Slashdot Mirror
Why AMD Is Still In The Race
Steve Kerrison writes "Despite a woeful inability to provide some of its most loyal customers with stock, and a range of CPUs that, currently, loses out to Intel's Core 2 processors in both price and performance (and who would I be not to mention the diminishing AMD fanboy numbers?), AMD's still got enough tricks up its sleeve to retaliate against Intel in due course. HEXUS.net has an opinion piece on why AMD isn't up the creek. From the article: AMD has been showing off its 65nm wafers for a few months now, which means the Rev G core is on its way. Even if the DDR2 memory controller which arrived with the Rev F only had a small performance benefit, Rev G has a few more improvements than just the die shrink. The latter will enable higher clock speeds and a lower price, plus allow AMD to compete on an equal playing field to Intel, which has been manufacturing 65nm processors since the Pentium XE 955 at the end of 2005."
Last I heard they regained the lead in performance/price in the low-end segment with their latest price cuts.
It might not be where the glory is, but it certainly is where the (OEM) money is.
While they are not top CPU for 2006/2007 their roadmap and strategy will bring them back end of 2007 towards 2008. There is not that much to be gained on the CPU front any more anyway. The differences are marginal and irrelevant for nearly all applications except heavy crypto. In the near future it will be IO, crypto and ASICs which will be the selling points on the higher end.
There AMD is the clear winner. It has managed to bring IBM and possibly Sun onboard of the hypertransport bandwagon along with a list of smaller specialized players. Power7 is rumoured to be hypertransport (even pin compatible with future AMD CPUs). Sun is also looking at the tech. So are a few ASIC players. The comparable Intel effort is very late and is largely ignored by everyone. Nobody has said that they intend to use it at the last IDF and it looks like a dead duck anyway because it has too many hacks put in with the only purpose of compensating for design failures (no memory controller, etc). As a result porting an existing design to it is a nightmare.
So in about 2 years from now Intel will be sitting and banging its drums about how good are its CPUs on general purpose tasks without shipping them. At the same time smiling ASIC vendors will be shipping in quantity specialised parts that go into Opteron slots. It will start with the high end, go down to the enterprise and database load and even further all the way down to "physics" CPUs for gaming platforms, "security applications" and the like.
Intel may have won this years battle, but they are clearly losing the war through lack of long term thinking and loads of panic actions all around. Quite entertaining actually.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
a range of CPUs that, currently, loses out to Intel's Core 2 processors in both price and performance
No, AMD have a range of CPUs that lose in terms of performance only, however AMD's prices have been adjusted so they aren't losing in terms of performance/price. Barely, admittedly.
And in terms of price only, AMD are winning there. The cheapest Core 2 Duo, the E6300, is $180. The X2 3800+ is $150. Beneath that are tonnes of single core Athlon 64s and Semprons that make Intel's cheap P4 offerings look lame. If you are spending under $150 on the CPU on your system, then AMD is your best choice still. That probably accounts for the vast majority of computer sales.
Intel win out when it comes to the high end, because AMD don't have a competitor there. Of course, if you like buying >$500 CPUs then I'm very happy for you, and you will enjoy the vast performance of an E6800 and know it beats everything else out there. Personally I think it is a poor investment to buy cutting edge.
Kentsfield vs. 4x4 will be six of one, half a dozen of the other. We'll find out halfway through November.
It's amusing how people think that AMD are going to die because for a year Intel finally will have a better product. For these people AMD has been dying for years and years, yet AMD has only got better and stronger, in markets that matter such as servers. AMD have a superior platform, and that matters here. Who cares about a slightly faster FPU when you can plug in a SIMD co-processor that is 10 - 100x faster? The future? No, they're already available.
AMD did actually have a chipset. If was called the 761 (if I remember correctly) and it was for the Athlon chips.
...
Paired with an Athlon 1.4, and filled with the Gainward Geforce2 (and then 3) as well as miscellanneous stuff, it was the most reliable computer I've ever had. As a matter of fact, it's still humming with no issues whatsoever in my ex-gf's machine.
P.S. Actually gotta give credit where it's due, it's tied with my old P3 733 on a Tyan board for reliability. That one is still powering my parents's desktop.
"I did buy a budget card, but I find it interesting the latest generation can't even keep up with ATI's 9000 series."
:p
A GeForce 7300 GS has 6.5GB/s of memory bandwidth onboard. That is your main bottle neck on modern cards. My GeForce 6800, which has 12 hungry pipelines, has 22.3GB/s of bandwidth onboard. The only time I run into issues with it is when I run out of RAM onboard for textures (forcing me down to AGP's much slower speed), or when rendering complex scenes (the GF 7 series executes some shaders 50-100% faster than Gefore 6 series). My average FPS in WoW at 1600x1050 is around 55.
If I were you, I would've bought the 7600 GT -- that's got 23GB/s of bandwidth. The 7800 series goes over 40GB/s! (The main deciding facter that made me spend 50$ more to get the 6800 vs. the 6600 GT was the extra 7 GB/s of fillrate, which is more than that dinky 7300 has). Budget cards are often garbage if you take a look at the numbers, unsuitable for gaming due to the non-existant bandwidth. An ATI 9500 has more fill rate than a Geforce 7300 GS
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Actually the accusations are that Intel in way or another threatened retailers into to not stocking AMD pricing.
The EU doesnt take corporatations engaging in what sounds a little like blackmail very nicely.
The Microsoft stuff is a little farcical at times does not take away from the fact that Internet Explorer and Media Player had integration with windows not possible for competing products amd stiffled competition.
Intel is still using a single shared memory controller. Opterons have a memory controller in every cpu. 2+ cpu (physical, not dual core) configs are still faster with Opteron due to the higher memory bandwidth.
Sure, 1 dual core Conroe has more memory bandwidth than 1 dual core Athlon64. But when you go to 2 sockets, the AMD numbers double while the Intel numbers stay the same. It only goes more and more in AMD's favor the more cpus you add.
Yes. That is precisely what you have done. This is why it is called a straw man, and why saying it ain't so doesn't make it not so.
Let us look at what I literally said:
Read what I literally said: I said that I am willing to sacrifice a little money in order to get a more ethical product.
Now, tell me where I said that I exhaustively research every aspect of every company, and I'll give you a dollar.
Your assertion is that I must do more, in fact, than I do. This is a ridiculous assertion. Simply being willing to change your purchasing habits when you become aware of wrongdoing is more than sufficient support for the statement which I actually made. You were trying to change my statement into one I did not make, and refute that - again, the very definition of a straw man argument is one in which you are attacking some point not actually maintained by your conversational opponent.
Allow me to, once again, quote your comment (which quotes mine) in a more complete fashion:
Now, if we do a little work with the dictionary, we can see that Willing to pay a little more is not equal to an absolute requirement to perform extensive research. I know this this may be complicated for you, which is why you have your whiny little complaint at the end of your comment about how I'm making supposed Ad Hominem attacks - but what I was attacking when I went after your prior comment was your apparent inability to comprehend English, which I still maintain is the cause of the problem. I am not making unfounded or irrelevant personal attacks - they are both founded (you do not know what a straw man is; you do not know what "willing" means) and relevant (this conversation is in fact about your inability to make a rational attack upon my position without resorting to the utilization of a straw man.)
Those readers who are still following this crapfest note that you are continuing your attack on the straw man here in point 2. In point 1, why would I say 'the chip industry' when I meant all industry? See, i
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"