Continued:

The interesting thing to point out is that both ATI cards as well as NVIDIA cards cost just about the same in the high-end area. Unfortunately for ATI, their solid mid-range X800 XL costs more than NVIDIA 6600 or 6600 GT. Granted that ATI’s mid-range card is superior to NVIDIA’s 6600 series, but the 6600 series still have support for SM 3.0. Once again, this is probably more architecture dependant than anything else. Once NVIDIA had figured out a way to implement SM 3.0 in their 6800 architecture, it was probably easier to just port over the features to their mid-end product line. Nonetheless, my whole point is that ATI’s prices can’t exactly be justified when their competitor is offering an impressive feature and future-proofing their products at the same time. Additionally, it’s simply not fair to ATI’s customers to have to purchase another card of the same value just to take advantage of SM 3.0.

All in all, I presume this is more or less a sign of competitive incompetence. Since ATI’s X800 series architecture wasn’t ready to support the feature, and the company wasn’t going to go back to square one just to add that feature, they went ahead and introduced their cards. I would be fine with it if ATI had somehow compensated for this feature to their customers instead of playing the PR game by degrading the usefulness of the feature.

Now that I am done presenting ATI as an example, let’s take a look at Intel. Intel has done the exact same thing with its 64-bit Prescott microprocessors that ATI did with SM 3.0. Right when AMD launched its 64-bit chips, Intel was the first one to say that 64-bit instructions were unnecessary. So far so good, right? I would’ve completely agreed with them at that point, except that AMD’s 64-bit chips running in 32-bit mode performed exceptionally well, so I felt that in 64-bit mode we might see some impressive gains. I actually favored Intel’s position at the time because their arguments did make sense. After all, 64-bit chips will truly show their potential when software catches up to the hardware. Only then can you enjoy the fruits of 64-bit. I suppose you can say that I was agreeing with both companies from their respective point of views.

The major point here is the claims that were made by Intel, stating that the world’s largest chipmaker will not introduce its 64-bit processor until software would take advantage of it. Sure, fair enough. But why exactly did Intel decided to introduce its Pentium 4 600 series of Prescott microprocessors with 64-bit extensions enabled in February of this year? As far as I can tell, sure we have the official 64-bit Windows, but the market is certainly not flooded with 64-bit desktop applications. Though the market is moving towards this goal, a complete shift to 64-bit is still pretty far off. Once again, given these facts, I fail to see how the software market has changed since AMD brought its 64-bit chips to the market (except for the 64-bit Windows aspect). UPDATE 05-11-005: Thanks to our readers for correcting the Windows XP 64-bit error in this paragraph.  The error has been fixed to reflect the updated statement, but my thoughts on the subject still remain the same. 

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