Why AMD Could Win The Coming Visual Computing Battle

Vigile writes "The past week has been rampant with discussion on the new war that is brewing between NVIDIA and Intel, but there was one big player left out of the story: AMD. It would seem that both sides have written this competitor off, but PC Perspective thinks quite the opposite. The company is having financial difficulties, but AMD already has the technologies that both NVIDIA and Intel are striving to build or acquire: mainstream CPU, competitive GPU, high quality IGP solutions and technology for hybrid processing. This article postulates that both Intel and NVIDIA are overlooking a still-competitive opponent, which could turn out to be a drastic mistake."

Comments

... vested interest.

[konputer]

This was written by an AMD shareholder, of course. Guilty as charged as well, here.

Re:... vested interest.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure those AMD shares will come in handy some day... I, for instance, am out of paper towels.

Re:... vested interest.

[konputer]

I'm still rooting for AMD. I think that they can pull themselves out of the mess they made. Why? No sane reason. But whenever the U.S. economy decides to come back up, so will AMD.

Re:... vested interest.

[hey!]

There's always an element of drawing the bullseye around the bullet hole in business planning. Your position is never quite what you'd want it to be (with rare exceptions), so you job, in part, is to imagine a bright future that, through an incredible stroke of luck, start right where you're standing right now.

The thing is, while that is all necessary and good as part of business planning, individual investors really ought not to make investment decisions based on this kind of planning, unless they have their own teams of researchers and analysts and their own sources of information.

If you know nothing about the technology, you can't really examine something like this critically. If you know a great deal about it, you are even less qualified to make prognostications, because your opinion about what is good technology messes with your opinion about what makes good business sense.

Mark Twain was a very intelligent man, who lost his entire fortune investing in a revolutionary typesetting system. The things that made him a great writer made him a lousy investor: imagination, contrariness, a willingness to buck convention. Of course, exactly the same qualities describe a superb investor. The thing that really did him in was overestimating his knowledge of a market he was peripherally involved in.

It was natural for Twain to be interested in the process of printing books and periodicals, and to be familiar enough with the process of typesetting in general to see the potential, but not quite intimately enough to see the pitfalls. He would have been better off investing in something he had absolutely no interest or prior experience in.

Re:... vested interest.

[Vigile]

This was written by an AMD shareholder, of course.

Guilty as charged as well, here. I am absolutely not an AMD shareholder. Nor do I own anything in Intel or NVIDIA.

Re:... vested interest.

[Mr_eX9]

Circumstantial ad hominem...nothing to see here, move along.

Re:... vested interest.

[moderatorrater]

There's are 2 critical differences between Mark Twain's investing in a typesetting machine and me investing in AMD: I'm the target customer for AMD and I'm not going to invest principally in this one company. I would assume from your description of what happened to Mark Twain that he wasn't heavily involved with the people who used type setting machines and therefore made the purchasing decisions for them. On the other hand, I'm intimately familiar with all the reasons that people choose one company over another in computer parts.

So, to sum up my comment in an analogy, Mark Twain investing in type setting technology would be akin to me investing in a company that's trying to sell a new kind of fabrication technology. My investing in AMD would be more akin to Mark Twain investing in another author, or perhaps a particular publishing company.

Of course, since I haven't been in the stock market long enough to have any sort of track record, this is all armchair investing anyway.

Re:... vested interest.

[hey!]

Oh, certainly. I wasn't making a specific point about you.

If you've ever been on the product management end of the stick, though, the biggest danger is overestimating the number of people who think as you do or visualize their needs as you do. That's why it's dangerous for people with lots of technical knowledge to use it to guide their investments. You can overcome this, but it's a serious trap.

That's why I don't invest in tech companies at all; whenever I have it hasn't worked out.

I did pretty well in the financial services sector for some time, although I'll admit I had more than my fair share of luck. I simply chose that as one of my investments because money bores me. I'm mostly out now, but I'm thinking of getting back in now that that a disaster is making people scared of these stocks. That's the ticket: if you balance your portfolio, every time an industry goes down, you end up buying. Every time it goes up, you end up selling. Which is just another way of buying low and selling high.

It doesn't pay to get excited by a single company's brilliant potential. I'm actually contemplating getting out of stocks altogether because it's too tempting to be clever rather than patient. It's really a lot of trouble for an amateur to try to out think the market; it's better to out wait it.

Re:... vested interest.

[ZeebaNeighba]

Thats why I only invest in alcohol and gambling stocks

Re:... vested interest.

[SiriusStarr]

I have no doubt that AMD will survive; however, I highly doubt that they will win any visual computing battle. While ATI did recently have the theoretically "strongest" GPU, nVidia/Intel have traditionally been the seat of the "enthusiast hardware" (read: too expensive, but very powerful). AMD/ATI have generally put forward more economical varieties. Look at the Phenom. As per the review on Tom's Hardware it was 18% cheaper than the Intel quad-core but 18% slower. (I forget the exact value, but 24% or 18%, the example stands.) I would be surprised if this trend reversed itself in the future.

Re:... vested interest.

[Creepy]

I'm sure those AMD shares will come in handy some day... I, for instance, am out of paper towels. Just use dollar bills for the time being.

Re:... vested interest.

[Nursie]

AMD cheaper than intel yes, but ATI?

They were better and more expensive than their nVidia counterparts at several points over the last few years.

And whilst phenom has been a crash, AMD lead Intel by a considerable margin through the Athlon64/Opteron days, before Intel got the "Core" architecture up and running. They left the giant rival chipmaker in the dust, struggling to figure out a way to make the P4 competetive.

BTW, before anyone accuses me of fanboyism, I'll mention I'm posting from a Core 2 Duo box with an nVidia chip. The last upgrade cycle was AMD and ATI all the way, and I hope we do get back to the state where we have multiple players really able to compete and continually outdo each other.

That's good for all of us.

Re:... vested interest.

[billcopc]

You mean whenever they stop printing U.S. currency and drafting junk bonds ?

AMD is non-competitive. They tried to go for the high end, missed the mark by a mile and now their only foothold is the low-to-mid-range market. They're right back where they started 40 years ago, a cheap alternative to Intel products. Product research and development is not their strong card, because since the very inception of the company, their business has relied on cloning other people's technology. They got lucky with the early Athlons, chiefly due to Intel completely bungling NetBurst. Had it not been for that bastard P4, AMD would have stayed in 2nd place, and my Q6600 would have cost five times more than I paid.

AMD sucks, but they're just strong enough to keep Intel on guard and keep them from resuming their historic pricing strategy. Beyond that, I care not for the small American chip vendor.

Re:... vested interest.

[whereareweheadedto]

Nice fan you are. I know many others like you, fans of AMD, but currently running Core Duos, since they are cheap. I believe those fans are called "savvy consumers". I am a fan of AMD and I run their chips even in these times. Why? Because I consider myself a man of principles. Because I don't care about a couple dozen â in exchange for my principles. Because I don't need that extra power, that Core Duo provides.

Re:... vested interest.

[Beefpatrol]

As I understand it, back in the 386 days, Intel tried to sue AMD with regard to the instruction set architecture of the 386. (AMD produced a 386 that was in some ways superior to the one that Intel made, and they both used the same socket and were thereby almost completely interchangeable). Intel was eventually forced somehow to back down due to the US government's requirement that there be at least two sources for hardware sourced for national security (military) purposes. I am not sure if the arm twisting was achieved by the threat of not being awarded a contract to produce something for the government or by some other means, but I have heard that this was a substantial part of the reason that AMD didn't end up in serious trouble at that time. This requirement still applies in many cases, although I am not sure about the details of when it applies and when it does not.

I suspect that AMD won't be going away any more than the major US automakers have gone away when they were completely bankrupt in the past. AMD, like Chrysler in the 80s, for instance, is "too big to fail" because AMD represents the only real competition to Intel for processors in the ubiquitous computer market.

There are other candidates that could do decently well to provide a lot of the functionality that the majority of people want, but not that use the same instruction set, so all the software would have to be massively overhauled. I'm also not sure if any of the other vendors would have the fab capacity to meet demand. Of the other candidates, I'm speaking mainly about the IBM/whomever Cell processor / Power6 / Altivec derived chips or whatever they are calling the now exclusively big-iron oriented successor to the G5. Another possibility might be something built on top of the latest stuff from ARM, but a solution of that sort wouldn't solve a fab capacity problem if such a problem exists.

AMD has, in my opinion, taken prudent action by buying ATI. When you look at the Phenom architecture, there are some aspects of it that make it seem substantially better than Intel's Core architecture. The fact that it has an L3 cache that is shared by all cores makes it so that multiple threads attempting to perform shared-memory type parallel processing can avoid having to access RAM to share data. (For instance, a Core 2 Quad has two dies each of which has an L2 cache that is shared by the 2 cores on that die. If a user is running 4 processes, and they are attempting to share memory, the RAM access is likely to be the bottleneck. Intel's next generation chips are supposed to have an L3 that is shared among all cores like the AMD model.) I'm not sure why the Phenom isn't performing as well as a cursory look at the architecture makes me think it should, but then again, I don't know of any benchmarks that focus on the kinds of things that the Phenom architecture should be good at. (I'd like to see a benchmark that includes a lot of database activity or something that uses GSL in a multithreaded app to do some huge matrix calculations or something.) Perhaps the lackluster performance has to do with the much smaller cache sizes that the AMD chips use. I somewhat doubt that explains it all, however. I was originally going to post that the usually smaller set-associativity factor of the AMD caches makes them faster than the Intel ones, but I realized that I have no idea if any of this is true of the Phenom/Core 2 comparison. Does anyone know any details about how the Phenom caches work compared to the Core 2 architecture ones?

Re:... vested interest.

[sumdumass]

AMD won't come back until the make some key product marketing and customer service changes. I have now had three local shops drop AMD products because RMA's take a month or longer and they don't want the hassle of fronting a new product while waiting for the RMA to be returned so they can now have out sates parts on the shelf. Intel products are essentially a 1 week no questions asked turnaround.

They have to front the product or suffer a reputation sting where they could sell a product, have it work for a month, then end up with it being down for almost 2 months before some reconditions Piece comes back that only lasts 5 or 6 months. I usually don't even bother with RMA and warranty myself because of this problem. But they have made it almost impossible to buy an AMD processor within 50 miles of my house. The only main boards I can find are older outdated board that are over priced because they needed extra to deal with the RMA issues.

Until AMD fixes that and gets something reasonable in place, they will stay in the tubes. When I have a part fail, I need a replacement the same day. If it is under warranty, I could wait a few days. Even if I swap it out and attempt to resell the other part, it becomes extremely difficult because the tech is 6 months old by then and I have to cut the price enormously.

Re:... vested interest.

[Gr8Apes]

I foresee AMD's phenom, when it goes to 45nm and gets 6-8MB L3 cache easily beating the current crop of Core 2 Quads from Intel. Problem is, Nehalem should be out by then putting Intel and AMD on a level playing field. It should be interesting what happens in the performance battle at that point.

I own Core 2 Duo (laptops), Core 2 Quad (desktop), and an AMD X2 (desktop) as the recent CPUs. The 2 year old X2 easily keeps up with any Core 2 Duo in the sub $200 price range, until you hit the higher reaches of OC'ing. The Quad, however, just rocks. I couldn't get a B3 Phenom system for the $260 I paid for the C2 Quad and MB together that would run nearly as fast (3GHz - it's a good MB).

Getting back to the ATI buy, it could truly work out to a stroke of genius. ATI has some excellent hardware, and removing the layers of bureaucracy between the two companies should certainly allow for AMD to come out with an excellent CPU/Chipset/GPU support. I wouldn't be surprised to see a base GPU/FPU come out on the 45nm die about the time Nehalem comes out for a truly integrated CPU/GPU all in one system.

Re:... vested interest.

[DuckDodgers]

I think involvement inside the technical market is a problem. I think the volatility and unpredictable nature of the tech market is a problem.

I can't think of that many people outside the tech industry who have enough knowledge to get rich investing in it through anything more than luck.

Warren Buffett is an overused example, but I'll bring him up anyway: he avoids tech stocks entirely in favor of things he does understand, like insurance, soft drinks, retail stores, restaurants, and recently, railways.

Sorry, you overlooked the obvious

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Year over year annual growth has ceased and this past quarter shows a 0.2% decline in revenues.

Re:Sorry, you overlooked the obvious

[brunes69]

Only a 0.2 decline in revenues in the mist of what many consider an already begun recession ain't too bad.

Re:Sorry, you overlooked the obvious

[moderatorrater]

Apparently you didn't RTFA, because they describe the problems that AMD is having and then go on to say why the problems may be surmounted. In other words, you're overlooking the obvious position that AMD's in. nVidia doesn't have a CPU line that's one of the top CPUs in the market and in performance. Intel doesn't have a GPU that's competitive in performance. With the market moving towards greater integration and interaction between the CPU and the GPU, there's only one company that can deliver both.

So it's going to come down to whether or not AMD has the ability right now to keep pushing their product lines and innovating fast enough to beat Intel and nVidia to the punch. Their financial situation hurts their chances, but it doesn't negate them completely.

Re:Sorry, you overlooked the obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

"With the market moving towards greater integration and interaction between the CPU and the GPU, there's only one company that can deliver both." Why only one? Aren't you contradicting yourself?

Re:Sorry, you overlooked the obvious

[BobPaul]

Intel has CPU but their graphics are severly lacking. nVidia has GPU, but no CPU at all (unless they pair with VIA or someone else). AMD is the only one of the 3 that has both. How is that statement self contradicting?

Re:Sorry, you overlooked the obvious

[Jax Omen]

Pretty sure Nvidia just announced they WERE partnering with Via.

Re:Sorry, you overlooked the obvious

[jonbryce]

But how are they doing compared to Intel, Via, ARM etc? That's what matters. There may well be a recession in America, and to a lesser extent (so far anyway) in Europe, but that is nothing compared to the huge market increases in India and China

Re:Sorry, you overlooked the obvious

[BobPaul]

Hence why I mentioned VIA specifically ;)

Partnering with VIA gives nVidia about as much CPU as Intel already has GPU, though... Having class A components (even if they're really only A- or B+) in house could prove to be a big advantage for AMD.

Re:Sorry, you overlooked the obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

AMD may not be dead yet but they have been left lying on the battlefield with intestines hanging out.

As for the article, with several obviously wrong points (Intel's Nehalem to include on-die graphics?) I've seen more convincing stuff in pump-and-dump stock spam.

Re:Sorry, you overlooked the obvious

[mabhatter654]

exactly, I think AMD should have gotten Nvidia from the start as ATI was always an Intel fanclub, but the bucks landed and Intel cut the leading integrated chipset vendor (ATI was always ahead of Nvidia in low-end installs that did just what intel told them to) out with their integrated graphics push. Nvidia was much more in line with AMD in terms of chipsets that properly complimented AMDs Hyper-transport tech. The GPU/CPU is what AMD made Hyper-transport for, it will be neat to see it implemented. Theoretically, those quad socket opteron boards with dedicated memory paths could hold a combination CPUs or GPUs if AMD fancied it... that's a level of tech Intel specifically works against in their "master-slave" CPU approach.

The one thing AMD fans miss is that AMD had a huge jump in multi-processor, multi-core technology 4 years ago with opteron... and Microsoft backed up intel with late products and underutilized systems that made the Opterons less of a benefit.. until Intel caught up... now multi-core is cool. AMD should have pushed Linux and other OSes a lot harder with Opteron instead of thinking MS would "innovate" with their new technology. The real problem is that MS is holding back the markets (look at XP for eeePC) trying to hang on. It has to get slightly worse before it gets better.

Re:Sorry, you overlooked the obvious

[hairyfeet]

Yes, but let's be honest here. The place that an integrated CPU+GPU is looking good is in the booming laptop and ultra cheap (think Everex) desktops. And especially in laptops as we've seen with the EEE you really don't need a smoking fast CPU for what most of the target audience are doing with their laptops. Same with the ultra cheap desktops which are going to those that only surf the web, check email, and watch videos. By hooking up with Via (which IIRC has built in Mpeg 2 decoding and crypto engine) they will have a BIG advantage in those two growing markets. I for one would like an ultra low power Via laptop with built in hardware encryption yet enough graphics juice to play a few online games and watch vids with being skippy. If Nvidia partners the Via chips with a GPU that is low power and does native h.264 decoding it will make for a truly sweet laptop. But that is my 02c,YMMV

Re:Sorry, you overlooked the obvious

[Gr8Apes]

THe nVidia/Via partnership may result in what you project, but I guarantee that AMD/ATI will get there far far ahead of them, and will have a more powerful combination in both graphics and CPU for a given power consumption/thermal footprint.

Laptops are one area that this solution is great for, but so are any sub $500 PC. And don't forget, you can still always plug in a separate graphics adapter for XFire with AMD (at least that's the current speculation). nVidia's SLI solution doesn't even come close to XFire.

Re:Sorry, you overlooked the obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

nVidia's SLI solution doesn't even come close to XFire.

Except where performance is concerned. ;) XFire has a nice feature set, but ATI's cards have been a bit lacking for a while now...

Re:Sorry, you overlooked the obvious

[Shadow99_1]

Except Nvidia wouldn't sell out, so AMD couldn't buy them... If they merged the Nvidia CEO insisted on running the show... So, no I still think AMD made the right choice on which way to go graphics company-wise

Dons an asbestos suit...

[knavel]

Flamewar in 3...2...1...

Catch & Release...

[Deadfyre_Deadsoul]

Amd has supposed to have been dead and written off how many times in the past years? Ati as well?

Its nice to know that they still maintain an edge, even though they have no where near the capitol on hand that nVidia and Intel do.

I for one always liked Underdogs... :)

Re:Catch & Release...

[Solandri]

Amd has supposed to have been dead and written off how many times in the past years? Ati as well?

Its nice to know that they still maintain an edge, even though they have no where near the capitol on hand that nVidia and Intel do.

Heck, 10 years ago the press had anointed 3dfx as king while nVidia was a barely-mentioned also-ran indistinguishable from the half-dozen other 3D chipset manufacturers. These companies stumbling on one major release is no big deal. If they stumble on two sequential releases like 3dfx did, then maybe there's something to write about.

Re:Catch & Release...

[Anonymous Coward]

I love underdog's too, and have been praying for AMD to find a niche ever since it starting this 6 quarter stream of losses.... But they don't have enough resources to match Intel's product development cycles, Intel can start working on a competing product later and have it to market sooner. I think AMD will need a serious change in business model to stay afloat, but i hope that doesn't mean going fab-less.

More like zombie visual computing

[danhm]

I thought AMD was dead!

Re:More like zombie visual computing

[Culture20]

That's only when the submitter(s) want to sell short. Now that it's low and they've bought AMD stock again, it's time to raise the stock price.

Re:More like zombie visual computing

[beav007]

Not until Netcraft confirms it. You must be new here...

Re:Catch

[Xordan]

Wrong story? ;)

Re:AMD bought out ATI?

[Anonymous Coward]

That card is never going to use 1GB of VRAM.

Re:AMD bought out ATI?

[Slippery Pete]

$30 for an 8GB USB flash drive? That doesn't really compare to the 10 CENTS I pay for a blank DVD. I still need to share gigs of data with people where placing that data online isn't an option. If I had to spend $30 a pop to send these out, it would cost a small fortune.

And no, the information I'm sharing isn't illegal.

Cash Crunch

[Guppy]

I used to know an engineer who worked for AMD, and one of the things he would tell me about were the problems with the merger with ATI. There were a lot of manufacturing and engineering differences between the two companies that made it difficult to combine designs from the two. In addition, the poor financial situation of AMD meant they didn't have enough time and money to complete the "Fusion" CPU/GPU combo -- one of the main drivers behind the merger in the first place.

He said that the company will still bring something out, and that something will still go by the codename "Fusion", but it will not be the product originally envisioned at the time the companies decided to merge. He speculated maybe some kind of Multi-Chip Module -- essentially just a separate CPU and a separate GPU die mounted into the same packaging.

Re:Cash Crunch

[gnuman99]

Like the Intel's quad code offering (two dual-core chips)? It may not be so bad after all.

Re:Cash Crunch

[afxgrin]

Yeah - they should just stack the dies in some half-ass manner at first. Go back to some kind of Slut configuration, put the dies ass to ass, sandwich the bitch with heat sinks, put high speed interconnects through the ass-to-ass layer, and -tada- you've got the first generation of GPU and CPU in one. It's dirty, it's hot, but it works.

They can code name it "Finger cuffs" or something equally dumb.

Yeaah - they'll be using more wafer area than they would like, since the GPU and CPU would still be manufactured separately, but they can probably make up for the additional cost by charging some premium price.

Hell, it would still be cool if you could remove the GPU and drop in another one, or do the same with the CPU. At least by keeping the CPU and GPU so close they could keep the interconnect lengths short, and deviate from the AGP/PCI-E standard. That would have to yield some sort of substantial performance gain.

But then again - I have no experience in the manufacturing of these things, so my 2 cents is worth exactly that. I may have a chance getting in as a wafer handling monkey. As long as I don't have to manually stir wafers in HF, I really don't like that ...

Re:Cash Crunch

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll be quite disenfranchised if they (AMD/Intel/Whoever) start manufacturing CPU/GPU combo hardware that can't be upgraded independently at my discretion. I'm a very frugal (read: cheap) builder of my own custom rigs and I pride myself on getting the best bang for the best buck through wise choices of cheaper hardware.

I've had gaming rigs run for 5 years on the same mobo and chip, while only selectively upgrading the graphics card & RAM once or twice along the way.

The day they force me to buy some static cpu/gpu combo module for $500+ every year to keep up with the software is the day my PC becomes a media/web browsing machine and my gaming consoles take over that facet of my entertainment.

I rather like my ability to upgrade a single cheap piece of hardware to keep my rig running nicely every year or two. Thats the whole beauty of PC's over consoles. It'll be a shame if they funk that up.

Re:Cash Crunch

[moosesocks]

Remember that Intel spent billions developing the Itanium, whilst one of their cash-strapped subsidiaries in Israel came up with the Core Duo.

Just because Fusion might not be the glorious flagship envisioned by AMD doesn't mean that it'll flop.

Re:Cash Crunch

[Anonymous Coward]

This is pure BS. I *am* an engineer working at AMD (hence the anon post), and there are no "manufacturing and engineering differences" that remain unsolved in Fusion whatsoever. I can't say that the two parts of the company have been totally seamlessly integrated, but many of the design methodology kinks have been ironed out. Fusion processors *will* be single-die chips, not MCMs like the post above suggests. The first Fusion project (Fusion is a concept/family, comprising several entirely different designs) is well underway, and others will start soon. I wouldn't write AMD off just yet..

Re:Cash Crunch

[Cyclon]

I don't think anyone is suggesting that they will stop making and selling standalone CPUs and GPUs. This is just another option for applications (e.g., low cost, low power laptops) where it makes sense to combine the two.

Re:Cash Crunch

[Anonymous Coward]

dude, you were supposed to keep this quiet...! now my stock options will never rebound into the black...

Re:Cash Crunch

[mabhatter654]

somebody could make a GPU with Hyper-transport connections instead of the standard PCI-E. HT is designed for just that purpose. Perhaps AMD/ATI will try it out.

Re:Cash Crunch

[LoRdTAW]

Hyper transport won't help with rendering as much as faster GPU's would. Remember GPU's have their own memory on very wide buses that can move data at over 20GB per second. The integrated CPU/GPU stuff is most likely targeted at low end users like cheap PC's, media centers and embedded systems.

Me personally, would like to see SLI/Cross-Fire like setups actually give you a near 100% boost in rendering speeds. From all the benchmarks I have seen you barely get 20-30% speed increase for a 100% price increase. And some benchmarks are lower for SLI setups and require fine tuning for better performance. Screw that. If I spend twice the money I expect nearly twice the performance just like the good old Voodoo 2 days.

Re:AMD bought out ATI?

[What Would NPH Do]

Is that before or after you start playing Crysis?

Re:Catch

[jmpeax]

Argh! Evidently!

Silly me.

Apple's role in AMD-Intel war

[Ilyon]

I respect AMD and had faith in their ability to make a comeback in the past, but there's a new wrinkle this time: Apple.

Apple computer sales are growing at 2.5 times the industry rate, and they use Intel CPUs. With all the growth in the PC market going to Intel CPU's, is there much room for an AMD comeback?

I can see two ways for AMD to make a comeback. If Apple's agreement to use Intel CPUs expires and AMD can win some business with Apple, AMD can latch on to Apple's growth. But Apple chose Intel for its ability to ramp up production. Will AMD be able to provide the same? Will AMD be willing to give up other customers to meet Apple's demand?

If Apple chooses this route, how big of an architecture change will this be? I've no doubt Apple can provide developer tools to aid the migration, but will Core 2 optimizations easily translate to AMD optimizations?

Will Apple take the risk of supporting both architectures? They are very active in LLVM development, which allows dynamic optimization of code. If LLVM works as well as many hope, Apple could deliver software in a common binary format that automatically adapts to any architecture using LLVM. This would be quite novel. Apple would benefit from ongoing competition between Intel and AMD while giving AMD a fighting chance in a market increasingly dominated by Apple.

The other potential AMD savior is Linux. Can the open source community deliver software that can take advantage of AMD's CPU-GPU architecture spectacularly enough to give AMD the sales it needs?

If Apple weren't in Intel's camp, I would invest in AMD with confidence in a turnaround, but I think the fate of AMD lies largely with adoption by Apple or Linux.

What do you think?

Re:Apple's role in AMD-Intel war

[dreamchaser]

OS X runs just fine on SSE3 equipped AMD CPU's as it stands. It's not supported of course but it runs just fine. They (Apple) could easily support AMD even if they didn't optimize for them quite as much as they do for the Core 2 architecture. Frankly, I'm not sure the difference would be all that noticeable compared to the already noticeable delta in performance between the two main x86 architectures.

Re:Apple's role in AMD-Intel war

[cesclaveria]

I know Apple is growing, but I sincerely doubt that it will have such a great impact. What is Apples current market share? 5%?

Re:Apple's role in AMD-Intel war

[moderatorrater]

What do you think? That linux is a dominant player in the server market and that Apple is pretty much negligible in either. With how similar Intel and AMD chips tend to be, I don't know that there's anything stopping Apple from switching to AMD at any time. Either way, it's a relatively small chunk of the desktop market.

The other potential AMD savior is Linux. Can the open source community deliver software that can take advantage of AMD's CPU-GPU architecture spectacularly enough to give AMD the sales it needs? This is an interesting question. When AMD comes out with their chips, if they really want to impress people with its abilities, they would do well to get some coders working on Folding@Home working on their new chips. It was impressive to see what ATI cards could do with the code, and it would be a great way to showcase the abilities to computationally heavy programs that run on servers (thereby breaking into that market).

On the desktop end they would have to get something working to showcase the performance in games. Unfortunately, open source doesn't have a lot of 3d games floating around.

Whatever happens, I think they're going to have to show something that works well with windows or else they're going to flop. If it works well enough with windows and they can show substantial performance improvements, then get manufacturing capacity up, they might be able to land an Apple contract. It would be huge for publicity and for a single contract, but for the overall market, it's not going to make or break them.

Re:Apple's role in AMD-Intel war

[Colonel Korn]

AMD never sold CPUs to Apple, and based on your Apple Growth = 2.5*Total PC Growth with Apple's still very small market share, the non-Apple PC market is growing too (which we already know, anyway). So AMD's potential market is expanding. I think that's probably not a bad thing for them.

As to your later comments, Intel and AMD CPUs still follow the x86 architecture that make them play nice with the same software. I imagine Mac software would work just fine on an AMD chip, and I seem to recall reading about hacked OSX doing just fine on AMD. AMD's CPU marketing these days is about price/performance, though, which might not appeal to those who want the Apple experience.

Re:Apple's role in AMD-Intel war

[WhiteWolf666]

IIRC its near 10% now. Nearly 20% of laptop sales, too.

I know its 25% of laptop sales by revenue, but I'm not sure on the unit counts.

Re:Apple's role in AMD-Intel war

[CODiNE]

Yeah they just passed Toshiba last quarter, next up is Acer, then HP and finally Dell. We'll see where they currently stand with the next report from Apple coming soon.

Re:Apple's role in AMD-Intel war

[TJamieson]

Indeed, AMDs can run OS X. The main thing Apple did to prevent this was to put CPUID calls into their binaries. Patch those out and you're running on AMD. (There's more to it than just this, of course, but that's the biggest issue).

Re:Apple's role in AMD-Intel war

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure that is just retail US sales, which is a tiny fraction of total computer sales. It ignores all of HP and Dell's direct and reseller sales.

I don't know why people want so badly for Apple to have better sales. Apple is awful to deal with pretty much from any angle. The only thing they have is that they aren't Microsoft.

Never one penny of my money with my knowledge.

Re:Apple's role in AMD-Intel war

[Anonymous Coward]

"RETAIL SALES- ignoring the rather large volume of sales by direct vendors, and resellers."

Apple is irrelevant in terms of computer sales.

Re:Apple's role in AMD-Intel war

[Creepy]

I'd be curious to know how well AMD CPUs running software OpenGL (which actually uses those SSE instructions). Supposedly AMD supports it, in fact, they released SSE5 while Intel continues working on its replacement, AVX

Re:Apple's role in AMD-Intel war

[MojoStan]

IIRC its near 10% now. Nearly 20% of laptop sales, too. As others have pointed out, those numbers are from USA retail sales, which doesn't include international sales and non-retail sales (e.g. direct, business). I think total worldwide unit sales is what's important for your original point about Apple's role in the AMD-Intel war.

According to Gartner's latest numbers, Apple had 6.6% of USA sales in Q1 2008, up from 5.2% in Q1 2007. IDC says Apple has 6% USA market share, up from 4.9%.

Apple's worldwide market share wasn't listed because they weren't in the top 5, but it's less than 4.4% (Toshiba's worldwide share).

Re:Apple's role in AMD-Intel war

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you think? That linux is a dominant player in the server market and that Apple is pretty much negligible in either. With how similar Intel and AMD chips tend to be, I don't know that there's anything stopping Apple from switching to AMD at any time. Either way, it's a relatively small chunk of the desktop market.

The other potential AMD savior is Linux. Can the open source community deliver software that can take advantage of AMD's CPU-GPU architecture spectacularly enough to give AMD the sales it needs? This is an interesting question. When AMD comes out with their chips, if they really want to impress people with its abilities, they would do well to get some coders working on Folding@Home working on their new chips. It was impressive to see what ATI cards could do with the code, and it would be a great way to showcase the abilities to computationally heavy programs that run on servers (thereby breaking into that market).

On the desktop end they would have to get something working to showcase the performance in games. Unfortunately, open source doesn't have a lot of 3d games floating around.

Whatever happens, I think they're going to have to show something that works well with windows or else they're going to flop. If it works well enough with windows and they can show substantial performance improvements, then get manufacturing capacity up, they might be able to land an Apple contract. It would be huge for publicity and for a single contract, but for the overall market, it's not going to make or break them. AMD already has a good amount of revenue coming from the server market, they're losing hold with the new quad Xeons but it still makes a substantial part of AMD's annual revenue

Re:Apple's role in AMD-Intel war

[mabhatter654]

because Apple is a big enough name to break the mental hold Microsoft has. When Developers start paying attention to Mac, Linux and others will hopefully get some attention too.

Re:Apple's role in AMD-Intel war

[CajunArson]

Uh... AMD released a powerpoint presentation about SSE5 and if they are lucky it will be shipping at about the same time the AVX instructions appear in production Intel Silicon.
    If AMD's powerpoint slides magically came true then Barcelona would have been out in April... of 2007, and it would have actually been faster and less power-hungry than Intel's chips. Unfortunately, presentations != reality.

Re:Apple's role in AMD-Intel war

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple computer sales are growing at 2.5 times the industry rate, and they use Intel CPUs. With all the growth in the PC market going to Intel CPU's, is there much room for an AMD comeback?

Balderdash. Apple's growth isn't materializing out of thin air. They're taking customers from other PC/laptop manufacturers, or upgrading older Apple machines. The net gain in new customers to Intel is precisely zero. Even if Apple were growing the market, 2.5 times Apple's market share is still less than bupkis to Intel's total sales volume. In short, Apple is a virtual non-factor in the Intel-AMD game.

Re:Apple's role in AMD-Intel war

[dreamchaser]

Software only OpenGL is horribly slow without a GPU to accellerate it, no matter how many SIMD extensions you have at your disposal.

Re:Apple's role in AMD-Intel war

[Creepy]

You're right - SSE5 was only a spec, and it looks like it is expected in the same timeframe as AVX. I actually heard someone talk about them both in a podcast, but I was at work and apparently wasn't paying enough attention. So much for multitasking :)

Anyhow, that wasn't my point - I was wondering if it worked in software mode.

Re:Apple's role in AMD-Intel war

[Creepy]

Apple also supports hybrid rendering, so if you aren't doing too much in software, you may be able to get away with it. I actually use software mode for testing, but my mac is ancient (it can't even run X.5), so it isn't much good.

Re:Apple's role in AMD-Intel war

[Shadow99_1]

AMD was (I haven't checked the statistics lately) making large gains in the server market... In fact they tend to take a large chunk of both low end PC & server markets, with weak laptop sales (not for lack of good mobile cpus though) & average mid-high end PC sales.

They don't have much need to show off server muscle, Intel still has to work to compete with AMD on performance in that market where Core 2 didn't make as strong a comeback for them.

Monkey See, Monkey Do

[MOBE2001]

Nvidia has a better chance to compete successfully against Intel because their executives do not think like Intel. AMD, OTOH, is a monkey-see-monkey-do company. Many of their executives (e.g., Dirk Meyer) and lead engineers came from Intel and they only see the world through Intel glasses. Having said that, this business of mixing coarse-grain MIMD and fine-grain SIMD cores on a single die to create a heterogeneous processor is a match made in hell. Anybody with a lick of sense can tell you that universality should be the primary goal of multicore research and that incompatible processing models should not be encouraged let alone slapped together. Programming those hybrid processors will be more painful than pulling teeth with a crowbar. Heck, breaking programs down into threads is a pain in the ass. Why would anybody want to make things worse?

The best strategy, IMO, is to work on a universal processor that combines the strengths of both MIMD and SIMD models while eliminating their obvious weaknesses. AMD needs somebody with the huevos to say, "fooey with this Intel crap! Let's carve our own market and create a completely new technology for a completely new paradigm, parallel processing". Is Hector Ruiz up to the task? Only time will tell. For a different take on the multicore and CPU/GPU issue, read Nightmare on Core Street.

Re:Monkey See, Monkey Do

[What Would NPH Do]

Let's carve our own market and create a completely new technology for a completely new paradigm, parallel processing". Parallel processing is a new paradigm? Since when? The 1960s called, they want you to stop stealing their ideas.

Re:Monkey See, Monkey Do

[Anonymous Coward]

And someone will surely say,

  Does it run Linux?

And the answer will probably be yes. Then someone else will ask, Does it run Windows?

  And the answer will probably be No.

And the whole think will be ignored except for a few server affictionadoes.
A shame really but there you go.

Re:Monkey See, Monkey Do

[Vigile]

I don't agree with this: it was AMD that led Intel into the world of on-die memory controllers as well as removing the front side bus from PC architecture.

Re:Monkey See, Monkey Do

[MOBE2001]

Parallel processing is a new paradigm? Since when? The 1960s called, they want you to stop stealing their ideas.

What's being passed as parallel processing is not really parallel processing. In fact this is the reason that parallel programming is so hard: it's not what it's claimed to be. Switch to a true parallel programming model and the problem will disappear. Read Why Parallel Programming Is So Hard to find out why multithreading is really a fake parallelism.

Re:Monkey See, Monkey Do

[Anonymous Coward]

Wa? How did they get our number? ??

Re:Monkey See, Monkey Do

[What Would NPH Do]

And yet that doesn't change the fact that neither parallel programming or parallel processing (yes the exact same meaning of the words as you are using them) is not new. All of it is based off of work from the 1960s.

Re:Monkey See, Monkey Do

[MOBE2001]

I don't agree with this: it was AMD that led Intel into the world of on-die memory controllers as well as removing the front side bus from PC architecture.

These things are just evolutionary improvements to exisiting technology and it goes to prove that AMD does have excellent engineering talent, which was never really in doubt. What is needed now is a completely new technology to solve a nasty problem that threatens to bring the industry down to its knees. AMD can do it. Question is, do Ruiz and the big money people behind AMD have the huevos and the vision to step up to the plate?

Re:Monkey See, Monkey Do

[samkass]

From the introduction of the Athlon by AMD (the first really "modern" x86 CPU that finally eliminated most of the CISC disadvantages), though on-die memory controllers and dragging Intel kicking and screaming into the 64-bit world, right up until AMD's lack of a solid response to Core, I'd say AMD led Intel's thinking. Now they're the followers again.

Re:Monkey See, Monkey Do

[ThePhilips]

That reminds me of AMD before Opteron release. Their CPUs sucked because they were always catching up with Intel. Their finances sucked. Luckily for them Intel made strategical mistake (called Itanic thus giving AMD opportunity and enough time to release completely new architecture - AMD64.

I wonder if AMD will get lucky second time - in the repeated "nothing to lose" situation.

/me crossing fingers.

Re:Monkey See, Monkey Do

[idiotnot]

And introducing x64....of which some of the design mistakes will come back to bite us in another fifteen years, as it just extends the agony of 8086 legacy even longer. IA64 may be overreaching, but what AMD did wasn't the answer, either.

In any event, Intel still seems far better positioned to move forward than either AMD or nVidia. The abrupt course correction from NetBurst to Core well illustrated that.

And, to be fair, the integrated graphics are a *lot* better than they used to be, and certainly better than some of the real cheap kit (Via, SiS, etc.). I've been pretty pleased with the couple of boards I bought recently w/ 945G chipsets. One happily serves NFS and Samba shares, and rarely has a monitor connected. The other plays videos off that NFS server, with nary a problem running 720p video. It also runs 10C cooler since I pulled the 6600GT in favor of another capture card.

Re:Monkey See, Monkey Do

[Vigile]

Yeah, I forgot about 64-bit - another instance in which Intel was lacking.

And in truth, AMD APPEARS to be ahead in the move to fusing a CPU and GPU architecture into something new.

Re:Monkey See, Monkey Do

[samkass]

I don't think you're obviously correct. You may turn out to be correct, but there is a lot to be said for heterogeneous processors on a single die.

Some thoughts:
1. A very-low power, slow core tied to a super heavy-duty number cruncher on the same die that use the same instruction set. One could imagine an OS shutting off the big core when all it has to do is blink the cursor to save power, but firing it back up when you click "Compute". Done right, it seems like this could give you a laptop with a day or more of typical battery power.
2. GPUs and CPUs are fundamentally different beasts, and many of the slowdowns are due to either shuffling textures between RAM and GPU, or coordinating CPU and GPU. nVidia is taking the tack of moving more computation to the GPU (physics, etc). It may be equally valid to move the GPU onto the CPU die so the CPU can do the collision/hit detection and the GPU the rendering with very fast coordination.
3. SIMD instructions have been grafted onto MIMD processors ever since the original MMX, and before that DSPs lived on the motherboards of some Macs and NeXT workstations. They're really two fundamentally different kinds of computing, and I'm not ready to say that it wouldn't make sense to separate them out into separate cores.
4. Some embedded CPUs can already run Java bytecode natively as well as some other ABI like ARM. I could imagine a world where some of the dynamic natures of modern languages is combined with hardware support to give us some pretty powerful little machines.

Re:Monkey See, Monkey Do

[MOBE2001]

Look, parallel processing is new for the mainstream. This is the point that Bill McColl made on his blog recently. Read Microsoft Agrees, Parallelism IS The New New Thing!

Re:Monkey See, Monkey Do

[Anonymous Coward]

...work on a universal processor that combines the strengths of both MIMD and SIMD models while eliminating their obvious weaknesses. And just what, pray tell, is that model? Really, I'm interested. How do you get the best of both with the weaknesses of neither?

Re:Monkey See, Monkey Do

[What Would NPH Do]

When Microsoft finally jumps on the bandwagon for something and starts calling it a "new thing" you're sure to know it's at least a decade or more old.

Re:Monkey See, Monkey Do

[Anonymous Coward]

Well the jerk store called and they're running out of you!

Re:Monkey See, Monkey Do

[moosesocks]

Intel got lucky with Core. It was never on their roadmap as a flagship desktop chip.

It's effectively a multicore version of a laptop-adapted Pentium III with a bunch of modern features tacked on.

Nobody ever envisioned that this would work as well as it did, and Intel only started paying attention to the idea once their lab in Israel was producing low-power mobile chips that were faster than their flagship Pentium 4 desktop chips.

AMD didn't have an answer to Core, because Intel themselves were largely ignorant of the fact that the P6 architecture that they had previously deemed obsolete was adaptable to more modern systems. AMD saw Itanium and Pentium 4 in Intel's roadmaps, and knew that it had nothing to fear, as the products they had developed were vastly superior to both.

Re:Monkey See, Monkey Do

[nxtw]

But looking back, what practical advantage does an on-die memory controller have for the end-user? HyperTransport has less latency and more bandwidth, but Intel Core CPUs remain competitive performance-wise without these features.

It was never the monumental change many made it out to be for desktop systems; it's another incremental improvement in performance.

Re:Monkey See, Monkey Do

[turing_m]

They asked the operator.

Re:Monkey See, Monkey Do

[shizzle]

Many of their executives (e.g., Dirk Meyer) and lead engineers came from Intel and they only see the world through Intel glasses.

That's a pretty serious mischaracterization. Though Dirk Meyer worked at Intel for 3 years early in his career, he spent the next 9 years at DEC working on the early Alpha CPUs (see here). Many of AMD's other current & former top engineers on the CPU side are ex-DEC people as well (Mike Uhler, Rich Witek, Jim Keller in the past, etc.). IBM is the other main source of top AMD engineers (Rich Oehler, Chuck Moore, until recently Phil Hester, etc.).

There are some top folks from Intel too but they're definitely in the minority.

Notice that there are no Intel people mentioned here.

Re:Monkey See, Monkey Do

[MOBE2001]

That's a pretty serious mischaracterization.

Gosh. You make it sound like AMD is being accused of a crime. The point I was making is that, even if there are only a few former Intel leaders at AMD, the fact remains that AMD was formed to compete against Intel on Intel's own turf, x86 compatibility. Not that there was anything wrong with that in those days. AMD did pretty well considering what they were up against. My point is that the computer world has changed drastically to the point that even Intel is getting scared, whether or not they admit it. It is time to change. The x86 line is ancient technology from the last century. Now the market is screaming for a multicore processor that is super fast, and uses a fine grain MIMD software model to run rock solid applications. In addition, the new processor must be so easy to program that everybody will want to abandon their legacy code and adopt the new model. You cannot come up with a processor like that if all you think about is how to maintain a slight me-too superiority over Intel's technology. AMD must climb up the vision pole so they can see what's beyond Intel's backyard.

Re:Monkey See, Monkey Do

[shizzle]

Gosh. You make it sound like AMD is being accused of a crime. Not a crime, but depending on your opinion of Intel, it could easily be taken as an insult...

The point I was making is that, even if there are only a few former Intel leaders at AMD, the fact remains that AMD was formed to compete against Intel on Intel's own turf, x86 compatibility. AMD's been around since 1969, well before x86, so to say they were "formed" for that purpose isn't right. That is where they've largely ended up though.

You cannot come up with a processor like that if all you think about is how to maintain a slight me-too superiority over Intel's technology. AMD must climb up the vision pole so they can see what's beyond Intel's backyard. I won't disagree with that. However I think where AMD has succeeded in the past it has been because they have done far more than "me too" with respect to Intel, within the narrower confines of commercially viable systems. And I think some of that is because they've hired non-Intel engineers from companies like DEC and IBM that have a much broader "system" view than just a "microprocessor" view. That's why I objected so strenuously to your initial claim.

So overall I don't disagree with your point that Intel and AMD are largely in the same market and as such are in the same boat as well. But I think your "monkey-see-monkey-do" characterization of AMD overlooks their record of innovations with respect to Intel (HyperTransport, x86-64, integrated memory controllers), and some of the factual details you're using to back that up (like being staffed with lots of former Intel executives, and being formed to compete against Intel) are just not true.

Re:Monkey See, Monkey Do

[MrNaz]

"a few server affictionadoes"

Yea, AMD would really suffer if this small, insignificant market was the only bunch who liked their products.

Re:Monkey See, Monkey Do

[imgod2u]

Funny, this is actually what Intel's doing. Nehalem is built on scalable cores that can be stitched together to form massive processing arrays. Imagine something very much like ARM cores today but with an improved system interconnect. Start thinking tiles instead of cores. Start thinking routing instead of system bus. Start thinking FPGA-fabric like devices instead of SoC's.

Hope

[Nom du Keyboard]

We as consumers can only hope that this will be true.

they have not "written them off"

[EjectButton]

Nvidia and Intel are well aware of AMD and have not "written this competitor off". The only one ignoring AMD is the technology press because they are generally too stupid to focus on more than two things at a time. Most articles are presented in a context of "x is going to overtake y" "technology x is a y-killer". Conflict sells and overly simplistic conflict sells to a wider audience.

AMD has some financial problems and their stock may sink for a while but they are not about to go bankrupt. If anyone should be worried about their long-term prospects it's Nvidia. Intel and AMD both have complete "platforms" as in they can build a motherboard with their own chipset, their own GPU and stick their own CPU in it. Nvidia has a GPU and not a whole lot more, their motherboard chipsets are at an obvious disadvantage if they need to design chipsets exclusively for processors whose design is controlled by their direct competitors.

Nvidia's strength has been that on the high-end they blow away intel GPUs in terms of speed and features, Intel has been slowly catching up and their next iteration will be offered both onboard and as a discrete card and will have hardware-assisted h.264 decoding.

Nvidia's advantage over ATI has been that ati has generally had inferior drivers regardless of what platform you were using, since AMD took over ATI has been improving their driver situation significantly both with respect to thei proprietary drivers and their recent release of specs for the open source version. Meanwhile Nvidia seems to have been doing everything they can to trash the reputation of their drivers over the last year both with their awful Vista drivers and their buggy/sloppy control panel that they have forced on everyone.

The consensus lately is that we are looking at a future where you will have a machine with lots of processor cores and cpu/gpu/physics/etc functions will be tightly coupled. This is a future that does not bode well for Nvidia since the job of making competitive chipsets for their opponents will get tougher while they are at the same time the farthest from having their own platform to sell.

Re:they have not "written them off"

[EMeta]

Speaking of which, does anybody know of anything I can do to get rid of or minimize how much I have to see Nvidia's control panel?

Re:they have not "written them off"

[GregPK]

I think its just a move with the cuda engine that needs refinement. As it grows mature, driver issues will subside.

AMD is making a break for the open source arena. I gave Hectar that advice a while ago. Apparently, he was listening in his anonymous drunken stupor on the financial forums. AMD is poised to make a stand in the next 2 to 3 years.

Re:they have not "written them off"

[Anonymous Coward]

minimize how much I have to see Nvidia's control panel? Stop opening it?

Re:they have not "written them off"

[RiotingPacifist]

Nvidia's advantage over ATI has been that ati has generally had inferior drivers regardless of what platform you were using, since AMD took over ATI has been improving their driver situation significantly both with respect to their proprietary drivers and their recent release of specs for the open source version. Meanwhile Nvidia seems to have been doing everything they can to trash the reputation of their drivers over the last year both with their awful Vista drivers and their buggy/sloppy control panel that they have forced on everyone. while this is good for linux, are they making similar improvements in the windows arena, I may be biased but i always preferred nvidia drivers to to ati ones.
If ati sort out there drivers then they will be able to cash in on the market that needs these chips, which also happens to be the one where the money is, laptops.

My only problem with AMD, is that their CPUs dont seam to scale as low as intel ones, my current 2.0ghz only drops to 800mhz, but my intel one would drop fro 1.6ghz to 200mhz, not sure how this reflects in powerusage though. Thinking of power usage, is anybody working on moving wireless on to CPUs or save power on wifi in other ways?, because the although nice graphics are welcome, its battery life that laptop users really want, if getting AMD or Intel on a laptop is going to result in having an extra hour, i dont really care which has the better graphics chip.

Re:they have not "written them off"

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny and Correct :}

I've been using nvidia gaming based cards now for 7 or 8 years now (4 different cards). I don't even know what control panel he's talking about.

There is the little icon in the bottom of the screen, I normally just remove that from my msconfig, does not hinder the operation of the card or drivers at all.

Re:they have not "written them off"

[toejam13]

Nvidia could get around their lack of a complete platform through the purchase of VIA. Their C3 line could be ramped in such a way to compete with AMD and Intel's processor lines. Furthermore, VIA's processor division does have some experience with blended CPU+GPU designs from the MediaGX days. The major problem, though, is that the C3 line is more of an embedded processor design than a mainstream one. But that may not be bad for integrated systems for devices like laptops.

Re:they have not "written them off"

[nxtw]

My only problem with AMD, is that their CPUs dont seam to scale as low as intel ones, my current 2.0ghz only drops to 800mhz, but my intel one would drop fro 1.6ghz to 200mhz, not sure how this reflects in powerusage though.

Your Intel CPU would drop from 1600 MHz to 200 MHz? Are you sure?

My 1200MHz Core 2 Duo ULV only drops to 800 MHz. My 4 year old Pentium M system dropped from 1400 MHz to 600 MHz.

Thinking of power usage, is anybody working on moving wireless on to CPUs or save power on wifi in other ways?

That makes no sense. Wifi is going to use power no matter what; it takes power to transmit.

because the although nice graphics are welcome, its battery life that laptop users really want, if getting AMD or Intel on a laptop is going to result in having an extra hour, i dont really care which has the better graphics chip.

The CPU and screen still use more power than your wireless transmitter, so get a laptop with an ULV CPU, a LED backlit screen, and a big battery.

Re:they have not "written them off"

[RiotingPacifist]

Your Intel CPU would drop from 1600 MHz to 200 MHz? Are you sure? Fairly sure, but i dont have it with me so cant confirm it as 100%,it was a celeron.

That makes no sense. Wifi is going to use power no matter what; it takes power to transmit. but it also uses alot of interups, the my powertop on an idle internet conenction looks something like:

Top causes for wakeups: 10s
    46.6% (113.4) : wifi0
    11.4% ( 27.8) firefox-bin : futex_wait (hrtimer_wakeup)
      9.3% ( 22.6) kontact : schedule_timeout (process_timeout)
      7.9% ( 19.2) kicker : schedule_timeout (process_timeout)
      4.8% ( 11.7) Xorg : do_setitimer (it_real_fn)
      4.5% ( 11.0) : acpi surely something can be done to cut that down on the cpu wake ups. Or development of a power saving protocol that dosen't use battery when nothing is being sent/received.

Re:they have not "written them off"

[nxtw]

surely something can be done to cut that down on the cpu wake ups. Or development of a power saving protocol that dosen't use battery when nothing is being sent/received.

are more CPU wakeups bad? It appears this means that the CPU is sleeping more. NICs have to do something with those packets.

Many NICs already have interrupt moderation.

Re:they have not "written them off"

[mabhatter654]

Via's new C5 is pretty good. At least as good as the low end dreck Celeron D's intel is still selling. That's good enough to put a very good motherboard GPU with and get a well balanced system. That's where Intel's strategy falls down right now. I'm sitting on a T7300 that's worthless for gaming because it's tied to "extreme" graphics... i have a 3 year old Sempron with good graphics that runs games better... that's very sad.
It looks more like their design might be for small integrated devices maybe a little bigger than eeePC.

AMD not a contender

[Anonymous Coward]

All this might be true if AMD didn't continuously shoot themselves in the foot. Socket 472/754/939/940/AM2/AM2+/AM3 anyone?

Re:AMD not a contender

[Vigile]

AMD has traditionally had a much more stable platform than Intel...

S939 was around a long time.

AM2, AM2+ are compatible.

Intel has had just LGA775 long time - but with all the new processor release new power requirements forced new motherboards to be purchased / manufactured anyway.

For someone that goes through a LOT of motherboards, I still give AMD the edge here.

Why AMD + ATI should win, plus why they won't

[Alzheimers]

Why AMD + ATI Should win: Hypertransport. Putting the GPU on the same bus as the CPU should theoretically eliminate whatever roablocks the PCI bus created. Plus, allowing for die-2-die communication and treating the GPU as a true co-processor instead of a peripheral should open up huge possibilities for performance boosts.

Why AMD + ATI won't win: AMD won't risk alienating their OEM partners who also manufacture Intel motherboards and NVidia boards. Also, it's AMD.

Re:Why AMD + ATI should win, plus why they won't

[Kelz]

If you combined a current CPU with a current GPU:

It'd overheat. Like crazy. Current GPUs usually run 40c hotter than most CPUs.

Re:Why AMD + ATI should win, plus why they won't

[MojoStan]

Why AMD + ATI Should win: Hypertransport. Another possible reason AMD + ATI won't win: it's too late. Intel's QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) is coming later this year when Nehalem ("tock") is launched.

Putting the GPU on the same bus as the CPU should theoretically eliminate whatever roablocks the PCI bus created. Plus, allowing for die-2-die communication and treating the GPU as a true co-processor instead of a peripheral should open up huge possibilities for performance boosts. Intel has said (and shown in their diagrams) that some versions of Nehalem will have integrated graphics. However, their big GPU statement isn't coming until 2009-2010 in the form of Larrabee. Even if Larrabee is delayed, it might be too late for AMD's Fusion. By the time Fusion launches, Intel should have their interconnect and GPU ready.

What you need to know about Intel's Nehalem CPU: Page 1
Nehalem Architecture: Improvements Detailed
A Little on Larrabee

Re:Why AMD + ATI should win, plus why they won't

[imgod2u]

The CPU to GPU interconnect was never really much of a bottleneck. When AGP went from 4x to 8x (double the speed) there was barely any improvement. The same is true of going to PCI-E. Yes, it is because all graphics cards include a huge pool of obscenely fast DRAM on it such that it almost never needs to go over the peripheral bus but the types of bandwidth required here simply isn't reproduce-able even with high-speed interconnects like Hypertransport or Quickpath.

From a performance perspective, graphics processing is not limited at all by how fast it can communicate with the CPU. It's limited, like pretty much everything, by how fast it can communicate with memory (either its own or system memory). I don't see integrating the GPU and CPU as solving this problem. If anything, it'll make it worse from a performance (though perhaps not from a power or cost) perspective.

I used to work at Intel...

[vivin]

... and I recall during company meetings we would be told that Intel was "keeping an eye on nVidia". AMD not so much. Intel looks at nVidia to be a new and strong threat.

A-Team

[afxgrin]

This is definitely a win for the A-Team. I'm sure Mr. T feels pity for the fools...

Re:A-Team

[rydan]

AMD puts the - in A-Team.

Re:AMD bought out ATI?

[Kingrames]

I was referring to [cost of drive] + [cost of countless cd's].

AMD has some great solutions

[LWATCDR]

Right now AMD has some great CPUs on the low end and the best integrated graphics solution.
A huge number of PCs never pay a game more graphically intensive than Tetris and are never used to transcode video!
Right now on newegg you can pick up an Athlon X2 64 4000 for $53.99
The cheapest Core2Duo is $124.99. Yes it is faster but will you notice? Most people probably will not.

Re:AMD has some great solutions

[zIRtrON]

True.
I just bought a test machine with an AMD chip for $100 aussie dollars.

That meant I could buy 8GB of RAM and do some Xen testing :)

Re:AMD bought out ATI?

[What Would NPH Do]

For 36 dollars you can buy a CD burner and a 100 pack spindle of CD-Rs from newegg. For 6 dollars more you can burn almost twice the content of one of those drives. Plus after the initial 18 dollars for the CD drive you'll save yourself about 12 bucks buying the 100 pack spindle and getting over twice the storage.

I've given up on ATI/AMD

[FireXtol]

I have an AMD Athlon processor, but my next system will likely be Intel/Nvidia.

I upgraded from a Radeon 9000 to a GF7600GT recently. Woah boy! Several times increase in performance, and paid the same price, essentially(5-6 years later). It has a nice price tag($100 after rebate), and better driver support and better performance than comparable ATI (~HD2600) cards. That's enough reason for me to switch. I didn't need anything 'uber' in my AGP 2.0 compliant slot that maxes at a mere 4x, just a little someting to keep this system 'in the game' for another few years. Biggest motivation was DX9 and Shader Model 3. I have no plans to run Vista, even though my system can now!

I like AMD...

[YetAnotherProgrammer]

because we don't just one brand on the market. I remember when we had 33MHz jumps for hundreds of dollars. Intel could charge what they wanted because they were the only player in the game. They had no reason to come out with a faster cpu. Without AMD we probably would be waiting for P3 500s to come out. I don't play many games on my computer or do anything with 3D modeling, so I can deal with the on-board or a low end GPU. This make AMD an attractive CPU-GPU bundle.

Re:AMD bought out ATI?

[What Would NPH Do]

And to add to my previous comment for 50 dollars I can buy a DVD burner and a 100 pack of DVD-Rs and I can have enough storage for almost 500 gigs of data. You on the other hand would have to buy almost 59 of those USB drives to match that at a cost of almost 1800 dollars. Have fun with that.

Intel could swallow AMD or Nvida for that matter.

[centosfan]

Currently the market capitalization for AMD is $3.7B, Intel's is $127.7B. I really believe, other than a possible government anti-trust problem, Intel could/would easily buyout AMD for competitive reasons if it felt so inclined. In fact, I am somewhat surprised given the current stock valuations that they haven't. I suppose they do not view them as a near and present threat to their market.

not sure I agree

[axiome]

Very good article but while I think AMD will still matter, its not in the best position of the three. The article mostly goes over AMD's technology and strategy advantage but glosses over financials.

AMD is highly leveraged with ountains of debt. The article glossed over it but the fact of the matter is AMD is highly leveraged has $5 billion dollars of debt and only $1 billion of cash. AMD unsecured debt bonds are now rated CCC, junk turf. And the other wammy is with capital liquidity so damn low in the current credit crisis, its hard to see how AMD can secure any sort of money. Its also poised to report a 238 million dollar loss for this quarter and just cut quite a bit of staff.

Intel is kicking some butt right now. Take a look at this very recent report:

Intel beat reassures tech sector. Tech bellwether Intel (INTC) posted EPS of $0.28 ($0.04 better than $0.25 consensus) on revenue of $9.67B (in line), and issued an upbeat Q2 outlook that sent its shares soaring +7.3% in extended trading. Unlike many other firms, Intel said strong sales (+9.3%) were driven by North American demand, particularly for servers. CEO Paul Otellini said Intel is not seeing any effects from U.S. economic weakness, a sharp contrast to recent remarks by rival AMD (AMD) which told of widely weaker-than-forecast Q1 sales. For Q2, Intel sees revenue of $9-9.6B (vs. $9.26B consensus) and gross margins of 56% (vs. 53.6% this quarter). NAND flash memory chips revenue continued to flag.

AMD is also losing a ton of its market share it gained from the Athlon 64/Opteron days in the server market. I believe its down to about 23% now.

Now from a strategic standpoint, I'll take a slightly different view than the Pcper paper. I believe its a case right now of Sun Tzu's maxim: "he sends reinforcements everywhere, he will everywhere be weak." In other words, AMD has an alright GPU solution but has been second fiddle to Nvidia except for a brief upturn during the old Radeon 9700/9500/9600 series days. And ever since Core 2, Intel has proven it didn't need a serial interconnect Hypertransport (yet) and an onboard memory controller to be faster than the Athlons of those days. With Nehelem, it will get both and will be a force to be reckoned with.

I believe that AMD sat on its laurels too long during the Athlon 64 generation. It introduced the A64 series in mid 2003 and basically took over the lead with its performance and power effieciency. It even had the early lead with dual cores (remember the 3800 X2?) But it got bogged down with the ATI buyout and Intel basically landed a surprise attack with Core 2. AMD got caught with its pants down until early 2008 with the release of Phenom which for all intents and purposes only matches Conroe and surpassed by Penryn in both speed and wattage use.

Even Nvidia, while as the article said, has a strategic position problem still has a mound of cash reserves as does Intel. Granted the losing market share of PC gaming will hurt Nvidia, it still has some maneuver room. From my perspective, Intel is in smooth sailing for at least another year.

Price per Performance keeps AMD alive

[Eldragon]

What is overlooked by most of the PC enthusiast press is that AMD still offers an excellent price/performance ratio that Intel does not match.

We have AMD to thank for the reason high end CPUs from intel costs $300 instead of $1000 right now.

Re:AMD bought out ATI?

[BlackSnake112]

I hope you meant 3700 series since that is the higher end version.

Intel hasn't forgotten AMD

[Anonymous Coward]

What was the title of Andy Grove's book? "Only the Paranoid Survive". OTOH, I wouldn't write off AMD, as a previous poster did, just because Apple chose Intel. Apple would have no problem unchoosing Intel if they can get a better product that meets their needs.

Re:Intel hasn't forgotten AMD

[ThePhilips]

The crucial difference is that Intel is one-stop CPU shop: they produce everything in house. AMD is much much smaller than Intel and often has to resort to outsourcing.http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=526148&cid=23109172# Cancel

What is important to Apple is that Intel delivers complete solution in several markets. AMD has lots of holes in its offerings which need to be filled by 3rd party components to make a product out of them. For Apple it is important to keep secret until product reaches market to rip additionally on wow-effect: dealing with many partners doesn't help.

Also, Intel can guarantee delivery - it owns 10+ fabs. AMD? Only 2 and only one of them is using modern process - only one fab to compete against Intel.

I'd say that the whole discussion is a praise to AMD, because the (relatively) small company is standing against giant Intel is. Thanks to open thinking of AMD (as opposed to corporate politicking of Intel) we have now affordable 64bit computing on our desks.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

KISS

[faragon]

Intel has to buy Nvidia or AMD to be competitive in the long run. There is no try, as if AMD survive, it could hurt badly Intel with CPU+IGP solutions.

Examples, please

[raftpeople]

Yoru blogs have many words but no concrete examples of "true" parallel processing applied to problems currently viewed as best solved by sequential algorithms. If your truly parallel processors are passing messages to achieve proper sequencing, how is that better than implicit sequencing for the class of problems that require sequential processing?

If you are saying that all problems can be parallelized with a net gain in elapsed time to solve, please provide the math proof that supports that position. Don't forget to include setup time for each parallel processor and it's internal environment to get it to solve the problem at hand.

Re: Heat

[IdeaMan]

Ok let's talk about heat.

Putting both GPU and CPU in close proximity to each other should help, not hinder. I think you mistook the GP for saying they'd be on the same die, but he said bus, not die.
It may be that they need to be separated a couple of inches from each other to allow room for fanout of the CPU signals to the rest of the board rather than having them in the same socket. If they weren't separated, and the chip packaging was the same height, they could design one heat sink over both chips. This reduces the parts count for the fan and heatsink and therefore increases reliability.

Having something on a plug in card with such an extreme cooling requirement just doesn't make sense. You aren't allowed much space for heat sink design between it and the next slot. Having the GPU on the motherboard gives case/motherboard designers more room for the heatsink design.

Re: "The other potential savior is Linux"

[rickst29]

I agree. In the past, (as well as right now), ATI-written GPU "Catalyst" drivers for Linux have usually been bug-riddled, feature-poor, and a problem waiting to happen. And so, the vast majority of Linux "heavyweights" have been building and buying computers with NVidia. (Both discrete and integrated.) BUT, AMD/ATI has recently offered the actual specifications, under FREE license terms, for Linux folks to write driver code under the GPL. (ATI personnel can also take part, as long as they offer their code under GPL terms.) This could be huge. And unlike Apple systems, many Linux boxes are built as low-end machines, naturally targeting integrated graphics anyway. My own PC cost less than $250, and adding a graphics card + passive cooling was a significant cost. It was, of course, an NVidia card... and I expect that ATI graphics will really become viable soon, due to their having released the full specifications required to write FLOSS drivers.

Re:AMD bought out ATI?

[Anpheus]

I just bought a portable hard drive, it's got better read-write speed, portability and it's easier to back up data too.

Re:AMD bought out ATI?

[PitaBred]

Persistent storage, yeah. No question DVD's are ahead. What if you aren't only archiving stuff, though? Moving data from one computer to another, and back? Not to mention that optical drives take a LOT more power and noise to run than flash drives, which is quite important in laptops.

They both have their places. Hammers, screwdrivers, all that jazz.

Re:AMD bought out ATI?

[What Would NPH Do]

True, but that wasn't what the person's claim was. To quote them:

speaking of which: I recently saw a $30 8 GB usb flash drive - that seems far more newsworthy than this, especially since it renders DVD writers obsolete for anything but creating illegal copies of dvd movies. which is easier with avi's anyways... Sure if it's just for transferring files back and forth on a constant basis you'd rather using some like a flash drive. But his claim was that this flash drive was going to make DVD writers obsolete. Considering that DVD writers are used almost all the time as a way to burn things for archiving then his claim is clearly specious.

why intel will win

[Anonymous Coward]

1. next gen processor (ie. nehalem) has no front-side bus and has a memory controller on chip. they will have something similar to AMDs hyper-transport. this difference is one of the main reasons why AMD has managed to stay competitive, and once it's gone Intel's performance edge will likely be more pronounced.

2. better process technology. Intel's 45nm is better than AMDs. Intel's 32nm will probably be better too, and get here sooner. Also Intel has complete control over their fabs, if AMDs fabs are spun-off as some speculate, their control and ability to adapt quickly to production changes will be significiantly reduced.

3. Intel has more money. this means more money can go into research for better compilers and better software support. In the end, this might make the big difference, and Intel has the money and more importantly the influence to do this right.

4. I doubt Apple would consider offering both Intel and AMD options, and they aren't going to switch. If they do switch, it will be because Intel isn't keeping Steve Jobs happy, not because AMD has any better options.

5. NVidia doesn't stand a chance. A high-end, general purpose processor is a hard thing to make, and NVidia doesn't have one. They also don't have the process technology that Intel does. Once we start getting a GPU on the processor die, NVidia's market for discrete graphics will shrink dramatically, making it much harder to compete.

Re:AMD bought out ATI?

[travbrad]

I prefer Ethernet for moving stuff between computers, but a USB2 card would be faster if you have 100mbit or wireless LAN. If you are moving less than 8GB then this card would be really nice. However, if you are moving a lot of stuff (> 8GB) you are better off getting an external HDD (long distance), or GB Ethernet (LAN). DVDs are a nice cheap alternative though. I use them to backup my data at home, at least until I can afford a RAID5 setup.

AMD is out of money...

[dtjohnson]

AMD processors are great. I've used them exclusively for the last 9 years. But AMD has a fundamental business problem that will prevent them from competing as the article says. They are out of money. It takes a lot of money to build the state-of-the-art fabrication facilities that are needed to be in the business that AMD and Intel are in. AMD builds a new fab and then they sell the products so cheap that they never come close to recovering the money they spent to build the product. Then they go out to investors for more money and the cycle starts again. After doing this a few times, their debt piles up, their stock tanks, and their ability to borrow money slips away. The bottom line is that whatever new cool product AMD is going to build will have to made in their current fabs and in the fast-moving semiconductor business, if you're not updating your fabs, you're dying. AMD slashed prices over and over to get market share from Intel and max out their production but their sales prices were way below their fab replacement costs. Intel said fine...have some more rope. Now...no more new fabs. AMD just never learned how to sell their products and their technology any way other than with a low price. Yes, Intel didn't play fair and pressured computer companies to buy Intel but AMD's problems were far deeper than that. AMD needed an accountant to tell them 'wait a minute...your fab will only last for 5 years so you've got to sell that product for 50 percent more than you are or you won't stay in business.' Yes, it's a competitive market and Intel sets the price for their competing products and AMD can't control that...now. But I've also watched AMD sell their products for dirt cheap prices even when they had Intel in a hammerlock...and I'd scratch my head at how little money AMD would make even in those good times when AMD was setting the price points.

Re:AMD is out of money...

[Shadow99_1]

Your view is simplistic... AMD wouldn't have made as much of a gain as it did if they had kept prices higher. As it was for some time Intel was under pricing AMD, forcing them to cut more and more... As only a company 40 times AMD's size can do. AMD chips cost less (on average) when they first launched the Athlon way back when, but Intel responded by reducing prices... Which they can cut much lower than AMD can while still turning a profit.

This is a perfect example of a market that had a monopoly player for to long for 'startups' to really get in. Intel doesn't crush them completely in the market by reducing the cpu prices to the floor only because they have some interest in keeping the governments of the world from declaring them the monopoly vendor because there isn't anyone else (they'd own the server, workstation, and most of the PC market outside specialty markets like ultra portables and handhelds without AMD there). For a short while Intel even found out how far they could force AMD to reduce pricing before they stopped playing the game, leaving Intel cpus less expensive than AMD cpus for awhile.

AMD does what they can from an already bad position. People don't pay for innovation alone, hence AMD's price/performance marketing. We should be amazed they have succeeded as well as they have given the factors against them.

Re:AMD bought out ATI?

[mikael]

You can buy a single external 500 GB hard disk drive for 60 pounds or 120 dollars.

Currently have and AMD GFX card

[Anonymous Coward]

I currently have an AMD card, fuck if I'm going to buy another one.

Next card will be NVIDIA.

As far as stock, they intentionally did it

[BlueCoder]

Buy low, sell high... we all know that.

But what they don't tell you is they intentionally crash the stock. It's all about 3 and 7 year cycles.

They make the company look bad but they are technologically sitting on gold and silk furniture.

Devalue the stock and make people want to dump it while you invest your money elsewhere. Then you buy up all the trashed stock a couple years later and pump it back to what it should be, taking a minimum 60 percent return within a year.

Memory connections

[Anonymous Coward]

Typical GPU has multiple memory lanes required to achieve high memory bandwidth. Also, memory chips are usually placed close to GPU chip. CPU has memory modules placed in dedicated memory slots and one lane with considerably lower bandwidth. How are they going to make compromise between these two conflicting models ?

Re:Memory connections

[IdeaMan]

Here's a crazy idea: Solder the GPU memory to the bottom of the board.

Not just 64bit

[FoamingToad]

Remember that Intel had the Pentium Pro architectire in 1996, which allowed multiprocessor machinery on the desktop. Intel sat on their hands with this technology for years, assuming in their arrogance that home users didn't want it badly enough.

It's purely down to AMD that multicore architecture has become mainstream. It's fair to say that software isn't wholly taking advantage of this at the moment, but it's definitely a step in the right direction.

I say thanks to AMD for at least being able to push the envelope and prevent Intel from getting too complacent.

AMD aligned with the SOC trend

[Donkey Kong Cluster]

I don't know how much of you are programming in image processing or having to change architecture to boost performance, but we have seen here in Slashdot the announce of Framewave, a performance library optimized for x86 almost identical to Intel one (IPP). You can't say that AMD is behind, considering it has ATI (against NVIDIA and Intel), it's processor line (against Intel), Close To Metal (against CUDA) and Framewave (against IPP). 1) The great deal is that Framewave is open source, and currently I'm using the IPP libraries and found a bug. Since I can't change the code, I think I'm going AMD. How much of Intel is open sourced? Their software products have quality, but how long could it survive the open source development model? 2) When AMD launches it's CPU+GPU solution, you could take advantage of this instantly. In the case of CUDA, you would have to rewrite your code. In the case of Intel + GMA solution, I would have to wait for their update on IPP (and a new License!). Currently, IPP only scales with the number of cores (since it is thread optimized). 3) This makes the perfect scenario for SOC (System-on-chip) to AMD, which it seems is a trend for the future. Best regards

Re:AMD bought out ATI?

[Wartz]

3870x2 is the only ATI card I am aware of with 1GB of memory that can actually make good use of it. (maybe the 2900XT with some hefty OCing too) 1gb of memory on a crappy 3650 is a horrible waste of money. The thing is too weak to take advantage of even 512mb. 400mhz memory clock...!?!? http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Diamond/HD_3650_1GB

Re:AMD bought out ATI?

[Kingrames]

why not just re-use the thumbdrive?

$30 versus $X.

You see, as X approaches infinity, the value of the thumdrive increases infinitely!

I mean it's not like you actually need permanent copies of old linux distros. once they're used they're no longer necessary. like 99.9% of everything you burn to a dvd.

Re:AMD bought out ATI?

[Kingrames]

The card I have now was a cheap card good enough to run the games I'd like to play. Thanks for the link and the reference.