A Year in Chips

By Jerry Pournelle

January 17, 2005

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This is the year end/first of year column, the traditional time for columnists to summarize the previous year and make predictions for the coming year. Few, I note, say much about last year's predictions in this year's summary, which is probably just as well. This is also the column for presenting Chaos Manor User's Choice Awards, and the annual Orchids and Onions Parade.

The big event last year was that Intel stumbled, and AMD did not. The result of that is probably a permanent loss of market share for Intel. When the year began, most analysts predicted that AMD would not survive the year. Now at year's end it's an entirely different ball game, with AMD actually leading in high performance desktop and gaming systems.

The CPU market used to be Intel and then everyone else. It's still Intel on top in sales, but in performance and price/performance AMD has become a real competitor with enough financial stability to stay the course; all that in a single year.

User's Choice: AMD Athlon 64

AMD has also solved most compatibility problems. In AMD's defense, most incompatibilities in the past were not due to the AMD CPU, but to the support chip sets. That problem pretty well ended when NVIDIA jumped into the picture. The combination of AMD CPU, 64-bit processing with backward compatibility, NVIDIA support chipsets, and NVIDIA graphics has brought AMD real dominance in the very high end gaming market; and NVIDIA's importance in the gaming world insures that there won't be compatibility problems either. AMD has a solid position among high end gamers, and that won't easily be lost: The newest game machines are cool, and just about all of them are based on the AMD Athlon 64, which wins the Chaos Manor User's Choice Award for best processor in 2004.

Prescott Goes Down

Intel bet heavily on its Prescott chips, which were intended to take it up into the 5 GHz and beyond realm. Prescott extended the 20-stage processing pipeline of its predecessor to an unprecedented 31 stages, but the chip fell far short of its clock-speed targets and the added complexity delivered no advantages on most software.

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