DBWI: Intel Abandons Tejas and Jayhawk in favor of Conroe

[Crunch Buttsteak]

For those who don’t know what Conroe is, it would have been Intel’s first attempt at a mainstream dual core chip that they had been developing in 2005/2006, which could have easily had the potential to outperform AMD’s Athlon 64 X2 chips, with far lower TDP than the infamous Pentium V chips that we got.

If Intel had gone to market with Conroe, and thus wasn’t scrambling to catch up to AMD’s multicore processor line with Yorkfield, could they have regained their market dominance from the late 90’s?

 

[Theoretical_TJ]

Tejas and Jayhawk were to the cpu what the Detroit gas guzzler was to the 1970s, with the bonus of leading to Hot Coffee lawsuits from gamers with burned crotches.

Just like with cars in the 1980s, the upstart nobodies came in with the equivalent of small, reliable cars in CPU form that used far less power and were much cooler, especially in states with stressed electrical grids.

 

[Crunch Buttsteak]

A buddy of mine ended up got into building her own PCs after her well-meaning parents bought her a prebuilt with a 4.8 GHz Pentium V EE. She used to joke that she could use her PC as a space heater in the winter months. I had built my own PC with an Athlon 64 X2 as the CPU, which cost me half as much as her PC did, ran cooler/quieter and got better performance.

TBH the Pentium V debacle still confuses me because Intel should have known that games weren't going to be entirely single-threaded forever. I mean you had the Xbox 360 coming out in 2005 with it's three PowerPC cores and the PS3 a year later with 7 sort of cores.

Of course, a competitive Intel in the CPU space might have prevented AMD from becoming the bloated shambling mess that it is today. Once Microsoft came out with Windows RT, the writing was on the wall for x86 outside of desktops and servers.