This is part one of a series of posts that leads up, in total, to what I see as the future of intel, AMD, nvidia, and even some of the console and OS makers.
So today I want to present you with a little bit of research that isn't exactly complete, but that leads up to this theory that I know will annoy a lot of people and honestly it annoys me. The Intel as we know it today in the common market was built off the back of the P6 architecture and the Pentium 3.
The chips and machines I will be using as examples today go as follows:
HP NW8000 (Pentium M 1C/1T 2 GHZ 2MB cache Dothan)
Apple Macbook 2,1 (Core Duo 2C/2T T2400 2MB cache Yonah)
IBM 600X (Pentium 3 1C/1T 650MMX 650MHz 256K cache Coppermine)
Acer AspireOne KAV10 D150 (Atom N270 1C/2T 1.677 GHZ 512K cache Diamondville)
So where I want to start is actually with the Pentium Pro (PP). When the PP came out everyone was excited about the performance boost. As tech got better and better, the pentium 2 came along with improvements on the cache speeds. After P2, the P3, P3 Xeon, and P3 Celeron. No one was all too excited about it. It offered a new instruction that no one was going to use for a long time (in comparison to chip releases), had the same amount of cache, and no one really cared about the faster clocks, especially those with dual processor systems. As time went on the P3 got better support on more and more things, obviously, and as systems died people started buying the P3. Since no one had much interest in the pentium 3, intel decided they needed something now since no one was terribly excited about their previous design and came out with the pentium 4. While I, and those of the insane asylums in india, like the P4, at the time it was a fire hazard almost literally. It was priced too high and people started to demand the P3 come back, which made Intel punch the clock rates into the sky as people were introduced to 1.2/4/5 GHz chips on the P4 side.
As time went on, the mobile pentium 4's were AWFUL. I have talked about this before; pentium 3's were still in demand, needed a mobile chip, Intel was against AMD with these wierd "Cores" and 64 bit thing.... Pentium M! Throw it out there feed the fish quick!!! Pentium M was still based on the P3. Soon after came the Core series, which people were getting all spun up about for what was GOING to be the Core 2 series of chips. The Core Duo and Solo weren't seen here often, mostly used in OEM jobs like the macbooks, and pre-mades that weren't big box. @wendell wanted a duo so he ordered one from Japan, and aparently a lot of people were doing that. On the Solo's, as much as I can tell, the performance of a 2GHz core PM to a CS was minimal at best. They didn't have that much of a boost other than the die shrink from 90nm to 65nm. In fact, you could even call them a refresh since there was nothing that was actually added extension wise. The real power came with the Core Duo which was 2 separate dies on the same chip, like the early core 2's.
When the Core 2's came out everyone was excited that they were going to kick AMD's ass. AMD had the phenoms come out and they were doing pretty well. But what people didn't even realize was that the next big thing, netbooks, was still going to be P6 based. I can only give an example of the chip I have, but a lot of the atoms that came out were the same, albeit with different power parameters and some of the new extensions duct taped to the side on some chips, on top of the SOC magic. But as far as I can tell, the 32 bit Atoms, my N270 as an example, are just another extension of the P6 line. The performance is that of my NW8000, has the same lag my macbook can get, and is faster than its old grampa 600X.
Now what I reckon is that, as I said, the Intel we know has been built off the back of the pentium 3. First the pentium 3 got popular after the pentium 2 and just before the pentium 4, then when the P4 was getting plastered in the mobile market the "PM" saved the day (and a really lot of review sites loved laptops like mine that had high clock pentium M chips, even more so when the Dothan chips came out and you could directly upgrade from Banias and keep a good laptop) and got some recognition in places. Then, when the core series spun up, it got popular everywhere but here, but people still desired them in the somewhat enthusiast market. Not only that but the macbooks sold like crazy. When the atoms came out the old P6 carried the entire netbook craze till it died out in 2012. Anything else was from help from AMD (AMD64). So, the longest running chip was also the most famous in its class and no one realized what they were actually using.
Funny huh?