Sunday, February 17, 2008

The Missing Perfect Processor

On the 23rd of January, I sent an email to the editor of PC Magazine Middle & Near East. Well, I like the content of this letter, so I decided that I would post it as a blog entry here, so here you go.

I read your February issue article on the "CPU Road Map 2008", and I started thinking about how far we are from the perfect processor. I'm not talking about future processors that are going to have gazillion cores and do everything from simple arithmetics to 3D graphics processing. I'm speaking about the processors that we could have this day with today's technology.

Intel is better in developing transistors; they keep producing smaller transistors each day, giving the possibility of putting more cores on the same chip and reducing power consumption and heat (especially after they created the High-k metal transistor). Another thing is that Intel supports DDR3 with it's greater speed (even though the FSB is still slower than the fastest DDR3) and lower power, while AMD moved to DDR2 recently.

AMD is, and was always, better in their processor architecture. They created the 64 bit PC processor more than a year before Intel adopting it to make it's own EM64T, AMD is not using an FSB to access memory, which is a great advantage and finally, AMD's Phenom processor is going to be a real Quad-Core processor, and not two dual cores glued together.

With the technology available from both manufacturers, we (the consumers) could have had better processors than we have today, especially that each of the two companies is excelling in something totally different from the other. Unfortunately, since they are competitors, and it's impossible to convince any of the companies of sharing their secrets with the other company, then we are never going to have the perfect processor, because there will always be great differences, that if combined would have produced a far more greater processor.

Well, this was the end of my letter to the editor, and I hope that you like it.

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