AMD Preparing To Give Intel a Run For Its Money 345
jfruh writes: "AMD has never been able to match Intel for profits or scale, but a decade ago it was in front on innovation — the first to 1GHz, the first to 64-bit, the first to dual core. A lack of capital has kept the company barely holding on with cheap mid-range chips since; but now AMD is flush with cash from its profitable business with gaming consoles, and is preparing an ambitious new architecture for 2016, one that's distinct from the x86/ARM hybrid already announced."
Re:Only the great Master of Paper can save AMD (Score:4, Insightful)
I stick to Intel because they're the best CPU you can buy right now.
But I'd love to see AMD back in the game. I bought the first X2 Athlon series, what a beast that was.
Sadly that was also the last AMD CPU I've purchased.
RTFA (Score:3, Insightful)
DId you RTFA?
More of the same? Probably not.
Intel Inside, inovation outside. (Score:1, Insightful)
It was never technology or the lack of it that kept AMD out and Intel in. It was clever marketing, FUD and just plain ignorance of the customer. The "Intel Inside" ads and the "what if something is not compatible with AMD" feeling that the marketing gurus created kept Intel on the top outselling even the more superior AMDs. The real Intel killers are the ARM processors and mobile computing that is giving Intel a run for its money. This is what happens if you refuse to innovate!
Drivers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly they need a better team writing the drivers. You can have the best CPU/GPU in the industry but if the drivers suck, no one will want to buy them.
[John]
Re:Just like Bulldozer? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yup, and the BS about them being first to 64-bit...maybe in the consumer sector, but Intel, IBM and DEC all had 64-bit chips before the Athlon was even designed let alone shipped.
They invented the architecture that you probably typed your post on. That was the point. Heck, on my linux distro it is still called amd64...
No kidding (Score:5, Insightful)
I would -love- to see AMD truly competitive with Intel on every level because it is only good for us consumers. It would be great if both companies made chips so fast, efficient, stable, and capable that you didn't buy AMD or Intel based on anything but who had the better deal that week.
However I'm not interested in hype and bullshit. As you say, "put up or shut up." I get tired of hearing about how great your shit will be in the future. Guess what? Intel's shit will be great in the future too, probably. It is great right now.
So less with the hype, more with the making a good CPU.
Re:Buh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:First to 64-bit (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean first to x86-64. Intel had a 64-bit processor before that (Itanium). 13 years later, Itanium is dead and x86 is holding us back, so much that servers are turning towards ARMv8 (inferior design to Itanium, but tons of momentum from mobile/embedded).
You do realize that this run towards ARM is not a full stampede, and is driven by price and operating costs and only useful for Unix/Linux systems as windows server isn't really interested in supporting ARM yet. This is more like a trickle of some large specialized systems off onto Red Hat (or similar) systems where one can afford to just change processors and recompile everything in an effort to same a bit of operating power and hardware costs. But you have to be looking at enough servers to make this worth the labor cost.
So, where I don't care for the X86 family and would love everybody to switch to ARM, I know it's not going to happen in my career without there being that "killer" app that pushes everybody off of Windows. Right now, with "Office" being the "killer got to have" application of all time, and that generally only running on Windows, guess what? X86 is here to stay.
Re:Just like Bulldozer? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, not so long as it used to be. I recently got a Macbook Pro and under "About This Mac / Processor" it says "2.3 GHz Intel Core i7" - the same thing it says on a Macbook Pro I got 3 years ago. The CPU is not actually identical of course - it has much-improved battery life, which is good. But the performance increase, if any, is not noticeable. Times really have changed.
Re:Just like Bulldozer? (Score:5, Insightful)
" Itanium failed to make significant inroads against IA-32 or RISC, and then suffered from the successful introduction of x86-64 based systems into the high-end server market, systems which were more compatible with the older x86 applications." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I... [wikipedia.org]
So the point is that AMD was more than capable of producing a chip to beat Intel.
Re:Just like Bulldozer? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the point was even with Intel's massive cash and infrastructure they couldn't bring 64 bit to the desktop
Wrong. They could have if they had wanted to, but they didn't want to. They wanted 64-bit to remain in the realm of big-iron, so they could sell their big, overpriced Itanic chips. Whenever anyone asked about 64-bit chips, Intel said "buy our Itanic!". When anyone complained about the 4G memory limitation inherent with 32-bit chips, they pointed to their crappy PAE extension.
Then AMD came out with the X86-64 ISA, and then suddenly Intel looked stupid. They tried to say things like "people don't need 64 bits on desktop systems", "you can use PAE to use more than 4G", "no one needs more than 4G", until they trotted out their hastily-made "EM64T" version.
Re:Just like Bulldozer? (Score:2, Insightful)
EMT64 was in the labs for several years before it was released to market, just like "Jackson Technology" or "Hyper-Threading" was in the labs several years before it's introduction to market, so "hastily-made" is definably false.
As someone stated earlier, EMT64 was already cooking in the labs at the same time Itanium or IA64 was cooking, Intel gambled on IA64 and wanted to start to move away from IA32, but fortunately for the rest of the world, AMD forced their hands.
I know a lot of this first hand, has I am a former member of one of the Intel Validation teams
Re:Just like Bulldozer? (Score:2, Insightful)
Frequency is not the same thing as performance. Your new 2.3 GHz i7 is faster in benchmarks and real-world use than your 3 year old 2.3 GHz i7. The performance gains have slowed down a bit, since Intel has been putting more focus on power (as you note, battery life is greatly improved), but performance gains are not completely gone by any stretch of the imagination.
You might not notice it, however, because a lot of people don't really have a use for all the performance modern CPUs have to offer.