> "The processes for fabrication was surely because they maintained their monopoly and having money to buy the best tech rather than innovation."
My first job was VLSI designer (GPUs) and I follow the industry. Intel is the innovator when it comes to fab. IBM has a fab (or just sold it) in Upstate NY, but they could not keep up with Intel.
The Pentium M (Banias was the first processor) was developed in the Haifa, Israel design center and it is the first example (in microprocessors) of slowing the clock rate and performing more computation per clock cycle. This was released in March, 2003. Could you please cite examples of competitors releasing low TDP models before this?
> it is the first example (in microprocessors) of slowing the clock rate and performing more computation per clock cycle
I'm sure designers were trying to get more out of each cycle, even while they were pumping up the clock frequency.
With the AthlonXP/MP, AMD was the first company to really market outsize the Ghz speed; pushing model numbers they believed rivaled their Intel equivalents that were lower than the actual clock speed. Today both manufactures market using model numbers.
Well, the Pentium M was just a refreshed PIII and was born out of necessity as the P4 was so disastrous on mobile platforms.
AMD was way ahead of Intel at the time regarding IPC, the Pentium M was just Intel catching up to AMD, and had about the same IPC as A64 that was released the same year. But unlike Pentium M the A64 was a real performant CPU.
Don't get me wrong, I loved Pentium M and I when looking at laptops there was no reason to bother looking at anything else at that time. But it was a parenthesis few even knew existed. It was more of a successful prototype proving that the (future) Core series had a good foundation.
AMD didn't have as good fabrication, which is partly why they couldn't compete with Pentium M on power. But that's not what we are talking about either, because of the higher IPC the A64 smoked everything Intel had for years coming. Despite Intel having better fabrication.
The Pentium M was released (not to mention designed) well before the giant ship that is Intel slowly changed course from P4.
And you shouldn't be comparing IPC of P4 or PM to A64. A64 was more a shot across the bow at Itanium at the time. You can rightly accuse Itanium of a lot of things, but lack of innovation isn't one of them.
I respectfully disagree. These are direct quotes from the Wikipedia article mentioned above. The Pentium M (Banias) was an innovation of increasing the (maximum) speed vs. power ratio. Intel chose not to extend to x64 because they wanted to market an entirely different 64-bit architecture, the Itanium processors.
I am very pleased that AMD came out with it and forced Intel to do the same, but the Pentium M was (for microprocessors) a true innovation.
"The Pentium M coupled the execution core of the Pentium III with a Pentium 4 compatible bus interface, an improved instruction decoding/issuing front end, improved branch prediction, SSE2 support, and a much larger cache. The usually power-hungry secondary cache uses an access method which only switches on the portion being accessed..."
"Other power saving methods include dynamically variable clock frequency and core voltage, allowing the Pentium M to throttle clock speed when the system is idle in order to conserve energy, using the SpeedStep 3 technology (which has more sleep stages than previous versions of SpeedStep)..."
"...Pentium M varies from 5 watts when idle to 27 watts at full load..."
My first job was VLSI designer (GPUs) and I follow the industry. Intel is the innovator when it comes to fab. IBM has a fab (or just sold it) in Upstate NY, but they could not keep up with Intel.
The Pentium M (Banias was the first processor) was developed in the Haifa, Israel design center and it is the first example (in microprocessors) of slowing the clock rate and performing more computation per clock cycle. This was released in March, 2003. Could you please cite examples of competitors releasing low TDP models before this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_M