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.'"

Comments

Profitable

[0mni]

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.

Re:Profitable

[Anonymous Coward]

They haven't been that low for the last couple of years. I remember a time when every AMD CPU cost about half of what you paid for a comparable Intel.
Heavy investing and comparably small market share would have more to do with the losses.

Re:Profitable

[Loki_1929]

"According to this article in Toms hardware,"

I can't believe anyone still reads that rag. Let me give you a hint: Tom's was bought and sold about 3 years ago. Since that time, it has descended to the ranks of online propaganda host for Intel and a number of other companies. Tricks with driver versions and other such foolery causes them to get benchmark results drastically different from those of almost every other hardware site. No one's bias is more apparent than Tom's himself. Many of the conclusions to their own articles are non-sequitur, and the articles themselves are often little more than a press release for the company doing the most advertising at the time.

The few folks left defending Tom's tend to either be Intelbots or those who like to feel they know something after having read a few dumbed-down for-public-consumption articles from the site. To quote them is to invite laughted upon yourself. You would do well to visit other sites instead for your hardware news. Anandtech, Ace's Hardware, and plenty of other sites provide good, in-depth and trustworthy analysis, as opposed to operating a propaganda machine designed to rake in cash.

"prodution yield is about 30%, it it expected to rise up to 60% after two years of production CPU's are just too complicated to be produced with yield of 98%-99%."

But I say that production yield is about 80%, and is expected to rise up to about 95% after three months. And best of all, I can make up numbers and formulas to make it look very official and correct. When I see Tom in a 'bunny suit' on AMD's FAB floor, I'll believe their 'analysis' of production yields. Until then, he's making up numbers and statstics, adding to the other 73.4% of statistics that are already made up.

The quote from the article, which you have parroted here, is as follows: "However, we doubt that AMD's yield will be any more than 30% - this is based on information from other chip manufacturers that use similar processes."

Now, let's put a little bit of brain power into dissecting this, shall we? First of all, the whole thing is rather vague - using words and phrases like 'we doubt' and 'similar processes'. Secondly, these so-called 'other chip manufacturers' aren't even named. Are they talking about IBM? Or are they talking about 'Phil's CPU FAB', which is run out of a basement in a townhouse in Idaho? Just what are 'similar processes'? Is there someone else making Opteron and Athlon64 CPUs? Someone really ought to tell AMD about that. Or perhaps they're referring to the 130nm 'process', which describes almost nothing about the chips themselves? Maybe they're even talking about the 'process' of getting from wafer to die. Well, so far as I, or anyone I've ever talked to knows, AMD didn't go out and re-write the book on die construction with the K8. The 'process' of getting from wafer to die for K8 isn't that much different from that of K7. I would assume then that Tom's is also asserting that Barton and Thoroughbred yields are also a mere 30%. Or perhaps there's an entirely new made-up number for their yields.

It's amazing how you can throw a few numbers onto a website and everyone will believe you. It's almost as amazing that throwing a few numbers into a post will yield +4 Informative.

You can't compete if you're bleeding

[ObviousGuy]

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.

Yeah ! AMD64 rulez ! Now if the could just...

[Brane2]

...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...

Congrats

[Killjoy_NL]

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.

Re:Congrats

[Plammox]

Face it. AMD and Intel need eachother. For me it's a sign of health that Intel's roadmaps are affected by AMD's moves and vice versa.

It's easy to imagine how Intel or AMD products would be more inferior due to lack of competition.

Re:Congrats

[Killjoy_NL]

I don't mean to give them a +1000, Innovative.
+500, sure :D

They designed a cpu that's a much better workhorse than that of their competitor (Athlon), then they did it again (AthlonXP) and again (Opteron/AMD64)

That's innovation from where I'm standing.
I know Intel has a lot more different products, but they use those products more as cashcows, trying to milk as much money from it as possible before the market demands something new.

AMD have been better than Intel for some time...

[mu-sly]

...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.

Re:Yeah ! AMD64 rulez ! Now if the could just...

[Barbarian]

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.

Main Reason for profitability

[MadX]

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.

Re:Go, Go AMD

[AndroidCat]

AMD won't have won until Intel starts rating its processors in "equivalent Athlon64 performance". ;)

Re:4gigs of ram

[AndroidCat]

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.

Re:I don't think intel has to worry.

[dreamchaser]

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.

Re:AMD have been better than Intel for some time..

[Jarnis]

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.

My amps go up to 11 !!!!

[gelfling]

That would be one than 10, wouldn't it?

Burst into flames

[dpilot]

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.

Re:Intel, 32x64?

[Loki_1929]

"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.