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Is AMD Dead Yet?
TheProcess writes "Back in February 2003, IBM predicted that AMD would be dead in 5 years (original article here), with IBM and Intel the only remaining players in the chip market. Well, 5 years have passed and AMD is still alive. However, its finances and stock price have taken a serious beating over the last year. AMD was once a darling in this community — the plucky, up-and-coming challenger to the Intel behemoth. Will AMD still be here in 5 years? Can they pose a credible competitive threat to Intel's dominance? Do they still have superior but unappreciated technology? Or are they finally old hat? Can they really recover?"
I was wondering if anyone could explain to me why they purchased ATI. They spent oodles of money to R&D the new quad core architecture to really be a seamless 4 core proc that shared caches etc. Intel just slapped two dual cores together and shipped that. Turns out that in benchmarks for consumer programs, intel's stuff works quite well. AMD's cache sharing and topology of memory access that seems better for true multithreaded applications is irrelevant and occasionally a hinderance when you're running multiple single threaded programs. So they spend oodles on R&D and may not see that much of a return until apps can utilize it better. . .Then they go off and buy ATI? Wouldn't it make sense to hang onto money a bit more than just purchase another company? Could that move end up dragging ATI down too?
If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
When AMD came out with low priced CPUs that were highly overclockable and great performance at stock they became *the* CPU for any serious geek. When they changed their mind and decided to price-match Intel causing massive price increases they alienated their primary sales force. Geeks selling to family & friends was a great system and without that AMD has been hurting. It's possible they would have died anyway sticking to the cheap, but they've never made a sufficient argument to their customers of why they can't keep the prices low like in the past without letting it on that they like all big business care more about short term cash than long term relationships.
Warning: Link leads to a malicious website.
For the sake of competition, let's hope so, but it doesn't seem like it. The first Radeon card to support Direct3D 10 took way too long and their processors (both CPU and GPU) are all but impressive these days. Also, their CPUs' cost:performance ratio aren't what they used to be in the glory days which makes them less attractive.
The FX-60 was in my opinion the last exceptional AMD processor to hit the market, both quality and innovation wise. After Core 2 Duo, AMD kind of hit the ground burning.
And they went with trusted computing. That was the last straw for me. I would have continued to buy from them despite the flaws listed in parent post, if they just continued to build computers that I could trust.
Wait for Phenom to unleash its fury.
Although AMD is not that advertised as Intel is, it continues to remain a solid product company.
For instance the AMD Athlon X2 64-bit dual core chip i use, is quieter, less power hungry and more powerful than its intel-equivalent.
I have always thought of Intel chips as a short, well-built sprinter, whose ting pegs can carry him over a short distance quickly but in the longer haul (marathon), it can keep up only by downing copious amounts of glucose fluids and sweats a lot.
AMD is a picture of a tall (6.5 feet), lean, kenyan man, whose stamina, endurance make him take the 15 mile marathon easily without breaking a sweat.
AMD would be either bought over by IBM or even by Microsoft.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
They've done it before. Beat all odds and started developing better chips than Intel for awhile. There's always a chance they could do it again, but I don't foresee that happening in the near future.
I hope that AMD soon becomes the darling of the community once again, it's because of them that I recently got back into PC gaming. I had totally given up on gaming on the PC, I had bought a gen1 X2 4200 and AM2 motherboard right before the Core 2 Duos came out and I was cursing my bad luck ever since - until I realized that the real holdup in my system wasn't the processor, but my aging 6600GT. In fact, even though I had bought my AM2-based system almost 2 years ago (or longer! I can't remember when the platform launched) I still had a fairly recent system that could actually support even the newest AMD chips. The real kicker came when I bought my Ati Radeon HD3850. This thing, in my oppinion, should be getting just as much press as the 8800GT. For someone like me, spending $180 on a graphics card is a whole lot more reasonable than spending $250+ on an 8800GT just for performance gains in games like Crysis. My housemate dropped over $1000 on a new Intel Quad-core based rig with an 8800GT in it and my system keeps pace with his very well under almost all scenarios. There is a difference, sure, but considering my entire rig probably cost less than $500 (exluding monitor), I'd say I'm doing pretty well. AMD is doing a great job at catering to people like me who were about to be console-only gamers because keeping up to date on the PC side was getting expensive. AMD offers an affordable upgrade path at a lower performance point - but it's good enough to make my Xbox 360 jealous! I'm proud to say that I'm still an AMD fan. Will an X2 5000+ Black Edition beat a comparably clocked Core 2 Duo? No! But look at the price! I'd say the price to performance ratio is way up there!
Well, I am sorry to say it, but AMD is dying at this moment. Their purchase of ATI was disastrous for them and probably the worst move they have ever made. While "good on paper", the reality of it was that AMD was over-sold on the merits of ATI's then just about to be in production GPU from 2 years ago, and its in development (the current generation GPUs that they have now 3870/3850). As we still see today, even this current generation of GPU's from AMD can not outperform Nvidia's last generation 8800 series, even with 1.5 years time to reach that level of performance. This have seriously damaged their ability to be profitable in the video card segment as they have had to price their cards much lower than Nvidia to be even considered from a prospective customer. This is the same battle they are fighting on their CPU side as well ever since Intel released the Core Duo (and the subsequent Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Duo Extreme, Quad Core, and Quad Extreme processors). Basically, on the mid and high end desktop market, AMD has had no real competing product for about 1-2 years, and again, have to settle on pricing against the comparable performance Intel CPU. Intel gets to use the production line chips that fail to meet full speed for slower binned parts which in many cases still outperform AMD's fastest performing part. This is allowing Intel to keep their costs lower, and forcing AMD to slowly bleed to death because they can not afford to price their chips that low. And the high debt AMD incurred on the ATI purchase has been keeping them from doing what they have done in the past when they had a poorer performing chip, i.e. cut costs, bunker down, and increase development dollars on the next gen that was in progress to push up the release date of the new architecture. However, the lack of cash on hand is making that last part impossible to do. And early indications are not looking good even for this current line of quad cores and tri-cores. Basically, these chips still can not get near the performance of the current high end Intel chips.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
I wish the Phenom turned out better than it did (like came out sooner and was faster and cheaper). I think AMD has a few more shots at recovering from Intel's brutal one-two-three punch of Core series and 65nm (AMD didn't get this until way late) and affordable Quads (phenom took way too long).
Now AMD will always be around, but maybe not in a big way in the future. VIA releases new x86 chips every one in a while. And they actually make money on what they do. But there is little mainstream interest in VIA's work. And I suspect that unless AMD can hit it big in the mainstream processor market they will have to reconsider their strategy and go after less competitive market segments with specialized products.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
They have shown that they can make Intel jump to their tune (64 bit CPUs anyone?), they just bought ATI and are thus in a position to better integrate CPUs and GPUs (for better performance), which is something that I'm sure a few hard core gamers might be interested in. They still have a strong research arm. And if nothing else, they can always go back to building cheaper Intel knock-offs which is (I believe) where they started.
I wank in the shower.
AMD could survive, albeit much diminished, as a foundry - they have a huge fab in Germany, and there are always companies willing to have their designs produced somewhere. Fabs really have no problem getting contracts.
AMD makes a ton of FLASH memory.
And then there's the GPU division (ATI). It's a bit hard to imagine that both CPU, GPU and Flash RAM will all tank at once.
Could it happen? Yeah. Everything is possible. I would not bet my apartement on it, though.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
with a nforce chipset mobo to go with it. i bought my first amd in 2001, and bought nothing else since. happy to say that with the amd+nforce chipset combo, i had done well with even mediocre graphic cards in the period. no sir, amd is not out.
Read radical news here
By the time the "Phenom"inal failure's able to "unleash the fury", it'll have to compete with Nehelem, which it will never be able to do, as it's Intel's approach to Barcelona (and all things being equal, which they aren't, Intel will win due to the sheer capabilities of its manufacturing process department). Add to this that Conroe's IPC is already better than Barcelona's and you can pretty much kiss AMD's shot at regaining the lead in the near term goodbye.
It's a basic business cycle here.
large company make billions of dollars, sits on it's laurels. Young upstart company makes a decent product and begins to eat at the large company's business. In this case, intel was nimble and humble enough to realize how to respond to that (make lower power chips and adopt x86-64 from AMD) So now, AMD is back to being a scrappy company. Just wait until Intel makes another bazillion and sits on it's laurels again. AMD (or someone) will come to push Intel again.
(The major difference now however, is that fabs are freakin' expensive and AMD might not have enough capital to keep upgrading fabs, which will run them out of business.)
Hewlett-Packard
IBM
Infineon
Intel Corporation
Lenovo Holdings Limited
Microsoft
Sun Microsystems, Inc That doesn't leave you an awful lot of choice, does it?
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
Long ago, FUD was the bread and butter of the IBM consultant, what's new?
I'll admit I don't know much about the matter, but they seem to be fairly Free Software friendly, in terms of their releasing of documentation for both their CPUs and the ATI GPUs.
Does anyone have any detailed information on this? Perhaps the Free Software community can support AMD's openness by buying AMD hardware, *and letting them know this is the reason*.
The OP is an IBM plant! I called it!
"We are Samurai, the Keyboard...Cowboys"
It is interesting to note that this article is dated February 17, 2003. In other words IBM made this prediction literally 2 months before AMD introduced their first 64-bit processors, the Opteron, in April 2003. Little did they know the impact the AMD64 architecture would have on the industry (Intel cloned the architecture) and on AMD itself (it helped them stay afloat for the past 5 years).
Persistently trolling with malicious links: or, how to waste Slashdot's moderation system. One such link uses several -1, Troll and +1, Informative. How many useful comments got missed because of that?
Says NO WAY!!!
AMD shall live forever!!
... when I deliberately switched to Mac.
Before I switched to using Macs, I would always build my own PC's from components, and I always chose an AMD processor (starting with the 450 MHz AMD K6-III).
Until Macs start coming with AMD chips, I doubt I'll buy another one any time soon.
Whoa, one thing at a time — let's see off BSD first, OK?
For full disclosure, I should add that last I checked was twenty years ago.
It is official; Fallen Kell now confirms: AMD is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered AMD community when IDC confirmed that AMD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming close on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that AMD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. AMD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict AMD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: AMD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for AMD because AMD is dying. Things are looking very bad for AMD. As many of us are already aware, AMD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
All major surveys show that AMD has steadily declined in market share. AMD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If AMD is to survive at all it will be among CPU dilettante dabblers. AMD continues to decay. Nothing short of a cockeyed miracle could save AMD from its fate at this point in time. For all practical purposes, AMD is dead.
Fact: AMD is dying
I've built a very good number of machines for people lately with Abit micro-ATX boards, with built-in graphics (d-sub and DVI). Throw in a 2.4 GHz X2 and 4 gigs of memory, a hard drive, and a burner, and the hardware comes to something like $300. Good, fast, and CHEAP.
One of the offices was broken into lately, and the thieves bypassed the "wimpy" micro-ATX cases and stole big, heavy machines... which happened to be older, slower stuff.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
How about DEC or SGI? Or Texas Instruments? I believe the transputer might be the wave of the future too.
When AMD had a good streak, it was more because Intel got lazy and fumbled the ball rather than AMD doing anything particularly well. During this time they kept churning out increasingly cheap yet powerful processors that gave great value for money compared to Intel. There was no particularly clever technology being deployed, it was just cheaper for the same power. I built loads of PC's during this time and they all had AMD CPU's because they gave by far the best value for money and ease of overclocking. The X2 was a bit of a coup but by then Intel were playing catch up with a vengence so any lead was soon lost.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Let us all hope they don't die, I'm almost an Intel fanboy but my god if AMD dies! Intel would rape us all. Competition is always healthy. I think AMD has good low priced CPUs though and they sure do the job.
What's better for Intel: to be charged for being a monopolist by the competition authorities or having an ineffective token competitor? Thus: Intel will keep AMD in business.
Can they pose a credible competitive threat to Intel's dominance?
Do they still have superior but unappreciated technology?
Or are they finally old hat? Can they really recover?
You will get the answers to these question and plenty of others in the next episode, released starting from 2013.
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
That good high end technology often gives you a good low end too. That is the current case with Intel's Core technology. You take a Core 2, but instead just make a single core version with less cache and clock it way down. You then have a chip with extremely good performance per watt, and good yields (and thus low price) to boot. The Core Solos, as Intel calls them, are extremely competitive on the low end. They've got ones with a TDP as low as 5.5watts.
So it can be hard to try and just compete on the low end of things, since you can't charge as much, and often the people doing the high end things get killer low end products as a side effect.
This is something companies have found out with graphics cards. There have been a number of companies who have tried to compete with nVidia and ATi in the lower end market. Their idea is that while they don't have the R&D to produce a top flight graphics card, that's ok because most people don't buy one of those anyhow. They'll make midrange and lower end cards and sell those.
Great idea, it seems, until you consider that ATi and nVidia get great midrange cards as a side effect of their high end cards. Graphics cards are highly parallel beasts so all they do to make a lower end card is cut some of the units off, put on less memory, maybe clock it down a bit to improve yields and they are good to go. An 8800 GTX and an 8600 GT are the same beast at heart. The 8600 basically just has 25% the number of shader units the 8800 does, and other things like a smaller memory bus. End result is nVidia has and extremely fast $100 card that cost them very little in terms of R&D that wasn't already done for their high end card.
So the companies that have tried have thus far met with little success. Their offerings just haven't been able to compete with the big boys and it is no surprise. You can pour a lot more in to R&D when you are going to sell graphics cards at $500+ and then make use of that very same technology in midrange and low end cards.
Intel did stick two chips together initially, whilst AMD put two cores on a single die. Later on Intel released the Core 2 Duo and implemented two cores on a single die.
Site triggers my AV with this attack: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms05-013.mspx
Or for processors that can still run x86 instructions, how about VIA?
AMD decided to price match Intel? I thought it was the other way around. Here in the UK at least you can get a quad core 6600 for £164.99. That's the CPU I use and I reckon that it's the total sweet spot for price/performance, plus you can overclock it about 40% using stock cooling. AMD have had to slash prices to compete on price/performance, leading to their current woes.
In fact looking at the AMD page on ebuyer they have great cheap AMD dual core chips. If I were building a nice but cheap system for friends/family I'd probably go with one of those AMD's unless they wanted to play the latest games. Then it'd be Core2 all the way.
I think you've got it exactly the wrong way round. Intel moved in on AMD's market, not the other way around.
If headlines are allowed in slashdot articles with this tone, I fear for the future: Can we expect such gems in the coming months: Torvalds leaves mangled corpse in Linux debate Minor power outage in Guam, world doomed! Copyright violators: You're screwed! Microsoft says, 'Fark off' Lets get a little sense of perspective in here please?
If he's the Walrus then can I be a penguin please?
...is to create the 128 bit architecture upgrade for their processors.
Personally, I'd rather by from ANY of those vendors. The sooner they stop being designers of proprietary tech, and start building from/contributing to open CPU designs, the better.
Ironic that IBM isn't manufacturing popular CPU's anymore.
FRAUD ALERT? First, for me this story crossed a line. It looks like stock manipulation. Was KDawson paid to post this story? Who at Slashdot or its parent company has recently sold AMD stock short, betting that the price will fall? Are any Intel employees involved?
... through dumbness rather than
malice."
I would like to see a statement added at the end of this Slashdot story that KDawson took no money for this story, and that no one at Slashdot or its parent company took money or will benefit from a drop in price of AMD stock. I'm not accusing anyone of anything; I am just concerned that this story is worded in a way that seems sleazy and possibly fraudulent to me.
Second, in response to the parent comment. ATI is the premier video CPU provider now. nVidia is so lame that there is an entire web site devoted to fixing nVidia driver issues: LaptopVideo2Go. I spent hours trying to get one of my laptops, which has an nVidia chip, to work correctly with an external monitor. It works well now, but I could never have done the work without the help of LaptopVideo2Go.
Third, Intel is suffering from very bad management. For example, see the comment I posted to an earlier Slashdot story, responding to someone saying, "Intel's behavior regarding the OLPC is reprehensible."
Fourth, AMD seems to be the more technologically dedicated company. Intel has a history of dumb mistakes. For example, see this December 2000 article about the Pentium 4, which calls Intel "Chipzilla": Pentium 4 Linux problem all Chipzilla's fault, apparently. Quote: "Intel... failed
I seem to remember that the entire Pentium 4 architecture was abandoned in favor of the Pentium 4 Mobile architecture, which is what Intel is shipping now.
Both AMD and Intel make VERY sophisticated processors. It's amazing that a product that is so tiny it is affected by quantum physics is cheap enough for everyone to own. When one is temporarily ahead, it is simply silly to say that the other is dying.
Stock prices are often affected by hysteria. This is especially true of prices of technical stocks, which are often owned by people who don't really understand the technology of the company they partly own.
Warning : telling people that a site is malicious will lead to increased traffic for that specific site
Slipping shoelaces ?
In terms of manufacturing technology, Intel and AMD are indeed taking different roads. One of the biggest advantage that AMD has yet to realize with their technology (SOI) is to implement Z-RAM for their processor caches. Z-RAM is a type of memory so dense it requires only 1 transistor per bit instead of 6 transistors for traditional SRAM, potentially allowing AMD to have caches about 6 times the size of Intel's caches on the same die area. Of course nobody knows yet for sure if/when Z-RAM will turn out to be doable. But if it is, Intel would have to way to implement the technology without massively reconverting their fabs to the SOI process.
Civilization has truly turned south when the first thing people think of when they hear "full metal gates" is animu instead of R. Lee Ermey.
Well, I tested it in the only benchmark that matters to me, my own applications. The result? For some applications involving video processing, those where I need most CPU, it performed at about 25% of the level of an Intel 2.4 GHz Pentium 4. For my own applications, the "AMD 2200+" is actually an "AMD 800-".
I really don't care about how much better it performs in office applications, or whatever other tests AMD did to "prove" that clock speed doesn't matter. You can only stretch the truth so far, when one is doing number crunching a faster clock will get you more performance than faster context switches.
Anyone thinking that Intel can always be ahead of AMD should read the history of the Pentium 4 on Wikipedia. Two quotes:
"Finally, the thermal problems were so severe, Intel decided to abandon the Prescott architecture altogether, and attempts to roll out a 4 GHz part were abandoned, as a waste of internal resources."
"The original successor to the Pentium 4 was Tejas, which was scheduled for an early-mid-2005 release. However, it was cancelled a few months after the release of Prescott due to extremely high power consumption (a 2.8 GHz Tejas consumed 150 W of power..."
And that's a bad thing?
I click those malicious links out of curiosity, I guess many people do. It's not like increased traffic to one of those sites are doing anyone any good, or is it?
Anyways, I enjoy looking at what 'malicious' javascript games those kids come up with.
Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion. -Francis Bacon
How do you STILL not know about *.on.nimp.org?? Seriously, this has been the standard LastMeasure mirror for years now. I'm amazed it still gets so many bites.
Silly me, I thought you were going to drag out AMD being the first to 1GHz and intel's failed attempt to leap frog them with the 1.13 GHz.
Kinda like Linux, AMD's big year has always been just around the corner, but has never arrived.
Yes, it did. And in 2007 they shipped millions of machines. And most of them were laptops or uses laptop CPUs. And in the US laptop market Apple had some 20%! That is a considerable market share. I believe the OP was right in saying that AMD would be hard pressed to supply Apple with that many chips - and still serve the rest of their customers. But that's just my guess.
2005 did arrive. You must have still been in high school then.
Intel stock is down, too.
See also this January 16, 2008 Bloomberg story: U.S. Stocks Fall on Intel Forecast, Extending Global Tumble.
Quote: "Intel, the world's largest computer-chip maker, tumbled the most in five years in Nasdaq Stock Market trading after saying first-quarter sales will be as much as 6.9 percent below analysts' estimates."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Intel marketing suits brought out the P4 because AMD weren't able to clock so high and a bigger number is simpler to market. AMD beat them to the Gig range and the P3 needed more work to get it clocking so high, so they brought the P4 and brought it out too early just so they could say they had 1.5G CPUs.
The P4 was all marketing.
AMD Athlon was engineering.
AMD Athlon won.
Meanwhile a small unknown branch from Israel had time and were left along long enough to fix the problems with the P3 and clock it up. It was an engineering solution.
And so it became the Core.
Core is winning.
So if Intel's marketing suits get in the way again, expect AMD to get the top slot until some quiet engineers get left along long enough to get back on track.
Maybe I'm biased because I live in Austin, but AMD chips to be FAR more prevalent than anything produced by IBM lately. The only IBM chip I see at this moment is sitting inside my 8 year-old Macintosh in the corner...oh wait...forgot, that one is actually a Motorola chip.
People are selling AMD stock short, betting it will go down. To make money, they need the price of AMD stock to drop.
Often a company's stock price reflects market manipulation rather than any sensible estimate of the true value of the company. This Slashdot story is very likely to drive the price down, as short sellers want. Check the price after the market opens.
When AMD integrates ATI video with AMD CPUs, the resulting combination is likely to be very competitive. AMDs technical prospects seem good to me, although I have not done a thorough analysis. Remember that we are no longer in a CPU speed race; CPUs are fast enough now for the average user.
INTEL: For, since the tragic death of her father-- AC: He's not quite dead! FATHER: Since the near fatal wounding of her father-- AC: He's getting better! FATHER: For, since her own father, who, when he seemed about to recover, suddenly felt the icy hand of death upon him. AMD: Uugh! AC: Oh, he's died!
I take my children to see Madonna(..), but I never for once ever thought I was in the same business.Chris Rea.
When I wrote the parent comment, I forgot to include my own statement: I don't own any AMD or Intel stock, and there is no way I can profit AMD or Intel stock prices rising or falling.
Bah, garbage compared to the Power series from IBM. I can see why they would make that prediction. When big companies talk like this, they arent talking about your desktop CPU's or toy computer (x86) webservers on the DMZ running linux. They are talking about computers that run the big applications, users in the thousands. AMD doesnt have a chance in hell in this space.
I'm glad AMD is in the market if only because they force Intel to do deep price cuts to their Core2Duo line. Plus, AMD's quad cores are terrific for digital audio workstations. For the price, they are still very fine processors.
You are welcome on my lawn.
1) People do not choose their BIOS(yet, anyway); so you're going to have an awful lot of people caught when they start having 'Trusted' Bios not allowing them the kind of control over their computer that we now have.
2) You're assuming that your ISP is going to allow you to connect without 'trusted' software running.
TCPA is designed to "secure" whole networks of computers for the trusted computing group, not just your own device(as if *anything* you own is going to actually be your own). Unless you are solidly sure that you'll always be able to connect to a 'non-trusted' network, this is fine. But for the rest of us, this stuff is *not* our friend.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Netcraft hasn't confirmed it.
( Redundancy is ) ^ n
Yeah I'm always watching the front page of slashdot waiting for it to tell me what to buy and what to sell. Actually that might work...stock market is group think, slashdot is group think.
Australian running a company that does C# / C++ / Java / SQL / Python / Mathematica
The simple fact that one of the biggest differences is made by having a multi-core processor when running modern Operating systems rather than raw processor speed should yield one obvious comment:
The cheapest Dual-Core processors I can quickly find :
The performance is within a hairs breadth of each other... and yes, when coupled with a modest graphics card they both do just fine in all but the latest bleeding-edge 3D games.
In other words, for normal home or business computing with light to moderate gaming - there is an obvious choice. Even with more demanding gaming, thats £30 more to throw at your graphics card which will make far more difference - or £30 more memory (2 GB !!!).
With this sort of thing going for them, and the higher-end really matching Intel in the price/performance stakes I suspect theres life there yet... quite a bit of it.
As far as graphics goes, everyone is happy to compare ATI with nVidia - but the only choice when it comes to on-chip graphics is not "ATI v nVidia" but "ATI v Intel"... you have looked at Intel graphics lately right ?
Dell is finally selling PC's with AMD processors right along the Intel offerings.
They finally, now, have the platform.
Not just that - the difference between Intel is hubris vs economics. As nerds, WE have the responsibility to show people where they're wasting their money. If you're shelling out $6000 to get something bleeding-fucking-tomorrow-edge, yes, you want Intel. If you want something you can use for the next 3 years, but not top of the line (which most people don't need), then an AMD chip will cost you less than half as much as an equivalent-powered Intel.
My hope is that AMD continues to grow and gets their chips into lines from a few other commodity manufacturers. The best thing for the consumer would be two companies competing on approximately equal footing.
...makes loads of cheap, low power dispersing x86 CPUs. They're fairly slow but compatible and very power-conserving. Via owns the former S3 GPU company, and makes its own chipsets as well.
Right now, they're not attacking the high-end, high power chips gamers love, but they have LOTS of experience designing chips for cheap PCs and relatively good fabs.
I find their chips (usually integrated into mobos with S3 graphics and via chipsets) priced rather higher than their speed would dictate, but they *are* a viable (no pun intended) competitor to both AMD and Intel.
if amd dies wouldn't there be a problem with the fact that intel remains the only (major) cpu manufacturer? it would be really bad for the cpu evolution (unless some researchers invent some new type of cpu that is much better, in which case they would probably get bought by intel anyway).
ics
AMD used to have a simple market, if you couldn't afford the top of the line Intel CPU then the next one in price would be an AMD with better price-performance then the Intel could deliver for that amount of money.
As in illusstration: for 10.000 intel could sell you 200 performance. for 1000 intel could sell you 20 performance, but AMD could sell you 100 performance for 1000. Intel had either fast and expensive or slow and cheap. AMD occupied the middle with processors that were not quite as fast but were far cheaper.
And then AMD suffered their defeat, their CPU's actually started to outperform Intel, a worse thing could NOT have happened to them. Emboldened by this short term success they raised their prices, they started to believe they were now the king of CPU land. Sadly the majority of the market simply buys intel because PC's is Intel, so AMD never really got to profit that much from their superiority as most consumers never even knew there was an alternative to Intel. Meanwhile they started to loose the rep at being the best budget buy for enthousiasts.
And then Intel caught up and AMD is left with expensive processors that no longer make sense to buy. Why exactly should I pay more for less? AMD constantly underperforms in tests and no longer makes up for it by being far cheaper.
They can do two things, regain the lead in tech and hope that this time the mass market is willing to switch from Intel (good luck with that) OR drop the pursuit of being the best and simply go for the budget market again and offer the best price/performance option.
I don't think they are going to go for the second option, it is NOT sexy. Perhaps they just got to learn that making a cheaper CPU that is almost as fast is just as much an achievement as making a benchmark breaking CPU.
But right now when I look at buying a new machine, AMD for the desktop just doesn't make sense. Why pay more for less?
http://www.microway.com/8wayopteron.html
http://hpcsystems.com/AMDQuadOpteron_A5808-32.htm
where you at Intel (IA64 doesn't count)?
If they don't play the game, it puts them in an even worse position to compete with Intel.
Trusted Computing is just a technology. Like all DRM schemes, it has some potentially stupid features that can be bad for users, but without legislation requiring its use, it is entirely inert. The proper response isn't to avoid hardware or software systems that offer support for both unrestricted and DRM-controlled media, but to avoid the DRM-controlled media.
Support for playback of DRM controlled media, in a player that will also play unrestricted media, actually adds value. This is because, at least in a hypothetical world where DRM media is cheaper, it increases consumer choice. A device that won't work with unrestricted media is broken.
Legislation banning devices that work with unrestricted media is the enemy, not customer hostile control schemes.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
The very Wikipedia article you linked to mentions that AMD has already licensed the technology for on-chip use and has a reference to back it up. I say that AMD knows very well what they've got with SOI.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Perhaps a GPU+CPU combo is what you need to get vista running well? if they can get the price right for everyday users(not gamers) then people will just associate an AMD cpu with good performance.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
The stated response time of 3 ns is, however, only equivalent to 333 MHz, or 10 cycles at 3.0 GHz. To realize the benefits of shorter trace lengths to compensate for the added latency, the cache volume cannot be increased. It's also harder to share cache between cores, as that's another source of "required" trace length. Z-RAM is very interesting, but it's not obvious whether it can improve over SRAM at all places in the cache hierarchy.
from the point of view available from slightly in front of and below where a tail joins a horse.
This is meaningless drivel.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
The debt markets are pricing in a 56% chance that AMD defaults in 5-years. So, this is a pretty relevant discussion.
When my Dad was working in the early 90's and Amigas and Atari STs were the big thing at home, a bunch of guys broke into his offices and stole all the keyboards! (They left those huge dumb looking beige boxes behind.)
have you done any fundamental looks at AMD's balance sheet, income statement, or CF statements? have you seen how the stock has performed over the last 2.5 years?it's stock has been in a precipitous downward spiral. If you were long AMD for the last 2 years, you have basically been crushed.
now, why is it down? well, look at their earnings. they have done pitiful. turns out in a slugout pricewar, intel can stay profitable while AMD is on the ropes. last year they lost money and continue to show no signs of recovering from their tech deficit they have again built against Intel. Now adays, the fastest AMD chip not on the market yet is slower than what intel already has at full production.
FYI: they last 166 million dollars last year. I'm not sure why this looks like manipulation as compared to just poor performance by the company without much of an end in sight.
oh, and my disclaimer: following my advice will hurt my long position in AMD.
Everything on the market depends on perception. It doesn't matter what your revenue is. It doesn't matter what your P&E ratio is. Doesn't matter how much debt you have.
What matters is perception. Period. If everyone thinks your stock sucks, it will suck. If everyone thinks your stock is wonderful, it will be wonderful, at least for a while.
All these brokers and analysts put all this research into the stocks; they can tell you everything about the company. But what they really really want to know is what the average person thinks about the stock, because private investment drives the market, and that will make or break a stock.
So it's not "manipulation". The prices are set by Joe Investor, and Joe Investor invests based on a complex formula involving Fox News, Beer, and what his barber thinks. You can try to manipulate that, but it's as likely to not work as it is to work. Whether or not a Slashdot editor thinks the stock is going to go up or down doesn't matter. I think it's going to go down as well; I think they're screwed until they get to 45nm, and I think everyone is screwed because of the perception of an economic downturn (the ultimate self-fulfilling prophecy).
And finally, if you're in the market short term with the nature of the market right now, you better either be a psychic or willing to lose your ass. The smart thing to do is move some of your stable investments (bonds/money market/etc) into cash so you can pick up a few bargains as stocks tank, but keep in mind that again, you can lose your ass if you bet against Joe.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
All I know is AMD made a bad decision when buying ATI because now they have to fix all the mistakes made by them (which of course, caused their demise), and then attempt to fix their own (which I don't think they have many, but I think things like the number of plants (of which there are 2 AFAIK) are important things for them to think about. ATI always and still does make bad drivers for both Windows and Linux (so much so that people hack ATI drivers on Windows to make them better), and only for a very short time withstood the power that nVidia has on the market. nVidia IS the standard whether we like it or not. I hope only good comes from released specs on the ATI cards (and I hope mine is better supported in Linux, ATI Radeon Xpress 200M), but if nVidia releases theirs as a result, AMD loses big time yet again. nVidia is the Sony of video card to all enthusiasts. (Hopefully though open specs of hardware will become a PC market standard.) I hope AMD doesn't die because I tried EM64T and I don't think it is nearly as good as true AMD64 (which is what I'm using with Linux). In the event that the future of AMD looks bad, will it be Intel or IBM that buys them out? Honestly, I hope it's IBM because Intel will destroy everything about AMD that made it often "the better alternative." We wouldn't see the AMD name ever again. With IBM, it might stay a company but a subsidiary. Again, I would hope for the latter, but I truly hope AMD can recover from its losses. I know I'll keep buying AMD while it lasts. AMD64 architecture is the best x86-64 implementation. Remember how far Itaninum went? Intel now has EM64T as their implementation of x86-64 because backward compatibility is extremely important when it comes to what binaries you can run on an architecture WITHOUT emulation (the Itanium uses emulation for 32-bit).
And again with backwards compatibility, did Apple care that people may have wanted to run classic apps on the Intel Macs? I would say no. Microsoft should do the same, and their security problems are solved. It's been said a thousand times: Microsoft should make old apps run in a special compatibility mode that uses no libraries or executables from the main system to avoid security issues (they should have a lot of versions of DLLs and executables included with Windows for backward compatibility in this mode).
Intel not caring about backward compatibility and not even caring about the future of x86-64 was a bad decision outright. AMD is going to last if they can keep their AMD64 architecture extremely solid and push for it to be used (even by Windows).
Intel's failings on Itanium and Netburst were common corporate faults.
When the competitive marketplace isn't driving you, you have to drive yourself. Once that starts to happen, the directions can become bizarre, with Itanium and Netburst being to very good examples.
Itanium: The problem Itanium was designed to handle was cloning. First and foremost, they sewed up the I.P. so that it was not subject to any existing cross-licensing agreements. Second, the architecture was sufficiently different that they were outside of the realm of existing art ahd cross-licensing, so their I.P. was "strong." Notice that I haven't said a word yet about performance, cost, or any of that normal stuff. When mere technical and marketplace concerns are that low in the priority schemes, guess what happens.
Netburst: It seemed like someone in marketing got overly focused on clockspeed as the Ultimate Metric. The rest falls from there.
The reality is that ANY corporate product, will turn to junk without a competitive marketplace to keep it focused on delivering value to customers. Once competition is gone from a specific marketplace, the company will either focus its development budget in other areas where it needs to respond to competition, or it's development will be driven by motivations internal to the company, that are likely irrelevant or even negative to customers
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
No one really understands the way the stock prices are going to go. Intel has the dominant chips right now; nVidia is a long-time winner in the graphics card market...My card experiences are almost exactly the opposite of yours, so generally I buy nVidia, though my purchases don't exactly drive the market.
Basically I, like a lot of people, buy the best thing right now for my needs. It's not any kind of conspiracy. I bought a ton of AMD when their dual procs were faster, cooler, and more expensive than intel's. Now that intel is doing better, I'm buying more intel. If I need a graphics card, I check to see who has the best in my price range, and I buy that.
I hope AMD catches up and I hope they stay a solid market competitor...but it's not because I have a bias one way or the other; it's because I like CPU price wars. That's the best reason to root for a company...You want them to make things better for you. Buying from a company just because you like them more is kinda crazy...They're all out to separate you from your cash, so why make it easy for 'em?
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Here's an excerpt from a recent internal memo that was leaked to a popular news website. Interestingly, it seems to indicate that AMD actually had the tri-core Phenom ready before the quad-core one:
'[...]Well, fuck it. We're going to five cores.
Sure, we could go to four cores next, like the competition. That seems like the logical thing to do. After all, two worked out pretty well, and four is the next power of two after two. So let's play it safe. Let's make a bigger L2 cache and call it the Phenom SuperTurbo. Why innovate when we can follow? Oh, I know why: Because we're a business, that's why!
[...]Here's the report from Engineering. Someone put it in the bathroom: I want to wipe my ass with it. They don't tell me what to invent -- I tell them. And I'm telling them to stick two more cores in there. I don't care how. Make the cores so small they're invisible. Put some on the pins. I don't care if they have to cram the fifth core in perpendicular to the other four, just do it!
[...]People said we couldn't go to three. It'll cost a fortune to manufacture, they said. Well, we did it. Now some egghead in a lab is screaming "Five's crazy?" Well, perhaps he'd be more comfortable in the labs at VIA, working on fucking embedded chips. SOC, my white ass!
[...]Stop. I just had a stroke of genius. Are you ready? Open your mouth, baby birds, cause Mama's about to drop you one sweet, fat nightcrawler. Here she comes: Put another cache on that fucker, too. That's right. Five cores, two caches, and make the second one prefetch. You heard me -- the second cache prefetches. It's a whole new way to think about computing. Don't question it. Don't say a word. Just key the music, and call the chorus girls, because we're on the edge -- the razor's edge -- and I feel like dancing.'
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
I don't agree with all of your points, but I'd like to add one:
Sisth, AMD stock is actually higher now than it was 5 years ago today.
and why won't you share you stingy bastard?
Hmm. Phenom 9700, $200. E6420, $200.
Phenom kicks the crap out of E6420.
I go with the AMD.
Since we are talking about "PCs", I wont go into alternative processors. But to say that IBM and AMD are the only alternatives misses out on VIA who makes the C7 line. Further, it includes IBM who isn't a PC chip maker at all, PowerPC is not an x86 clone. As far as I know, since Apple dumped them, they now have a chip without a market. Meanwhile, VIA is seeing sales in the low cost and embedded markets, especially in sub-$500 laptops. And finally, Intel itself isn't doing too hot these days since the multicore mumbo jumbo isn't impressing Joe User that he should give up his newish 3Ghz box for a 2Ghz dual core.
So the winner is: Noone!
Well, maybe VIA since they actually sell boxes, but you probably wont be playing on a 1.5Ghz fanless with embedded graphics, so they don't count.
guess I missed the advice part of your post.
> You can only stretch the truth so far, when one is doing number crunching a faster clock will get you more performance than faster context switches.
You don't specify which applications you were using, or what you were doing, or in fact any useful detail at all, which makes your story essentially unverifiable. Moreover, your reported results appear to be somewhat at variance with the general experience, and your claim here is just overly simplistic (ALU throughput, and having enough registers to effectively manage latency, are just as important) - and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Given the variance between the two architectures, on lots of levels, I'm sure there are specific runs of code in which the P4 would trounce the Athlon (and vice versa), and it's possibly that you happened upon them in the specific applications you were using (or writing - you don't specify that either... although of course if you had access to the source code, you could have produced profiler runs and seen exactly where the time was going). On the other hand, you might have missed something simple yet vital in your comparisons, or your comparison might be completely unrepeatable.
I am NOT saying you didn't observe what you have reported, not at all. But without useful detail, the rest of us can only disregard outlying data points.
Uh-huh. "for some application" that does "something video-y"?
/.
That's a credible testimonial if I've ever seen one in
Most of the time, when someone refers to x86_64 bit processor technology - they call it AMD64.
AMD is going no where
Shameless plug alert: Game server control panel
As far as I can tell, if you're looking to build a machine with low power consumption and enough horsepower for HD, AMD is still considerably cheaper than Intel. Too bad for AMD that that's not where the money is.
Yeah, SourceForge, Inc.
On the other side, I made benchmarks where it matter(ed) to me: synchrotron simulations.
An AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1600+ was about 30-50% better for simulations than a Pentium 4 1700, as well as cheaper.
So, stop fussing about, multimedia and games is not the only things computer are used for (but obviously they matter a lot), and Intel for sure had/has a big advantage there.
I did mention video processing didn't I?
I don't need to run a profiler on those applications I write, since the kernel has to be in assembly language anyhow. If you need a profiler to tell you that the inner loop is using most of the CPU you have no business writing numerical analysis programs. The reason why the Pentium 4 was so much better than the Athlon is because the P4 has the SSE2 instruction set, which means it can do two floating point multiplication+addition operations in a single clock cycle. The instructions must be properly sequenced and the cache must hold, of course, but if you need the speed the P4 delivers it.
A large number of number crunching applications depend on operations such as matrix inversions and digital filtering. Those are, at the lowest level, nothing but a sequence of multiply+add operations. The 2200+ Athlon had a clock speed of 1.7 GHz and could do only one multiply+add per clock, which means at best 1.7 billion operations per second, while the P4 could do 4.8 billion.
Of course, not all applications depend on number crunching. If you have a network router or database server, for instance you will not need number crunching. But for *desktop* systems, audio, still images, and video processing are most likely to be the applications that will strangle your CPU. Intel made the right choice, IMHO, to focus on that, instead of on a more efficient instruction pipeline like AMD did.
Also, there are other factors such as cache and memory bus speed that must be considered. But to state that clock speed does not matter is an outright lie. All other factors being equal, if both systems are correctly dimensioned, the faster CPU will result in a faster system.
Thank you Mr. Intel Information Minister for letting us know that the P4 w/ Netburst was really the right architecture after all, and that those Core 2 Duo chips that run at slower clocks than the P4 while getting dramatically better performance are really lying about their true clockspeeds in order to keep up with AMDs blimey marketting. Clearly Netburst was the superior architecture and clock-rates are all that matters.
Or not.
Throw the bums out!
Yeah, but slashdot is tech group think, which is often very different from business group think. Business group think probably has greater effect on the market. Of course, once you know what the group think is, it's too late because the stock price will have already moved.
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
The only way you could have gotten a performance difference that large is if the Pentium 4 was using an SIMD extension which the AMD CPU wasn't using. In other words, if the test was specifically optimized in favor of the Pentium 4 and not optimized in the same way for AMD.
Yes, clock does matter, but there are tradeoffs, and Intel chose to maximize clock frequency at the expense of all else. AMD had to either explain that to customers, or switch to using an actual benchmark to measure performance. Argue all you like about which benchmark they chose, but it was the right decision.
While it may be hard to find a Dell AMD, Dell itself is also no longer #1. That title now belongs to HP, and FYI my HP AMD x2 laptop is working pretty well. I really hope AMD would do well since it is not a good for consumers if Intel has a monopoly.
No. "AMD stock is falling" is old, old news. Actually I'm disappointed because there's really nothing timely here. AMD processors are great. AMD buying ATI was probably a good move in a lot of ways, too. It makes it easier for them to tap the laptop market, where they need to be able to say, here's a CPU/chipset combo that's ready to go. Graphics is probably not what they're after. But they bought ATI mostly for cash, i.e. ATI stockholders received mostly cash for their shares, rather than mostly AMD stock. This turned out to be horrible timing, because Intel released Core 2 Duo at about the same time. So beforehand, AMD had demonstrated for 2 years or so that it had the top technology -- not just the most cost effective -- for PC CPU's. Dell and others were starting to see that they needed to field AMD solutions. They were flush with cash and they needed a way to keep growing. Buying a chipset maker, who would then always have a ready chipset, was the way to get more system integrators on board. But when Core 2 Duo came out, it really blew AMD out of the water on the high end. And squeezed them in the midrange. Everyone knew it was coming, but I don't think anyone outside Intel knew what an improvement Core 2 Duo would be. That said, while all this was going on, I put my system together using AMD's AM2 socket, with an nVidia chipset. And I don't regret it. The cheapest Athlon x2 was cheaper than the cheapest Core2Duo, and either was plenty powerful. AMD still makes good chips. But the company itself is hurting, because they used all their cash to buy ATI. Again, it was a good buy, but they needed to use stock. Maybe ATI exec's saw the writing on the wall and didn't want AMD stock? I don't know. Hope they make a comeback. Maybe a company with lots of cash will come buy them. AMD with cash would be in a great position. [Question from a /. newbie: why aren't my paragraph breaks showing? I used return to make blank lines, but they're gone.]
I really don't care about how much better it performs in office applications, or whatever other tests AMD did to "prove" that clock speed doesn't matter. You can only stretch the truth so far, when one is doing number crunching a faster clock will get you more performance than faster context switches.
I'm not going to question your personal experience as the others did. It's certainly believable that there's an application where the AMD processor performs 1/4th the speed of an Intel one (and vice versa).
I just want to point out that if the AMD processor actually was 2200 MHz, then you still could have found that the application that interests you performed at 1/4th the speed on that processor than the equivalent Intel one. Meaning that without the performance modeling numbers, you still would have found the equivalent "numbers" to result in an invalid comparison.
Clock frequency is not an automatic benefit for number crunching. If you don't change the architecture, then obviously yes a faster clock helps. But you don't go from a 1600 MHz chip to a 2200 MHz chip in the same time period without changing architectures. Performance is Clock Frequency * Insructions per Cycle, and a wide machine (many execution units) with low memory latency is going to tend to have higher IPC. However, the IPC value varies wildly by benchmark, and a benchmark that reveals certain deficiencies or strengths of the architecture may fall well outside normal, as was your case.
AMDs "modelhertz" or "markethertz" numbers became strained when the new generation of Intel products came out, but for most of the life of the Pentium 4 they were extremely generous to Intel's architecture. It's not just office applications -- go check benchmarks on Tom's, HardOCP, Ace's Hardware, and you'll see the AMD processor outperforming in a wide variety of benchmarks from games to high-performance scientific computing (the true number-crunching benchmarks), even including some media encoding benchmarks though Intel was very strong there and generally dominated.
My point is that if what you're looking for is a singular number by which to compare performance, then there is no "truth" to be stretched. MHz is an actual measurable number, true, but to equate that number with performance is "stretching the truth" to a greater extent than taking an aggregate of a wide variety of benchmark scores and relating that to performance. Marketroids can and do manipulate which benchmarks are chosen, but at least the resulting number means something regarding the performance of those benchmarks. MHz, by itself, means essentially nothing for a cross-architecture comparison.
So next time if you want to get the truth about performance, then the truth is that you have to measure the performance of the application you personally care about on the two processors in question. You can get an idea from reading reviews with benchmarks and looking at the results of similar applications (i.e. media encoding, or games, or what have you), but even that won't get you the real picture.
The enemies of Democracy are
The past is the past and the future is now.
AMD's Barcelona design for the Opteron and Phenom has the thermal problems and can't be sold above 2.6 GHz and is very hard to overclock successfully.
Meanwhile, Intel's 45-nm quad-core designs start at 3 GHz and overclock to 4 GHz easily with only fan/heatsink cooling.
Intel is ahead of AMD, by a ton, and AMD is rapidly going broke (lost $2 billion last year on operations and another $2 billion due to writeoffs; has less than #2 billion in the bank and can get more only through junk bonds and massive stock dilution). Intel can always be ahead of AMD when AMD goes out of business.
IBM was right, but a year or two overzealous.
Around the beginning of February, ATI/AMD did not have a functioning driver for their Radeon HD2600 AGP cards. With certain mobo chipsets (including mine, strangely enough), these cars would not even start X, instead freezing the OS solid. Needless to say, there are no problems in Windows. These cards are also their most powerful cards for AGP (the HD3xxx series is PCIe only, as far as I've seen). Ya gotta admit, that is a throwback to the wild west days of the 90s when you actually had to look up HCLs before buying any hardware for Linux.
And then their quad-core. I waited, I waited, and waited. But business can't wait forever; so I got a dual quad-core Xeon. Now you'd think there should be some leeway to the challenger, but that doesn't mean forever. Especially when their CEO got a fat bonus.
Wrong... The 6502 kicked the crap out of both of those processors...
If you look at the companies from a 5-year window (such as this article does), AMD looks better:
Intel is UP 17.4%
AMD is UP almost 28.4%
But if we extend that window to 8 years, they are BOTH in trouble, each DOWN about 63%.
Lastly, with careful manipulation of the dates to just a little bit over 2 years (where I chose the high point in the stock after the AMD/ATI hysteria and AMD's stock price skyrocketed before coming back to the Realm of Reality), it looks like AMD is on the brink, being down over 80%.
This is why we shouldn't use stock prices over time to judge these things. They are just too easily manipulated.
However, I'm NOT saying AMD isn't having troubles right now. There's a LOT on AMD's sheets right now that look very unhappy with a negative P/E and EPS along with massive cash losses. I'm just saying we shouldn't look at stock price alone, especially over arbitrary time lengths.
The
Considering how I can buy 3 or 4 Phenom chips for the price of a single Quad Core Intel chip, I'm not worried about AMD's future. They might not have the fastest chip on the market right now, but the fact remains their prices are much lower.
Intel didn't clone the architecture, they merely doubled their bus width.
AM64 did very little for any industry. Very few people ever got any 64-bit instructions to execute, because the software wasn't (and still isn't) primarily geared towards it.
I'm running 64-bit Vista and a casual glance in the task manager shows that I have 12 32-bit processes and 12 64-bit processes running, and the 64-bit code is all system daemons. I would have to deliberately hunt for 64-bit versions of any of the apps. Nobody offers them up front.
Intel went to 64 bits only because AMD had a purely marketing advantage with it. It's been nearly zero value to users so far.
IBM System x has some excellent AMD Opteron dual cores 1 and 2U machines, normally priced better than their Intel equivalents. We run most of our infrastructure on them.
x3455, x3655, x3755, BladeCenter LS21 and BladeCenter LS41
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
Funny, IBM's not even in the top 20 semiconductor, and hasn't been in the past 2 years
-mkb
I hope they will stay on business, and I hope some other company will join too. Leaving Intel alone is too much of a monopoly for me to wish for.
Zilog still makes microcontrollers; Motorola spun off most of its chip assets into Freescale. TI still make micro-controllers too, but I'd not want a black fin or an ARM running on my main desktop (only because the boards aren't a fully-loaded as the ones for regular PeeCees. If I could buy an ARM or a Z480 board that was pimped like any normal Via/AMD/Intel board, it would be a great thing).
Intel has been contributing massive resources to X.org and their adoption in the FLOSS community has benefited. AMD has been making progress in openness also, but I don't know if it is enough. All of the coolest advances are being done because of the facility of freedom. If you want to sell your product you must sell with it the freedom to do amazing things in the future.
Manufacturing companies are starting to take note of this. Their implementation of this principle can be directed correlated with their success. Hopefully, AMD will be competitive in openness.
The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the
I got my Machine a couple of Years ago here are the specs...
AMD Athlon 64 4600+ Dual Core Socket 939
3072MB DDR-333 Ram
Gigabyte K8N-SLI Nforce 4 SLI Chipset
Nvidia 8800 GTS 386MB GDDR3 Ram
It's a pretty old Machine once you think about it using Last generation Chipset, and Processor and Two generation old Ram. (I'm pretty sure they are up to DDR3 now). Anyways my case and point.... Even though how old this machine is I can still run Team Fortress 2 and Portal on the Highest setting AA, AT, HDR, Blur Effect everything on and will stay above 120FPS. I think AMD seriously needs to go back to Socket 939... All socket AM2 machines I have messed with are complete crap and can't stand up to my socket 939 computer.
My opinion of ATI is that AMD should just drop it or just create workstation video cards for it and stop the futile competition between ATI and Nvidia. Nvidia obviously makes the industry standards now for Video Cards and there is really no need for ATI anymore especially with Intel GMA Video Cards for Workstations.
"oh, and my disclaimer: following my advice will hurt my long position in AMD."
Funny.
"... poor performance by the company without much of an end in sight."
It seems to me that there is an end. AMD has done what it has always done, invest for the future. Maybe a year from now everyone will be using AMD CPU-GPU chips in their low-cost laptops.
To me what is happening seems like classic market manipulation. Drive AMD stock down a little more, buy a lot, and make a huge profit as soon as the new products are released.
AMD has open-sourced its performance library.
This is not the first time people have suggested AMD can't survive.
Agreed. Reference: See Vista
Maybe, because at the time their stock valued more than Intel's. But what about the long run? Look above, the title of this story is "Is AMD Dead Yet?" Not quite, but things aren't going too well for them, and they caused it themselves.
It's interesting to note from others that answered to my post, how much they depend on what AMD tells them. It seems that, as long as you are the underdog, you can tell them anything and they will believe. I didn't believe either Intel or AMD, I measured the performance, and Intel came out as the winner.
Exactly! You got the point, SIMD makes the difference. But it would be wrong to say that the test was specifically optimized for the Pentium 4. It was optimized for the *needed* performance. Do you need more performance for editing text? Or do you need more performance for editing video? Intel had the right answer here, they optimized their CPU for that specific point where performance is still needed today. It makes no sense to further optimize for an application where a 286 already had more than enough power.
Slashdot is BIG media now. As I write this the top two entries in Google News for AMD are both this Slashdot story: Google News: AMD.
That means that anyone in the world who wants to know about AMD right now will see Slashdot's speculation.
What about VIA? I hear that they have cheap processors that are x86 compatible.
If you can't say something nice, make sure you have something heavy to throw.
I really don't think AMD will die. Sorry to say but AMD has always been stupid when it comes to running a business. I love AMD and use their chips. They always lagged behind Intel and when they get a head they start acting dumb like buying ATI when AMD boards are mostly Nividia base chipsets. I think a smarter move would have been to buy in to Nividia or have them buy part of AMD. With that said AMD chips are better the Intel. I am sure someone would buy AMD if they were to die if only to keep Intel from holding the PC market hostage with high prices.
Make sure you have "Plain Old Text" selected in the dropdown box.
Then you will see line breaks when you hit return.
If using "HTML Formatted", you have to put in br's for line breaks.
You can also dive into the past. MSDOS 3.3 was it for (stagnant) *years*, until DRDOS 5 came out with significant and useful new features. Then MSDOS 5 came out shortly after as a catch-up, and for a few years DOS development was real, again.
That timeframe also gave us the Microsoft/Stack lawsuit over the integrated disk compression and the AARD anti-non-MSDOS code.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
If it were not for AMD and other chip manufacturers we'd still be watching Intel fry their chips trying to achieve higher clock rates instead of working with multi-cores. AMD and other chip manufacturers are a necessity in this world - even if they don't bring much to the table (which I believe AMD does); they give competition and keep prices in check. Without them, you would be dealing with affordability and lock-in issues from these companies.
I call bullshit.
The original Pentium 4 models were widely and famously known for the fact that their clockrate was vastly out of proportion to its real-world performance. I believe that clock-for-clock, a Pentium III performed 1.5 to 2x as fast as a Pentium 4. It is quite possibly, the least efficient CPU in terms of clock per performance ever to be manufactured.
The early Pentium 4s were almost universally slower than the Pentium IIIs that they replaced.
Likewise, only very specific types of "number crunching" actually took advantage of the Pentium 4. Certain types of video encoding worked quite well, whilst "general purpose" calculations were pathetically slow. Intel was also widely known for running highly-optimized benchmarks on their processors, and then running unoptimized i386 compiles on AMD's machines to make them look poor by comparison.
AMD's chips, at the time, however, had clock speeds that were more closely pared to Pentium IIIs.
Intel wound up getting a taste of its own poison after the architecture proved to be unsustainable in meaningful yields past 4Ghz, and its low-power Pentium 4 M chips began outperforming their power-hungry desktop equivalents that were priced twice as high. This architecture eventually evolved into the Core series of chips. In the interim, Intel had a *very* tough time marketing its chips, and for a time, Mhz ratings dropped out of Intel's marketing entirely.
AMD's speed rating was pegged to the Pentium 4, and from what I can remember, it was a fairly faithful benchmark. Although the "fake" speed ratings aren't as necessary today, it's still nice to be able to vaguely compare processors across generations.
If it weren't for the Core series of chips (which weren't even developed by Intel's main development group!), AMD would almost certainly be on top of Intel right now, provided they could keep up with the demand.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Have you ever tired of HTML editing a Slashdot post? The sort of thing that chat clients like AIM did away with years ago?
Zilog is still alive. Motorola has been renamed to Freescale and spun-off.
The next generations of multi-core CPUs will start including GPUs on them also, eliminating (or at least reducing) bandwidth bottlenecks between the main and video processors. AMD wanted GPU technology in-house, and that's why they bought ATI.
On a related note, AMD just released the 3D programming specs for their R5xx series chips (R6xx coming soon).
The real money is in the high end anyway -- consumer grade stuff may see high volumes but at very low margins, and AMD's technology does make a difference at the high end.
-- Alastair
intel was making minor improvements to their technologies and charging ridiculous prices until amd came along and offered true competition. this is why monopolies are bad. its one of the quintessential examples of the last 10 years. i fear that intel will resume the same bs very soon.
Frink: Nice try floyd, but you were designed for scrubbing, and scrubbing is what you shall do.
For most people, is the performance difference really that important? Maybe for uber-power users and gamers, but not the majority of people, even geeks.
Meanwhile, the motherboards that support AMD Phenom's are superior to and cheaper than motherboards for Intel Quad-cores. Gigabit motherboards offer up to 16GB of RAM; it also offers 2 x16 PCI-e slots and 3 x1 PCI-e slots, as well as 2 PCI slots; the Gigabit GA-790FX-DQ6 is around $200 for that. This motherboard has around a 4- to 5-star rating from numerous reviewers.
Some of the MSI motherboards offer 8GB and 4 x16 or x8 PCI-e slots, along with 1 x1 PCI-e slot, and 2 older PCI slots: that's 7 total. This one's for around $160. This board has a 5-star rating from numerous reviewers (on NegEgg). It also has an award for best motherboard in terms of quality.
Meanwhile, the only Intel motherboards for their non-server Quad-cores that go up to 16GB are by A-bit, a poor brand, and those motherboards have comparably poor reviews from NewEgg.com.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
They also targeted the market of people paying thousands for a single CPU. Incidentally, this market was also shrinking. Google is a good example of why Itanium failed. Here was a company with one of the largest computing arsenals in the world, and it's all based on desktop type hardware. AMD also killed Itanium with x86-64, and cheap 64-bit hardware at a time that Intel wasn't willing to offer it. Taking full advantage of Intel's 64-bit solution required massive rewrites of compilers. AMD's just extended an existing instruction set to 64 bits and added more registers. Of course, what is making things hard on AMD today is that Intel copied this idea.
I've done some research and if people are really that paranoid about Trusted Computing, then they might be okay with VIA.
It seems though that the whole industry is jumping on it, from Open Source to Microsoft.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
I'm currently at the SPIE advanced litography conference. For those unaware, photolithography is the most costly, critical manufacturing step in all of semiconductor chip production. It is where the 45nm pattern is generated and transfered to the wafer. I've seen dozens of presentations scheduled from Intel and hardly any from AMD. The cost of R&D in this business is *brutal* and it is the lifeblood for progress. If AMD is going to become competitive again - it's definitely not because of any technological/manufacturing advantage.
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LaptopVideo2Go is NOT dedicated to fixing driver problems - it's dedicated to installing newer reference drivers onto your laptop without the hardware manufacturer customizing and testing them, which is required by their OEM contracts with nVidia. nVidia is NOT required to provide a driver for your laptop at all.
A bit of history - not so long ago, laptops required custom drivers and these were provided by the laptop manufacturer, not the GPU manufacturer due to specialized display hardware. Newer laptops tend to work with reference drivers, however, and no longer need specialized drivers due to standardization in the video display industry. Some people like you require the latest-and-greatest drivers to fix bugs, so they resort to the reference drivers at a possible expense of functionality. All LaptopVideo2Go does is add mobile GPU values to a list of supported machines so you can install a much newer reference driver (at the possible cost of bricking your machine) because your laptop manufacturer is too slow at releasing an official driver that suits your needs.
ATI releases a reference driver, as well, the Catalyst Mobility driver, but they allow it to be installed by anyone, as I recall (I've never had an ATI laptop, only desktops). I'm not sure if that's because they have more control over the platform, or if they have no OEM requirement for support and provide it themselves, or if they are taking a risk and letting anyone install a reference driver.
Ya gotta love AMD's spirit. I was all AMD until Core2. Still, AMD has good stuff in the works, it's just whether or not they'll be able to sustain themselves until it comes to fruition. I think they will -- I seem to remember this same type of discussion right before Hammer came out.
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
The situtation is a bit different in the Linux and *BSD world, where you can find that most of your programs are 64-bit. (A lot of that is having the source available.) It will take a long time for people to adopt 64-bit software in the Windows world but in the free software realm it is already here.
Could be a microsoft insider taking out retribution for AMD going GPLv3: http://digitaltippingpoint.com/?q=node/132
And again with backwards compatibility, did Apple care that people may have wanted to run classic apps on the Intel Macs? I would say no. Microsoft should do the same, and their security problems are solved.
.NET API and Silverlight. They won't get rid of their security issues by switching to an environment that is more heavily based on insecure design.
Apple had the Intel option at hand from since before OS X was released. They didn't take the Intel option until after they removed the last classic-booting Mac from their online site without a flood of protests. They had tried to do it multiple times before, but each time there was an outcry and they brought classic-booting back.
Based on Apple's comments when they announced the Intel switch, they started seeding big developers with early versions of the released Universal development kit (under NDS) shortly after that.
So I think you have cause and effect backwards.
As for Microsoft:
First, security: they are still keeping the biggest security-related design flaws in the Win32 environment, the whole "security zones" model, as a centerpiece of their
Second, compatibility: Microsoft is STILL being forced to support AND distribute Visual Studio 6 by their developers, because that's the last version that included full Win32 support. Their equivalent of the "NOW we can abandon Classic" moment is far in the future.
I'm not saying that they ignored technical concerns. I'm just saying that anti-cloning was in the driver's seat, they all drank the kool aid, and believed that the technical concerns would simply be flattened. Sometimes those technical concerns are simply *hard* and don't fall to ordinary engineering, and this is one of them.
I expect to see the trend toward thousands of PCs to slow, even partially reverse. Energy and cooling are growing issues, as well as maintenance. All of those favor a more measured approach than "Fill a room with commodity boxes." Google already has a maintenance policy that consists at least partly of, "Don't bother." You have to fully understand your cost structure.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
...I've just bought an AMD Phenom 9600 (and an Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe) and I'm fucking impressed... and I'm not usually easy to impress.
The dead one should be Intel.
--
I'm neither associated with AMD nor Asus.
AMD may not be dead, but interest in underdog companies certainly seems to be. For investors & fanboys, this is the age of the one big company. People like the one company with all the answers & the one CEO who is wealthier than all other life forms.
"That number, generated by marketroids, is absolutely meaningless, but it was meant to imply that this chip was more powerful than an Intel 2200 MHz chip"
No, the XXXX+ numbers were to show the performance of that CPU relative to a 1 GHz AthlonXP (originally a 1 GHz Athlon), if the performance of the AthlonXP was linear. ie, if there was a 2200 MHz AthlonXP, then the Athlon64 2200+ would have the same performance, while only running at 1800 MHz.
The AMD numbers were always relative to themselves. It was all the tabloids (er, I mean computer rags) that confused them with "this compares to an Intel chip running at 2200 MHz".
The only time that "Performance Rating" numbers were relative to Intel was back in the 586/Pentium days, when IBM, Cyrix, and company tried to show their 586-class CPUs were as fast as the Pentium, PentiumPro, and P2.
That's why I didn't do any such thing; of course clock speed has an effect. I did, however, insist that it isn't the whole story - and despite your defensive tone, you pretty much demonstrated my point when you started talking about SSE2. What hoisted the P4's performance for your code wasn't the clock speed, but the architecture...
However, it might not have done so quite as much as you believe. According to Agner Fog's optimisation guides, the reciprocal throughput for the SSE2 MADD instructions on the P4 (and the P4E) is 2 - in other words, a P4 only completes one MAC per clock cycle, not the two you assert. Granted, the FPU lacks a single MAC operation; even if it didn't, the P4 had a crippled FPU anyway, so anyone after decent FP performance on a P4 is compelled to use SSE2 to get it. However, the Athlon XP had three (heterogenous) floating-point pipelines - so an FMUL and an FADD could proceed in parallel, to give the equivalent of a single-cycle-throughput MAC... again, with the caveats of proper sequencing et al.
Ironically, then, since both architectures could process one MAC per clock, the only notable difference in theoretical throughput between the P4 and the Athlon XP would indeed be the clock speed... but that only accounts for a 40% difference in your case. Sure, not to be sniffed at, but not the 300% speedup you claim.
Helps me when I am using my 8 gb of system memory in 64 bit xp pro running CAD.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Phenom 9700 for $200. ON NEWEGG.
Isn't intel's new quad (the one not released) going to be the same as AMD's quad? AMD has an on board memory controller so will intel's new quad line. Intel did that due to the memory issues with multi CPU (each being a quad core) systems. The on board memory controller fixes the memory issues. Why do you think there are not too many multi socketed quad core motherboards.
There are other ways to improve cache density without SOI. I am sure Intel has something up their sleeve. On the other hand the die area is already dominated by cache. Using higher density memory may enable cost saving, but introducing more cache does only lead to relatively mediocre performance benefit - if any extra cost is involved that may quickly become a losing game.
ZRAM is actually more similar to DRAM than to SRAM. Additional logic overhead for refreshing is required.
Intel published work on FinFET ZRAM, which can be implemented without SOI, a while ago.
IBM is forbidden from making a desktop computer. If it wasn't intel would have never gotten started. IBM tried making desktop CPU's for a while in the early 90s (my 486dx Cyrix CPU had IBM stamped on it). But they stopped. I wish the law/ruling would be go away now. Intel is big enough to have extra competition. AMD would be in big trouble though if IBM entered the desktop CPU market.
But AMDs big year didn't catch them up to Intel, then they fell behind further.
Some of us actually have jobs, lives, and other things to do besides be online...so SOR-RY, if I didn't know about *nimp.org(I'm sure many others don't either). And what's up with the "troll" mod? Looks like the so-called GNAA have already infiltrated slashdot and have taken places among their mods.
In 1999 I may have guessed they'd be hurting in 5 years, but not out of it. In 2003 I'd have left such predictions alone.
It's not going to be a popular view here, but IMO they've gone from "cheap and not worth it" like Cyrix to "cheaper but good enough."
Personally I like to get an Intel system that's dated enough to be within a sane price range, but still fairly close to the top, then coast for a few years, though I have owned AMD-based systems too.
take it `from my cold, dead socket...`
Is 'big trend here' dead yet?
Is this the only technique they teach in journalism school?
It's really getting OLD. Get some new material!
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
The issue with apple is that they only order a few lines of processors, all of which are at the top-end of the scale, which has the lowest yields in the manufacturing process. Notice how Intel gave Apple exclusive access to their quad-core 3ghz CPUs for the MacPro a few months before anybody else got them http://techreport.com/discussions.x/12176. If Apple is capable of saturating Intel's high-end production line for a single chip on a desktop machine, AMD wouldn't have a change to keep up with their high-end laptop demand.
I love the internet, mostly because of stuff like this. I am talking about events that pre-date the ones you are talking about by five years, and somehow you figure that makes me younger than you; I suspect reality would be even more obvious had you not posted AC.
AMD has never had the success that many predicted for it. They have had some years lately that have been better than any before, but never have taken over the proc market in the way they were expected to. This is very much like Linux. Linux has made progress and gained market share every year, but they have never had that huge break through year that experts and fanboys alike keep predicting.
I'm quite sure the AMD processor will outperform the Intel one on many sorts of benchmarks... every which one was conceived by AMD.
Have you ever heard the maxim "a chain is never stronger than its weakest link"? The weakest link in desktop processing has *always* been numerical calculations. And no matter what you and so many other AMD fanboys try to say, it's a simple question of SSE vs. SSE2. You can do one double precision add/multiply cycle per clock as the Athlon did or two cycles per clock as the Pentium 4 did. Any other optimization is useless in the desktop, since the CPU is idle 90%+ of the time for other tasks. While AMD was increasing CPU idle time from 90% to 91% when not doing number crunching, Intel was doubling number crunching capacity in the Pentium 4.
Well, OK, reading what I wrote above, I give up, I'm convinced. MHz by itself is meaningless, that's true. The fact is that, by implementing SSE2, the Pentium 4 performs twice as fast as an Athlon with the same clock speed. I rest my case.
AMD is a good company, with (some) great products, but they've totally missed the boat in what may well be the most important chip market of the future: "mobile" CPUs. AMD has no decent mobile products, and nothing compelling in the pipeline over the next few years.
Don't underestimate the importance of "mobile" CPUs - they're going to be the heart of almost all post-PC internet access devices, and Internet-enabled smart phones, PDAs, and MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices, as Intel calls them) are only the beginning. Anywhere a high-function, low-power, Internet interface is required, these things are going to show up. Personally, I expect devices based on this sort of chip to outnumber PCs by 10 or 20-to-one over the next several years. As pervasive internet connectivity finally arrives, these will be the chips that make such products real at the prices (and battery life) we demand.
Intel has a solid strategy here with their new x86-based MID chips, but AMD's tack is to keep whacking the old ex-NationalSemi Geode nag until it falls over dead. Geode's not a bad tech/architecture, but there's no way it can keep up with the likes of Intel's Silverton, or especially, the generations that will follow.
From a strategic point of view, this is AMD's greatest weakness, and it's not one they can patch up easily or quickly. Intel stands to be the big winner, since moving x86 downwards into this market means development gets really easy, even if not optimal. There's still a window for non-x86 architectures such as ARM (the iPhone's engine) in such devices, but AMD simply has no answer for what is probably the largest and fastest growing CPU market of the next few years.
Without a major correction ASAP, AMD may find it hard to maintain second place...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
I think you're misinterpreting the term realize. Definition two.
That was all about Rambus.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
How the hell was I supposed to know that "to realize" can mean "to make real"? That's completely unintuitive!
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
MOD PARENT UP!!! "I for one can PROMISE you that Slashdot is WIDELY read by traders and analysts working in this sector."
You could also add the following items as major failures of Intel:
- race to 1Ghz
- Itanium
- Rambus
- 64 bit x86
meh
Thanks for that contribution.
Since I first started using AMD, during the era of the 486dx2 era, AMD has consistantly released products that have performed better than Intel's. During the 486dx/2 era, AMD released a clock doubled 40Mhz chip which ran the system busses at 40Mhz while Intel had learned from their mistake on the 486/50Mhz that increasing the performance of the system clock was flawed.
The 486 era was a black age for PCs. There were more players in the CPU market to begin with, there was Intel, AMD, Cyrix, Evergreen, ST and a few others. The biggest drawback of the era was the commoditization of PC components. Design decisions were even being made based on cost of production, and in reality, it was a decision of cost vs. reliability. At the time, there was a single motherboard manufacturer I could possibly name that showed even the slighest interest in quality vs. performance/cost. It was Micronics. They ended up developing their own chipsets and insisting you purchase memory from their sister organization Micron (which I think has evolved into Micron/Crucial).
After the 586/686/Pentium/Pentium Pro/Athlon/Pentium II/III/4 wars, the market narrowed to two serious players. Intel took the route of developing the most stable platform they could. They focused on chipsets and reference platforms which made it so that board producers such as ABit, ASUS, etc... could release new motherboards without even having to reroute their boards. Intel simply gave them the designs and the board makers would try to differentiate based on peripherals. AMD on the other hand tried to make the boards easier to develop chipsets for. So companies such as ATI and nVidia would release the reference designs and simply use the AMD CPU as a component of the design.
It may sound strange, but although I was never able to establish scientific proof in favor of Intel or AMD regarding quality, I always had a little bit of a dark feeling when using AMD. It just seemed that while AMD completed the benchmarks faster, the AMD machines always showed slightly higher latencies when it mattered most to me. I can qualitify it based on application switching time and if a user were to watch me use a single processor/core system, the Intel hyperthreading chips always performed better than the AMDs, but in reality, when Intel released inexpensive dual processor systems using celerons on ABit motherboards, it spoiled me. Then until the dual core world came back around, I was forced to spend huge amounts of money on Xeon systems just to get the responsiveness I had earlier on crappy celeron machines.
My underlying point however is that when I buy Intel, I know I'm buying a processor from a company that was willing to lose market share for years just to make sure their next processor would be awesome and right. When I use AMD, I know I'm always using the absolute latest and fastest chip they can make, but I know they didn't put the years of testing in which Intel has. So it's really about the name
Oh, that's right. I guess I knew that.
I was afraid for a second I was going to find out that General Electric or Disney owned Slashdot.
Thanks for the reply.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Nvidia wanted nothing to do with joining with AMD. Yet AMD wanted to buy into graphics technology. Who else was there to buy?
Personally I'm quite happy with the move, even if you'll see most of Slashdot favor Nvidia over ATI.
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
TI seems to be doing well, as they supply a huge portion of the chips within Sun machines.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
when I think Intel, I think "what gimmick can we make this week?"
Seriously - MMX. Did CRAP forever, but they marketed the hell out of it. Same thing with the dual-core stuff (that 99% of applications don't even use), same thing with chips that hit extremely high GHz clock speeds for their time yet had performance less than an AMD chip that was "clocked" half as fast.
Seriously, redirect *.on.nimp.org to localhost.
Fnord.
"nVidia is NOT required to provide a driver for your laptop at all."
That's an interesting position taken by many suppliers. However, it isn't a sensible or workable position. When an nVidia driver fails to provide necessary performance, nVidia's reputation is damaged.
The laptop I mentioned came with a driver that was capable of many resolutions, but left out the most important for a large monitor, even though there were bigger resolutions supported. That's a nasty way to treat the customer. nVidia cannot avoid being considered at least partly responsible, even if they didn't have a good enough contract with buyers.
As an AMD stock holder I would like to send a big FUCK YOU to theregister and kdawson for regurgitating a 2 year old article to make people more nervous than they already are about AMD stock.
Sincerely,
PseudoLogic
Insert witty comment here
Let's collaborate in doing technology stock evaluations. My email address is above.