Let's look back into the crystal ball of tech-time and mull over how all this came to be.... You'll recall that with Netburst on life support, the Intel Pentium D's sudden introduction reeked of a band-aid fix, at best. Slapping two Pentium 4 cores together into one slab of silicon is a bad idea; the architecture isn't designed to handle two bandwidth hungry cores. It just... isn't.

Here's an example of what I mean. Consider if you will that an Intel Pentium 4 CPU running on an 800 MHz Front Side Bus (FSB) requires 6.4GB/s of bandwidth. Therefore an Intel Pentium D with two CPU cores requires 12.8GB/s memory bandwidth. The dual channel memory controller within the Intel 945P chipset (not to mention the 955X, 975X, nForce4 SLI Intel Edition, etc) only provides between 50% to perhaps 66% of this. The rest is simple math; without sufficient bandwidth, the processor has to pause, if however momentarily. It's almost as bad as the i845+SDRAM days of the socket 478 Intel Pentium 4. Shudder the thought.

AMD's Athlon64 X2 processor suffers from a memory bandwidth crunch too, yet its dual cores do not rely as heavily upon pure memory bandwidth. Rather, the Athlon64 X2 reacts to a mix of tight CAS Latency memory timings and memory bandwidth. This is why on AMD systems, loosening up the memory timings to increase memory frequency may actually have a negative effect on overall performance of the system.

Despite this technical advantage, I think Intel has walked away with dual core processor sales because it has a better marketing team. Marketing has always seemed to be AMD's achilles heel. Whenever I walk into a large electronics store I always see oodles of Intel Pentium D paraphernalia everywhere. Enthusiasts might discount TV advertising, but hey if you've got 'Frodo' shilling that new Core Duo you're going to be swayed on some level. "AMD Me" by comparison is a pretty flat call to arms.

...the story continues next issue.
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