-=> Richard Menedetter wrote to Tony Langdon <=-

 RM> It blew out anything that Intel had at that time of the water.
 RM> What was your exact problem?
 RM> I had a 800 MHz Thunderbird, and it was exceptionally great.
 RM> Only issue I can think of is with the first cartridge based ones, which
 RM> had heat and production issues.

Mine was a 1.2 GHz CPU, IIRC.  I had some stability problems, which
underclocking did resolve.  I ran it at around 1 or 1.05 GHz.

 RM> The P4 was a complete disaster that Intel only did to have something
 RM> that can counter the Athlon marketing wise.
 RM> All the DEC engineers went to AMD, and the Athlon microarchitecture was
 RM> 1-2 years ahead of what Intel had at that time.

yeah, agree with the P4.  Only thing it did have was the stability, but it did
suck.

 RM> See also the talk/book of Bob Colwell for that.

 TL> One thing AMD did do right was developing the 64 bit instruction set
 TL> we know and love today. :)

 RM> That was only made possible by the exceptional K7 (Athlon)
 RM> microarchitecture. We compared P6 (PPro, P2, P3) to K7 (Athlon) at
 RM> university ... The age of P6 showed VERY clearly.

Cool.  I was long out of university by then! :)  But yes, the AMD 64 bit
instrution set was a good development.

 TL> Intel's "clean slate" 65 bit efforts didn't penetrate the mainstream
 TL> like AMDs did.

 RM> Well ... the Itanium was never really meant as a P4 replacement.
 RM> It was a monster that had to be able to replace PARISC for HP.

Yeah, I didn't follow the Itanium much, but was aware it was intended for "big
data".
... I used to be an agnostic, but now I'm not so sure.
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