Robert Pogson

I remember that day when I first read an article about the 4004 processor from Intel. I had worked with computers made from discrete transistors, small modules, SSI (Small Scale Integrated circuits) chips but here was a microprocessor on a chip (almost). It was the beginning of a new era of productivity bringing the desktop PC into the realm of possibility for the ordinary person.

Those were the days when Intel competed on price and performance no one else could match. Along came monopoly. M$ got monopoly on the desktop PC OS and Intel wanted monopoly on hardware. IBM insisted they have second sources. Intel has been messing with the competition ever since. AMD is/was/may be close to being real competition for them but Intel has done everything they could to thwart AMD. AMD survives today only because they did things differently than Intel,

• cheap 64 bit processors which not only souped-up processors but gave us motherboards that could kill…
• memory controllers on-chip for faster access/larger bottleneck/lower clock speed/less power consumption/better scalability which Intel is now beginning to copy…
• lower prices (except when AMD was alone in the lead with 64 bitness)

Now the EU is on Intel’s case and the market in the EU is too large for Intel to ignore, so we have the possibility of a return to competition in processors.

2009 could be a very good year:

• 2009 – the Year of GNU/Linux on the desktop
• 2009 – the Year Competition Returned to Wintel
• 2009 – the Year I Retire (and fight Evil full-time)

Sadly, AMD, the largest competitor for Intel, is neglecting the netbook and does not sell the optimal processor for my terminal servers running GNU/Linux. Those XEONs are sweet with their huge caches… Terminal servers run a huge number of processes and large caches help keep some in the cache for incredible performance. Users of that other OS have no idea what they are missing when they are not using a thin client running GNU/Linux. Shared memory permits a server to run many more processes than that other OS.

Let us look forward to the day when Intel compete again solely on price and performance so that I can again buy their products and AMD can improve their performance on terminal servers. It’s all good.

UPDATE There is another sign of competition coming to Wintel: VIA is selling in servers from Dell. Small can be beautiful.