AMD: What Went Wrong?

Barence writes "In 2006, AMD could seemingly do no wrong. Its processors were the fastest in the PC market, annual revenue was up a record 91%, expansion into the graphics game had begun with the high-profile acquisition of ATI, and it was making exciting plans for a future where it looked like it could 'smash Intel's chip monopoly' for good. Now the company is fighting for its very survival. How did AMD end up surrendering such a advantageous position – and was it given an unfair shove on the way down? This article has plotted AMD's decline, including the botched processor launches, the anti-competitive attacks from Intel and years of boardroom unrest."

Comments

Re:It's not so much AMD failed

[0123456]

Intel just succeeded HUGE. They few years of AMD dominance were more a result of intels missteps.

Bingo. The P4 was a dead end, Intel were betting on Itanium for the 64-bit market, and AMD just kept on building better x86 chips.

Once Intel realised they were falling behind, they dropped their brain-dead policies and pushed out better chips than AMD's.

Forgetting Intel tactics?

[nicholas22]

Let's not forget the underhanded tactics that Intel used. They were forced to pay a minimal $1bn to AMD for it. I always thought its too small an amount for losing their position as leaders in the CPU market. And now look how things turned out...

Re:Products

[Randle_Revar]

>The problem was AMD didn't bet hard enough on ramping up clock speeds.
Clock speeds have barely moved lately.

>Hertz to Hertz, AMD makes a better processor.
Not since the Core2, and even less competitive in the "i" era

Intel Compilers still backstabbing AMD

[steveha]

The Intel compiler, widely regarded as the best compiler available for x86, still produces code designed to make Intel chips look better than any others.

http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49

That page was posted three years ago. Scroll to the bottom, and read the latest additions to the discussion there: "New Intel compiler version - still the same!"

http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49#179

This makes it difficult to be sure how much better Intel chips really are than AMD chips. When the Intel chip scores higher on a benchmark, and the benchmark includes Photoshop, was the Intel chip actually better or was Photoshop compiled with the Intel compiler?

Sadly, I think Intel chips really are better now; given that Intel is leapfrogging past AMD on process technology, they have major advantages so their chips ought to be better.

But I still buy AMD. Yeah, I'm giving up some increment of performance... but the chips these days are so fast, I can survive on only 90% performance or whatever. And I prefer to avoid doing business with a company that continues to sell a compiler that sabotages performance on competitor's chips.

Personally, I would love to see AMD sell a line of processors that return "GenuineIntel" for the CPU ID, and thus run Intel compiler code at full speed. When Intel sues them, they can argue that this is necessary for full compatibility with the code produced by Intel's own C compiler. (Yeah, I know. It will never happen. It's a fun daydream but that's all.)

Even if AMD doesn't have the top performing chips, they continue to score very well on price/performance, and the performance is good enough for me. And they are less evil than Intel. So I remain an AMD customer.

steveha