Intel or AMD for Bandwidth in 2008?

Competition is a beautiful dynamic of technological evolution. Anyone who's been paying attention to the x86 market place has seen some of the fiercest competition recently between Intel and AMD. This is truly a beautiful thing as now we have two companies that are working aggressively to develop better products and beat the other to the next major technological milestone.

As stated in my last column, the real winners here are the consumers. As both Intel and AMD work to make their products better, faster, and more cost effective the end result is ultimately better products at better prices for the consumers.

One area where we will really appreciate this will be in the bandwidth capabilities of x86-64 systems coming out in late 2007 and through 2008. Although AMD has had a commanding lead in CPU to memory and PCI Express bandwidth, Intel is catching up with a vengeance.

Recently, I have seen several released and soon to be released Intel platforms from multiple vendors. I must say that the early bandwidth performance results have been extremely impressive. In fact, I have already seen some Intel systems running at twice the levels of bandwidth of what I had previously recorded.

What makes this news even more exciting is that these results were observed using shipping Intel processors. This means these great results were seen using processors with external memory controllers. It is reasonable (let's say near certainty) to conclude that the Intel processors of 2008, with integrated memory controllers, will only further increase this bandwidth and hopefully by a healthy margin.

So, my crystal ball tells me that in 2008, we're going to see a number of bandwidth records broken by a large margin. And I'm happy to say that we as consumers will have many systems to choose from to meet even the most demanding of bandwidth needs.

Third I/O intends to demonstrate record setting bandwidth performance once again in 2008. We'll keep you up to date on our results as they are revealed to us.