AMD's Diverging Parallel Path

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Margaret Lewis, commercial software strategist from AMD

Lewis says there was neither an architectural nor an economic need for hyperthreading in AMD processors, so the company won't add features to Opteron in order to mirror Intel's strategy. "In our particular world," continues Lewis, "hyperthreading was not the right approach. Our architecture [AMD64] has been designed since 1999 with dual-core capability. Having two physical cores is going to provide you the potential for much better performance than having one core that's divided into two logical pieces, which is what hyperthreading does."

AMD's strategy is to prove that hyperthreading doesn't matter in the migration to dual-core. Intel will have to persuade software developers of just the opposite; and as Nathan Brookwood argues, Intel may already have taken the right steps in that direction: "Over the last two years," Brookwood states, "all of the work [Intel] did to adapt their software for hyperthreading applies directly to the work they would have had to do to adapt it for multicore. So the hyperthreading initiative from Intel basically primed the pump, getting ISVs looking at this, and in many cases, taking the first steps to benefit from it."

Pat Patla, AMD's Marketing Director for Server and Workstation CPUs

Pat Patla, AMD's Marketing Director for Server and Workstation CPUs, tells Tom's Hardware Guide that AMD is leveraging its success with AMD64 as a way to drive the implementation of an entirely new system architecture. "With the introduction of Opteron and AMD64," Patla explains, "we started to become system architects, because we're now providing the I/O technology [and] the memory technology, all the northbridge functionality, NUMA [Non-Uniform Memory Architecture], as well as just the CPU. So people doing system layout recognize that we're changing the way they need to be thinking [with regard to] system design."