01-10-2009, 03:55 AM
|
|
|
| 4. It's apples-to-apples all over again with Intel's Core i7s and AMD's 45nm Opterons and Phenom IIs.
In a normal year -- one not involving the global economy collapsing like a house of cards, that is -- this would easily be the top story on all the year-end lists. As it stands, the November introduction of major new product lines by Intel and AMD was somewhat overshadowed by affairs on Wall Street.
Which is a shame, because Intel's new Nehalem microarchitecture on its Core i7 desktop chips and AMD's transition to the 45nm fabrication process with its new Shanghai line of server chips and upcoming Phenom II desktop chips bring the two top x86 microprocessor makers into more direct competition with like products than we've seen in years.
With AMD pricing its new products very aggressively, the benchmarking competition between its 45nm chips and Intel's is due to get very interesting indeed.
| |
|
| 5. Wintel conspiracy buffs have a field day.
How is it that a software story that was hatched in 2005, played out in 2006 and got legs in 2007 is a top 10 chip story in 2008? It helps when a federal judge releases a slew of internal Microsoft e-mails that implicate Intel in the laughably misleading marketing campaign for Windows Vista ahead of the operating system's release in early 2007. That's what happened in the past year, as a class-action lawsuit against the software giant over its Vista Capable campaign really got rolling.
Did Microsoft and Intel conspire to fool customers into thinking old Intel systems were "capable" of running Microsoft's graphics-rich new OS? Thanks to Judge Marsha Pechman, we've got plenty of evidence to pore through.
| |
|
| 6. Intel puts major muscle behind the new 'netbook' category.
Intel began the year pushing the promise of MIDs and UMPCs at CES, but by April the chip giant had shifted its primary position towards slightly larger form factors -- the "netbook" and "nettop." To that end, Intel released its ultra-low voltage Atom processor (pictured) a competitor straight out of the gate for both RISC-based chips and low-power x86 devices from companies like VIA Technologies. On the heels of Asus' success with its Eee PC netbook, Intel started going after the new category with Atom.
The upshot -- now the chip giant, along with OEMs like Asus, Acer, HP and Dell, has a brand new category that's growing wildly in defiance of overall market trends.
| |
|
| 7. Visual computing goes well beyond gaming.
We've come a long way since the first graphic user interfaces were introduced on PCs. Rich visual computing is a bona fide mainstream phenomenon and trickling down to smaller, cheaper devices every day.
But if 2007 was the year of novel twists on the GUI as per Apple's iPhone and Nintendo's Wii, then 2008 was the year GPU computing stopped being strictly "visual." That's because Nvidia, and to a lesser extent AMD, have worked hard to develop ecosystems around the development of general purpose-GPU (GP-GPU) computing.
The basic idea is that graphics processors, pigeonholed for years as eye candy gimmickry, have been underutilized as highly efficient engines for certain types of non-visual parallel computing operations that are commonly performed less efficiently by central processors. So how's all this playing in the wild? Nvidia in May reported it had shipped more than 70 million GPUs featuring its proprietary CUDA architecture for GP-GPU computing, already had more than 60,000 CUDA SDK downloads and was seeing 350.000 CUDA-enabled driver downloads every week.
| |
|