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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?"
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.
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"
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.
They think - or at least they claim to think - it's all about the platform. With ATi under their wing, they can now offer a complete PC ("Spider") or notebook ("Puma") without giving any sales to Intel on the CPU side or Nvidia on the chipset/graphics side. To be honest, I'm not convinced that's what they needed, but I can sort of see the appeal for them.
their processors (both CPU and GPU) are all but impressive these days
The Phenom's a bit of a disappointment, and will probably remain so until/unless people start writing much more parallelisable code (until then, Intel's bigger L2 cache more than makes up for Phenom's "true" quad-core design). But AMD are fighting back on the GPU side - the HD 3870 X2 has had some great reviews, and in many games it's faster than an 8800 Ultra for sixty quid less.
Of course, since Nvidia have just launched the 9600GT, we may presume there's a 9800GT on the way soon that'll blow both of them away; but while AMD's GPUs were, frankly, laughable all through 2007, the new cards definitely put them back in the game. I think they'll be with us for a while yet.
I'm hoping that their new interest in opening up documentation and APIs is along term winner and they follow that through properly. OSS really needs a top hardware vendor on board that is open. If ATI is a secondary income stream then "we're protecting our IP" *should* be heard less and less. If the open model is right then a vendor that makes solid open hardware should be a winner over closed locked down stuff.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
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?
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.
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.
2005 did arrive. You must have still been in high school then.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Sure, if the *only* things you are doing with your PC are looking at web pages and "doing email" (as some put it), or "office work", then our current PC's are fine. Of course, the same was true of the computers at the time I was quoted in the paper, too. I want to do *more* and I'm not alone.
Just look back to '93, then compare that with what we can do now. Now, try to imagine what we could be doing in another 14 years...
bork bork bork!
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.
If you'll note, I said E6750, not E6420. It'd be stupid to pay $200 when you can get a better processor for a bit less:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115029
Now unless it's one of the few apps that actually utilizes quad-core, the E6750 beats or compares to the 9700, which is at least $50 more expensive than it is (can't find a 9700 for sale anywhere, 9600 is $240). And if you need quad-core, the Q6600 is probably about the same price as the 9700 and about the same performance.
I've never been a fanboy of Intel nor AMD (being a fanboy in general is pretty stupid...no company always makes the best products). My prior PC was an AMD 64 3800+ (which is now chugging away happily as a server). I build AMD machines for the workstations where I work because you can make a great machine for $300. What I'm saying is that AMD is simply not competitive for most applications in the mid-high end right now. I really wish they were and hope they get there, because competition is good, very good. Intel getting the crap kicked out of it for years and producing the Conroe is a great example of why....had AMD not been beating them, they might have just stayed lazy and complacent and just done the standard MHz upgrades.
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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.
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