Indeed, and they show no signs of slowing down. Their next generation core Nehalem (which has already been publically displayed by Intel over a year before launch) seeks to bring eight cores, 16-way SMT, on-die memory controller and the elimination of the FSB to be replaced with a serial interconnect similar to Hyper Transport. Overnight they will eliminate any trace of AMD advantage that is left (meager as it might be).Durandal wrote: Even when Intel was on top of the speed wars, they never had an architecture that was so cradle-to-the-grave as Core. Intel has one architecture that annihilates the mobile competition in terms of performance per Watt, outperforms AMD's best offerings on the desktop and still has plenty of room to grow.
What Intel's got right now is basically a perfect storm. They have the clearly superior architecture, gigantic amounts of money to keep that architecture going and the fab resources to pump them out and take advantage of economies of scale. It's kind of a shame that they're doing so well at systematically destroying the competition, because that means no more CPU wars.
Furthermore, these are only the details about Nehalem that we know about at this point, which are still not complete. Rumors of an integrated GPU (derivative of the Larrabee x86 graphics processor) and more are swirling about along with further advancements to the hardware virtualization system.
Heck, Intel even recently signed a MOU with Rambus to potentially license XDR, which would give them a serious boost in memory technology (Rambus may have been a bust for the P4, but the technology is still very sound, especially in the XDR variety).
