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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.'"
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.
As far as I recall, Intel has not released anything yet. They put something on the roadmap, but they are still 100% behind Itanic. They released an improved 32bit emulation environment for the latter though
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
They're chasing big boys market at the moment with 64-bit, but do they have something for the laptop market to match Centrino.
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
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
What I want to know is, where are the 128bit CPUs?
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'.
Well, yes, but the real reason that 64-bit is better is that software should be able to move data around more quickly, typically twice as fast as 32-bit given a well-designed data bus external to the chip.
...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...
you can adress more than 4 gigs of ram with a 32bit prossessor You just need a cludge (kinda expensive/slow) but itspossible speaking of lots of ram, anyone seen those Ram Harddrives they had at CES a couple years ago
come comment on the madness at http://slashdot.org/~phreak03/journal/
Do you also explain jokes to people after you tell them?
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)
AMD has made deep cuts in their CPU prices, probably pre-emptively.
In other news, the DVD consortium has finally approved a standard of blue ray disc drive, which allows optical media to break DVD's 18 megabyte barrier, finally allowing for movies times exceeding 10 seconds.
...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.
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.
"and Intel releasing chips mimicking the 32/64-bit behaviour of the Opteron"
Does anybody else see the irony in this ?
This is the sig that says NI (again)
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
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!"
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.
In soviet russia stale jokes recycle you!
I just finished a game of UT2K4 on my Athlon64 3000 (2000mhz, currently overclocked to 2150mhz). Processor temp reads a cool 34.6'C - and thats air-cooled. Compare that to the new Prescott P4's that are setting records for hottest running cpu's... The Athlon64 is an amazing piece of hardware.
Using terms like "versatile" and "nimble" to describe a CPU makes me slightly wary of the rest of your point ;) What's next, "majestic" RAM? "enigmatic" GPUs? :-P
...unless your competitor spends gazillions of dollars on advertising.
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".
A Pentium IV Mobility Processor
A Particular Intel Mainboard Chipset
Intel's WiFi Internal Card
I also believe that it needs a certain Graphics processor, also from Intel.
The 'Centrino' label is nothing spectacular. It is just another marketing line that 'creates' a new Intel Line without really engineering a whole new line. The whole 'Centrino' line is a marketing thing to get people excited about mobile computing and is designed to get people out and buying laptop computers. It gives people a sense of having 'teh' best laptop, even if they really don't have the best laptop.
Really, which would you rather have...
An HP Laptop with a Mobil Pentium IV, Wireless Access and a 3D Graphics Chip?
or...
An HP Laptop Equipped with Centrino Technology?
They are both basically the same thing, one just has a shorter 'catchy' name attached to it, nothing more, nothing less.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
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?
(-1, Pedantic)
2^32 bit = 4294967296 bytes of address space
Converting to gigabytes...
4294967296 / 1024 = 4194304 (kb)
419304 / 1024 = 4096 (mb)
4096 / 1024 = 4 (gb)
Of course there's a much easier way of doing that by figuring out that 1024 = 2^10, so you could just do:
2^32 / 2^10 / 2^10 / 2^10 = 2^(32 - 30) = 2^2 = 4
You can't address more than 4 GB of virtual memory with a 32 bit address. So regardless of how much memory you can afford that means that you can't have more than 4 GB of physical memory plus swap. Even then you typically allocate at least 1 GB of address space to the kernel leaving you with 3 GB of addressable space for applications. Now add up your swap and physical memory and you realize that we're getting pretty close to that limit on newer desktops.
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.
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.
64 bit processors are good because they can easily adress more than 4GB virtual memory.
NO!
The bottleneck on all modern [isolated, not networked] computer systems, which dwarfs all other bottlenecks, is precisely virtual memory. Calls to the hardrive are many, many orders of magnitude slower than calls to any other system.
Now while it's generally true that you can't have more than 2^32 bytes of total [physical + virtual] memory on a 32-bit machine, 64-bit machines are faster than 32-bit machines precisely because they allow for more than 4GB of true, physical memory.
Calls to virtual memory are so slow that you can practically beat them by hand - if, for instance, you have a big database of phone numbers and addresses, so big that it bleeds over into virtual memory, then you can just about find a phone number by hand from The Real Yellow Pages themselves faster than your computer can retrieve it for you from virtual memory.
A 64-bit platform with less than or equal to 4GB of physical memory is utterly worthless: As you yourself have pointed out, it's almost certainly slower than an equivalent 32-bit system.
Dictionary.com. It is used when quoting, to indicate that the transcriber has faithfully reproduced a possible mistake in the source. This is because it is considered bad form to modify a quote, at least without indication through square parantheses, which are generally used for explanatory additions due to loss of context, not corrections. And if 'sic' wasn't put in, it would likely look like an error on the transcriber's part. It's certainly not a /. thing ;-)
Yeah, that Prescott is a cool running chip.
I'm the urban spaceman babe, but here comes the twist... I don't exist
This was announced on January 20th.
My server
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
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
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.
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 ;-)
There are a couple of points here:
This signature is not in the public domain.
I don't know what bothers me more. People stating their uninformed opinion as fact, or people actually buying it and modding it up.
.bomb inflation), etc.
They make their profit on Xeons, where until recently they have had no competition.
Huh? Intel is the largest manufacturere of CPUs in the world. They have had a net income of about $1b per quarter for the last 4 quarters, they have $16b in the bank. Thier stock has remained pretty stable (aside from the
Being that were I work (a university) and there are THOUSANDS of p3, p4, etc chips and way less than 100 zeons, if they are making all of their profits on those 100 chips that only cost a few dollars more than the other thousands of chips.... Whatever, obviously your wrong.
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.
They are going after the HPC market, because that is the only market for cheap 64bit CPUs. You don't need a 1.457THz 128bit processor to check passwords on your domain. Sorry all of you Windows admins, being a domain controller is not that big of a deal.
Crunching numbers across 20 processors for 5 days at a time is a big deal. Being able to do that in 2.5 days is a real big deal. Not being able to do that because you can't address more than 4Gigs of memory at a time is a show stopper.
Think before you mod people.
"Take, for example, the cooling required for AMD chips. Compare it to that of their pentium equivalents. When said cooling falls off (or stops working) - the pentiums don't burst into flames."
.. "That's the difference - higher manufacturing quality." ... "They make cheap [quality] chips"
Wow, another TomBot, I see. Listen, reading dumbed-down consumer grade articles from a propaganda rag like Tom's makes you neither smart, nor informed. First of all, the problem was NOT with the AMD CPUs, but rather with the mainboard's non-spec design. Had the manufacturer designed the board to AMD's specifications, this would not have been a problem at all. The computer would have locked up, just like the Pentium 3 did. Why does it act like a Pentium 3? Because the K7 came out about the same time the P3 did. AMD's board specs called for specific thermal protection circutry on the board itself to help protect the board and the CPU. Arguably, AMD should have put all the thermal protection circutry inside the CPU itself, but the fact remains that Tom's took a board that was not built correctly, and used it to make an example out of AMD. In journalism, the technical term for doing this is, "bullshit".
Secondly, the chances of a heatsink falling off are virtually nil. Your statement is the equivelent of saying, "When the radiator falls off my Chevy, it still works semi ok - not like those Fords". Yeah, I sure do hate it when the radiator falls off my car. Happens what, 'bout once a week at least?
"their construction hasn't (in the past) been up to that of Intel."
This just shows your complete lack of knowledge of the CPU industry's past. Or perhaps you're actually 10-second Tom from 50 First Dates, and you've forgotten all the many, many problems and recalls Intel has had over the years. That being said, I don't remember a single recall of AMD's Athlon chips. Let's see if I can remind you of Intel's shady past, shall we? Go read this from last year. I actually did my homework before opening my mouth - as opposed to reading some sellout's online rag (Tom's).
-- "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 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.