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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.'"
They're chasing big boys market at the moment with 64-bit, but do they have something for the laptop market to match Centrino.
Way to go AMD. Intel is eating dust on this one...
The problem is, Intel went from an Engineering company to a marketing company. Let's just hope it doesnt became a lawsuit comapny...
how long until
AMD has made deep cuts in their CPU prices, probably pre-emptively.
HOWEVER, the dual opteron contains an intel raid and soon an intel network card. And I must say that installing the pentiums in the past was an awfull lot easier.
Price/performance opteron is currently the clear winner, its giganctic cache and better memory structure heads above the same price Xeons. As far as support and quality of the hardware goes. Intel all the way. Sadly for intel the bubble has burst and web companies cannot afford the Itanium. So Opteron it is.
But AMD has been on top before and they always managed to screw up. Intel screws up to but somehow manages to keep making money during the down times. AMD is not so lucky.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
On the other hand, I had a dual Athlon-MP machine that was like an oven. Really nice computer, but it had to go, because it made my computer room too hot.
I, too, am looking forward to an Opteron-based system in the future. As a former AMD employee, they'll always have my financial support as long as they continue to produce innovative products.
>> "What would the robut do? Frame someone!"
Bob renderfarm knows low clocked P4's out render high clocked AMD's.
Figures, please. Assertions like that without any evidence to support them are what we normally call "trolls".
I was reading Slashdot for the first time to figure out what it is all about and for a novice you have to agree that it might get a trifle confusing when a discussion starts off on an incorrect note. I do not know what (sic) means and as I come up to speed with Slashdot lingo and accepted levels of casualness of this community I am sure I can get the joke better.
Really?
What makes a cpu xx-bits?
Answer: how big numbers it can deal with in a single instruction. So a 64-bit cpu can handle 64-bit floats natively without splitting the operations into 32-bit chunks.
I have no idea if the Sony emotion engine or whatever it's called can handle 128-bit floats/longlonglongs natively (Quad precision?) but I doubt it since it's utterly unnecesary for the software it uses. If it's able to utilize it's 128-bit registers fully with some kind of 4-unit-SIMD instructions, it still isn't a real 128-bit processor, just a vectorproc.
I'm guessing that you might have seen information on RAM rather than processors, but the numbers seem artificially inflated.
/. had a story on this last year.
It's known that RAM that won't work at one level will work for another, all the way down to RAM used for storing voicemail in answering machines, which has failed at several levels above. Example - chips are supposed to work as 128M chips, fail the test, so they try them as 64M. If this fails, they go to 32, etc.
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4 megabytes (sic) of memory at a time
shouldn't that be 4 gigabyte ;)
Actually, the 4 megabytes is correct: x86 processors handles memory in pages. They normally are 4kB in size (thanks to the 8086 or propably even the 8080). The Pentium then introduced an extension called Page Size Extension (PSE, see /proc/cpuinfo if that flag is present ;-). The PSE allows the use of 4 megabyte pages. And the processor can only access one page at a time, which makes the original statement correct... more or less ;-)
Intel's model for profitabilty is simple. They make their profit on Xeons, where until recently they have had no competition.
A friend once told me that the Celeron is priced, "one penny above variable cost," or essentially the lowest they could get away with without getting in dumping/antitrust problems. Note that a Celeron can only pay for its wafers and processing, not its own manufacturing line. Intel has managed to keep AMD pretty much in that market, except that AMD has to buy the manufacturing line at those prices, too.
In that respect, Intel is a lot like Microsoft. Microsoft makes so much money on Windows and Office that they can afford to lose it everywhere else. Intel makes that kind of money on Xeon, and gets the lion's share of its profit there.
People have criticized AMD for not going after IA-64 harder with Opteron/Athlon-64, or not flooding it into the mainstream market. But the IA-64 market is a hard nut to crack, and for a newcomer there's no money to be made there. AMD can't take on the mainstream market without at least a dozen fabs to handle the volume - which would just plummet prices through total Intel/AMD CPU overcapacity. Take a look at what they're doing - they're going after Xeon - and trying to get a piece of the profit in a market that's consistent with their fab capacity.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Probably both figures are right, just ripped out of context.
IIRC, there are 20-30 steps involved in the overall process.
Each individual step in the process absolutely must have 98-99% yield.
Meanwhile, the overall process has a yield more like (0.98)^20 = 0.66
Or something like that./p
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Intel's model for profitabilty is simple. They make their profit on Xeons, where until recently they have had no competition.
Xeon may be one of Intel's big cash-cows, but it's not their only one. The Pentium-M processor (part of the "Centrino" marketing package) is another good source of revenue, as are the high-end P4 chips. Intel sells a LOT of processors (10M+ every month), and a lot of their higher-end chips make over $100 in profit. That adds up REAL fast.
A friend once told me that the Celeron is priced, "one penny above variable cost,"
The Celeron doesn't make nearly the profit of the P4 and Xeons, but it does still make money. Variable cost for most processors is down in the $25-$50 range for commodity type chips. The bottom-end Celerons sell for not much more than that, but the top-end ones sell for over $100 (though they are definitely NOT worth that much, current Celerons are dog-slow, but that's another story).
In that respect, Intel is a lot like Microsoft. Microsoft makes so much money on Windows and Office that they can afford to lose it everywhere else
That much is definitely true, just have a look at Intel's balance sheet some time. The ONLY sector of the company that makes money is their PC processor division. They make roughly 75% of the companies revenue and about 150% of the profits.
But the IA-64 market is a hard nut to crack, and for a newcomer there's no money to be made there
Yeah, just ask Intel, they still haven't managed to crack that nut! The Itanium line is not making any money and hasn't really cracked into the high-end server market in a big way (Sun and IBM still own it). I haven't seen the numbers for Q4, but in Q3 of last year Intel managed to sell a grand total of 5000 Itanium servers. For comparison, AMD sold 10,000 Opteron servers while the Xeon found it's way into around a 1,000,000 servers (source here).
Why can't Intel just stick the Itanic's 64-bit instruction set onto a P4 like how AMD has stuck x86-64 onto the Athlon?
The AMD64 (aka x86-64) instruction set is a natural continuation of the the old IA32 (aka 32-bit x86) instruction set. Pretty much the entire chip can be used for both, it's just a few tweaks here and there. The Itanium's instruction set (IA64, no connection to IA32 other than both came from Intel) is a TOTALLY different beast. It's not even remotely like x86 and would require a completely separate processor core. Now, that's not to say that Intel couldn't put two separate processor cores on the same chip, but then you get into the matter of cost.
Time to through a few numbers out here... The Opteron has a die size of 193mm^2 at a 130nm manufacturing process. This is considered VERY large, especially since the "Northwood" P4 was only 131mm^2 on a similar process. The Itanium2 has a die size that is 374mm^2, ie it's HUGE! If you were to combine a P4 and an Itanium on the same die, it would be well over 400mm^2. The cost for Intel to make such a chip would be VERY high, significantly more than 3 times the cost of making their P4 processors (a larger chip always results in lower yields in addition to taking up more die space). This would eat into their profits by an enormous amount.
Maybe if nothing changes in die sizes by the time Intel starts shipping chips made on a 65nm manufacturing process (late 2005/early 2006) it might be economically feasible. Of course, things have already changed, the new "Prescott" P4 built on a 90nm fab process uses a LOT more transistors (both logic and cache) than the "Northwood".