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Upside interviews Jerry Sanders of AMD
An Anonymous reader writes "Titled The Last Man Standing, this Upside interview offered an inside view of the bloody war between the two CPU makers from Sanders' point of view. He also talks about upcoming Hammer, flash memory, Transmeta and telecomm bubbles. Somehow I get a feeling that both companies are living under the heavy cloud of Microsoft. Pretty lengthy, but an interesting reading.""
If you want the full (hi)story about Intel, AMD and lots of other companies in the PC processor and how the PC chip market became what it is today go read the book: Inside Intel by Tim Jackson.
3 8/
You will realise how much this Intel vs. AMD has been a personal fight between Andy Grove and Jerry Sanders. Great story.
See e.g.:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/04522764
I went with AMD when I saw the benchmarks from average users. The K6 had problems, and made me stay with P2/P3s. Comparing pricing and performance, AMD is better on most accounts. My AMD 1800 is faster than a P4 2ghz in all areas but the 400mhz bus.
Just check out Mad Onion 3dmark 2001 and looks at the scores, AMD is leading the way on the top machines!
I might have to get a dual AMD MP machine thou, the prices are coming down, and with newer chipsets for AMD, will make it even faster. 333mhz bus?
This article is pretty good if you want to see a management level rewrite of history. Mr. Sanswers leaves out a few interesting details, like how AMD's turning point at the K6 came from buying out NexGen and rebranding their NX86 chip. It is hard to make AMD look like a small company battling a giant when they were buying out smaller companies, filing thousands of patents per year, and knowingly violating IP agreements hoping Intel would settle.
Nonetheless, it all worked. And I'm very glad it did.
An interesting article, with a lot of good truths from a business perspective. I can't believe he waffled on Slot 1 (Intel) vs. Slot A (AMD).
However, he does take credit for a lot that was, at best, shrewd investing on AMD's part. One of the Lost Tales in silicon history is the saga of NexGen, a little operation funded by Compaq and a few other players, which was the real developer of the microcode/x86-to-RISC architecture later seen in the K5 and K6 (-2 and -III flavors, too) cores. NexGen survived for a while, selling the two-chip Nx586 solution on some custom Alaris boards, but PCI versions were late in coming, and few, if any, versions were shipped with the fabled FPU. (As it was, you got the equivalent of a plain 80386 with the integer performance of a 100MHz Pentium, off a 90MHz core.)
AMD swooped in and bought the ailing company, using their engineering talent and one-chip Nx686 design to produce the K5. I thiiink a very small number of real Nx686s made it to market; TigerDirect was listing them back in 1996 or so.
Apparently AMD reorganized to produce the Athlon, and much of the NexGen team left or were laid off. Compared to the K6, the Athlon we know and love is something of a 'brute force' chip- NexGen designs relied on their very accurate branch prediction logic, while the Athlon threw it out in exchange for more execution units.
Running equal performance at a lower clock speed shows better design and engineering. If you're actually a student of Computer Science, that means something.
If you're the kind of guy that reads http://www.sandpile.org/ you know what I'm talking about. If you're just a consumer reading about Quake 3 framerates on Tom's Hardware, I guess it doesn't matter. (No offense)
According to The Register, Microsoft is designing the new Xbox 2 around an AMD processor. It seems that Microsoft is trying it's best to help AMD against Intel, as the interview with Jerry mentions Microsoft helping AMD out with their 64bit Processor. Any thoughts on this?