel on low power

In response to the Perspectives column written by Charles Cooper, "Intel changes the subject":

You are giving Intel far more credit than they deserve. With the exception of their "dynamic shared cache," I didn't hear anything from Intel that wasn't plain old catch-up.

AMD's product line (with the exception of the P-M notebook part) has had universally lower power than Intel's for the last six months, including low-power server chips. The "no execute" page table tagging is over a year old in the AMD product line.

You write: "Moving the debate away from pure clock speed is a clever marketing move, one that plays to Intel's advantages."

More correctly, Intel is moving away from their weakness. Intel is "changing" the topic to the path AMD took before it.

Intel didn't do anything clever; they took the only path left. But guard the tomatoes--Intel's in catchup mode.

John Zulauf
Longmont, Colo.

 

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