14 DAY TRIAL // When Intel took the prices down for its line of desktop and server processors, AMD was the most hurt of them all; I mean, who wouldn't be? Getting beaten while you're laying on the ground isn't a nice thing to do, and it hurts, a lot. So much like a bully taking on the smaller kids, Intel felt good for having one of the biggest revenues, with AMD's downfall and all, but things could take a rather nasty turn for Intel because AMD's processors apparently kick ass.
When placing an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6800 processor, clocked at just under the 3GHz barrier, against an AMD Agena processor, situated at "just" 2.5GHz, the results were surprising, to say the least. By using SiSoft Sandra's Multimedia Benchmark, the Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6800 scored around 300.000 it/s (instructions/second) in the integer test and around 180.000 it/s in the floating point test, according to Fudzilla.com. Agena-based processor took home the crown with over 400.000 it/s in the integer test and around 300.000 it/s in the floating point test. There seems to be hope for AMD after all, at least on this market, in spite of the fact that their video cards don't exactly have what it takes to gain a serious advantage over NVIDIA's cards.
Maybe somebody read what I've said about a processor handling multiple threads, instead of the software supplying it, because it seems that Intel has funded a company which will take single-threaded code and translate it "into code appropriate for the device its running on". That would help Intel extend Moore's Law, if not by increasing the number of transistors, then by actually advancing their processors into the next decade, especially in the light of recent benchmarks.
The company which is set to perform this daunting task is called Rapidmind and they have already adapted their technology to IBM/Sony's Cell processors and NVIDIA's unified GPU architecture. With that in mind, it seems possible that this technology will be available to the general public, you know, when the time is right.