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AMD Back in the Black
XaXXon writes "CNN reports that AMD had a profitable quarter for the first time in over two years. According to the story this is mostly because of their 64-bit line of chips (both Opterons and Athlon-64). AMD has forced both HP and Intel to change long-standing plans of only supporting Itanium, with HP coming out with Opteron-based systems and Intel releasing chips mimicking the 32/64-bit behaviour of the Opteron. According to the story, 64-bit processors are better than 32-bit ones because 32-bit processors 'can't take advantage of more than 4 megabytes (sic) of memory at a time.'"
When I went to nanotech lab open day, one of the speakers said that 98%-99% of the chips on each wafer must work for the CPU company to make a profit.
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See this. Of course, there were the standard rumours going around before Prescott's launch that it was going to have a 64-bit layer, but that didn't happen.
What I find interesting is that Intel said before Opteron's launch that they weren't going to make any form of 64-bit x86 processor, and now it's on the roadmap.
Earlier this week, Intel's President and COO, Paul Otellini, confirmed in a web-cast interview that a move into the 64-bit desktop market was certain, but that the company would nevertheless wait for the arrival of operating system and application support. "You can be fairly confident that when there is software from an application and operating system standpoint, we'll be there," he said.
You mean once the OS and application developers have started using AMD's 64-bit extensions, Intel will come up with something to compete?
Socket 940 arranges the pins so that it's easy to lay out multiprocessor systems with a 6 layer motherboard (expensive, but you'll want it in a server anyway for reliability reasons). Sockey 939 (real soon now) will work with 4-layer motherboards and so will result in cheaper systems. Both the Athalon 64 and Athalon FX will soon be socket 939, differentiated by the ammount of cache. Opteron will remain as it is, as otherwise your 4 and 8 way boxes won't work. Given that Opteron 8xx is absurdly cheap compared to any other 64 bit 8-way server, I can't see why AMD would want to lower prices.
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Haven't seen any problem with AMD processors. It's necessary to follow the Cooling Guidelines, of course.
Make sure you have a good power supply. We use KingWin 350 Watt supplies that have two fans. (Ignore the language, "Extreme Series". That's there just to appeal to gamers, who expect every product to include some reference to violence or games. There is nothing extreme about them, and they are reasonably priced.)
Note that power supply manufacturers sell power supplies that have 100 Watts more rated power for sometimes close to twice the price. That's to take advantage of the "more is better" people.
Modded +5 Insightful? Now that shows the weakness of the Slashdot moderation system...
Athlon, Athlon 64 and Opteron all have thermal protection, just like the P4s...and have had it for some time.
Further, current P4s dissipate more power than the AMD solutions, due to high clockspeeds that don't equate to better performance except for a slight edge in multimedia codec performance.
In short, at this point AMD is flat out better - and a much better deal to boot. You can pick up an Athlon 64 3000+ for about $210...that's a steal!
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
AMD has an approach that says they will "build smarter" than their competition. Their flagship fabs (Fab 30 in Dresden, for example) are highly automated with very tight process control, ensuring the right work gets done at the right time. The focus is on equipment utilization; reduction of tool idle time. Further, they focus on minimizing the number of non-product wafers in the line, which take tool time but don't directly produce any chips that can be sold. The management of all this is done through software.
They also have to focus on fab uptime ... since they don't necessarily have the back up manufacturing capability to allow them to recover if their fab is down. For example, AMD makes about two-thirds their revenue from processor sales according to a recent 10-Q filing. Most recent quarter for which there is data (for the period ending 12/28/2003) shows $1,205M in quarterly revenue. You can estimate around $800M in revenue from their processor lines. Fab 30 make nearly all their processors. If Fab 30 were to go down for one hour, that's one hour in the 730 hours in a quarter that they can't make chips. If they have demand that is greater than or equal to capacity, and they're running at full capacity, they would loose roughly $1M due to potential finished goods that could not be made. A cost of $1M per hour of fab down time is pretty typical in the market where AMD competes and for fabs that compare to Fab 30.
A single tool going down is a problem. The entire fab going down is a huge problem. Things that can bring an entire fab down include utilities (electricity, water, gasses, etc.) contamination of facility-wide services like vacuum line, DI water, and various gasses, labor strikes, natural disasters, fires, and plant-wide software.
When you rely on software to manage your manufacturing to the degree that AMD and other high-end semiconductor manufacturers do, you tend to pay a lot of attention to the software.