'We've an Unexpected Manufacturing Advantage For the First Time Ever': Intel's Manufacturing Glitch Opens Door For AMD (theinformation.com) 136
Over at The Information (paywalled), reporter Aaron Tilley has a splendid interview of Forrest Norrod, a senior executive who joined AMD four years ago. Mr. Norrod describes the challenge AMD has faced over the years and how, for the first time ever, it sees a real shot at making a significant dent in the desktop market. From the report: Advanced Micro Devices' battle with chip giant Intel has often seemed like a gnat fighting an elephant, with AMD struggling in recent years to gain even a tenth of the market for the chips that power PCs and data center servers. Forrest Norrod, a senior executive who joined AMD four years ago, says the company suffered from "little brother syndrome" where it tried and failed to compete with Intel on lots of different chips. Now, though, AMD may have a shot at coming out with a faster, more powerful chip than Intel for the first time. Intel in April said it was delaying the release of a more advanced chip manufacturing process until sometime in 2019. AMD has its own new, advanced chip, which it will now be able to release earlier than Intel, potentially giving it an edge in the market for high-performance chips for PCs and data center computers.
It's a market opportunity worth around $50 billion. That's what Intel makes from selling chips for PCs and data center servers, and it dominates both markets. The data center market is particularly important because of the growth of new technologies like artificial intelligence-related applications, much of which is handled in the cloud. Companies that buy chips for data centers or PCs could gravitate to AMD chips as a result of Intel's delay. "I think we have a year lead now," said Mr. Norrod, who oversees AMD's data center business. AMD now has "an unexpected [manufacturing] advantage for the first time ever," he added.
It's a market opportunity worth around $50 billion. That's what Intel makes from selling chips for PCs and data center servers, and it dominates both markets. The data center market is particularly important because of the growth of new technologies like artificial intelligence-related applications, much of which is handled in the cloud. Companies that buy chips for data centers or PCs could gravitate to AMD chips as a result of Intel's delay. "I think we have a year lead now," said Mr. Norrod, who oversees AMD's data center business. AMD now has "an unexpected [manufacturing] advantage for the first time ever," he added.
Intel lost their edge (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why the rumor about Apple making their own Mac CPUs is believable. Intel lost their 18 month chip fabrication lead and they are now 9-12 months behind TSMC.
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That and Apple has a history of dropping CPU Chip makers. While your old 8088 XT is similar and still maintains a lot of compatibility with your Core i7 8th gen processor Dell.
Even with just the Macintosh line had 3 major chip changes, it is actually due for one now.
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Maybe not 3 "changes", but they have used the Motorola 68000 series, the IBM PowerPCs, and Intel's Core/i3/i5/i7" series
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The first ~10 years of Macintosh used the Motorola 68000 series microprocessors.
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This was a long time ago, back when there several 680x0 computers. 680x0 being Motorola. The first Macs where based on the Motorola 680x0 chipset. They switched to powerpc when the motorola design couldn't go above 66mhz, I believe.
With that being said the 680x0 was a better design than the x86 chips at the time. To bad Motorola couldn't keep on the ball.
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Mainstream Windows has only transition x86 to x64, a relatively small change.
However various parts of Windows or Win32 API have been available on a few other architectures.
There was Win16(eg: Windows 3.1) to Win32. Win16 support is still alive in 32 bit versions of Windows 10.
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True.
Not to undermine that achievement, but there was never any transition from one totally different architecture to another that supported software from the previous architecture.
Whereas for example a third party software like Photoshop MC68K would run on Mac PowerPC, and Photoshop for PowerPC would run on a Mac x86, at least during the transition period.
I believe at least the Alpha version of NT had a JIT that could run x86 binaries, both Windows and DOS.
The PowerPC version of OS/2 could also run x86 Win16 binaries (probably Win32s binaries as well), actually the whole WinOS2, a real version of Win 3.x as well as DOS binaries using a JIT.
Re: Intel lost their edge (Score:2)
Re:Intel lost their edge (Score:5, Insightful)
"This is why the rumor about Apple making their own Mac CPUs is believable "
No it isn't. Apple doesn't even bother updating its product lines with current Intel offerings so it's hard to believe that Intel lagging behind is even a small problem for Apple.
That's not to say Apple's interest in making their own CPU's isn't believable, just that Apple wouldn't do it for this reason.
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They don't update their product lines because Intel isn't delivering any fucking value or performance increases with minor revisions... LPDDR4 in configurations bigger than 16GB being the biggest complaint to date which is totally an Intel problem.
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That could actually be part of the reason why Apple has not updated the Mac mini and MacBook Air in years, because these two computers will be the first ones to be converted to Apple's own desktop-class ARM processors. Imagine something two or three times as powerful as an iPad pro. macOS can run on the low-end Intel m3 of the MacBook so I don't see why a switch to ARM would be impossible.
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I don't know. Back when the rumor came out that Apple might pony up their own chips I thought it would be a mistake. Now, with all intels issues with bugs, I think it might be a smart move for Apple to look into this. I read a report that Apple is about to become the first Trillion dollar company, go apple, so its not like they don't have the cash to waddle in this direction.
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Developing their own processor will be ridiculously expensive. Even their i devices are mostly ARM design.
Apple's in-house cores use an ARM ISA, but they are categorically not an ARM design. They are a complete reimplementation and currently outperform all of their competitors. In the same power envelope, they also outperform Intel. Given that they're already spending the money designing these, it's not too crazy to imagine that they'd switch to them.
Also, you think they can do better at securing cpus than Intel and amd - both of which have larger market shares?
Yes. Apple's secure element is not vulnerable to any of the speculation-based attacks against SGX enclaves.
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This is the real key.
Intel has managed to stay ahead in the scaling race. The die shrink lets them speed up and reduce the power and stay ahead of their x86 competition and within spitting distance of the low power ARMs.
If they can't stay ahead in that... they've lost their biggest advantage.
Everyone seems to be thinking this is about AMD... it's not just them. AMD is fabless. They don't care who fabs their designs. Intel is being attacked from the bottom too... by ARM and they don't care who fabs their des
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It's not going to fail immediately, but there's a stink of decay about Intel these days.
On the contrary, Intel will do great. PCs are doing ok and could servers are selling very well. Intel will still get a majority of that business, and they have good margins. Intel also has Altera, Movidius, MobileEye, Flash RAM, Optane 3D crosspoint RAM, and other product lines.
The global semiconductor industry grew 27% in 2017. It will grow 20% in 2018. Intel might underperform the industry for a few quarters, but they will still do well. They are positioned well for future growth in 5G and autonomou
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3 million IOS and Android devices used for Internet consumption... I can only see that number doubling. Windows desktops... not so much.
SSD > NVME? not many users can tell the difference once they migrate to SSD, even at SATA 3GBps.
Commodity and COTS, can Intel hang with the cool kids???
Pre Intel Core Chips. (Score:5, Informative)
Back in 2005 time AMD was making significant headway in becoming the Chip for your PC right before Intel released the Core duo chip. The Pentium Line was getting aging and the Pentium-5 wasn't that popular and AMD was the chip for your PC. AMD had about a year or two of popularity.
Then Intel made the Intel Core Duo and the Core 2 Duo chip (64 bit) which put AMD back. But right before then, Intel was seen as the dying giant.
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Back in 2005 time AMD was making significant headway in becoming the Chip for your PC right before Intel released the Core duo chip. The Pentium Line was getting aging and the Pentium-5 wasn't that popular and AMD was the chip for your PC. AMD had about a year or two of popularity.
Then Intel made the Intel Core Duo and the Core 2 Duo chip (64 bit) which put AMD back. But right before then, Intel was seen as the dying giant.
Wasn't there also something about AMD selling some of their fab-lines to Motorola/Freescale at a most inopportune time, or something like that?
Re:Pre Intel Core Chips. (Score:4, Insightful)
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came back strong
I think you meant "bribed every OEM not to buy AMD chips, which robbed AMD of the cash they needed to do the R&D needed to stay on top, while Intel could keep selling their substandard chips and rely on manufacturing being too capital intensive for any competitors to keep up."
Catching up with someone isn't much of a comeback if you depend on having hired hands impeding your competitor.
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Wait a minute. Although I like AMD's underdog status, and have zero love for Intel, AMD's chipsets are perhaps even more dangerous than Intel's at this point, and they STILL HAVEN'T DELIVERED a fix for Epyc and Ryzen vulnerabilities. They ignore it like a health insurance provider breach.
There is NO good reason to buy either organization's chips until they fix the design, and with it, the code needed for quite a few apps (looking at you, VMware and Hyper-V) to get permanently fixed. Right now, the patch lis
Re:Pre Intel Core Chips. (Score:5, Interesting)
At one point AMD briefly passed 50% of retail desktop sales, thanks to the Athlon 64.
If I remember correctly it was retail CPU sales excluding pre-built systems from OEMs, Intel was still by far the biggest by total volume.
Intel came back strong and almost crushed AMD who screwed up with the A-series and other pre-Ryzen processors.
The actual screw-up was earlier, when AMD stretched waaaaaaaay too far to buy ATI for $5.4 billion where $4.2 billion was cash. That's the war chest AMD should have had to counter Intel Core 2, instead they were stretched super thin. To cut development cost they replaced manually designed circuits with inferior designs created by automation and they couldn't afford to invest as much as they should in process technology so that even then they managed an equivalent design they were behind on cost, performance and power consumption. Meanwhile ATI was under siege by nVidia and couldn't really contribute much and there wasn't really all that much gained by APUs over discrete/integrated graphics because it took special code paths to take advantage and the niche was too small.
Strategically it was also a huge mistake because sure ATI would be fully aligned with AMD (the CPU side). But it meant nVidia had little choice but to deal with Intel on their terms, which Intel used to kick nVidia out of the integrated chipset business and then took all integrated graphics on Intel chips for themselves. AMD opened that door and Intel said "look, we're just doing what the competition is doing". Even if worst case Intel had bought ATI as was rumored they'd have gotten nVidia's full support for free in the fight against Chipzilla instead of paying billions. They should have seen that the battle wouldn't be that easily won instead of thinking CPUs was in the box, on to GPUs...
when AMD was good Intel bullied dell and others to (Score:2)
when AMD was good Intel bullied dell and others to not use AMD
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That is just false. AMDs APU graphics could/can actually play games worth a salt.
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That is just false. AMDs APU graphics could/can actually play games worth a salt.
Absolutely, but the division of labor between the CPU and GPU remains pretty much the same. The theory with APUs was that you'd mix and match CPU and GPU resources, calling the GPU for parallelism more because of the tight interconnect compared to going over PCIe. In reality AMDs APUs provided competitive value to Intel's CPU + nVidia GPU but they didn't really add any extra value. The gamer market didn't care because they used dGPUs anyway, in fact it's only when AMD released Zen processors with no graphic
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There's a lot more to it than that. AMD had far better chips for just over 6 years but Intel had a huge head start in terms of brand recognition and market share, as well as far more fabrication capacity. While their market share dropped over the years as people discovered that AMD CPUs were faster, more reliable, ran cooler and cost less all at the same time, Intel used every dirty trick they could to keep AMD from growing. Despite that, AMD continued to become more popular, and Intel decided to throw thei
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While their market share dropped over the years as people discovered that AMD CPUs were faster, more reliable, ran cooler and cost less all at the same time
I'll accept faster and cooler, but for a long time Intel was shipping thermal throttling and AMD wasn't. In some cases, this was a problem for Intel. We had an Opteron cluster and a P4 Xeon cluster. When the cooling failed in a node on the AMD cluster, the CPU burned and the node died. The cluster management system noted the failure and redistributed the work. With the P4 cluster, the CPU would clock down to something tiny like 200MHz. It would still be responsive to command messages and so work would
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Except AMD will have nothing performance wise to offer even with this delay. bang for buck, yes, but CPU cost is tiny thing to businesses that buy servers
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Except AMD will have nothing performance wise to offer even with this delay.
But won't they? The way I see it now, both in bang for buck and in actual raw power AMD have some decent offerings either on the shelf or about to come out the door. Sure, they don't have a 72 core big chip on the market, but honestly that kind of stuff makes up such a small percentage of the servers on the market that it borderline isn't relevant. And chips like the Threadripper are within the low double digit percentage points of the top tier offerings from Intel core for core.
If you absolutely must have
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Yeah, I was a huge AMD fan when AMD was better.
Cyrix was also better; however, Intel sued them, lost, and destroyed their capital holdings in the process, sending them out of business anyway.
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Re:Pre Intel Core Chips. (Score:4, Insightful)
No serious observer regarded Intel as a dying giant, though you'd have my vote for a Napoleonic (Itanium) psychopath (RDRAM), sleeping off a boozy bender (Prescott, Caminogate).
One humble phone call to their Israeli design center ("maybe let's just put the engineers back in charge for a short while"), and Intel bounced right back off the matt again, big time, rocking those giant abulous fabs we all knew they were still packing under their delirious anti-competitive power-grab.
For about a five year period, during their Hewlett Packard joint venture, that must have been one hell of dysfunctional board room, perhaps even arcing as high as 100 mFi (milli-Fiorinas).
Itanium Sales Forecasts edit.png [wikimedia.org]
I can never review that chart without hearing Julie Andrews in my inner ear chirruping gaily away about kettles of kittens and mittens of string.
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Back in 2005 time AMD was making significant headway in becoming the Chip for your PC right before Intel released the Core duo chip. The Pentium Line was getting aging and the Pentium-5 wasn't that popular and AMD was the chip for your PC. AMD had about a year or two of popularity.
Then Intel made the Intel Core Duo and the Core 2 Duo chip (64 bit) which put AMD back. But right before then, Intel was seen as the dying giant.
What actually happened was at the turn of the century Pentium III was replaced with Pentium 4, which had a worse per clock and per watt performance than Pentium III. But Intel kept pushing it because Mhz. They were also thinking Itanium was the way of the future.
AMD managed to make cheaper, lower MHz, faster chips. They also invented x86-64 with full backwards capability.
Intel kept pushing the Spaceheater 4. That thing was such an energy hog it was completely unsuitable for laptops. Intel in Israel created
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Netburst wasn't just justified by marketing reasons (moar MHz) but by technical reasons. The idea of using a very long pipeline combined with high frequencies sounded good at the time. They just didn't expect heat to be that much of an obstacle. Turned out it was, so they shifted their focus on their more energy efficient line (Pentium M), with the added bonus on not having to maintain two separate micro-architectures.
And while Netburst definitely was a failure, I'm quite sure that they managed to salvage p
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Plus they expected the frequencies to be able to keep going up. They quickly hit 4GHz and the wall. If 10GHz has been feasable maybe Netbust would have been a competitive architecture, but the power requirements and thus heat does not scale linear, and it appears 5GHz the maximum frequency for 2000 tech as it is for todays tech.
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Well... The core2 duo was the best FSB chip, but AMD had the integrated HyperTransport memory bus and it kicked ass. So much that I asked Dell for Engineering workstations and servers for the enterprise.
I was told by Dell that nobody was asking for AMD, I was the ONLY one who wanted something other than Intel. Secretly Dell was taking billions a year in "Partner Promotions" that magically appeared under the rug if they never sold ANY AMD based systems.
http://money.cnn.com/blogs/leg... [cnn.com]
That is a huge kick
You are only as good as your last invention (Score:3)
Isn't capitalism grand! You stubble and you failed!
Intel isn't in any danger here. AMD may gain market share and Intel may make less money, but this isn't the beginning of the end of Intel. Not by a long shot. It may mean that AMD finds it easier to be competitive, but Intel will get it's manufacturing back on track eventually and recover.
It's going to take more than a couple of stumbles for Intel to fall to second place to AMD.
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More to the point, There are a lot of vendors who partner with Intel, it will take time to end out their contract and make a good one with AMD. Then these partners will need to make sure they don't make AMD Chips sound like the budget alternative.
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This is a very difficult time to have lost this much ground on manufacturing. Though straight comparison of feature size doesn't tell the whole story due to Intel's better use of vertical space, TSMC's 7nm node is currently making chips that do beat the still future Intel 10nm node in transistor density comparisons. Furthermore, TSMC is scheduled to iterate to a 7nm+ process to further boost transistor density by the end of the year. So their version 2 process will also be out, in 2 fabs, before Intel plans
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Isn't capitalism grand! You stubble and you failed!
Capitalism doesn't apply here; Intel is too big to fail.
If it ever stumbled so bad that it was put at risk of being bought up by some Chinese company, the US government would step in and kibosh that plan in a heartbeat, using a taxpayer-funded bailout if necessary.
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Sanders? For Pete's sake, that guy was a loony toon of the leftist socialist elitist masquerading as a common person. He was type cast by the same folks who gave us Stalin, Mau, and the Castro brothers. Any number of his policies where transparently just vote buying by making promises the country couldn't hope to afford.
Sanders only purpose was to get Hillary on the November ballot and keep her from having to lurch too far left by appearing to be the sane choice of the two. It was basically a ploy to k
Intel will fight dirty. (Score:5, Insightful)
If I've learned anything about Intel from their past behavior then it's that they will lie, cheat and steal if that's what it takes to suppress AMD. I wouldn't be surprised if they paid off a bunch of companies to have a supply disruption occur, bad firmware updates bricking machines or creating a shell company to make purposefully shitty AMD machines.
Honestly, the FTC should have had their boot on Intel's neck decades ago and kept it their.
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And that's the point. if you don't care how much money you spend, then Intel is better. But if you would like to save 50% (or more) on the price and still get ~90% of the performance, then you go with AMD.
Yes, Intel was faster (not better) at the cost of the Meltdown vulnerability. Patch that vulnerability and Intel is no longer faster (perhaps slower) than AMD.
Of course that's the measurement on desktops (Score:3)
> If you want to factor cost then, maybe
Performance is measured as "X per Y", such as "miles per hour", "miles per gallon", etc.
In a phone, the most important measurement is "instructions per watt", how fast can you go for the amount of power you use. Per dollar is also important in a phone. If you didn't' care about power usage / heat, and didn't care about dollar cost, your phone might have four Core i7 CPUs. It would have a ten pound battery and cost $2,000, and it would be fast.
On the desktop, power
Price per kWh; unreliable grid; commuters (Score:2)
On the desktop, power usage isn't nearly so important - it's plugged in.
Less important than on a phone, but it still depends on local price per kilowatt hour (1 kWh = 3.6 MJ).
Your budget isn't a power budget on the desktop, it's a dollar budget.
Cost of kilowatt hours in dollars leads many PC users in areas with expensive electric power to choose integrated graphics or a laptop-as-desktop. The latter is especially practical in areas with an unreliable power grid because of the internal UPS in every laptop. These users' needs overlap somewhat with those of a seminomadic group who want the ability to run (at least lightweight) desktop applications w
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Hotter and hotter? (Score:2)
> run hotter, have a higher TDP
You realize TDP is the measurement of heat, right?
So you sad "hotter, and hotter".
Re: Of course that's the measurement on desktops (Score:2)
You need to factor in the whole system cost. AMD cpus might be cheaper per instruction, but if you need a certain number of instructions per second, it is likely that 8 full Intel systems, even though the cpus cost more, would be cheaper than 10 full AMD systems.
Also managing 8 machines generally will be slightly easier than 10, although obviously there's also slightly less redundancy.
Desktops aren't a cluster. #systems==#users (Score:2)
> if you need a certain number of instructions per second, it is likely that 8 full Intel systems, even though the cpus cost more, would be cheaper than 10 full AMD systems.
Server clusters have different requirements. AMD may still be a good choice, but the analysis is very different. You don't add two more DESKTOPS in order to have higher IPS. The number of systems for desktops is determined by the number of users. The question is which CPU to put in the system. Either a Ryzen or a Core i9 is going to
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Either a Ryzen or a Core i9 is going to be sufficient for any desktop
Not really, I'm already wanting more than Ryzen 2700. Next build is 16 core Threadripper when the 12nm refresh comes out, and looking forward to the new chipset. At least $2k for that build, but I'm hooked on the power performance and quietness.
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On the desktop, power usage isn't nearly so important - it's plugged in. Your budget isn't a power budget on the desktop, it's a dollar budget
At a rough approximation, 1W for one year costs me £1. A 20W power difference over the lifetime of a device is £20/year if it's always on. Now that a 3-year upgrade cycle has extended to a 5-year cycle for most people, a 20W power increase is a £100 difference to TCO. For a corporate budget, it's worse because it's a £20/year operating expense rather than a £100 capital write-down.
*COOFF* Athlon! *COOFF* (Score:2)
You forgot about AMD K7, the Athlon series, that make a big dent in the intel market share and it just didn't had more success due to Intel dirty moves and AMD manufacturing problems.
But yes, Ryzen and friends are good CPUs with more potencial growth and intel plans will be lagging, giving the opportunity for AMD leapfrog intel.
I do hope so, competition is good and while ARM did add more competition, it failed to enter the desktop and just barely entered server market
Seen this before (Score:5, Interesting)
K8.
Intel tried to make its next chip in Bangalore and screwed up so the K8 Opteron was a better chip and for a year AMD was the darling of the markets.
Intel caught up and ate AMDs lunch. AMD instead of using the windfall from the Opteron to build a sustainable chip pipeline (3-4 chips in dev instead of 1-2) used the moeny to buy ATI.
People in the CPU div were pissed when the 40 dollar RSUs went to 3 dollar.
But with AI and computation shifting more towards GP-GPUs than CPUs the ATI purchase has now started to payoff.
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Forget AMD and Intel, TSMC is the true tech leader (Score:2)
Intel also hurt them selfs by sticking it to users (Score:2)
Intel also hurt them selfs by sticking it to users.
On stuff like jacking up prices / cutting pci-e lanes.
raid keys
The X299 UP to X pci-e lanes sucks!
Desktop have been suck on 16+DMI for to long. Amd has 20+4+USB on die.
Eh, not for the first time... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not for the first time. How old are you, 15? AMD's Athlon was faster than the P3, especially when the latter couldn't keep up with clock speeds (there was even a P3 that was unstable at the rated speed and had to be recalled), and then Athlon 64 was much faster than the P4 (esp. with 64 bit OSes) but most publications at the time were at Intel's pocket and were trying to pass off that absolute turd Netburst architecture as gold, while at the same time Intel was strong-arming or bribing system integrators into not using the superior AMD. So AMD has had better solutions for years in the past, but due to Intel's illegal tactics they did not gain a big enough market share. In the end, Intel was forced to pay a fine which was nothing compared to the revenue AMD lost over that time and that lost revenue when they had superior technology meant they eventually were not competitive which meant consumers lost.
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but most publications at the time were at Intel's pocket and were trying to pass off that absolute turd Netburst architecture as gold
Dark black coloured glasses much? I remember building a computer back in that time. The publications most definitely didn't pull any punches when talking about how inferior Netburst was to the Athlon 64 and most of the talk was about how the Athlon 64 would change the world. And it did. About the only negative thing anyone said about AMD at the time was related to TPD, and that was a generation behind. The good old Athlon may have spanked the P3, but it screamed with the delight of a Dyson in need of a bear
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He may be talking about process nodes, which normally Intel win at - they're either straight up ahead or they get to it before others do.
Intel 10nm appears delayed. AMD 7nm (actually 10, sigh) is probably going to beat Intel to shelves.
AMD64 anyone? (Score:5, Informative)
Back when Intel was trying to sell Itanium as the 64 bit successor to the x86 instruction set, AMD came out with what is now known as x86-64. It was worlds better than Itanium and Intel was forced to license it from AMD in order to stay in business (Of course, AMD had no choice but to offer Intel such a license on reasonable terms because it was built on the x86 architecture which AMD licensed from Intel).
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The Itanic was a clean-sheet design and it was quite interesting, but compiler technology was a decade away from using the features of the processor in a good enough way to compete with the mature wintel systems.
No, it was not a clean sheet design, see i860 for reference.
You obviously don't know how VLIW pipelines work. Even if you had the best compiler available in the X arch, in the next iteration you should recompile all your code for it to be able to take advantage of thi VLIW pipeline.
VLIWs are far from interesting, they are a pain in the ass to fill the slots with ops and one simple hazard creates multiple "bubbles", or if you prefer noops.
Even in situations where you remove the conditions from your ISA and y
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Re:AMD64 anyone? (Score:4)
There's a huge amount of complexity in a modern x86 - x64 based CPU around decoding instructions and detecting where work can be done in parallel. Part of the Itanium design required shifting a bunch of complexity into the compiler.
I can imaging that in the HPC space, where you really care about how fast this single loop is running, it makes sense to invest the engineering effort to improve the compiler. But that work had not been done.
It's easy to sell a CPU that will run your existing binaries faster. It's hard to sell a CPU that will require massive investment on your part to recompile *everything*, with a compiler that doesn't exist yet, in order to see any benefit at all.
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Has everyone forgotten AMD64?
Not here. AMD64 is my car number plate.
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It will take time for the consumer sales to shift, but not as much time as it will take Intel to catch up in fabrication, assuming they do.
TSMC, AMD's current fab partner, is producing 7nm chips in two fabs. Intel isn't yet producing their close-to-equivalent 10nm node. TSMC's production at this level is therefore vastly greater than Intel's.
TSMC will be entering volume production of their next 7nm+ node when Intel finally hits volume on their 10nm. Hopefully, AMD will tape something out on that as soon as
Opteron/AMD64 (Score:2)
AMD had the lead for a while in the early days of the opteron, they introduced the 64bit architecture and were quite handily beating intel's p4 in benchmarks and power consumption, they also had the first dual core x86 chips, a faster memory controller and various other advantages.
So we are going to just forget K7 existed? (Score:3)
>Mr. Norrod describes the challenge AMD has faced over the years and how, for the first time ever, it sees a real shot at making a significant dent in the desktop market.
And then we remember how the first Athlon wiped the table with Pentium 3 and Pentium 4.
First time ever? (Score:2)
AMD has been neck and neck more than once, and ahead at LEAST once.
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