The spider and the tick

Intel’s strategic mascot, the tick, fares no better against the spider in technology than it does in nature

I was so outraged that I stood and turned off the TV from the button in the front. It was bad enough that I was confronted by the momentary image of a bloated 52-inch tick (measured diagonally), but to be told that ticks and spiders share a family tree? It looks like somebody’s been looking to Wikipedia for their science research.

It’s true. No less an authority than the Dictionary app in OS X Leopard explains that the tick is a member of the arachnid family. Every time I see a spider, I tell it that I can only imagine the shame it must feel now that its awful secret is out. But after a moment’s thought, I can imagine the spider that I pity giving me an eight-eyed wink. The tick’s lack of interest in evolution has given the spider an ideal means to cope with what might otherwise be an awful truth. Not wishing to be too graphic, let’s just say that a spider tolerates a visiting relative from the unfortunate branch of the family, but the spider doesn’t tolerate it for long.

The tick bites, sucks, bites, sucks, in a never-ending cycle that seems to inspire its name, and this brought to mind Intel’s celebration of 2008 as a tick year in its tick-tock strategy of bringing out fresh, or what the press will accept as such, processor technology every other year. Intel’s Year of the Tick will coincide with AMD’s Year of the Spider, and I couldn’t look at this juxtaposition of marketing phraseology and not think of its parallels in nature.

AMD’s Spider is, as I’ve written, the chipmaker’s first complete platform. That’s an area that observers cede to Intel. Being the single-source supplier for the guts of rubber-stamped PCs has been Intel’s stock in trade reaching back as far as one’s memory can stretch, but an uninspired sameness dominates recent years, painting a clear picture of a company that sees no need to evolve. Actually, Intel saw that need exactly once. In that case, nature used AMD as its agent of balance, and Intel’s instinct led it to evolve by reverting to a prior simple and more survivable CPU design.

AMD took the Spider platform to a level of completeness, of total performance and total power efficiency, that Intel can’t reach with this tick or the next. Those giving Spider even a shallow look will see world-beating 3-D graphics as AMD’s platform checkmate over Intel. But others will point out, and rightly so, that the full Spider platform will be a relative rarity among PCs on shelves and in catalogs, primarily because discrete desktop graphics cards, and their onboard equivalent in notebook designs, are shrinking in popularity compared to cheaper integrated graphics. That’s a pity; without discrete graphics, you don’t know what you’re missing. Apple knows that, which explains why Apple doesn’t sell any desktops with Intel’s integrated graphics. Apple bought discrete 3-D graphics processing units for iMac from the same vendor that AMD used for Spider: ATI (now part of AMD, of course).

The Spider brand isn’t one that AMD is likely to extend beyond the ultra-fast enthusiast platform that it used to introduce the Phenom quad-core CPU and AMD 7-series chipsets. The “Spider” badge won’t play well in IT, so when new-era AMD desktops and notebooks come your way, they’ll be branded Phenom, and as I’ll explain over the next few weeks, what distinguishes Spider from Intel’s 2008 tick platform doesn’t fall away when you cast off Spider’s enthusiast trappings of CPU and bus overclocking and ATI CrossFire four-slot, PCI Express 2.0, 3-D graphics. Spider’s beauty lies in its adaptable, efficient AMD Phenom CPU and 2-series chipsets. It will take some time for the relevance of Phenom — that it’s more than a half-advance of the technological second hand — to reach users below the enthusiast level, people who are, most likely, like you.

A Spider by any other name is still an awe-inspiring creature, and no matter what you call it, you have something that is as merciless as it is beautiful. Am I stretching the metaphor too far to point out that unlike elsewhere in nature, there is never a race or a battle between spider and prey, and that the spider’s limitless patience always pays off? Perhaps. But with AMD and Intel, the outcome is just as predictable as any face-off between tick and spider.