Re:Intel’s Netburst: Failure Is a Foundation for Success
by antod on Sunday June 19, 2022 @07:50PM
(#31804697)
>The real problem was Intel's focus on frequency above all else at the time. They were demoing I think a 10 GHz processor at Intel Developer Forum at one point.
I don't know if they demoed that or not, but I can remember early claims in the press that they expected the P4/Netburst architecture to scale to 10GHz.
Re:Intel’s Netburst: Failure Is a Foundation for Success
by sitkack on Sunday June 19, 2022 @11:47AM
(#31800413)
Intel was surfing the Moores Law frequency curve. The message they were trying to drive home is that if you stick with us, your existing code will get faster with each release.
They knew they couldn’t keep it up. But when you have a process advantage you want to maintain it. To put it another way, they wouldn’t be sacrificing and advantage to make multi core chips.
This is why I think intel parts are so power hungry, this pathological focus on single core perf.
And you could say the same thing about Itanium. (In fact, Gordon Bell did.)
The real problem was Intel's focus on frequency above all else at the time. They were demoing I think a 10 GHz processor at Intel Developer Forum at one point.
A few years later as the world had pretty much entirely shifted to multicore, a senior Intel exec I was doing some work for basically told me that of course they knew the challenges around ramping frequency. But Microsoft was apparently very concerned about the ability of Windows to use multiple cores.
There was a lot of concern in the industry at the time around how well software--especially on the desktop--would be able to take advantage of multiple cores.