Yeah, but have you actually looked at the design of the P4? It's completely 100 percent optimized for running SSE2 software. Intel put all of their eggs in one basket there. But it's a plan that just might work.
Even IF AMD does release chips (other than their Hammers which are meant specifically for servers) with SSE2 capability, they will NEVER run SSE2 software as fast as Intel's P4 chips do because AMD would never design their whole chip strucutre around SSE2. They'll just take their Athons, Durons, T-Birds, etc. and add SSE2 into them. So against a P4, AMD chips will always lose while running SSE2 software.
And with SSE2 being so easy to compile for and all software engineers having been hungrily waiting for it to be served, you can bet that Intel did the right thing this time around. The only way Intel can lose now is if somehow AMD can convince everyone in the world that their chips are better before SSE2 software becomes as commonplace as MMX. Because once that happens, AMD has lost all hope of overthrowing Intel.
Oh, and it'll never get as bad as Amiga Vs. Atari (or Mac Vs. PC) because both Intel and AMD are producing chips based on the same architecture. They might be optimized in different ways, but software engineers are going to be able to adapt programs to run both ways since they're both fundamentally the same, just optimized differently.
- Anything can be fixed with duct tape, a swiss army knife, and WD-40.
<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by slvr_phoenix on 11/28/00 02:51 PM.</EM></FONT></P>