Intel copied us, says head of AMD

AMD's CEO, Hector Ruiz, says that all the all the major recent innovations have come from AMD, while Intel is ‘trying to catch up’

Intel might have started the whole silicon microprocessor thing in the early days of computing, but AMD’s chief, Hector Ruiz, reckons that AMD’s been responsible for all the recent innovations in the chip industry.

Talking to Gulf News, Ruiz said that ‘If you look at the last five years, if you look at what major innovations have occurred in computing technology, every single one of them came from AMD. Not a single innovation came from Intel…so I would say that Intel is trying to catch up with us in that respect.’

The last five years has seen the introduction of AMD’s infamous AMD64 architecture, which kicked Intel’s power-hungry NetBurst architecture where it hurt and led to Intel sheepishly introducing EM64T instructions to its processors. It’s also seen the introduction of the first ‘native’ quad-core AMD products, while Intel is still sandwiching together two dual-core chips to make a quad-core CPU.

Meanwhile, Intel’s forthcoming Nehalem architecture promises an integrated memory controller, which AMD has had since 2003, and Intel is also promising processors with integrated graphics, which AMD has already announced with its Fusion technology.

That said, 64-bit desktop computing has yet to become widespread, and Intel’s Core 2 Quad processors are dramatically outperforming AMD’s Phenom chips. AMD’s AMD64 architecture may have been ahead of its time, but Intel’s Core 2 has proved that you don’t necessarily need an integrated memory controller to make the fastest chip.

Is Intel copying AMD, or would it have come up with these ideas anyway, and is just pacing itself more sensibly? Let us know your thoughts.

Via The Inquirer