Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
I guess its easy to understand that AMD would be running in the red, its prices are really quite low. Even with small production prices I couldnt imagine there would be too much profit for them.
I'm glad to hear this kind of recovery by AMD. Not only for the employees of AMD who won't have their lives disrupted by layoffs, but also for the stockholders who can reap the benefits of a company that is now making money.
What's more, it forces Intel to compete against a competitor that can actually put extra top line money towards research and development. Everyone wins when companies can compete.
I have been pwned because my
...stop being such assholes and decide to use Socket 940 for all the models, stop charging insane amounts for those extra two HT links on Opterons 8xx and use some smart diferentiating qualities between subfamilies (like amount of L2 cache, for example) instead of number of HT links, Socket models etc crap, this 64-bit idea would have a whole lot more appeal...
Congratulations to AMD, they've been more innovative in the CPU market than Intel (which is a big feat in my book)
They've also setup a big solid state memcard department (I'm dutch and can't remember the correct name for it right now) which is running along nicely as well.
I hope they can continue keeping up the good work, they deserve it.
This is the sig that says NI (again)
...however, it's not about better products, it's about mindshare of the buyers.
I've been building PCs for quite a few years now, and have nearly always used and recommended AMD processors over Intel. In my opinion, AMDs cost less, often outperform their Intel equivalents, and lead the way when it comes to new innovations.
I guess the reason they don't have a bigger market share is because a lot of the OEM companies only sell Intel, and because Joe Public only knows about MHz as a measure of speed.
Organic free-range music... yum!
You know the reason for the product differentiation they have chosen is based on what is most likely to fail in fabrication--so for example if some of the HT links are bad, you can turn them off and call it an Athlon 64.
curious that you would critisize AMD's pricing structure in the context of an article reporting that AMD had finally returned to the black.
As long as they have a product that their rivals cannot compete with, they can keep the prices at a premium.
Hence, until such time as Intel release a competitive product, AMD can enjoy high profit margins.
This will change once Intel do release their competitive product though.
BTW: As was said in the article, the other arm of AMD's fabrication was also responsible for their profits ie: flash memory for cellphones. It's only because they have a majority stake in the joint venture with fujitsu, that they are able to declare the income as part of their overall turnover.
AMD won't have won until Intel starts rating its processors in "equivalent Athlon64 performance". ;)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Just ran a centrino sys. the other day. This thing started-up just like a calculator should. In about a nanosecond it booted and was ready to run. Multiple apps. open on the fly in the same manner. I had about 15 major memory intensive programs open at one time and this chip handled everything. Also, someone told me that the new AMD chipsets have a default lockout to prevent over-clocking? Has anyone heard anything about this?
www.linuxfree.net Quality linux distributions on cd/dvd
I suppose that Joe public recogonise big brandnames like Microsoft and Intel and this will hold sway their purchasing habits. The "Intel Inside" advertising efforts did reach a lot of people, I just can't seem to remember and AMD reaching out to as many with their advertising spend. If you are buying on technical grounds then you are correct but how many of Joe public think like you?
You can address more than 4 gigs of ram with an 8 bit processor. That doesn't mean that the result is pretty or that you should do it.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
AMD did a great thing - they've pushed CPU development and innovation forward, but let's not pretend they're something they're not. They make cheap chips that run just as well as the intel equivalents. Just like how a souped-up Honda Civic can go just as fast as an Aston Martin... That said, I know which one I'd prefer to drive ;)
For Gentoo it does, since everything is compiled during install. I'd expect AMD's to do better here since they generally exectue integer code faster.
The right statement would be that in order to make a profit, the percentage of duds have to be equal or less to those that your competition makes.
A rate of 10% failure can not raise the price of the chips by more than 10%.
How so? The AMD chip is more versatile, more nimble; meanwhile, all the intel does is go fast in a straight line. The P4's pipelines just keep getting longer to facillitate higher clock speeds (to keep pace with AMD, as it were), as opposed to AMD who puts out a new design that focuses more on efficiency per clock and adds something completely new to the CPU market. So you can take your souped up ricer chip, I'll stick with the chip that actually has some engineering and innovation.
Overall system/platform stability also matters a lot.
In my experience (repairing computers at a 'white box' shop), AMD has still way more 'oddball' problems with it's chipsets and motherboards.
If you build an Intel box, generally it Just Works. If you build an AMD AthlonXP box, it generally probably works, if you are lucky and you are using just the right brand of memory.
Part of the problem is the HAREBRAINED idea of AMD; 'we are not a chipset company'. They gave keys to their kingdom to VIA, and VIA promptly keeps churning out crap. Only the latest chipsets (KT400A etc) are in my opinion any good, and even there you can find big differences with the quality of the implementation between mobo makers.
Granted - motherboard and chipset maturity seems MUCH better with Athlon64 and Opteron, but I've seen too few systems so far to be sure if the status quo is maintaned when Athlon64 goes mainstream and motherboards get cheaper.
But in any case - if I'd have to build a new high-end gaming rig today, I'd still choose Intel, even with the penalty of higher price. I agree that _right now_ is a stupid time to do so, as AMD is rapidly moving to 940pin, while Intel is going to the new 775(?) pin thingy. So basically everything out there today will be obsolete within 6 months. Of course this doesn't really differ from the norm in reality, but at least you can *hope* that if you go for the first 940pin Athlon64 board, it might be upgradeable with just a CPU swap down the road. No such luck for 745 pin mobos.
I really hope Athlon64 motherboard stability and quality is better in the long run than with AthlonXP.
That would be one than 10, wouldn't it?
But 32-bit processors can, using the exact same tricks to pass around 64-bit data, address more than 4GB of memory.
Both are legitimate enhancements that a 64-bit processor has over a 32-bit one.
More address space, wider data path.
My personal opinion is the end result of 64-bits will be an efficiency improvement, but not a performance one. So once again AMD favors performance over clock speeds. Probably another reason intel is weak on putting out 64-bit CPUs because they know the clock speeds will be lower.
Performance isn't just a factor of clockrate. The latest Barton chips have twice as much cache as previous models, so they typically perform better than older models at the same clockrate. That's the entire point of the rating system!
The Pentium M and the P-4 Mobile actually have little in common. The Pentium M is much closer to a PIII in design, borrowing some elements of the P4 such as SSE2 support, adding in some power saving functions of its own, and adding a ton of cache. Clock-for-clock the Pentium M eats the P4 alive, and it's really a shame that we'll probably never see a desktop version of this chip made available as Intel has invested far too much marketing money into the ridiculous scaling of the MHz with the P4.
Bursting into flames has everything to do with one specific feature, and nothing to do with overall design quality. Specifically, the Pentia you're talking about has a fast-acting, sensitive temperature sensor connected to clock-throttling circuitry. When the chip gets too hot, the clocking is cut back to reduce power. FWIU, AMD has merely an on-chip temperature sensing diode.
AMD would do well to pick up Intel's design on this feature, but I'll bet it's patented.
But it is a single, specific feature. Other than that it's a very nice feature to have, it says *nothing* about other measures of quality in either CPU.
If you want to talk about other measures of quality, ask which CPU just plain runs well with today's compiler output, and which CPU requires new compiler generations in order to get decent performance.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I think it's the other way:
The souped up cars are for the dudes with somthing to make up for, while the Aston Martin, a relatively unflashy car, is for people who like luxury and/or prestigue. AM's are a great example of enginreering master peices.
The AM is a plain Lian-Li case with a solid system underneith, while the souped up Honda, is a stock IBM with heaps of mods and neon lights. While the AM is more expencive it is a much more solid, and valuble car, also from a logical point of view, it will have a much longer life and a comparitively much higher re-sale value.
VENI, VIDI, VICI, DIXI
"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. "
It's entirely possible that 64-bit extensions are within Prescott, but disabled. Intel did this with the P4's SMT for quite a while. Xeons had SMT, and it was enabled, while desktop P4s had SMT, and it was disabled. The 64-bit instructions might not yet be finished, to be finalized and debugged in a later stepping of Prescott, or they simply remain dormant, used only as a preliminary testing grounds for Intel, while they're waiting for viable engineering samples of Tejas. To my knowledge, no one has completely accounted for all the new transistors inside the Prescott chips. The speculative execution enhancements, larger cache, longer pipeline, etc all provide for some of the extra transistors, but certainly not all. There's something about these chips that Intel's not telling us, and 64-bit extensions is as good a guess as anything else.
"You mean once the OS and application developers have started using AMD's 64-bit extensions, Intel will come up with something to compete?"
No, he means that when x86-64bit support is there in software, Intel will have a CPU at the ready to support it. Since AMD's 64-bit extensions are the only game in town, and Microsoft has told Intel to go stuff a second set of x86-64bit extensions, Intel will be forced to either emulate AMD64 (a thoroughly bad idea), or include the instructions as the core of any 64-bit x86 CPU they release. Intel has already licensed the AMD64 technology, and thus will be forced to use its 'little brother's' technology to stay ahead of the curve. The interesting thing about that is that AMD can then choose the direction for future instruction sets. So long as the industry is working off AMD's instruction set, AMD calls all the shots.
Intel's big mistake was continuing to behave like a monopoly, and ignoring the breakout CPUs of its chief rival. Intel was banking on a 64-bit nosedive on x86, choosing to all but ignore the concept until it was too late. Intel knew that x86-64 would force Itanium into a small niche at the upper end, and would send 10+ years of R&D down the drain. Now, even HP is getting over its sunken Itanic - choosing to sell Opteron machines in order to remain conpetitive.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Even with "mega" corrected to be "giga", the statement 'can't take advantage of more than 4 megabytes (sic) of memory at a time.' is a fallacy.
Ever since the Pentium Pro the Intel line has been capable of 64GB of RAM due to it's 36bit memory path.
Can you make use of over 4GB without some ugly extensions that are reminiscent of using 2MB on a 286? No. Is that anywhere near the memory capacity of a 64bit path? No. Do either of those problems justify continuing the false statements about 4GB memory limits? No.
the 4GB limitation is as much a problem with the OS (in other words, without paging tricks you -are- limited to 4GB of RAM per process, but that's not a function of the CPU it is a programming item).
I'm all for Opterons and Athlons, but if they are superior tech, then they shouldn't need falsehoods to win, especially when the real truth is -almost- as bad as the FUD.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
"If you build an AMD AthlonXP box, it generally probably works, if you are lucky and you are using just the right brand of memory."
Quit using ECS and no-name memory and you won't have problems. I've been building AMD systems almost exclusively for about 3 years now, and I've had about the same number of AMD and Intel-based computers come back, nearly all for mainboard problems. Trying everything from ECS (crap) to FIC (almost as bad) to MSI, Gigabyte, and finally, Asus, I pretty much have run the gambit on different combinations. I've been using Asus boards exclusively for about a year now, and I haven't had a single one come back for any hardware or driver related problems. It doesn't take expensive memory or an expensive board to make it work - just decent quality stuff. The Asus A7V8X-MX is a good, inexpensive, entry-level board, which works very well with the Kingston value RAM. There's nothing about 'luck', merely doing a little bit of research ahead of time. I had tons and tons of problems with Intel CPUs on ECS boards, which is why I quickly learned my lesson not to trust that cheap garbage ever again. I've had similar problems with Intel brand mainboards, which seem to have quarky memory problems, especially with Rdram.
"If you build an Intel box, generally it Just Works."
This is such an amusing statement to me. It just reminds me of how, with sufficient marketing, you can cover up all the garbage being pushed out the door with little to no real effort. Take a look over here and let me know what you think about Intel 'just works'. How many times does Intel need to recall defective CPUs before you, and those like you, figure out that they're not the clean 'n pretty CPU maker their marketing droids have programmed you to believe they are?
What's next? Microsoft products as the pinnacle of security and stability?
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
AMD. Going from simply fabbing chips for Intel, to making simple clones(cheaper and lower performing than the intels) to dead even performance with their own designs, to actually pushing around the direction of the industry a bit(though not quite as much as intel). Without AMD, computers would probably be much more expensive. Even when they just fabed chips for intel, rather than compete head on like they do now, that got more chips onto the market keeping prices from getting too out of hand. And now with them being a viable competitor, and even leading in some areas(it seems every six months the one with the fastest chip flip flops)... Even Intel fans benefit from AMD forcing Intel to keep prices somewhat reasonable.
If either Intel or AMD slacked on advancing their designs, or decided to get too greedy with pricing, the other would eat them alive. They push each other to put out better products at lower prices, and the consumer wins.
If only the consumer OS market was this competetive. Linux is rapidly rising in the consumer space, so perhaps things will start looking up even there.
I'll explain the joke for you, just in case you really didn't get it and aren't just another pompous, pedantic windbag:
AMD started out as a manufacturer of Intel clones. The expected result of this sequence of events is: Intel makes a new chip, and AMD clones it. The actual result is shaping up to be: AMD makes a new chip, and Intel is scrambling to clone it.
I didn't say the other chips weren't profitable. They are. They just aren't *obscenely* profitable. The Xeons aren't 'just a few dollars more', a quick check on pricewatch (for lack of a quickly accessible better source) shows a 3.0GHz P4 at $214 and the Xeon 3.0GHz, 'slow' fsb, for $440.
They make money on your thousands of garden-variety Pentia, but they *mint* money on the hundred Xeons.
As for the HPC market... Yes, AMD is going after that. Opteron is a natural for NUMA. But that wasn't what I said about going after the Xeon market. The HPC market may be spectacular, but it isn't big. The Xeon market may not be spectacular from a computing standpoint, but it is for profits. They can sell into the HPC market as an aside to the Xeon market. Besides, the price gap between X86 and X86-64 isn't anything like the gap between X86 and IA-64. It isn't stupid to buy X86-64 as a fast X86, even if you don't use 64-bitness.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
You can get 64 GB with a modern 32 bit processor with PAE (physical address extension; which extends some register up to 36 bits - but not the whole processor)