AMD Promises "Completely Different" CPU Architecture To Succeed Barcelona

[infornography42]

I do hope AMD pulls back up soon. We saw what happens when a company has a virtual monopoly on the processor industry back in the nineties. I don't ever want to go back to that. For better or worse, we NEED AMD. We need fierce competition in the processor industry to drive innovation and keep prices reasonable.

Whether you are an Intel fanboy or an AMD fanboy, you should be able to see the benefit of having both companies competing.

 

[wild9]

infornography42 is right. In the 90's the college I went to bought some workstations, which were Intel-based and very, very expensive. The only way I could personally use the software which ran on those workstations, was through the purchase of AMD-based hardware. Prior to this I was able to afford AMD-based 486 clones and again, that was the only way I could afford to run the software I needed. Intel practically monopolised the industry at the time..competition is good for innovation and keeping prices down. Without AMD there would be no Core2 architecture

 

[blppt]

I have been advocating ever since the advent of SLI that a radical redesign of the PC is necessary. We are no longer using 16-color displays to run DOS windows full of 80x40 text, yet it is exactly this obsolete dinosaur spec that continues to manifest itself in the PC and drag down advancement.

Ironically, it is partly AMD to blame for this...had they never come up with x86-64 as an extension to the ancient x86 architecture, Intel's Itanium (or some consumer-grade derivative) might be coming into the mainstream by now, and could have been a step in the right direction of "overhauling PC architecture" as you mentioned. Just MHO.