Intel responds, again

From that point on, we see Intel increasingly in the position of responding to AMD. Intel was no longer setting the tempo all of the time, and as the years flew by, it would increasingly find itself reacting rather than being pro-active.

AMD was first to 1GHz with the Athlon. AMD bet on 64-bit x86 while Intel was pushing Itanium and the EPIC architecture as the next generation. The whole time, Intel was denying it would make a 64-bit Pentium 4 while secretly working on one. Heck, the entire Pentium 4 and NetBurst architecture didn’t live up to expectations either.

Take a look back at Brandon’s Pentium 4 Performance Preview. You can almost smell the expectations Intel had of creaming AMD. Not only was Intel expecting to outperform the upstart Athlon, but they knew they had the marketing MHz advantage. The P4 traded blows with the Athlon, but dominated key benchmarks like 3DMark and Quake III Arena. Moreover, NetBurst promised almost limitless MHz, it had pipelines way longer than anything else out there. Sure, its per-MHz performance was disappointing, but it was going to have 50% or more cycles per second than the best comparable Athlon, right?

Of course, the failure of the Pentium 4 isn’t quite Intel’s fault. What the company encountered, the new roadblock to faster clockspeeds, was foreseen - just not expected as quickly. The problem is of heat density – the amount of watts put out by a specific area. With a smaller area relative to the number of transistors and the clock speed, you end up with a more focused point of heat. The limited area means the contact patch of a heatsink is small, while the heat is greater than previous processors. Intel bet that it wouldn’t hit the wall until sometime around 2010. For whatever reason, they were wrong and got stopped dead in their tracks in 2005.

The heat issues were unexpected, but our disappointment lies more with Intel’s inability to lead the way. They focused too much on what they have to lose rather on what they have to gain, they put the customer in second place to their own goals. Intel’s plan was to live out the Pentium 4 in 32-bit, slowly transition away from x86 towards EPIC and the consumer successors to Itanium. EPIC would be a proprietary architecture, with no nasty competitors like AMD or Cyrix around to spoil the party. It wouldn’t have any of the legacy problems of x86 (which are far too many to list), but consumers would also lose out on choice. If Intel had pioneered 64-bit x86, that would have undercut their plans for EPIC. They thought about what they had to lose, so they didn’t do it. If Intel had thought about the consumer, they could have had 64-bit processors before AMD.

Intel could also have had dual-core before AMD, and possibly a superior implementation rather than the inferior design out now. Yet again, the company got held up by not wanting to undercut its glorious Itanium dreams for the future, rather than trying to lead the market. And yet again, they got burned for it by AMD.