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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."
It's really simple--Intel made better products. Once Intel abandoned the dead end of the Pentium 4 and changed tacts with the first low-power Core chip, AMD never had a valid response. The article details some predatory behavior on the part of Intel which was eventually settled, but I don't think the outcome would be different today had that not occurred.
Of course, Intel better watch its back with ARM around.
... and then there was a small matter of Intel being accused of monopolistic behaviour, in some cases convicted, in several countries.
A firm with a Monopoly has multiple, permanent advantages. That there is little/no interest in breaking it up is another story.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Right from the start, you've lost me. If memory serves, 2006 would've been Athlon XP Barton core era. At this time they were numbering their CPUs in a way that indicated what P4 they could beat. But who was responsible for rating the CPUs for speed when they came off the line? AMD. So really they asked themselves, "Is this processor faster than a P4 1.6Ghz? Yes? Then this one is a 1600."
Yeah, you can stay that they were faster and be right, but only because the processors were marketed in a smart way.
AMD might have made okay CPU's but their partners made junk. You simply can't buy quality motherboards for AMD. All of it seems to be low-end crap with weird flaws. Every AMD system I have put together I wound up regretting. Things would crash randomly, freeze randomly, or just act downright strange. With Intel-based systems, I rarely have this problem (though I always pair it with a boring, plain-vanilla intel motherboard).
Bottom line, I simply cannot recommend AMD-based systems. Sure it costs less, but you pay for it in frustration.
Yes, that was covered in the article. But it doesn't excuse AMD's numerous bad decisions since 2006.
The article is pretty explicit about how AMD dug its own grave. I don't think blaming an Intel monopoly is all that convincing.
Really? The article mentions how Intel managed to get Sony money to cancel ALL AMD shipments, and how they paid Dell roughly 3/4 of a billion dollars in a single quarter to not use AMD chips. But I'm sure you're right, I'm sure keeping AMD out of all of the major OEMs(except to some extent HP) had nothing to do with it.
If i had one dollar for every brain you dont have, i would have $1.
What're those things? Big, loud boxes. There's usually lots of them in a big, cold room together. Oh yeah, servers!
I think those are probably quite important, too.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
In essences what AMD was evolution vs Intels attempted revolution. They evolved x86 with a 64-bit extension rather than attempt to revolutionize like Intel went for.
Now however the roles have switched. Intel goes for a evolution, while AMD tries for revolution with their APU concept of shifting floating point onto the GPGPU.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
We can see some of the same behavior with MS, where they basically stopped doing anything with IE and slowed down considerably the Windows development in the 2k/XP run. Then all of a sudden they find that Mozilla and Linux can be credible threats on the casual home market, their traditional marketing leverage vs corporate office sales. Just consider the quote from Gates about him preferring people pirating Windows than considering alternatives. The central issue is one of mindshare. If a potential employee already knows the product from home, MS can claim that there will be little to no training time once hired.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
When Intel produced laughable chips for years they still remain the absolute market leader, because of their unethical tactics. Therefore AMD was not able to collect its well earned profit, so they had no resources to improve faster.
This is the classical case of monopoly, the resources cannot go to the better company, like they would on a free market.
I believe that anybody not totally illiterate (yes, for example RTFA), with at least some small amount of ethics, will not buy anything from Intel in the foreseeable future.
"Once Intel realised they were falling behind, they dropped their brain-dead policies and pushed out better chips than AMD's."
Hmm. Not so much. More along the lines of they had a "Oh Shit!" moment, and cross-licensed AMD's 64-bit design (Intellectual Property swap) to get back in the game. Even Intel's earliest attempts (at a 64-bit x86 architecture) were pathetic in this area, with numerous complaints about their broken, half-assed 64-bit support (it supported, at first, only a handful of 64-bit instructions that AMD did, and required some unnecessary work, hence the bitching from the programmers). There's a reason the architecture is commonly referred to as AMD64, even after attempts to change the name to something more neutral.
This is not to say that Intel doesn't put out some good products, their NICs are simply wonderful.
I am John Hurt.
If [..] you had the time/budget to write Itanium-specific assembler, you'd love Itanium (64 64-bit registers is nice)
I thought one of the major problems with Itanium was that it used EPIC architecture which relies heavily on the compiler explicitly figuring out how the parallel instructions should be scheduled (rather than the CPU itself doing this at runtime)... except that apparently such a compiler was never really written.
(Interesting quote I just came across in the Itanium WP article from Donald Knuth- "The Itanium approach...was supposed to be so terrific- until it turned out that the wished-for compilers were basically impossible to write".)
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
The movie character Gordon Gekko, got famous for his words "Greed is good" in the movie Wall Street, but he was wrong, and AMD has proven it - as so many others have before them, greed is indeed NOT good, it's a destroyer of all things good.
Why?
Because AMD was Warner Brothers when Disney always bet their money on Cute & politically correct. AMD appealed to the young student generation, the people that wanted POWER but didn't buy into the heavily advertised Intel hype. Sure - nothing wrong with Intel, I was an avid Intel fan myself, the AMD processors where notorious for overheating, and several issues on certain math performances, but AMD overcame those issues, and produced some absolutely AMAZING processors that even outperformed their competitor at a staggering 3rd of the price back then, it was a no-brainer, every geek wanted an AMD in their computers, many of them where excited about overclocking their AMD cpu's to unseen speeds, it was indeed the "rogue" choice, but people (like me) loved it, and certainly took advantage of it.
But anyone who gets up there, get's taken by GREED, it's kind of like Nintendo who just couldn't understand why no one wouldn't pay the same price for their toy, when it was 3 times slower than the competitor, it's like Sony who simply didn't understand why no one wanted their proprietary formats and couldn't understand the need to have an open platform, when they could be in total control instead...
Yep, story of our lives as computergeeks & users, history repeats itself, and it never fails to tell things like it is.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Intel seems to be winning because of marketing. Their top end CPUs out perform AMDs, but few people actually buy those.
Intel's MID-RANGE CPUs beat AMD's high-end, even though the AMD CPUs are 50% larger. That's a recipe for disaster, because AMD are forced to sell their most expensive CPUs for less than Intel's mid-range. Few people can see any good reason to buy a slower, more power-hungry AMD chip instead of an i5 unless the price is low enough to justify that.
I wouldn't bet against Bulldozer in the long term because the benchmarks I've seen seem to indicate some kind of unexpected bottleneck in their hyperthreading implementation; if that's the case then a new generation could actually make some use of all those extra transistors. But for now it's hard to see how they're going to make enough money from it to fund development of the next generation.
We've yet to see where Bulldozer can go and it's definitely a design aimed at a 6+ core future.
Throwing cores at the problem isn't really a solution for the desktop. Most desktop apps are still single threaded and even games are usually unable to use more than four cores.
The big question has to be: why are AMD losing money?
Becuase intel are both bigger and technically ahead (both better designs and better processes afaict). This means a few things.
1: Intel can almost certainly produce equivalent/better chips to anything AMD can make at a lower cost.
2: Intel can produce chips that are faster than anything AMD can make. These chips can be sold with no competition (at prices that go up by big chunks for each minor step-up in performance).
3: Intel can spread their R&D costs over more units.
AMD got ahead of intel briefly because intel went up a dead-end with the pentium 4 but intel fixed that with the C2D and afaict AMD CPUs havebeen behind intel ones ever since. Afaict AMD has an advantage in integrated graphics but Intel is working hard to try and destroy that too and any serious gamer will probablly go discrete anyway.
Where AMD has chosen to not compete
I'm pretty sure that if AMD COULD compete in the high end desktop market they would. The very existence of the FX brand implies that they want to.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register