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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?"
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.
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!
What they originally wanted to do was merge with nVidia, it made sense at the time because nVidia was producing the best chipset for AMD CPUs. Anyway the communications between the 2 companies went sour, so AMD, still hot to do something picked the number 2 choice, ATI.
Now a merger between nVidia and AMD would have produced a powerful company. nVida has 3DFX tech, Telsa, chipsets and the 2 companies had already done a lot of joint work on the original X-BOX design (intel was a late entry). AMD brought CPU tech, flash and some other tech into the mix. However it was not meant to be.
So buying ATI was just a plan B, and not really optimal.
The Intel Core architechture is impressive. It's powerful enough over the Athlon that they can take shortcuts. Gives them more headroom for later, whereas the Athlon is reaching its maximum efficiency of instructions per clock so they have to be more thoughtful with their engineering.
Australian running a company that does C# / C++ / Java / SQL / Python / Mathematica
In the past, AMD had an architecture advantage over Intel and Intel had a slight process technology advantage.
Now the situation is different:
-Since the introduction of the Core 2 Duo Intel has the better architecture (minus memory controller though).
-Intel is smoking the rest of the industry with 45nm high-k/metal gate in therms of process technology. Compared to what has been published by IBM about their hkmg technology IBM/AMD has a long way to go to catch up.
And let me say this: Intels technology is extremely clever, they did one fundamentally different thing (gate first) against conventional wisdom which took them onto an entirely different path. Getting the fundamental flaws out of this approach enables a flurry of additional optimizations that IBM/AMD will not be able to apply in their technology. (full metal gates, not using any exotic materials for the gate)
The only disadvantage for intel could be higher cost/lower yield associated with the hkmg process. However they have the benefit of scale (in therms of volume) on their side. In addition they went go through the painful hkmg transition two years earlier and hence things will be much easier for them at the 32nm node. IBM/AMD will be in even more trouble than they are now. I predict that Intel will have a very quick 32nm ramp around the time IBM/AMD managed to get their 45nm hkmg process to manufacturable yield.
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.
When you are designing architectures for 7 or so years out, you need a powerful crystal ball, but no such thing exists. AMD just guessed wrong about the nature of future applications. Intel guessed wrong with the Itanium also. Maybe the common thread is you have to fit existing apps instead of the other way around. But, betting against app change has risk also.
Perhaps AMD should focus on the low end rather than guess what the high-end app technology of the future will look like. This may be a better bet for them because they cannot absorb the kinds of gambles that Intel can, being a smaller company. Thus, if they focus on the low-end, they don't have to predict the future of the high-end apps, reducing their risk. They just have to make existing apps run faster and/or cheaper. This would essentially force Intel to be the pioneer (of app change guessing) and take the arrows so that AMD doesn't have to. Of course there are the arrows of internal technology changes, but at least having to guess what *apps* of the future will be like is out of their court.
Table-ized A.I.
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
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*.
I've used several AMD processors (couple of Durons and now an Athlon X2). I chose them on a value for money basis. I never buy the fastest chips that command a heavy price premium, so the arguments over who has the top chip of the moment are irrelevant to me. I considered an Intel for my current PC, but the price difference was minimal and I know the AMD-based chipsets a bit better so I knew it should work for me. I do like to support the underdog, but not if it exceeds my budget.
Even in the last few years I have met people who consider AMD to be inferior or less reliable than Intel chips. Intel's marketing millions must be doing something for them, but I find their jingle intensely annoying when it crops up in the middle of an ad.
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.