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Intel and AMD May Both Delay Next-Generation CPUs
MojoKid writes "AMD and Intel are both preparing to launch new CPU architectures between now and the end of the year, but rumors have surfaced that suggest the two companies may delay their product introductions, albeit for different reasons. Various unnamed PC manufacturers have apparently reported that Intel may push back the introduction of its Ivy Bridge processor from the end of 2011 to late Q1/early Q2 2012. Meanwhile, on the other side of the CPU pasture, there are rumors that AMD's Bulldozer might slip once again. Apparently AMD hasn't officially confirmed that it shipped its upcoming server-class Bulldozer products for revenue during August. This is possible, but seems somewhat unlikely. The CPU's anticipated launch date is close enough that the company should already know if it can launch the product."
There might be good reasons on both sides, but the tinfoil hatter in me believes this might have more to do with fact that both companies might want to see a little more profit out of the R&D that went into the current generation of products before obsoleting them. The performance of the current generation is high enough that it is getting harder to introduce a new generation at a price point that could both recover R&D and provide reasonable value for the customer.
Gee those delays mean the brand new shiny chips will just hapen to come out with Windows 8. Coincidence?
Not only can you finally ditch that aging Vista or XP machine, with shiny Windows 8 but now you can have a shiny new CPU too!
http://saveie6.com/
The current situation is Intel is slaughtering AMD. AMD hasn't had an architecture update in a long, long time and it is hurting them. Clock for clock their current architecture is a bit behind the Core 2 series, which is now two full generations out of date. Their 6 core CPU does not keep up with Intel's 4 core i7-900 series CPU, even on apps that can actually use all 6 cores (which are rare). Then you take the i5/7-2000 series (Sandy Bridge) which are a good bit faster per clock than the old ones and there is just no comparison.
On top of that, Intel is a node ahead in terms of fabrication. All Sandy Bridge chips, and many older ones, are on 32nm. AMD is 45nm at best currently. Not only does that equal more performance but it equals lower heat for the performance, particularly for laptops. Then of course Intel is talking about Ivy Bridge, which is 22nm, another node ahead. Their 22nm plant is working and they've demonstrated test silicon so it will happen fairly soon.
The situation is not good for AMD. All they've got is the low end and that is getting squeezed hard by Intel too. They need a more efficient CPU and they need it badly. Delaying is not something they want to do, Bulldozer has been fraught with delays as it is. They've been talking about it for a long time, like since 2009, and delivered nothing.
They have every reason to want to get Bulldozer out as soon as possible and preferably before Ivy Bridge. Each generation that Intel releases that they don't have a response for just puts Intel that much farther ahead.
Now that said, Intel may well have decided to hold Ivy Bridge if AMD can't deliver Bulldozer because they don't need to. Sandy Bridge CPUs are just amazing performers, they don't need anything better on the market right now. However I can't imagine AMD colluding with Intel on this. They are not in a good situation.
we have known that ivy bridge will be released in 2012 since april... http://www.maximumpc.com/files/u69/sandy_bridge-e_roadmap_updated.jpg
The most naive question to ask if is this sort of delay is relevant to Moore's law and similar patterns. There are a variety of different forms of Moore's law. We've seem an apparent slowdown in the increase in clockspeed http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/mother-cpu-charts-2005,1175.html. The original version of Moore's Law was about the number of transistors on a single integrated circuit and that's slowed down also. A lot of these metrics have slowed down.
But this isn't an example of that phenomenon. This appears to be due more to the usual economic hiccups and the lack of desire to release new chips during an economic downturn (although TFA does note that this is a change in strategy for Intel's normal approach to recessions.) This is not by itself a useful data point, so this is not further need to panic.
On a related note there's been a lot of improvement in the last few years simply by making algorithms more efficient. As was discussed on Slashdot last December http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/12/24/2327246/Progress-In-Algorithms-Beats-Moores-Law by a variety of benchmarks linear programming has become 40 million times more efficient in the last fifteen years and that only a factor 1000 or so is due to the better machines, with a factor of about 40,000 attributable to better algorithms. So even if Moore's law is toast, the rate of effective progress is still very high. Overall, I'm not worried.
I was surprised that the original date when it was planned to be released back than would have made it way ahead of the curve predicted by Gordon Moore. I was saying that it should be delayed some time so it actually is more accurate to the prediction and it has been delayed, however I will never know whether it had been done for that reason.
So... If I'm reading you correctly... the reason that they should have delayed the hardware wasn't because of something like it being too expensive to produce for expected market, too difficult to produce in sufficient yields, or any other technical or business reasons that might exist, but because the number of transistors involved didn't match up to a prediction made 30-some-odd years ago?
You realize that prediction has only "come true" when you average the graph over a very long period, and there are significant statistical outliers (that represent significantly successful chips in their day) along that plot?
Wait, wait... you're trolling right? I admit, you got me!
I will continue to buy AMD. ive compared my sub $500 AMD rigs with comparable Intel rigs, I don't see why spending 2 to 4 times the amount of money for intel over AMD when AMD does a fine job. My Phenom II 945 has served me well, runs cool, runs fast, everything I put on it it takes like a champ. I have yet to stress out the Phenom. Ive run multiple games on it, audio and video work on it. The only 'advanced' thing I haven't done on it is CAD and seti@home. Why spend 2 or 3 times for the Intel, when all i'm buying is a name??? You intel fanbois go ahead, spend your money and feed the giant, duchebags
Hm, actually, if you're going to have a pile of heavy-duty VMs running concurrently, a higher number of slightly less powerful cores are going to be much better than a lower number of more powerful cores, so that's another of those cases where the Phenom might be more convenient.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
Oh but you could OC the living shit out of the Celery back then! With a good air cooler and a little luck a Celery could be OCed by a good 30% to 35%. Man in those days there really was a reason to replace your gear every 3 years or even less, the innovations on both sides of the aisle were just like two heavyweights duking it out....then Intel bribed all the OEMs and won through deceit what they couldn't when fairly, boo hiss.
Meh the big story as far as AMD goes isn't gonna be BD, frankly IMNSHO as a PC builder frankly PCs have been "good enough" on the CPU side for quite awhile which is one of the reasons my customers are quite happy I put my money where my mouth is and became an all AMD shop. No the really BIG STORY in 50 foot neon letters is gonna be the switch from VLIW to Vector Based GPUs, both in the discrete and in the APUs.
Imagine a chip that can not only crank out graphics like nobody's business but can actually work like a hyper FP on top of that with VERY little penalty. Today you are lucky if you get 1/4th the performance on double FP but with the new chips that will be cut down to less than half for the first bunch with the goal of native speed double FP in the next gen. I bet the math geeks are drooling at that prospect right now. And for those that switch to the APUs it'll mean an all new hybrid Crossfire where the APU can take over physics while handing off rendering to the discrete for some truly insane graphics. Sounds pretty damned sweet to me.
I just hope more geeks here at /. do as I do and give AMD some business. Unless you are one of those that literally slam your CPUs right to the bleeding edge (which admittedly there are more of those type here than on average) frankly the bang for the buck has been firmly in the AMD camp for some time now. you can get better quality boards with damned good IGPs for cheaper, The huge length of support time on the AM socket means you can go from dual to quad to six core without replacing anything but the CPU, the quads are dirt cheap right now, they just make really damned good, solid as a rock, long lasting systems.
I mean how can you not love a company that lets you get a fully loaded Black Edition dual kit for $200, a triple core kit for just $250 which BTW kicks ass as an HTPC, just swap the case for one of the "VCR style" cases and a dirt cheap 4xxx or 5xxx GPU, or a quad for $270? Oh and for those that have older machines I'd suggest a trip over to Starmicro where you can pick up cheap chips to upgrade older machines, both Intel and AMD. In my shop the Phenom X3 and the Pentium Ds are both quite popular upgrade paths for those with older AM2s or LGA775s respectively. Enjoy and go AMD!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
45 nm is correct for the AMD Phenom II series. But the "Llano" APUs for low-end desktops are already in 32 nm. So you could say Intel is half a step ahead right now. Overall, however, I agree that AMD is under pressure and cannot afford artificial delays in their products.
What they still have are some niches where Intel has slacked off or does not compete for other reasons. The most important one right now are the APUs. AMD's Brazos platform does well on netbooks, and IMHO the LLano is a good choice for cheap consumer PCs.
Another one is (desktop) CPUs with support for ECC RAM:
Intel does not support that feature in its current "Core iX" CPUs at all, Presumably because they want to extract extra money from customers who need it by making them buy the much more expensive Xeons. Well, I'm a bit paranoid about reliability myself and thus I just ended up ordering a Phenom II instead of a (otherwise superior) Sandy Bridge CPU.
C - the footgun of programming languages