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."
AMD is in the race to stay alive as a company but they are not in the race to have the top CPU of 2006/2007, which is what really matters.
With their aquisition of ATI, I am much more worried about chipset instability. Anyone else remember the bad old days with the horrible via chipsets and mystery conflicts with nvidia hardware?
Then the finger pointing starts, and we're stuck in the middle. I'm upgrading for the first time in 3 years, hopefully I can wait all this mess out. It'll be an AMD chip though. If I had to pick, I'd go with whatever platform Nvidia supports in the future. Their commitment to driver quality deserves to be rewarded and won my loyalty - and interestingly enough, I have never purchased another ATI product after their little opengl driver fiasco.
Why doesn't AMD have a chipset, anyway?
..don't panic
You mean that just because they haven't been King of the Hill for a few months now that they're still in the game? Wow! Who'da thunkit?
This guy's the limit!
AMD is only behind this one generation, a company doesn't just throw in the towel after their competitor comes up with a better product... AMD is working right now to come up with their own response. Plus I don't think the stock holders would be happy if AMD came out with a press release "Good Game Intel, you win, we are dissolving the company"
As any race like that between AMD and Intel goes, there is an ebb and tide that goes on between them. It wasn't until just recently that AMD's opteron, X2 and FX lines of chips were top of the class when it came to their prospective markets. However now with Core 2 Duo out, and Core Quadro just coming down the chute, Intel has gained significant ground on AMD. That's the way this industry works, one comes out ahead for a while, and then the competitor surges ahead. I wouldn't be surprised to see AMD back in the lead in a year or two with their new 65nm process and 4-way chip
"A woeful inability to provide some of its most loyal customers with stock" can only mean that demand for AMD chips still exceeds supply. Otherwise, they would be happy to deliver.
Otherwise, yes, Core 2 Duo is superior at the moment. I wonder if this will last when AMD goes to 65 nm.
C - the footgun of programming languages
AMD is only in the race if they can continue to innovate like they did with the AMD64 dual cores, while also increasing production. Seriously, can anyone get their top processors? I've read that even reviewers have been unable to get their top FX64 chips. ... 5 years isn't that far away in chip manufacturing terms.
Even if AMD goes back to their old copy-Intel ways, the value they have brought to the average is immeasurable. Intel would still be stuck on their old single core processor, instead of making plans for 80 core chips that top out at 1 TeraFlop in 5 years. AMD pushed them to get there. AMD needs to focus on creating something far better, and they need to do so quickly
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
And please include a 'value' analysis in your report on 'ass mastering' because the lower range Athlon 64's are much closer to my price range than the lowest priced Conroe. You know, there's a vast market out there for people who just want CPUs that run a word processor and connect them to the internet. Vast.
No way. Intel made a comeback? You mean that whenever one side comes out with a newer chip, they are beating the other side? This completely blows my mind. Completely.
Look, give AMD time to react. I don't think many people have considered them out of the running even for a second. And don't forget about the AMD/IBM alliance. IBM's research (and that is a lot of $$$ & research) backs AMD.
I find your opinion article to be largely unecessary and fear mongering -- who said AMD was in trouble in the first place?
My work here is dung.
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.
"A woeful inability to provide some of its most loyal customers with stock" can only mean that demand for AMD chips still exceeds supply. Otherwise, they would be happy to deliver.
Yes but buyers can only wait so long, and if enough buyers are forced to go elsewhere then the demand will vanish too.
Having something in demand is desirable but in the long term you have to eventually meet demand for a majority of customers or perish.
I don't think AMD is anywhere near perishing of course, but the supply of these chips seems tight enough that it's not a healthy level of demand at the moment.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I got a new system right after Core 2 Duo came out. I really liked what the Core 2 Duo offerred, but compatible motherboards and ram are more expensive than going with (Socket 939) AMD. Go anywhere and price:
A. mid-range Intel Core 2 Duo, 1GB DDR2 RAM, and a decent motherboard
B. mid-range AMD Athlon X64, 1GB DDR RAM, and a decent motherboard
Odds are very good that you will save $50+ going with AMD. That may not seem like much, but if you skimp just a little across a whole system you can save $200+. If you want to go SLI then it gets a little trickier. I have had bad experiences with ATI, so I go with nVidia. There are VERY FEW Intel nVidia SLI boards (in fact, maybe like 5 at the max), so there is not much choice there. There are a lot of ATI SLI boards, though. AMD has nothing but nVidia SLI, so there is a large range of options. Also, the increased bandwidth of DDR2 vs DDR doesn't get you any performance boost at all right now; maybe it will in the future. I would have loved to go with Core 2 Duo, but I felt that AMD's platform just had more options.
If AMD falls too far behind, Intel gets greedy and jacks up its prices and/or slows its performance curve. Then AMD becomes a challenger again.
Of course, that requires AMD to stay in business...
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
I think the 65 nm process is key here. It doesn't really surprise me that Intel can create faster and cooler CPUs on 65 nm than AMD can on 90 nm.
Just the decrease in size alone will give AMD's processors a boost, and might well propell them past Intel again; at least from what I've seen, the FX (90 nm) already consumes less than the Core 2 Duo (65 nm) in power save mode, whereas the advantage that the Core 2 Duo has in performance mode is nothing that a die shrink wouldn't overcome.
And that's at the high end. At the low end, I see Intel still selling 32-bit CPUs, where AMD's offerings are 64-bit enabled. I recently helped somebody pick a laptop, and I noticed the biggest differences between Intel-based and AMD-based systems in the applicable price range were slightly better game performance for Intel and 64-bit support for AMD. I recommended AMD, because (1) the laptop wasn't for gaming anyway, and (2) I expect AMD64 (especially the extra registers that come with it) to eventually offer better performance; and at least you can run 64-bit software on it. These benefits aren't so obvious now, but I expect they will be.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
For tech firms like Intel, AMD, Nvidia and ATI, there are two main ways of promoting your products:
#1 To create the fastest product. It makes people talk about it and therefore a lot of people end up buying that particular product, just lower-end.
#2 Media exposure. It's simple and we all know it works, but it's also expensive.
Some of you may disagree about #1, but think about it for a second. A majority of all reviews online and offline first and foremost cover the high-end products even though only a few of us can afford it. This is why the market offers products like Crossfire, SLI, FX and Extreme.
Full Tilt
I recently had to make some hardware recommendations for some friends. While I realise that Intel has better bang for the buck processor-wise, it's not true when you start to consider the motherboard. Intel motherboards are wicked expensive, and less stable than their AMD counterpart.
The last Intel processor I had was a Celeron 700, years ago. I've been an AMD man for a while now. I was considering advocating, if you will, the new Intel chips until I got motherboard sticker shock.
In then end, I'd go with an AM2 motherboard and whatever processor you can afford. You're still going to need DDR2 ram, but AM2 looks to have some staying power and it accomidates the whole gambit of processor options.
No one is buying AMD processors any more. There too popular to find!
If I were in the mood (and financial position) to dash out and purchase a new system right now, I'd consider both offerings carefully but probably still go with AMD. The difference between the performance offered by a new AM2 and an Intel Core Duo would still not make that big a difference given that I'm upgrading from a midrange Athlon XP. More to the point, a certain amount of consumer loyalty isn't fanboyism. AMD's treated me very well since the original Athlons came out, and I have no intention of turning my back on that - particularly since a growing body of evidence suggests that their platform is more forward-thinking and less prone to regurgitation of the same product with minor tweaks, more cores, and mounds of expensive cache being thrown at an inefficient design just to make it performance-competitive. Time will tell, but Intel hasn't done anything to persuade me yet; after living through the last seven years seeing AMD upstage the Pentium III with the Athlon, the Pentium 4 with the Athlon XP, and the Prescotts with the Athlon64, you'll understand my skepticism if I don't immediately believe that the Core 2 Duo is manifestly superior in every way, and always will be, forever and ever, amen.
The opinion piece compares the cost of the Athlon proc to the Core 2:
Let's take Dell for example - one of AMD's big wins of the last year, and the one everyone is saying looks stupid now Intel is back. As a business customer, you can either buy the Dimension E521 for £499 + VAT (with an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+), or the E520 for £50 more (with an Intel Core 2 Duo E6300). They're both dual-core, and the performance difference is essentially irrelevant to a business customer. But if you're buying 100 of them, you'd save £5,000 by going for the E521. That's a fairly easy decision for a financial director to make.
It's not always about the power, but rather the sock to the wallet, and when finances factor into decisions, a cheaper previous generation proc for a competitor will always win out over the current generation of the leading vendor. I would tend to agree with this assessment. Business decisions are most often made based on cost, not performance, and in IT, it seems more the case that long term consequences are not the predominant factor considered prior to making final decisions. it's always about the money...
Just another nameless binary in a crowd of 1's and 0's
Hope AMD can capitalize on what...getting away with an inferior product. Spoken like a true fanboy. Right now Intel has the better product and that won't change if a lawsuit is smacked down on them. Whether or not they had shady business deals is seperate from the fact that the consumer would be better in picking an Intel product. I may be a bit trollish here but your comment isn't insightful...it's the cry of a sad, sad AMD fanboy who doesn't want to see the big bad Intel back on top. AMD can capitalize on whatever it wants once it has a better chip.
not for old memory- but they made one model
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRAM
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
"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.
Indirectly Intel helped create this AMD shortage.
Here are the causes
1. By hyping Core 2 so early, it eroded confidence in Netburst, now no one wants a P4. (so the choice is Core 2 or Athlon x2)
2. Intel cannot produce enough Conroe's. So those who cannot get Core 2 look at Athlons.
3. AMD had to cut prices in half to match Core 2 (because Intel actually priced Core 2 a little too cheap*) it created more demand than AMD could handle until 65nm and all the Chartered product comes into the channel.
4. Intel started kissing up to Apple instead of Dell, forcing Dell into the AMD camp.
Yes, maybe AMD should have turned Dell away, but the real truth is that there is a shortage of everything but the netburst chips! Because Intel made/makes so many P4's the market will be this way for a few more months.
* if Intel had priced Core 2 duo's 25% higher, it would have helped them clear out the netburst chips. It seems they were more interesed in stopping AMD than they were in making a profit.
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.
Intel is currently using their manufacturing process(es) to increase/extend their performance (and performance per watt) lead. Currently Intel is using 65nm and have been for a year or so, with plans to move to 45nm sometime in late 2007/early 2008. AMD is still on 90nm, with 65nm starting late 2006, with mass production in 2007.
AMD's 90nm chips are *PRETTY CLOSE* in performance/heat dissipation to Intel's 65nm chips, and they completely destroy Intel's 90nm chips in both performance and performance per watt.
With there being a physical limit to how small you can engrave transistors on silicon, Intel is just rushing to that point way faster than AMD. So whenever Intel hits a sticking point on process technology advancement, AMD will still have 1-2 generations of process technology improvement (since they're "behind" manufacturing-process wise).
Basically what this says to me is that AMD's design(s) are still far superior, and they still have a LOT of headroom if they can extract the same performance gains from die-shrinks as Intel has.