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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.
Intel has had its share of buggy and bad designs, and that's even without going into discussion of the HMSS Itanic. Some AMD chips do great job of bang for the buck, my laptop has a nice dual core one that made the cost much less than comparable Intel chip would.
Still, AMD needs to get more risky with heavy investment into more advanced design and fab. mediocrity just isn't tolerated in processor design.
Intel just succeeded HUGE. They few years of AMD dominance were more a result of intels missteps. The p4 didnt clock as high as they wanted it to, so they had to scramble up a new design.
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
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...
AMD's budget range is still better than Intel, when compared at a constant price against Atom
But with the netbook/nettop market starting to flatline (or so I've heard), maybe they just made a wrong stratey decision
Also, the botched Bulldozer launch: they should have used the no. of complete modules in the processor name, instead of the number of Integer units
That way they wouldnt have a 6 core which was actually 3 core, but rather a 3 core which performed better in Hyperthreading than an equivalent Intel
Getting the driver issue sorted out before launch would have helped as well
AMD will never fail because Intel won't let it fail since it is their DOJ defence against being a monopoly. The couple of times AMD got ahead of Intel on technology, like x86-64, Intel started a money losing price war to put AMD back in its place. When AMD is struggling, Intel raises profit margins on its products to help them out. There are also less advertised ways Intel helps keep AMD afloat: Patent sharing, employee no-stealing, joint tools development like OpenAccess, etc. Having worked in that industry I was always surprised that the DOJ never came down on them for those agreements. The patent sharing and joint tools ones are official even though Intel puts like 10X more into them as AMD does. I left that industry after 5 years since I saw it as a dead end since you only have a few companies competing for your skills. As my manager at Intel told me, "I won't give you a raise since you only have one other place that would even care about the skills you picked up here, AMD and we really control them too."
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.
AMD has done this many times throughout the years.
The only reason they boom is when Intel makes a mistake. In the mid 2000's Intel bed on that crappy Pentium 4 line. This allowed AMD to gain a huge foothold. It was only temporary until Intel figured out they goofed and corrected. AMD sat on their hands and didn't invent the next thing so Intel just stomped all over them.
This isn't the first time this has happened. The same thing happened in the days of 486 and 586's. AMD gained a huge share then lost it all as Intel corrected they're mistakes and AMD failed to continue to innovate.
It's almost like AMD shows the way then Intel does it better. It will probably happen again assuming AMD doesn't eventually just die.
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.
That campaign really had a lot of success. The only people who buy AMD are geeks who only do it when it gives a good price performance ratio. It does for me, going AMD simply means you can spend your budget on a fast SSD which will do a hell of a lot more for your performance then a faster more expensive intel CPU with a regular HD.
But people like me are the exception and AMD never really managed to remove "a computer has an intel inside" from the consumers mind. Just try your local electronic store.
Netbooks were a chance, AMD didn't put restrictions on its netbooks but they failed to push high end netbooks before Intel again stole their thunder with smart books. My netbook has got 8gb in it, it makes it a very smooth machine, just light and cheap enough to lug around and not worry about it getting dented or worse, stolen. Netbooks partially failed because they sold with slow HD's and tiny amounts of memory, hurting their performance no end.
AMD just never had the clout to sell its chips on even terms. And it is sad because Intel dropped the ball completely when they believed they had no competition. There is a reason that 64 bit linux is report as AMD64. Intel failed and AMD delivered but for AMD to have truly broken through they need a long string of victories and no losses like Bulldozer.
If AMD wants to succeed, they might consider something that Intel is also thinking of doing. Intel is having trouble gettings its chips into tablets and phones especially, so they have considered making their own... AMD could do a lot better getting their CPU's in PC's if they started selling them. Control the whole supply line and pass the savings on to the consumer and beat Intel and Intel Inside PC makers on price. Intel can't do that for fear of pissing of all its customers but AMD doesn't have many bridges to burn.
Yes, making PC's is a very low margin industry but that is partly because you are buying all the parts from third parties. AMD wouldn't be doing that. The profit on the CPU inside the PC would be part of the profit of their PC. The profit on the graphics card would be part of the profits on the PC.
Risky and unconventional but unless THEY build the PC, they are always going to have a hard time getting their CPU into the PC.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Dell – then the world’s biggest PC maker – received billions of dollars to “remain monogamous” with Intel. At their peak in the first quarter of 2007, payments from Intel made up 76% of Dell’s quarterly operating income: $723 million against a total of $949 million.
And I really wonder why Intel hasn't been gutted and salted for monopoly abuse, with its CEO and main backers arrested. How can it not be MORE clear than that ?!?
Non-Linux Penguins ?
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
Then when you look at the server market, they do not compete at all anymore. Performance per watt and per dollar both lag badly behind the Xeon.
That's untrue in my experience and has been for 5+ years. In the higher-end 2-4 CPU server range, AMD has had the best performance/price ratings for a long time because competitive Xeons are much too expensive. For example, the highest-performing 4P Linux servers (e.g. SPECint2006 rate) are currently Xeon E7-4870 based, followed closely by Opteron 6282 SE, but for the Xeons you'll pay 4 times as much as for the Opterons. A typical server configuration with 256GB memory will cost you ~8000 EUR ($10500) if you go with the Opterons and ~20000 EUR ($26000) if you go with the E7-4870 (and if you can actually find one on the market). More affordable Intel-based servers are not competitive performance-wise with the 6282 SE. If you don't need much parallelism and a lot of RAM, you might be able to get a more affordable offer using Xeons (with 2 of their 4C CPUs e.g.), but even there C32 based Opterons will offer much better performance per Dollar at comparable or lower TDP even (e.g. 2 x X7542 vs 2 x Opteron 4238). We've always been comparing closely when purchasing beefy 1U/2U servers over the past 10 years and Intel has not had competitive offers since their socket 604/Clarksboro Xeons when they allowed decent amounts of RAM (24 FB-DIMM sockets) in 1U compared with socket 940 Opterons (at somewhat sane prices). YMMV if your CPU needs are different, although I'd like to know how ...
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
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.
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
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
A large but trivial example...
How about a small but perfect example: running more than one program at once.
I'm not sure where this idea that multiple cores isn't useful came from, but it's dead wrong. Many individual programs might not be written to take advantage of parallel processing, but the OS will quite handily dispatch different programs to different cores.