Geeks declare war on Intel

The big surprise of 2000 was the fact that AMD, an Intel competitor with vastly inferior technical and financial resources, bumped Intel out of position at the top of the chip heap. When AMD launched its 1.2-GHz Athlon processor last summer, it opened a huge can of silicon whoop-ass on Intel's 1.13 GHz Pentium III. That was also about the time Intel's stock price went scuba diving, plunging almost 60 percent. Since then, Intel has been obsessed with striking back.

Part of its counterattack has included an obsession with increasing its megahertz stats. Meanwhile, AMD is moving more sedately, probably because it is aware that more megahertz does not guarantee a faster processor. More megahertz translates into greater speed within the same processor, but different processors react differently to different stimuli. Hence, a 1.2 gigahertz processor can outperform a 1.5 gigahertz processor, depending on what it's being used for, or if it has a more efficient design for a given task.

Which, in the case of Athlon vs. Pentium 4, is exactly what's happening. According to the Microprocessor Report, an industry trade journal, the Athlon performs between 5.3 and 12 percent faster than the Pentium 4 on typical systems.

In the quest for the Holy Grail of megahertz, Intel neglected other areas of the chip's design that have affected its overall speed -- to the point that the Pentium 4 has actually lost ground to the Athlon and even the Pentium III.

Pabst and other hardware geeks say that Intel's engineers were asked to place disproportionate emphasis on aspects of chip design that catered to the goals of mucho megahertz and the bazooka-like bursting system bus, and they were willing to forsake anything that got in its way. It's made for an awkward processing design -- and, for the most part, a majestically unpopular final product.

For example, to accommodate its goal of a massive bus and extended "hyper pipeline," Pentium 4 engineers were forced to reduce the size of something called the L1 data cache -- a piece of hardware used for storing and processing frequently used information -- to a meager 8K. This shrunken size is half of the Pentium III's, and an eighth the size of the Athlon's.

The diminutive cache size has had, according to Darek Mihocka, "crippling effects" on the chip's ability to handle basic office software. Which is why the Pentium 4 has lagged behind the Athlon and the Pentium III on most basic office software benchmarks.

Intel doesn't see this as a problem. "Once you get past one gigahertz, you're going to have more than enough power to write your letter to Grandma," says Alfs. "We wanted to focus on some of the more exciting aspects of processor design." This means streaming media, gaming, MP3s, video encoding and the like. These are the areas where the Pentium 4 does beat the pants off any other processor.

In that vein, the Pentium 4 is a great processor. But it's not what Intel claims it is: the best in the world. PC World, the New York Times and sharkeyextreme.com all agree with Mihocka and Pabst's estimation that the Pentium 4 is not the same quality processor for your buck as AMD's Athlon. The Microprocessor Report also awarded its Processor of the Year 2000 prize to the Athlon.

In fact, the Pentium 4 has grabbed only an anemic 1 percent market share in its first couple of months (as compared to 10 percent for the Pentium II and III on their debuts). It's possible that the Pentium 4's bloated price has something to do with its lack of success -- it retails at two to three times the price of its comparable rivals. Overall, Intel still maintains its stranglehold on the overall processor market, floating around a 90 percent market share.

Could the skepticism expressed at sites like TomsHardware explain Intel's failure to hit a home run with the Pentium 4? Hard to say. What is for certain is that if you care about finding out the truth about a certain chip, the Internet is there to help. There are plenty of computer lovers, like Pabst and Mihocka, who know their stuff and are more than willing to share it with the rest of us. You can rest assured they'll be typing away furiously on their Web sites every time Intel, AMD or anyone else does anything computer-related worth noting.

The only question is whether the rest of us are willing to listen.

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