The CPU wars (Part – I)

Intel has always been in the forefront of innovation as far as CPU technology is concerned. It sports a formidable marketing machine as well. AMD and other CPU vendors have brought out Intel CPU clones, providing buyers alternatives, sometimes cheaper than those provided by Intel itself. Intel always provided a single line of CPUs till the Pentium II, and to combat competition in the value segment, it brought out a parallel line of CPUs, the Celeron line. This was a sound strategy, increasing pressure on the other cloners.

Intel was also the vendor who lead computer users into the 32 bit era, by releasing the 80386 CPU, of course other vendors followed suite. When users went shopping for computers, in the old days, they probably asked their computer savvy friends which CPU based system to buy and they answer they got was a ‘386′ or a ‘486′. While the Intel line of CPUs were simply called “Intel 386″ or “Intel 486″, the AMD clones were calles “AM386″ or “AM486″. Life was easy for the salesman, who would sell the user a “386″ or a “486″ depending from where he got better profits, while the users didn’t know (or care) from which vendor the CPU came from.

I first thought that the reason why Intel didn’t sue AMD for using a similar trademark was because I read somewhere that numbers can’t be trademarked. But a little googling reveals that this is not the case. I guess they can be. The issue was really not about trademarks at all. Intel actually shared CPU designs with AMD for the 386 and the 486 processors. Early AMD CPUs actually run Intel microcode. This was beacause AMD was the second source in many tenders for the government and large corporations. So, Intel “needed” AMD. There were several lawsuits between Intel and AMD where Intel tried to negate the design sharing agreements. AMD finally realized that getting future processor designs from Intel would become more and more difficult and thus designed its first architecture in-house, the K5.

Intel wanted to lead the world into 64-bit computing, with its Itanium processor in 2001, but failed. It is believed the primary reason for this failure is its incompatibility with the x86 processors that the whole world ran on. 64-bit processors have been around in quantity since the early 1990s, especially the Silicon Graphics MIPS based ones, but thats another story. AMD, in the meantime, came out with the AMD64 architecture that added 64 bit extentions to the existing x86 architecture. These processors became an instant hit due to backward compatibility. Intel’s 64 bit architecture is referred to as IA64. In a strange twist of events, Intel secretly worked on to include AMD’s extentions into its processors and released them to the world calling it EMT64.

I think this is the first event that changes the path from the MHz wars to wars based on CPU features. So, it seems the wars wil continue anyway. I remember the Chinese saying, “May you live in interesting times”.

To be continued.