That was such a fun time to be into hardware. For years Intel had the money and relationships to keep the Pentium 4 everywhere even though AMD had the better product. The P4 might edge ahead in video rendering but the Athlon would win overall and use less power.
AND those chips overclocked to the moon. I got my E6420 to 3.2ghz (from 2.133ghz) just by upping the multiplier. A quick search makes me think my chip wasn't even that great.
Absolutely. Intel was also keeping up the tick-tock processing. I could be misremembering, but it seemed like every tock intel was getting something like 20% improvements over the last tock. It really wasn't until ~Haswell that that slowed down and continued to slow down to basically nothing. I think Kaby Lake IIRC was the last major performance jump from intel. Everything else has just been incremental changes.
One of the reasons that Intel only shipped 5% incremental updates was AMD was basically non-existent due to both Intel pressuring them and AMD has done a massive mistake with bulldozer/piledriver architecture.
They vastly underestimated how much a single FPU would be bottleneck on a multicore/SMP processor.
Then AMD took things personal and architected Zen/EPYC. The rest is history.
Certainly, and by that time Intel just sort of dropped all the balls. They were already struggling to do die shrinks and it seems like they simply lost all their ability to develop the architecture.
That had maybe happened years earlier. The thing about Conroe is, IIRC, its ancestry came from the P3 and Intel's mobile CPU designs. P4 was steady evolutions on the Netburst architecture. The years of improvements to conroe were mostly just incremental changes and porting over features from Netburst (such as hyperthreading). Once that all played out, intel really didn't have anywhere else to go or plans on how to evolve the architecture. They fell back on the same old "let's just add wider SIMD instructions (AVX)".
I also seem to recall that intel made fab bets that ultimately didn't pay off. Again, IIRC, I believe they were trying to use the same light lithography (230nm light?) rather than going into UV lithography. That caused them to dump a fair bit of money fabrication that never really paid off.
Buying parts for that particular desktop was quite fun:
- Me: Can I get a Q6600?
- Seller: But, that's... Quad core?
- Me: Yes, I'll have it.
- Seller: OK. RAM?
- Me: I'll get OCZ Flex-XLC Hybrids. 1GB.
- Seller: *Gives one*
- Me: I'll get four.
- Seller: ?
- Me: Yes, four please.
Then Conroe launched and the balance shifted. Even the cheapest Core2Duo chips were competitive against the best P4s and the high-end C2Ds rivaled or beat AMD. https://web.archive.org/web/20100909205130/http://www.anandt...
AND those chips overclocked to the moon. I got my E6420 to 3.2ghz (from 2.133ghz) just by upping the multiplier. A quick search makes me think my chip wasn't even that great.