Year after year, we can’t help but mentally compare the rivalry between Intel and AMD to the old fable of the tortoise and hare. Intel keeps doggedly putting one foot in front of the other, year after year, never making too big of a deal about innovations such as Hyper-Threading or SSE3 because, after all, they’re just another step in the long journey. AMD is the tortoise, seemingly firing off bursts of speed and jetting ahead of its rival based on the extreme ingenuity of its engineers.

Last year was AMD’s time to bang the x86-compatible 64-bit drum and leapfrog its Santa Clara-based opponent in speed and functionality. In 2004, though, AMD’s great 64-bit effort is largely accomplished, and now the company enters into the phase of releasing incremental speed bumps. Intel, on the other hand, is coming off a year of relatively little news. The 3.06 GHz processor was already released by the end of 2002, and the end of 2003 saw the company still sitting at 3.2 GHz. All Intel really had to show for the year was a front-side bus speed increase from 533 MHz to 800 MHz.

AMD maintains that its head start in the market
and pioneering technology make it the de facto
choice for 64-bit desktop systems now and in the
months to come, effectively having seized the
market direction reigns from Intel. (No, AMD
would never say such a thing directly, but read
between the lines.) Intel, as always, is staying
mum on “future features or technologies,” but history is there to speak for the company. AMD
was the first to break the 1 GHz barrier, and the
Athlon and Athlon XP lines in their turn trounced
Intel on performance in a barrage of press reviews.
In each case, though, the tortoise returned and

snatched away the hare’s advantage. According to Mercury Research, Intel owned 83.7% of the x86 market in the fourth quarter of 2003 compared to AMD’s 14.7%. The prior quarter, the numbers had been 82.6% for Intel and 15.8% for AMD, so the slight sway toward Intel seems odd given that AMD’s first tide of 64-bit parts came to market in November and December.

Is AMD right? Is 64-bit leadership the stone that will trip up the tortoise and establish AMD as the microprocessor innovation leader? To be sure, there’s more to the Athlon 64 than 64-bit compatibility. On the other hand, 2004 looks to be Intel’s year to grab most of the headlines. Ultimately, the news on both sides is good for resellers. As AMD rides the wave of innovation and Intel prepares to launch its next round of advances, resellers have a plethora of solutions and selling points at their disposal. Let’s take a look at the current and coming desktop offerings from both vendors and how the channel is reacting to them.

AMD's CPU Lineup

Duron

Yes, believe it or not, Duron chips are still around.
While Duron has largely become an ultra-low end
product for third world markets, you can still find
Duron chips available on the Web. Newegg
currently has 1.8 GHz Durons for $42 each. Rock
bottom boards that support Duron start at about
the same price, making this a potentially attractive
option if you need to sell a bank of data entry
stations, for example, or perhaps a simple Web
and email machine.

Duron chips, which debuted in 2000, were essentially Athlon chips with less L2 cache. Models spanned from 550 MHz up to 1.8 GHz, although AMD seems to have stopped updating its Web data for the chip line at the 1.3 GHz mark. Pricewatch currently shows models ranging from800 MHz ($28) up to 1.6 GHz ($40). Durons feature 128K of L1 and 64K of L2 on-die cache. The front-side bus operates at 100/200 MHz and the architecture uses three floating point pipelines. Note that the Duron line is not currently listed on AMD’s price list, and availability may be tricky in some cases.

more work as an equivalent Intel processor, it could no longer stay toe-to-toe with the Pentium line on megahertz alone. Thus AMD’s “performance mapping” system was born as part of the company’s “True Performance Initiative,” (TPI) an effort to devise a universal benchmarking system in which total work output rather than megahertz became the system by which processors were measured. Alas, Athlon XP and Athlon 64 chips are named according to their megahertz equivalents. The Athlon XP 1500+, the first chip to adopt the new naming system as well as the updated Palomino core, was rated to perform at or better than the level of a 1500 MHz competing processor. Unfortunately, in the nearly three years since AMD started its TPI push, the company has been unable to dislodge megahertz as the industry standard for chip nomenclature, although change seems to be in the air owing to the Athlon 64 FX and Intel Pentium M chip lines, neither of which seek to equate their total performance to raw clock speed.

Modern Athlon XP processors are based on the Barton core (the seventh Athlon revision), which differed primarily in its bump to 512K of L2 cache over the 256K in its predecessor, Thoroughbred-B, and in having the cache run at full speed. Together, this makes Barton far more effective in memory-intensive applications. Barton contains 54.3 million transistors, up from 37.6. Both Barton and Thoroughbred cores use 0.13-micron fabrication. Additionally, while Barton arrived with a 333 MHz FSB, it quickly jumped to 400 MHz, which is where it still stands.
The Athlon XP 3200+ arrived in February of 2003 and is still the fastest XP chip being sold. Many conjecture that the most recent Athlon XP innovations (larger cache, faster FSB) arose because it was the only way AMD could squeeze more speed from its K7 architecture, which effectively reached its limit with the 3200+. While the chips are still readily available and rolling off of fab lines, the XP family is essentially done. AMD is positioning the chips as its value solution, with the entry level being the 266MHz FSB Athlon XP 2200+ starting at about $55 online. Most likely, AMD will keep the XP alive until 64-bit software hits the mainstream, whereupon the XP will be supplanted at the low-end by the Athlon 64.

You shouldn’t take this to mean that the XP is obsolete—far from it. The 333 MHz FSB XP 3000+ processor (retail) currently sells on Newegg for $121. The similar 3.06 GHz Pentium 4B sells for $224. When you can offer similar performance for $100 less, that’s a persuasive selling point for budget buyers.
As a side note, the multi-processor Athlon MP ran from 1 GHz to the 3000+, and AMD still shows the 2400+, 2600+, and 2800+ models on its price list. The MP is very similar to the XP save for the ability to run in a multiprocessor setting. (Actually, the XP and even the Duron can do multiprocessing, but a chipset was never brought to market to support the feature.) The MP series met with little public fanfare and AMD seemed unable to generate any enthusiasm for it. In the end, the company appears to have decided to let the chip blow into obscurity as the Opteron clearly replaced its market position.

masses while still maintaining full, native compatibility with all 32-bit, x86-based code. The alternative is an approach such as that taken by Intel’s Itanium, which can run IA32 (32-bit x86 code) in an emulation mode, but in doing so takes a massive performance hit. The advantage of 64-bit computing, of course, is that each processor operation crunches 64 bits of data at a time rather than 32. 64-bit systems are also able to address more than 4GB of memory. While there are few applications that take advantage of this today—and none in the consumer space—massive RAM addressing should enable radically more realistic and complex virtual environments.

Critics (and Intel) argue that a 64-bit mainstream processor is completely unneeded today since there are no mainstream 64-bit operating systems and the number of 64-bit applications on the market are few and far between. But this harkens back to 1985 when Intel released the 386 and with it made the jump from 16-bit to 32-bit computing. (Hard to believe we’ve been treading 32-bit water for nearly two decades, huh?) At the time, critics lobbed the same argument at Intel, and indeed it took nearly 10 years for the PC industry to make a complete switch to 32-bit applications. By the time the change-over was finished, the 386 was a distant memory and Intel was well into its second-generation Pentium. In the chicken-and-egg game of x86 code updating, hardware has to lead the way. This time, AMD wanted to make sure its eggs were laid first.

AMD’s name for its new architecture is AMD64, although you’re likely to see the term x86-64 get tossed about much more by year’s end as Intel’s 64-bit efforts filter down to consumers. True enough, if 64-bit support were are there was to the Athlon 64, the chip would bomb in a heartbeat. Fortunately, AMD has packed in plenty of additional enhancements.
First up on the list is larger, full-speed, on-die caches. The Athlon 64 sports a 64K L1 cache and 1024K (1MB) of L2 cache. This is roughly twice what the Pentium 4 offers. Additionally, the caches feature improved branch prediction, enhanced translation lookaside buffers (TLB, which helps the cache recover from faulty fetch attempts), parity checking, and error correction code (ECC). However, the substantial L2 cache is part of what drives up the chip’s cost, and AMD will have to decide whether or not to drop the L2 size in order to stay price and feature competitive against Intel in the months ahead.

AMD also boosts memory performance by taking the novel step of pulling the system memory controller off the northbridge and planting it within the processor. This saves a substantial amount of data traffic from crowding AMD’s admittedly robust 6.4GB/sec HyperTransport bus. What remains to be seen is whether AMD’s devotion to DDR memory comes back to haunt it. The integrated controller presently only supports up to PC3200 (DDR400) memory, although ECC modules are supported. As Intel pushes the shift to DDR2 in 2004 and 2005, it will be interesting to see how AMD64 owners respond. Before, users would generally only need to replace the motherboard to support a new memory format. Now, the processor will apparently need to be replaced along with the board.

Another slick innovation in the AMD64 line (also found in Intel’s Itanium family) is NX functionality, or a no-execute area. The technology is also called execution protection. Essentially, NX is an operating system feature that coordinates with processor hardware to cordon off a section of system memory and prohibit code from executing within data pages such as the default heap and certain stacks. Pages must be marked as executable in order for code to execute within them. The loopholes that have hitherto existed in this process are what have enabled viruses such as MSBlaster to be so virulent. AMD and Microsoft together ascertained that NX technology could have thwarted roughly 50% of the security threats Microsoft has had to address in security patches. Windows XP SP2, due out shortly, will contain NX support.

Thus resellers are able to pitch Athlon 64 on several qualities. The obvious one is the future-proofing inherent in x86-64 compatibility. But immediate benefits can be realized in the fields of security and performance. Independent reviews of the Athlon 64 against its equivalent Pentium 4 competitor have been generally favorable for AMD. Also note that because the benchmarks AMD uses to arrive at a performance rating are different and more conservative for those used with the Athlon XP, the Athlon 64 3200+ (2.0 GHz) is considerably faster than the Athlon XP 3200+.

(2.2 GHz), marking AMD’s wise and overdue departure from a product nomenclature based on megahertz reference. The FX-51 uses a 2.2 GHz core, making analogies to megahertz speeds 50% or more higher increasingly inappropriate. While such a move might still be premature for the mainstream-slanted Athlon 64, FX buyers are likely to be the type who judge true performance according to a wide swath of benchmark applications, not a number on a sales tag.

Some have said that the Athlon 64 FX is more or less an Opteron that can officially run 400MHz DDR memory, and in many regards this is true. Unlike the Athlon 64, the FX supports dual channel architecture. Moreover, Athlon FX chips will work on Opteron motherboards with a current BIOS. However, this also burdens them with the Opteron’s requirement of running registered/buffered modules, which poses yet another price hike for buyers. While the move isn’t official yet, it appears likely that the FX will adopt support for conventional unbuffered modules with the move to Socket 939. The one key way in which the FX is not an Opteron is that the Opteron has three HyperTransport links whereas the FX only has one.

Due up next for release is the FX-53 (2.2 GHz) and FX-55 (2.4 GHz). As we see over and over in the graphics card field, die-hard enthusiasts are plenty willing to spend major cash for a performance gain of only a few percent. The same will hold true with the Athlon 64 FX. The Athlon 64 is slower, but not substantially slower and it costs less than half of the FX’s price. At this point, we would contend that, despite AMD’s positioning, the Athlon 64 FX won’t really be a consumer product until Socket 939 rolls in. Until then, this makes an excellent, high-performance workstation option for single-processor applications.