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AMD Preparing To Give Intel a Run For Its Money
jfruh writes: "AMD has never been able to match Intel for profits or scale, but a decade ago it was in front on innovation — the first to 1GHz, the first to 64-bit, the first to dual core. A lack of capital has kept the company barely holding on with cheap mid-range chips since; but now AMD is flush with cash from its profitable business with gaming consoles, and is preparing an ambitious new architecture for 2016, one that's distinct from the x86/ARM hybrid already announced."
I stick to Intel because they're the best CPU you can buy right now.
But I'd love to see AMD back in the game. I bought the first X2 Athlon series, what a beast that was.
Sadly that was also the last AMD CPU I've purchased.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
I bought the first X2 Athlon series, what a beast that was.
Sadly that was also the last AMD CPU I've purchased.
The Phenom II X3 was also an absolute monster for the price, as was the Phenom II X6.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You mean first to x86-64. Intel had a 64-bit processor before that (Itanium). 13 years later, Itanium is dead and x86 is holding us back, so much that servers are turning towards ARMv8 (inferior design to Itanium, but tons of momentum from mobile/embedded).
The story is more about the come back of their great designer who has done a lot, and how they are betting on him.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
DId you RTFA?
More of the same? Probably not.
It was never technology or the lack of it that kept AMD out and Intel in. It was clever marketing, FUD and just plain ignorance of the customer. The "Intel Inside" ads and the "what if something is not compatible with AMD" feeling that the marketing gurus created kept Intel on the top outselling even the more superior AMDs. The real Intel killers are the ARM processors and mobile computing that is giving Intel a run for its money. This is what happens if you refuse to innovate!
But the real fight of a decade ago, when AMD was first to 1GHz, the first to 64-bit, the first to dual core, seemed missing. It's not surprising since the company was facing a real threat to its survival. But with a gravy train from the gaming consoles, it looks like the company is ready for a fresh battle, with a familiar face at the helm.
Uh, wait. No. It was surprising when AMD was the performance leader. It was surprising because they were broke. It's not surprising to see AMD pushing out a new architecture now that they have money. It takes a lot of money to do that. So we start out completely ass-backwards here.
Much elided, then
The most logical move for Keller would be to dump the CMT design in favor of a design with simultaneous multi-threading (SMT), which is what Intel does (and IBM's Power and Oracle's Sparc line).
Wait, what? Why? Why wouldn't it make more sense to just fix the lack of FP performance, perhaps by adding more FP units? Why would it make more sense for them to go to a completely different design? It might well, but there is no supporting evidence for that in the article.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
All the article is saying is that now they have the capital for R&D so they expect to be able to push new territory that they otherwise wouldn't have. Intel will just match this new capital expenditure level, and everyone will be happy.
I was a strong AMD guy from the K6 days up until the phenom days. up to that point I found better bang for my buck with AMD Its only with the haswell processors* that I have made the switch back to intel
* just happened to be the generation I was on when i was ready to upgrade my 1st gen phenom
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
I was so proud of them when they kicked IA64's ass with their amd64 architecture, beating Intel at their own game by choosing to be x86-compatible when even Intel didn't go that way. Then I was sad when amd64 started getting called x64, since it stripped AMD of the credit they deserved. Go AMD! A world without strong competition for Intel would be very bad for consumers.
Come on, you know you want AMD to produce something not-backwards-compatible. The drama, it would be so entertaining.
Honestly they need a better team writing the drivers. You can have the best CPU/GPU in the industry but if the drivers suck, no one will want to buy them.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
This was their opportunity to dominate the CPU market with the MIll CPU architecture and they blew it.
Seastead this.
All the article is saying is that now they have the capital for R&D so they expect to be able to push new territory that they otherwise wouldn't have.
Citation needed. Last I looked, Intel's R&D budget was larger than AMD's revenue.
Yup, and the BS about them being first to 64-bit...maybe in the consumer sector, but Intel, IBM and DEC all had 64-bit chips before the Athlon was even designed let alone shipped.
Last I looked, Intel's R&D budget was larger than AMD's revenue
That certainly was true (probably still is), but it's misleading. AMD no longer owns fabs and the majority of Intel's R&D spending is on process technology. By spinning off GlobalFoundaries, AMD is able to share that R&D cost with other SoC makers and go to other companies if they happen to be able to do it better at a specific time.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I think profits will be from consoles, GPUs and low end APUs for the time being
Sorry AMD, you're heading in the completely wrong direction. CPUs are already plenty fast. They have been for years. 3D gaming is starting to look like just another "Gold plated speaker wire" guy hobby as everyone moves to mobile devices.
The real winners in the future are going to be the very cheap, very efficient chips. Do you want one very powerful computer to run everything in your house? Or do you want everything in your house to have its own dedicated, highly efficient CPU that does just what that device needs?
I'm looking at the new Intel G3240 with Intel HD 4000 and I was wondering if something around the same price range (70$CAD) from AMD had an equivalent CPU with a better GPU.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
With openpower systems coming with such great performance numbers from IBM. AMD jumping back hard into the arena at this time might be good timing. ARM/Mobile is growning everything else is shrinking at this point. Its going to be an interesting couple years with the Tegra chips in there.
Got a Phenom II x4 as it was the best bang for the watts and I was building an always on multi-purpose rig.
Where are the same demands for realism when it's a 3D printing story? There it's always "in 50 years we'll 3D print houses on Mars!" and everyone sucks each other's dicks!
Compaq was afraid to use AMD chips given out for free, because Intel would "retaliate", ok?
What kept AMD's market share low was not "clever marketing" of its competitor, it's crime.
Back in P4 Prescott times, Intel's more expensive, more power hungry, yet slower chip outsold AMD's 3 or 4 to 1.
Not being able to profit even when having superior products, it's really astonishing, to see AMD still afloat.
Yup, and the BS about them being first to 64-bit...maybe in the consumer sector, but Intel, IBM and DEC all had 64-bit chips before the Athlon was even designed let alone shipped.
They invented the architecture that you probably typed your post on. That was the point. Heck, on my linux distro it is still called amd64...
I would -love- to see AMD truly competitive with Intel on every level because it is only good for us consumers. It would be great if both companies made chips so fast, efficient, stable, and capable that you didn't buy AMD or Intel based on anything but who had the better deal that week.
However I'm not interested in hype and bullshit. As you say, "put up or shut up." I get tired of hearing about how great your shit will be in the future. Guess what? Intel's shit will be great in the future too, probably. It is great right now.
So less with the hype, more with the making a good CPU.
Way to shoot yourself in the foot, AMD. I don't want or need a new architecture. I want x86 (and x64) for my PC and laptop, the end. In 2016, you'll have some stupid new chip that won't work in any PC or laptop in the world just in time for people to realize that tablets are netbooks with no keyboard and a higher failure rate and stop buying them. I don't think they will make a 1/8 watt cell phone chip when they're this far behind so they're making a completely useless product that nobody will use in anything.
Good point. Would be interesting to know how their CPU R&D budgets compare, though AMD will still struggle if Intel continues to be at least one generation ahead of the fabs AMD are using.
And that cash is going to other parts of the business to offset their loses. AMD lost $83M last year and $20M last quarter. At this point, the only part of the busines that is viable is the graphics division; they just need better drivers. AMD is grasping for straws at this point. Personally, I think their should ditch their x86 products, it is dragging them down.
how is spinning off your fabrication capability 'good' in the long run? (not trying to be flippant, it's a serious question)
I remember when the AMD K6 came out. "AMD is preparing to give Intel's pentium a run for its money with the new K6".
Don't like news about what tech will be like in 2 years? Then why do you read slashdot?
Last year I had an R&D budget of $1. This year I have an R&D budget of $100. It doesn't matter what my competitor has, it matters that I can now do a lot more research and development.
Yes, and Itanium is dead. Alpha is gone. And I don't even know what IBM did. Meanwhile, x86-64 is here to stay.
But Intel has been spending on research. AMD gave up a while ago, and settled for making money on mobile devices.
Because I want the news from last week of course.
I read the internet for the articles.
AMD made it easy to upgrade incrementally; not sure if the same would have been true of Intel as I've not had an Intel desktop in over 10 yrs.
Bought a Athlon X2 with nForce-based mainboard & DDR2 RAM in 2006.
Maxed out the RAM & upgraded to Athlon II X4 in 2009 while keeping same mainboard.
In 2011, bought new 990FX- based board to get SATA 3 / USB 3 & DDR3 RAM but kept the same 4-core CPU.
Just last week, got a 8320 Black Edition 8-core at a good price and might soon get my first "AMD" videocard as an upgrade for my GeForce 9600GT.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Oh! The mighty Linux says? Wow. This must be fact!
Intel has so much tech on the roadmap, anything AMD were to come out with, Intel would just push stuff to come out sooner that would immediately be better.
AMD should just stop bothering with processors...
how is spinning off your fabrication capability 'good' in the long run?
I don't work at AMD, but I do work at another company that relies partly on foundries.
Basically, it's economies of sale and competition. Semiconductor fabrication processes keep getting more expensive. Foundries specialize in process development and spread the R&D across many, many customers. Unless you're willing to spend a fortune keeping up (as Intel is), have special requirements, or need a ton of volume, you have little to gain and a lot to lose from rolling your own process. Remember, you don't just have to make transistors, you also have to have good enough yield to turn a profit and good enough reliability to keep your customers. If you fail, you have to spend even more money to fix the fab on top of the money you're losing on the stuff you manufacture. Meanwhile, TSMC is cheerfully cranking out wafers for your competitors.
Visit the
That's a good question. After all, Intel was able to use their vastly superior fab capabilities to fend off AMD's enhanced tech for years until they released their Nehalem architecture to definitively take back the desktop CPU performance crown.
They're not called ChipZilla for nothing.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
It isn't, but they needed survive and the fabs were draining too much cash.
That is true. However AMD were the first to make a 64-bit architecture, which was x86 compatible. And it was also the first 64-bit CPU to be in a price range that was acceptable to average consumer. But most importantly, AMD designed an architecture so successful that Intel decided to make their own AMD compatible CPU. Today Intel probably earns most of its money on CPUs using AMD's 64 bit design.
But if AMD now want to go and build an entirely new design, which is nothing like x86, they may very well be repeating the exact same mistake Intel made to let AMD64 get the lead.
By now it might be safe to ditch all 8, 16, and 32 bit backwards compatibility with the x86 family. But AMD64 compatibility is too important to ignore.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Not the architecture, that belongs to Intel, AMD extended it to support 64 bits. Intel actually had 64 bit extension in the closet, they didn't want to cannibalize the Itanium. When the AMD extensions became mainstream, the defacto standard, Intel licensed it. But the extension is still tied to the Intel architecture and Intel is still in control.
AMD arguably still is pretty competitive... for the price. Having to append those words to anything about AMD is what they hate, though. They can compete in the low-mid end by undercutting Intel (and even then their CPUs are usually more power hungry), but as soon as you get closer to the high end AMD's just left in the dust except for those rather rare use cases which don't need much FPU performance but can run in massively parallel systems, where their 8-core CPUs shine.
Can't wait for a new day to dawn for AMD!
AMD made it easy to upgrade incrementally; not sure if the same would have been true of Intel as I've not had an Intel desktop in over 10 yrs.
No, intel changed sockets more than AMD did in that period. I got an AM3+ board, so I went from Phenom II X3 720 to Phenom II X6 1045T, which I still have. If you're not expecting massive single-thread performance, it is still a fairly beefy CPU. I mean, sure, half as much as an intel chip, but I paid a hundred bucks for this (and for my original CPU) and you'd have to spend $200 to get an intel chip with this much horsepower today. AMD-chipset motherboards are cheaper than intel-chipset motherboards as well, so the total savings was at least $200 if not more. Today, I still have more than enough CPU for anything I want to do; It's the 240GT that's holding me back now. Been thinking about a modest upgrade to a newer nvidia card pulled from a Dell on ebay for $60.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It better have a configurable secureboot feature, because ARM has the real nightmare of TCPA/TC through the use of a non-configurable secureboot.
Intel does that by spending massive scads of money on process technology. They are able to spend that because they massively overcharge for their product if you take only the design, manufacturing and distribution costs into account. You also have to count paying for their processes.
AMD let a bunch of designers go, it's not clear if intel would have eaten their lunch so aggressively otherwise. Guess we'll have some inkling here soon.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Not the architecture, that belongs to Intel, AMD extended it to support 64 bits.
What are you on about? amd64 is not an architecture, nor is x86. They are instruction sets. The underlying architecture may be informed by the instruction set, but it's also only loosely coupled in modern CPUs.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
By 2016 AMD will have a CPU that beats the sh*t out of Intel's 2014 best offerings.
Yes, and Itanium is dead. Alpha is gone. And I don't even know what IBM did. Meanwhile, x86-64 is here to stay.
And we are all better off? Um, NOPE!
The ONLY thing that kept the X86-64 going was that it ran X86 instructions. As a processor the X86 family is really horrid both from the electrical and programming sides. Lucky for the motherboard makers most of the sticky "design" is abstracted away by the chip-sets, but for the programmer, the architecture was not designed to be expandable, certainly didn't port well into 64 bits.
If you ask me, Alpha and other processors where of better design. My personal favorite was the Motorola 68000 (aka power PC) stuff. That was an engineer's dream to work with both from the hardware and software sides of things. Certainly the instruction set and programing model was a whole lot better than what we generally see today...
So why did the X86 win out? You can think both IBM and Bill Gates for that. (I suppose you could blame Motorola for not accepting the license terms too.) It is the processor in the PC, which have been sold by the millions, making production costs lower.. Apple Mac stuff was initially Motorola CPU's but finally even Apple had to ditch them for cost. X86 is in use for business and historical reasons, not because it was the right choice technically.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Who was the first search engine - no one cares and most don't know. Being first is nice, staying first keep you in business.
The only running Intel is gonna do is to the bank with armfuls of money.
I hope they will release a Steamroller based FX series until that, many would like to put their hands on those improvements. No one really expects them to be present in the high-end market, but we sure want them to remain strong in the medium segment.
http://semiaccurate.com/2014/01/23/kaveri-versus-richland-performance-per-clock-comparison/
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/177099-secrets-of-steamroller-digging-deep-into-amds-next-gen-core
Motorola 68000 and PowerPC have nothing whatever to do with each other except that Apple used both in its products and Motorola was involved in the design of both processors.
Well, not so long as it used to be. I recently got a Macbook Pro and under "About This Mac / Processor" it says "2.3 GHz Intel Core i7" - the same thing it says on a Macbook Pro I got 3 years ago. The CPU is not actually identical of course - it has much-improved battery life, which is good. But the performance increase, if any, is not noticeable. Times really have changed.
Compaq was afraid to use AMD chips given out for free, because Intel would "retaliate", ok?
What kept AMD's market share low was not "clever marketing" of its competitor, it's crime.
Back in P4 Prescott times, Intel's more expensive, more power hungry, yet slower chip outsold AMD's 3 or 4 to 1.
Not being able to profit even when having superior products, it's really astonishing, to see AMD still afloat.
Intel's Payola [1] (which basically kept Dell profitable for several quarters of the past decade) is something you have to factor in when looking at these "deals". I'm just sad that Intel didn't pay a bigger price for their purely anticompetitive corrupt practices.
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/tec...
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
I think the point was even with Intel's massive cash and infrastructure they couldn't bring 64 bit to the desktop - hell they couldn't do it on the server end either; thet Itanium chips were huge flops. And what killed Itanium was AMD's chip!
" Itanium failed to make significant inroads against IA-32 or RISC, and then suffered from the successful introduction of x86-64 based systems into the high-end server market, systems which were more compatible with the older x86 applications." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
So the point is that AMD was more than capable of producing a chip to beat Intel.
You mean like Windows phones.
They already work on mobile chips, they also want to be back on par with Intel on the desktop and server markets. Not everybody needs a server or workstation but the market isn't going away and the cash Intel makes is a proof that the market is still relevant. Let's hope AMD succeed, so that there is again competition in this market segment.
Netburst did seem like a reasonable idea, in testing. While it was low IPC, it looked like it would scale bigtime in the speed area. They had test ALUs running at 10GHz.
So I can see the logic: You make an architecture that can scale to high frequencies easily, and that gets you the speed.
Obviously it didn't scale, and wasn't a good idea, but I can see what they were going for. It wasn't like it was completely nuts.
My personal favorite was the Motorola 68000 (aka power PC) stuff.
Just a minor correction. 68000 has very little in common with the PowerPC except that they were both great architectures to program for. PowerPC is RISC and was originally spec'ed out for a 64 bit architecture. Take any FreeScale CPU manual (the spin-off company from Motorola) and you will see that the WORD datatype is 32-bits long (hence DWORD is 64 bits). On top of that PowerPC was the product of a consortium of companies AIM (Apple IBM Motorola). 68K on the other hand was a 16/32 bit CISC CPU and was designed and manufactured by Motorola only.
You can think both IBM and Bill Gates for that. (I suppose you could blame Motorola for not accepting the license terms too.)
As for thanking Mr. Bill G, well you don't need to. A 32-bit CPU also required an expensive chipset. So, m68k was definitely the choice of high-end HW of its day (e.g. Unix servers and workstations) and would not have been a good choice for the PC platform just due to the cost of the chipset and the peripherals.
Every.. Single.. AMD System that I have seen has blown caps or a bad power supply. Every.. Single.. One..
My Intel systems at work that were purchased at the SAME time from the same vendor are still running today. After my old Athlon 1.3XP back in 03 started eating power supplies and caps, I bailed on the AMD bandwagon. Way too power hungry for the processing power. Intels just seem to run "smoother" also. Just my .02c AND I don't have computers that sound like leaf-blowers or shop-vacs in my house anymore! Bonus!
Yeah. This year you can get the PSU. .. :)
According to xbitlabs, Kaveri has worse CPU performance than its predecessor.
AMD got lucky. It's found a dependable stream of revenue in game consoles. Better yet, no matter whether Microsoft or Sony wins the next generation console wars, both have AMD under the hood. Now that's hedging your bets. Whoever at AMD was in charge of negotiating these deals deserves a paid vacation to Necker Island with all the trimmings.
But lets get serious. AMD's current processors suck. And I hate saying that. A decade ago, AMD was the hero in the processor wars. If it wasn't for AMD, we'd be stuck with Rambus RAM, using Itanium processors, and have PCs running so hot we could cook breakfast on the case. But AMD's desktop processors are inefficient, almost two generations in fab technology behind Intel, and just cannot compete at any level.
Unlike 10-12 years ago, Intel's making great strides in microprocessor technology. It is thanks to AMD's competitiveness that Intel finally got its act together, and for that, I will always be thankful. If they can find a way to improve on Intel's product line, I'd be amazed at their comback. But do they really need to?
Not the architecture, that belongs to Intel, AMD extended it to support 64 bits.
What are you on about? amd64 is not an architecture, nor is x86. They are instruction sets. The underlying architecture may be informed by the instruction set, but it's also only loosely coupled in modern CPUs.
This is why the term "microarchitecture" is useful. In addition to the term "instruction set", the term "instruction set architecture" is also used, so "architecture" is used for both.
Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) is also a common name for it. That and tons of linux distributions and people refer to it as "arch" or "architecture". GNU coreutils even has a program named arch that prints out the "machine hardware name" (ew...).
The fact is lots of people call it architecture and it can reasonably be called architecture in the given context. I'll allow it!
Not denying it's important to know the difference, though!
IBM did Power and PowerPC (IBM PowerPC 970 is the "G5" in Apple products.)
One could argue that the reason Intel's products have advanced as far as they have is because AMD was there to keep them on their toes. The game has changed since then, with mobile and whatnot, but I am still rooting for a comeback. Rory Read has played his cards well so far; and with Jim Keller back, it will be interesting to see what they have in store for us.
I think the point was even with Intel's massive cash and infrastructure they couldn't bring 64 bit to the desktop
Wrong. They could have if they had wanted to, but they didn't want to. They wanted 64-bit to remain in the realm of big-iron, so they could sell their big, overpriced Itanic chips. Whenever anyone asked about 64-bit chips, Intel said "buy our Itanic!". When anyone complained about the 4G memory limitation inherent with 32-bit chips, they pointed to their crappy PAE extension.
Then AMD came out with the X86-64 ISA, and then suddenly Intel looked stupid. They tried to say things like "people don't need 64 bits on desktop systems", "you can use PAE to use more than 4G", "no one needs more than 4G", until they trotted out their hastily-made "EM64T" version.
What I've read is that the AMD64 stuff is actually good. Personally I don't have an opinion since I'm not educated and experienced enough to have one really.
Motorola 68000-series isn't PowerPC. Their PowerPC chips are called PowerPC 74x, 75x, 74xx and 86xx. ... and I assume you're wrong there before a friend of mine back in the days was a demo coder on the Amiga 500 and later got a i386 and afaik he thought it was better (why else would he had switched?) Then again he never experienced the M68040 or M68060 (or the 020 or 030 I guess) and there was improvements like MMU, floating point units, I guess possibly more registers in those.
Apple used both M68k, PowerPC both from Motorola and IBM and Intel x86 and whatever Intel calls AMD64. I guess Apple business was the major player of higher end PowerPC chips and as such they had to fund a large part of the research and manufacturing whereas they didn't had to do that with Intel chips. The 32-bit chips was pretty lame but I guess they knew Intel had 64-bit chips coming soon and that they would be very competitive vs what they could get from IBM.
I'd advise against unless it's a very new card or you're not intending to game; Nvidia's just dropped support for all pre-fermi cards and will be dropping support for Fermi (400 and 500 series cards) with their next hardware revision.
That said, given you said you're coming from a 240GT, I guess gaming isn't really a concern for you anyway.
s/before/because/g :)
Yeah, its not like they intentionally gimp their processors with shoddy construction methods, LIKE PUTTING THERMAL PASTE DIRECTLY ON THE PROCESSOR. I know I'll never own a processor that requires delidding. Thankfully AMD processors are still made correctly.
AMD has pissed away massive leads over Intel in the past.
AMD single-handedly created the x86-x64 market from NOTHING.
Then they fell back on their laurels.
Then they bought a graphics company.
Their last effort in the market was basically a fizzle. Forgoing a custom chip designed to eake the maximum efficiency and power from the device, they went with a crappy computer-designed monstrosity that basically was the worst of all worlds, and a flame-throwing power hog to boot.
Sure, they can kick out a processor that says "I can throw *insert a number here* cores at you!*
Are they FULLY FUNCTIONAL cores? And are users actually going to be using anything that can take advantage of the massively multiple architecture?
The problem is that AMD doesn't know and has long since stopped caring.
So, until they actually deliver a complete platform that can top Intel, I'm just going to ignore them. They're not worth dealing with otherwise.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Helps to bribe system builders to keep AMD out of most consumer's machines.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/s...
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
I'd advise against unless it's a very new card or you're not intending to game; Nvidia's just dropped support for all pre-fermi cards and will be dropping support for Fermi (400 and 500 series cards) with their next hardware revision.
That's OK, I'm looking at a 640GT. I do game, but I mostly play older games and I don't demand full detail at 1920x1200, my display res.
The 240GT is enough to play many older games at full res with full options, but of course, no newer games. And it won't even play most newer games with even half the options turned on. Even Star Trek Online taxes my 240GT.
I chose the card on the basis of power consumption. The 250GT was the hot card when I bought it (I've had it long enough to replace the GPU fan!) and the 240GT had 3/4 the performance with 1/2 the TDP. I have a 480W power supply, no problems. The 640GT is another one of these no-SLI, no-additional-power-connector cards, so it appeals to me. I can get one for fifty bucks.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yeah, but ISAs are all but over, and they are over in x86-land. We haven't had an x86 core defined by its instruction set since the 80486. Even the Am586 was internally RISCy.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I would also add that unless AMD plans to have a business where it can migrate cheaper chip business to use the older fabs, AMD might well find itself having to manage fabs i.e. run a foundries business to recoup its investment. AMD doesn't really make the cheap as chips chips (the kind of stuff that Broadcom makes), then they should not be in the business of fabs. They ought to let the likes of TSMC who can manage that migration much better than AMD be in that business.
Possible but not attractive if the time frames between upgrades was a bit longer.
Bought an Athlon X2 with DDR2 RAM in 2007.
Wanted an upgrade in 2011 and found that the price per GByte of DDR2 RAM was much higher than for DDR3 RAM. CPU and GPU needed changing anyway. 4GByte of DDR3 RAM were not more expensive than buying another 2GByte of DDR2 RAM would have cost. Some Athlons and Phenoms for socket AM2+ were still available but the socket AM3 CPUs looked considerably better.
So I settled on a Phenom II X4 on a relatively inexpensive new socket AM3 Board. Bottom line, I paid some extra for the new board but got better memory bandwidth and a more power efficient CPU out of it. The old board remained operational, as I did not rip out CPU, GPU or RAM.
I also still had a nice case from 2004 hanging around so I shelled out a bit additional money for a PSU and a new hard disk, and put the new system into the old case. Overall, I paid maybe 150 euros more than with maximum reuse of the old stuff. But that way I kept the 2007 PC usable, which is still useful from time to time :-)
C - the footgun of programming languages
When you say a 32-bit CPU what do you mean really? The Intel one or the Motorola one?
From what you're saying afterwards it sound like the m68k was ok on more expensive stuff but not on PC because it was cheaper?
But lots of designed for home gear like the Mega Drive, Atari and Amiga home computers and so on used the m68k.
The article is just a lot of vague and mostly clueless ramblings from a "freelance journalist" who clearly a) has no insider information from AMD and b) knows nothing about CPU design (as his comments on the 2 INT + 1 FP approach make perfectly clear).
I wonder how much he gets paid for that; I bet I could write an automated "article generation" script that would produce more relevant articles.
I do wonder what the future has in store for the humble CPU. With a huge market shift towards tablets and phones in the consumer area, where power savings are more important than raw oomph, as well as a similar shift in a good portion of the server market, are we starting to reach an era of CPU's being "good enough" for most people and performance to begin stagnating?
Hopefully some good competition between AMD and Intel will keep things fresh and fast.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Yeah, but ISAs are all but over, and they are over in x86-land.
They're not "over" to compiler writers and assembler-language programmers.
We haven't had an x86 core defined by its instruction set since the 80486. Even the Am586 was internally RISCy.
So? They (and the latest z/Architecture chips) might translate native instructions into microops and schedule and execute those microops, but the only way in which those microops - or other implementation details of the processor - are visible to code and people or software that generate code is that they may affect the performance of particular sequences of instructions, so that, for example, a compiler might optimize differently for different processors.
It would be nice to see AMD offer a 4-8 processor chipset that would allow you to highly parallelize their chips. Intel can do it, but the premium for Xeon silicon is outrageous. Not sure if AMD has enough business in that market that they're willing to chuck it in hopes of getting a leg up, but I sure as hell wish I could drop a second CPU into my desktop so I don't have to chuck the entire thing and buy a whole new board/CPU from Intel just to get a 50% boost in performance every 3-4 years.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Well I guess Intel have the volume too, so that is another thing going for them. AMD with its lower volume may be (more strongly) forced to go with a foundry.
At the same time, progress in fabrication processes seems to slow down a bit, and cost advantages are no longer so obvious with a new generation. Maybe the gap between Intel and AMD in manufacturing will shrink due to that.
C - the footgun of programming languages
What are you on about? amd64 is not an architecture, nor is x86. They are instruction sets. The underlying architecture may be informed by the instruction set, but it's also only loosely coupled in modern CPUs.
AMD64 and x86 most certainly are architectures. Have you heard the term "instruction set architecture", i.e., ISA? The underlying implementation you refer to is usually referred to as the "microarchitecture" to distinguish it from the ISA.
The term "architecture" is often tossed around to refer more broadly to the general organization of an implementation, but it's not wrong to use it in the more specific sense of ISA as well.
EMT64 was in the labs for several years before it was released to market, just like "Jackson Technology" or "Hyper-Threading" was in the labs several years before it's introduction to market, so "hastily-made" is definably false.
As someone stated earlier, EMT64 was already cooking in the labs at the same time Itanium or IA64 was cooking, Intel gambled on IA64 and wanted to start to move away from IA32, but fortunately for the rest of the world, AMD forced their hands.
I know a lot of this first hand, has I am a former member of one of the Intel Validation teams
Yeah, but ISAs are all but over, and they are over in x86-land.
They're not "over" to compiler writers and assembler-language programmers.
IS != ISA, HTH HAND
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
IBM introduced the 64-bit version of the PowerPC architecture in 2002, and I think that some of their mainframe processors were 64-bit about 2 years before that.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
x86 is holding us back, so much that servers are turning towards ARMv8 (inferior design to Itanium, but tons of momentum from mobile/embedded).
The x86 ISA is not holding us back. IMO, the only thing that motivates people to turn to ARM for servers is that AMD is not giving Intel sufficient competition in the server space. No one wants an Intel monopoly, and if AMD is not going to be an effective alternative, then people are forced to look beyond x86 for one. But that has nothing to do with the relative technical merits of x86 vs. ARM.
Also, no way is ARMv8 and inferior design to Itanium. I think the fate of Itanium should make it clear that there were very few things in this world inferior to Itanium ;-).
As a processor the X86 family is really horrid both from the electrical and programming sides.
Nowhere near as horrid as Itanium, at least on the programming side. Yeah, let's throw all the complexity into the compiler, not the CPU, that'll work.
Yeah, but ISAs are all but over, and they are over in x86-land.
They're not "over" to compiler writers and assembler-language programmers.
IS != ISA, HTH HAND
It would only help if it were true. What are your definitions of "instruction set" and "instruction set architecture", and what citations can you give that would make those definitions worth taking seriously, as opposed to, for example, Intel's use of "instruction set" and Intel's use of "instruction set architecture"?
AMD64 and x86 most certainly are architectures.
Nope. I will correct you one time and then I'm done with this stupid thread.
AMD64 and x86 are instruction sets. x86 isn't even an instruction set, it's a name for families of instruction sets. Once upon a time, instruction sets were related directly to architectures. In PC-land, that time ended with the 80486. All x86-compatible processors since have been some other kind of core internally, with decode and encode on the way in and out of the CPU to make it look like an x86 processor.
We no longer have instruction set architectures in mainstream computing, because we have moved up to a level of complexity as well as a level of feature churn where that makes no sense. Developers depend on instruction sets remaining fairly constant, but customer continue to demand (with their dollars) ever faster processors. The instruction set is now divorced from the processor internals.
That is what I mean when I say we no longer have instruction set architectures: we have micro-op architectures with translators strapped to them. Meanwhile, architectures shift around beneath them with most users (and programmers!) none the wiser. Architectures are now known not by the associated instruction set (which is now simply a line item in the specifications) but by code names like "Hammer", "Clawhammer", "Bulldozer", "Nehalem", etc etc. Today these architectures are designed to implement multiple instruction sets.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The best technical choice isn't always the best practical choice. x86-64 won out because it was practical and manageable from a cost perspective. Ran existing code natively while at the same time being an upgrade for the future. Technically speaking, it would be great to have the nation run completely on nuclear power, but there are costs to that, coupled with natural disaster risks, so we moved in other directions. It wasn't practical.
By now it might be safe to ditch all 8, 16, and 32 bit backwards compatibility with the x86 family. But AMD64 compatibility is too important to ignore.
Dropping 16 bit backwards compatibility is probably OK by now, and I don't think there is such a thing as 8 bit programs on x86 at all. But 32 bit software is still widely used and backwards compatibility to it is an important feature of AMD64. AMD would be crazy to drop that in an AMD64 compatible CPU.
At the same time however, they are developing ARM-based server processors which are not x86 compatible at all. So there seems to be a market for that. There certainly is in the tablet world. I just don't see it for the desktop yet.
C - the footgun of programming languages
What are your definitions of "instruction set" and "instruction set architecture", and what citations can you give that would make those definitions worth taking seriously, as opposed to, for example, Intel's use of "instruction set" and Intel's use of "instruction set architecture"?
Instruction set, the set of instructions. ISA, the part of the architecture which handles the instruction set. Just the decode and encode stages of the CPU, and the instruction set itself. But originally, the ISA was defined by the very architecture of the processor, and it related directly to the architecture of the underlying processor.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I remember back in the day when nerds loved AMD for the Athlon XP for being the smarter, nerdier choice. Then when the Athlon 64 and its dual core version were dominating everything Intel could throw at it, Nerds still bought it because it was the best CPU even though AMD was charging ridiculous prices. But then.... suddenly, Intel comes out with the Core 2 Duo which was an unbelievably monumental leap in performance... and on top of that they charge reasonable prices for them. Suddenly you can get a Intel CPU for $300 that offers 6x the performance of an AMD CPU that was selling for $1200 just a week ago. That turned a lot of nerds against AMD, if they hadn't been busy ripping people off when they were on top they'd have held onto our heartstrings and we'd have kept buying.
AMD64 and x86 most certainly are architectures.
Nope. I will correct you one time and then I'm done with this stupid thread.
Since drinkypoo is done with this thread, I won't bother to try and change his/her mind---but for the benefit of other readers, you may safely assume that drinkypoo is wrong. If you really care to learn more, there's plenty of information out there, say here or here.
Or if you really want to go back to the start of it all, the IBM 360:
The design made a clear distinction between architecture and implementation, allowing IBM to release a suite of compatible designs at different prices.
All the code names listed above are different implementations of the AMD64 architecture.
AMD may have shed the risk associated with owning fabs but process-wise, they have also slipped almost two process generations behind Intel - Intel is about to start shipping 14nm products while AMD is still on 28nm.
And Intel is also sharing some of their fab costs by leasing some of their capacity to other fab-less chip designers such as Altera.
I bet AMD never expected TSMC and GF to slip so far behind Intel when they spun their fabs off.
Instruction set, the set of instructions. ISA, the part of the architecture which handles the instruction set.
Who, other than you, uses that definition of ISA? Intel doesn't, as per my previous post. IBM doesn't, either, and neither does ARM, nor does AMD, nor does Sun^WOracle, for example; they're all using "instruction set architecture" as "instruction set", with "architecture" perhaps given to signify that the instruction set is not just a characteristic of a particular processor, it's something that's specified separately from particular implementations of the instruction set.
Just the decode and encode stages of the CPU
So what does the "encode" stage of a CPU do? Take various internal chip signals and write out instructions to memory?
But originally, the ISA was defined by the very architecture of the processor, and it related directly to the architecture of the underlying processor.
If you mean "in the very early days of computers, the connection between the instruction set and the design of the CPU was straightforward", that might be true, but, dating at least back to the IBM System/360, the same instruction set was implemented by extremely different internal processor designs in many families of computers.
Instruction set, the set of instructions. ISA, the part of the architecture which handles the instruction set..
That may be what you think it means, but that's not what it means. Instruction set and ISA are synonyms. In fact "architecture" by itself can mean "instruction set", but people also use "architecture" in other ways, so the term ISA came around to clarify that we're talking about "architecture" in the sense of "instruction set".
As in my other post, I'm not really trying to argue with drinkypoo, just hoping to keep others from being misled.
Intel and AMD followed, not led. MIPS, SPARC and ALPHA all preceded them to fully 64-bit chips. And the Sun MAJC chip was the first dual core chip on the market.
French - The lingua franca of Europe!
The pentium D(netburst) was the first x86 dual core.
The desktop ones need some pci-e in cpu or at least 2 channel s of HyperTransport so you can have PCIe HyperTransport bridge s
The best thing AMD got right was the upgrade path, S939 kept my machine current for years before the glorious AM3 socket. Every Intel we've built OTOH only has one good CPU per socket and no upgrade path after that.
$
It won't let you multi-task since you can't reprogram it when ever you context switch.
Mobile devices have tended to work around this by implementing a window management policy of all maximized all the time. If you want to context switch, you'll do so by pressing a dedicated button or dedicated area of the touch screen to pull up a list of contexts to which you can switch.
3D gaming is starting to look like just another "Gold plated speaker wire" guy hobby as everyone moves to mobile devices.
Let me know when a substantial number of people start buying MOGA clip-on gamepads for their mobile devices. Until then, even the smartphone or tablet with the strongest CPU and GPU will be limited by its touch input. Mega Man 2 and Castlevania ran comfortably on 1.8 MHz CPUs, yet not even a 1.8 GHz CPU can add buttons to a device that doesn't have them.
Effectively all the GPU revisions between Xbox One and Xbox Two and between PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 will be for PCs. AMD needs to keep its PC GPUs and respective drivers competitive in order to continue to have a leading-edge product. Without a leading-edge product, AMD has no real way to research tech that will keep Xbox Two and PlayStation 5 on AMD instead of switching back to NVIDIA like the original Xbox and PlayStation 3 did.
If your mp3 encode takes longer, so what? You're encoding from a batch, right?
Not if you're offering live streams at multiple bitrates. Then you need an encoder faster than real time.
IBM did Power, but PowerPC was jointly designed between IBM, Motorola, and Apple.
EMT64 was in the labs for several years before it was released to market
But was the project started before, or after, AMD published the first AMD64 spec? My guess is "after", unless Intel either 1) somehow managed to come up with the same extensions as AMD or 2) discarded their extensions and went with AMD's after AMD announced them.
Intel's problem here was that they tried to break the x86 chain by not being backwards compatible in their 64-bit solution. Even Intel knew that x86 wasn't a great architecture and they wanted something better. There were a set of problems with public acceptance of itanium though; their emulation of x86 wasn't very good, and for the high end systems that they targeted there was already a lot of competition, and the price was steep. AMD succeeded by being an extension of x86 instead of being a new design and by being cheaper. In that sense, Itanium was a better architecture all around and the x86-64 was just more of the same.
Think of it this way, when you've worked on code that's 10 years old and you think "this would be so much better if we could throw it away and start from scratch" imagine that Intel thinks the same way with x86 only it's dealing with a 40 year long chain of incremental improvements.
Every time I go to buy a CPU, AMD wins on the price-performance charts, so... AMD wins. I have to assume that Intel is for the subset of people for whom money is not a concern.
Regardless they have made 64 bit PowerPC processors which was the point.
Finally,, a new round of aggressive innovation,
I hope AMD kicks the Sh1t out of INTEL AGAIN!!!!!!!
I think Intel has gotten too smug again and their pricing model reflects that..
I have allways liked AMD's approaches to the issues @ hand..More meat to chew on.
a more agreeable "bang" for Buck ration..
Plus I have allways been a FAN of the ALPHA chip innovations..
I find it interesting, that 20+ years later their innovations are still seen in a significant portion of the market..
Is it, the engineer's have gotten to lazy to bring REAL innovation? Have we run out of innovation (steam)? Is the Alpha class chip so far ahead of its time that no current design's come close??
i mean really even GM has moved away from it (bread&butter) Bowtie platform. (the 350ci engine v8).
Moving past that, perhaps I am wrong. But seriously i still see people basing alot of stuff of the EV7 bus/backend, etc...
I am also not omitting AMD in that picture as well they have sliced and diced soem older tech as well.. (ev7)..
bottom line is something NEW has to come from this..
The next horizon, the next big thing..
Lets look FAR FUTURE, what would you like to see in the next REAL USS enterprise???
many things to consider.
thanks for you time, you may remove the soap box...
I'm sure your method of choosing a car is, no doubt, similarly insightful...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
IBM introduced the 64-bit version of the PowerPC architecture in 2002,
Well before that, and, yes, the PPC 620 was used in some systems shipped by Groupe Bull. IBM's first systems using 64-bit PPC processors came out in 1997.
and I think that some of their mainframe processors were 64-bit about 2 years before that.
2 years before 2002, yes.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
Frequency is not the same thing as performance. Your new 2.3 GHz i7 is faster in benchmarks and real-world use than your 3 year old 2.3 GHz i7. The performance gains have slowed down a bit, since Intel has been putting more focus on power (as you note, battery life is greatly improved), but performance gains are not completely gone by any stretch of the imagination.
You might not notice it, however, because a lot of people don't really have a use for all the performance modern CPUs have to offer.
This written on an Athlon 64 X2 "Toledo". It runs XFCE 4.8 on a 64-bit Linux kernel 3.5 pretty snappily (my experience is not too much worse than on my Ivy Brigde) and keeps up admirably with the (modest) workload I'm throwing at it. It's a day-and-night difference with the 1-year-newer P4 Cedar Mill I threw out because it was nearly unworkable in the exact same function, even though it was paired with faster memory. I'm thinking the early EM64T implementations were not up to snuff, which wasn't such a big deal at the time because no-one was using it much.
I guess I'm giving everyone a blast from the past with this post :)
The ONLY thing that kept the X86-64 going was that it ran X86 instructions. As a processor the X86 family is really horrid both from the electrical and programming sides.
Like you know anything about either side.
Lucky for the motherboard makers most of the sticky "design" is abstracted away by the chip-sets, but for the programmer, the architecture was not designed to be expandable, certainly didn't port well into 64 bits.
You base this on... what, precisely? 64-bit x86 seems to work pretty well to me.
If you ask me, Alpha and other processors where of better design. My personal favorite was the Motorola 68000 (aka power PC) stuff. That was an engineer's dream to work with both from the hardware and software sides of things.
ROFL. 68000 and PowerPC are entirely different instruction sets, not the same thing in any sense at all. And anyone who tries to claim that x86 is ugly "electrically" while 68000 is beautiful clearly has no clue. Despite all the elegance which appealed to assembly language programmers, it turned out that 680x0 (particularly post-68020) is actually much less friendly to high performance, pipelined hardware implementations than x86. Ironically, the super powerful addressing modes and high orthogonality of the ISA made hardware engineers' lives significantly more difficult. This led to Motorola's 680x0 designs falling progressively further behind Intel's x86 designs, both in performance and time-to-market, and thence to Apple deciding to shitcan 680x0 and switch to PowerPC, a completely different architecture derived from IBM's POWER design.
So why did the X86 win out? You can think both IBM and Bill Gates for that. (I suppose you could blame Motorola for not accepting the license terms too.)
Motorola lost the IBM PC deal because the 68000 literally was not ready, and was too expensive for IBM's system price targets. Not because Motorola balked at licensing terms (for what?). The 68000 ended up losing in the market because, although it was clearly superior in the early 1980s and was successful in many markets, particularly high-priced UNIX workstations, by the late 1980s it had lost the high end markets to even more clearly superior RISC CPUs. And then it also began falling behind x86 performance, leading even Apple to abandon it.
Core2 Duo 6x faster than Athlon 64 X2? What are you smoking? Yes, it was somewhat faster, and AMD was a bit more sluggish adjusting its prices than it should have been, but the Core 2 Duo's big success was largely due to its much lower power draw in laptops, and more importantly, the market's "Intel inside" bias. The Core2 later got significant competition from the Phenom xx50 and newer, but that was only half a year before the Core i7 came out. Only then, you could really say the Intel CPUs ran circles around their AMD counterparts, at least in desktop and mobile applications.
For clarity, I am not the AC who was on an Intel validation team.
It's an open industry secret that Intel's 64-bit x86 project began before AMD first announced or published AMD64. It was not an identical extension by any means. When Intel realized that AMD64 was going to force them to release 64-bit x86 products, they actually tried to get Microsoft to support Intel's own 64-bit x86 in Windows in addition to AMD64. This would have made AMD64 irrelevant, in much the same way that MMX had previously made AMD's 3DNow! irrelevant (on average, independent software vendors faced with similar effort to write software for two similar chips are going to prioritize the one with higher sales volume).
Microsoft refused. They didn't want to fragment 64-bit x86, and they felt that if Intel had wanted to have a voice they should've beaten AMD to the punch, or at least participated when AMD published first. And, of course, it was in Microsoft's best interests to resist Intel's attempts to monopolize x86.
Intel was then forced to go back to the drawing board and rework their extensions to mostly match AMD's, which significantly delayed their time-to-market. It's known that at least one Pentium 4 generation shipped with dark silicon implementing Intel's original, never-disclosed-in-public 64-bit x86 extension. There are still differences between AMD64 and EM64T, but they're confined to privileged VM-related instructions which only kernel-level software can use. The userspace ISA got fully harmonized, which is what Microsoft needed in order to unify the software market.
Most of the changes to Intel's processor designs would've been in the decoder front end, rather than the actual execution pipeline: a 64-bit add is a 64-bit add. So it wasn't as huge a task to rework the design to support AMD64 as you might think, though obviously it cost Intel a product generation.
I have owned AMD processors exactly 3 times, and every single time I have heat issues. It doesn't matter how much Arctic Silver I use, or having a good or better or best heat sink, or having a better case with better airflow, they always get too hot and tank. My last one was the Phenom II 6-core... after less htan a year I was down to 1 core.
I have had ZERO problems with Intel in that regard, and their CPUs perform well under a variety of loads, with no problem.
The Phenom x3 was alright for the price, especially if you could unlock the 4th core. But the Phenom X6 is where AMD started sucking. Lots of slow cores sitting around doing nothing but sucking away power and creating heat. That's where they went wrong. Now they sell 8 core CPUs that get slaughtered in most everyday tasks by a $45 dual core Celeron G1840 which uses 1/4 of the power or less.
Agreed, Phenom II's were amazing - most of my home servers still run them, 1/4 the price of anything Intel had at the time around the same speed.
Honestly, if they were still developing Phenom II's w/ die improvements / power reduction - I'd still be buying them (my latest round of build servers will probably end up being AM1s instead).
Right. Had forgotten about that, my bad.
Still very glad I never spent a penny on Dell hardware.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
A lot of devs in the game industry are also eyeing AMD's mantle, a GPU solution that tends to achieve 40%+ performance over DirectX/OpenGL:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
There was an impressive demo at GDC this year by Oxide:
http://www.maximumpc.com/AMD_M...
Technically speaking, it would be great to have the nation run completely on nuclear power, but there are costs to that, coupled with natural disaster risks, so we moved in other directions. It wasn't practical.
You left something out - Included in the working definition of 'practical' at the time was "can the design be used to make Pu239?" If a design, like Liquid Thorium Salt or Pebble Bed, couldn't make bombs, it didn't get funding. To maintain the ability to make megaton explosions, we accepted higher (forget about nature) man-made disaster risks like Chernobyl, Fukishima, Hanford, and Savannah River and blame nature for the result of our global myopia.
Except the chip you have now is roughly
* 66% faster across the board, per thread
* 70% faster at multithreaded ops
* 800% faster at AES operations
* 300%+ faster on video transcodes
and to top it all off,
* 66% less power draw at any given time, and
* statistically speaking, probably 2x as many cores.
Other than that, yea! No real changes.
I love my Phenom X3 720. I got lucky and got one that was a 4 core with the forth core disabled. I have it unlocked through the bios and am run at 3.4 on air. Not bad for under $200 a 4 years ago.
Oops, should've worded that differently. I was thinking of the G5 (or the 970 series, if you want to stick with the IBM names). I was just looking for a well-known 64-bit IBM-produced chip from before 64-bit x86.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Itanium 64-bit failed for one reason. It could not execute 32-bit workloads at the same speed as an equivalently priced 32-bit Xeon chip.
With an AMD Opteron chip, you got the best of both worlds. A chip that could do 64bit, and it could run your existing 32bit software as fast as your old CPU.
That made moving to Opteron a no-brainer decision. You got better performance from having a newer chip, even if you weren't ready to jump to a 64bit OpSys. PLUS, when you finally did move to 64bit operating systems, your CPU chip was ready and waiting.
The other reason that AMD ate Intel's lunch for a while was that they were the first ones to drive the cost of dual-core chips below $150. Intel was still charging $300+ for a dual-core CPU while you could pickup AMD Athon x2s for under $150. And dual-core makes a huge difference in how responsive the machine feels compared to a single-core CPU.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Star Trek Online taxes high end GPUs with you have all details maxed and you're in a warzone, such as the Undine space battlezone. Even a dual GTX 780 can crawl to only a few FPS.
3 years ago was already the 2nd core ix architecture. If anything, performance is at best 30% faster per thread. He has an i7, so exactly the same number of cores and threads. Yes the 4th generation ix do draw much less power, but the CPU is only part of the story.
Essentially, performance-wise, Desktop CPUs have stalled. I bought my core i7 920 (1st generation) in 2009, and I can find no reason to upgrade. 40% faster across the board at best is not noticeable. In comparison, in 2004 I had bought an Athlon 64. Single core, 2GHz. The performance improvement between the Athlon and the core ix were astonishing.
Intel do not massively over-charge for their product. If they did, people would buy AMD instead.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Um.... Itanium failed for 2 reasons. The second one being price. It wasn't just Xeon priced, it was way more expensive than that. It wasn't just outperformed by an equivalent priced Xeon (that didn't exist, they were cheaper), it was destroyed performance wise by consumer non-xeon CPUs on x86 code.
Which happens to be all of the code people actually cared about running.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
The question is why would you bother? A modern x64 CPU has billions of transistors. The 486 CPU (which has 16/32 bit compatibility) was implemented entirely in around 1 million transistors. You're going to save a fraction of a percent of the CPU die, whilst breaking virtually all software written prior to 1992, and probably a lot of niche software written after that. It's not worth it.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Nah, the original guy posting about his Macbook pro is correct. I also have a 2011 macbook pro with Sandy bridge, an i7-2720 quad core, 2.2Ghz. GPU performance is different, power consumption is better now, but in terms of raw performance on CPU, it's a wash. The 1990s style gains of 2x performance every 18 months or so are well and truly gone.
But yes, i agree, desktop CPU performance has pretty much stalled since the Sandy Bridge machines. I suspect it is because AMD simply dropped the ball and intel hasn't seen any need to push the envelope yet.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Performance is good enough that they spend effort making it more efficient for battery life, instead of letting the CPU idle .1% more time. And you say this is not progress?
What if the about page displayed estimated power consumption instead of speed? Progress would be evident.
During that period? I dropped intel because every time I wanted a new CPU I needed a new motherboard. Didn't use to be that way in the pentium II and pentium III days, but sometime mid 2000s intel changed. Sorry intel I don't wanna buy a $200+ CPU AND a $200 motherboard everytime thanks. My 6 core 1055t AMD uses a 4 year old motherboard and I'm thinking about getting a new motherboard for usb 3.0 and ten USB ports and 4x PCI-E x16 that can use the same CPU. It's nice not having to change both CPU and motherboard at the same time when you're happy with what you have
I like Intel. I'm running their chipsets and chips right now, but competition is also good. Eric Clapton never played as well as when he was trading licks with Skydog (Duane Allman). Mind you, Allman was considered the better player, but in each others presence, all the other strummers just stood around dumbstruck watching two masters jam and going 'how the hell did they do that? and 'I didn't know you could get a guitar to sound like that!' So now we have AMD pressing to give Intel some CPU competition. Good. If we could get either Intel or AMD to give Nvidia competition, that would be even better. You know IBM isn't going to, they have given up on attempts to be innovative in the consumer space.
AMD very recently released an embedded quadcore processor, which is available in a Zbox-Nano from Zotac and there is an Intel Mini-ITX board available from ASRock, at a 10W TDP, also with four CPU-cores. It is late of course, given that ARM-CPUs are available already as octacore versions following the big-little design.
Nonetheless embedded PCs have much more attractive prices than high-end ARM-machinery. So unless you are enthusiastic about ARM, or you are paid by Google or Apple, there is no need anymore to buy ARM, it may also cost more than 10x as much as a comparable Intel-compatible product.
ARM-CPUs can run at 2 GHz or even higher frequencies, but their energy-efficiency is not necessarily better than of PC-architecture chips.
Very recently I upgraded from the AM2+-platform to FM2 and now I am wondering, whether single-thread-performance really _is_ the holy grail of today's desktop-computing, respectively how long it is going to remain this way, if so?
Linux-Software is not properly parallelized yet, so 2x3 GHz will be faster than 3x2 GHz in more than 93% of all use-cases.
So I guess now, that either the software-producers have to do something in order to make better use of multicore-designs, or it is the hardware-vendor's turn to deliver the technology to us, that automatically makes proper use of multicore-CPUs, also with single-threaded software, most probably both.
The PC-crisis is clearly hitting Intel more than it hits AMD, the Wintel-alliance is obviously over, the marketing-powers have shifted to other regions of the world, this shit is not being 'Politically-Correct' either, see ??
Please find me a competitive AMD CPU that wins against my core i5-4430 over 3 years with power consumption taken into account. Cheers.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
ps. my power rate here in Australia is roughly 26c (aussie) per kw/h, and my machine is turned on approximately 12+ hours per day.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Wasnt sandy bridge just coming out in may, 2011? A computer owned at that point would have a nehalem architecture, which i was comparing with haswell (which is in the wild now, and has been for a year).
With Intel CPUs, I have to upgrade less often than with AMD. The cost evens out and I end up with top of the line gear instead of settling for AMD's second best.
Even AMD's 8 core CPUs get left in the dust by Intel's 4 core CPUs. They haven't been competitive since the Athlon vs Pentium III days.
I wouldn't say 6x faster, but easily 2x to 3x at the same clockspeed.
At least AMD64 did do some preparations for ditching some of the cruft. The 64-bit mode of the AMD64 architecture left out some of the features of the original x86 design. If we can get the 16 bit BIOS interfaces replaced with 64 bit interfaces, then it would make sense for the next generation of CPUs to switch on in 64 bit mode. After that, it won't be long before you can completely drop the 16 and 32 bit support from the CPUs. Support for 32 bit user mode on a 64 bit kernel may need to live for a little longer though.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Let's hope he won't get run over by a bus. ;-) A bus factor of one would be bad for any company's success. AMD's size just multiplies the risks.
Ezekiel 23:20
Depends on how much that percent of the CPU die holds the rest back in terms of complexity and maybe performance limitations (not really my area of expertise). You may be right that it does not really matter.
On the other hand, "prior to 1992" means DOS and maybe Windows 3.x software. I'm aware that there are still a few DOS-based maintenance tools for the PC around, but otherwise I don't know anyone who still works with DOS software.
I used to work for a company that was really backwards that way, until a few years ago they produced a medical device with DOS-based software as "implicit real time system" (no other thread that can steal the CPU). But even they have given up on DOS, as the technical limitations became too bothersome. The successor of that device, now on the market, uses Windows 7 with a real time extension to the OS.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Hahahahaha http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
With your mouth full (as you "eat your words" vs. apk) http://it.slashdot.org/comment...
!= good nutrition & not polite to talk w/ yer mouth ful eating 'em http://it.slashdot.org/comment... hahahaha
I have read stories about AMD making a come back for so many years its not even funny. I know many consumers who still don't even know AMD exists.
For me AMD as a processor company has at least managed to tread water all these years. But to say they have ever really attracted mainstream in a significant way since desktops began their slow demise is a reach. AMD simply dropped the ball for too long on mobile to ever gain much confidence from PC makers. Other then HP and a couple others who offered some hope of competition with Intel but always fell short of what consumers wanted. Which was processing power and good battery life. Sure ATI purchase was a big help in the graphics department. But the end results have been mixed and far from setting the world on fire against Intel. I hope AMD holds together and continues its quests competing against Intel. But they may have to resolve themselves to the fact that being number two is not so bad.
Sardaukar86 profanity riddled "FoaMiNg-@-The-MouTh" priceless "ReAcTioN" #1 -> http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
Sardaukar86 profanity riddled "FoaMiNg-@-The-MouTh" priceless "ReAcTioN" #2 -> http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
Why? He had to "eat his words" vs. APK http://it.slashdot.org/comment...
From a fair challenge like a chickenshit blowhard http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
From a fair challenge like a chickenshit blowhard http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Although it's three times the price, might I recommend the 750Ti? (Maxwell architecture)
Sub-60W TDP (no additional power connectors) and it's fast enough to run almost all modern games at medium/high (It's faster than my 560Ti, which can draw 220W at load with the overclock needed to stay relevant). It's on a more recent CUDA revision as well which means it should be useful if you're doing video encoding or grid computing of any kind.
It's funny to read summaries written by 20-somethings who obviously weren't around in the 1990s when AMD was king and outsold Intel 3 to 1 in the desktop market, all starting with the 40Mhz 386 DX, and again trouncing the Pentium with the K5.
When the AMD extensions became mainstream, the defacto standard, Intel licensed it. But the extension is still tied to the Intel architecture and Intel is still in control.
What does it even mean to be "in control?" AMD could apparently fork the last architecture/instruction-set/whatever-you-want-to-call-it (AIW for short), and create their own AIW which everybody adopted, just as Intel routinely adds new instructions to newer chips.
I don't question that Intel is usually in the lead with advancing the x86 world. However, it is fair to say that by introducing amd64/x86_64/whatever-you-want-to-call-it (AXW for short) AMD brought 64-bit to the masses. They certainly didn't invent the first 64-bit chip, but they created the first one that anybody was willing to use.
I suspect that today moving to ARM or some other architecture would be easier than it would have been 10 years ago. Back when the Athlon 64 came out virtually all workstations ran Windows, with all software being win32. On the server front Linux was popular, but even in that world there was a lot of non-portable software around. Using AXW made it a lot easier to migrate, and at least in the Linux world I'd like to think that people have learned to avoid reading a 32-bit record using an int data type. In the non-linux world things are much more heterogeneous than they were a decade ago as well. That means that changing instruction sets entirely is more practical than it used to be.
Fab building is expensive and so is fab R&D. You want to spread the cost as much as possible. For the R&D costs, you want to build multiple fabs for the same process. For the fab costs, you want to make sure that the fab is running at full capacity for a very long time, even when it is one or two generations old. Intel can do this, because they produce a lot more chips than AMD and because they produce a large range of ICs that can be produced on older fabs (AMD does this to a far smaller degree).
For AMD, they can spread the R&D costs by allowing GlobalFoundaries to produce chips for ARM SoC vendors (for example) as well as for them. GlobalFoundaries can then keep their fabs open and producing things for smaller customers that don't need the latest generation for many years after AMD no longer has anything that they want to produce in that space.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Actually, a Microsoft engineer developed the 64-bit extension, and AMD adopted it.
I've seen a number of papers that squeeze more performance out of x86 processors by being micro-op aware. Some just more carefully choose among instruction sequences, given awareness of the micro-ops that will be generated, while others consider what-if scenarios over what more performance you could get if you could have more control over the micro-ops themselves. For instance, given an ISA sequence and the corresponding micro-op sequence, is there a functionally equivalent alternative micro-op sequence? To some degree, compiler writers have to reverse-engineer the micro-op generation in order to generate micro-op sequences that schedule better. Even Intel compiler writers do this; although they have access to exactly what micro-ops are generated it's still not trivial to get the optimal micro-op sequence.
Actually running your own fab can give you tremendous economies of scale if you know you'll be running you part (or its die shrink successors) 24/7/365. The per chip costs are going to be lower.
But to build a state-of-the-art, 300mm, 14-nm fab with all the latest process technology can run you $10 billion. AMD doesn't have enough mnoney to make those bets anymore, and few companies do.
Going with a foundry means you earn less profit per chip sold, but it also let's you avoid that $10 billion up-front investment.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Although it's three times the price, might I recommend the 750Ti? (Maxwell architecture)
Nope. Sounds nice, but $100 is my absolute upper limit for a computer component these days. I don't think I've ever spent more than about $300 for any one part, but I try to keep it a little cheaper these days. And I don't really care about CUDA either. My whole six-core PC has about $600 in parts in it. If I buy this video card that will actually decrease, and I'll be able to kick the 240GT down to a machine that has a fairly pathetic video card in it now and my old Phenom II X3 720 which gets up to 3.2 GHz on air with a $20 thermaltake heat pipe/big fan cooler. Though, I think that's in my system now, so I might have to drop another twenty bucks on another cooler. The OEM cooler was fairly pathetic.
Like I said, I'm not really picky about performance. I just want adequate to play games with, say, medium settings but full resolution. Since I mostly play older games, I'll get fantastic performance in most of what I play.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I've been running with a board from the same era (ca. 2007) straight through today. It's an AM2 board, so you can't put a *new* CPU in it anymore, but their backward-compatible AM2+ chips extended the life significantly. I haven't gamed much in the past year, but as of 2012, I hadn't come across a game it wouldn't play. That's a lifespan of 5 solid years, which is great for a gaming rig, and (coincidentally?) about the length of a console cycle.
The only thing that could get me to upgrade at this point would be if some new game comes out that I *have* to play, and the game can't run with a less-than-stunning CPU. However, given that most games today are developed to console specs, I have yet to come across such a game.
Same here. Sadly I stuck around longer until my first Intel build, Q6600.
Should laptops be considered "mobile"? If not, why not?
Sardaukar86 "FoaMiNg-@-The-MouTh" ReAcTioN #1 http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
Sardaukar86 "FoaMiNg-@-The-MouTh" ReAcTioN #2 http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
Why?
He had to "eat his words" vs. APK http://it.slashdot.org/comment...
No, the original goal of that CPU was to replace x86 altogether and give Intel an architecture that they didn't legally have to share w/ anybody - unlike x86, where Intel had not just AMD but other competitors like Cyrix and Centaur. They saw the introduction of new CPUs like Alpha & MIPS running NT, and the possibility that PowerPC would run OS/2, and thought they'd be left behind in the CPU sweepstakes. They also thought that others were already ahead of them in RISC, which is why they decided to risk things w/ VLIW. Since there was the AIM alliance behind PowerPC, MS-DEC-MIPS w/ NT and Sun running w/ Solaris/SPARC, the only one left was HP. Hence, Intel went w/ this alliance, and HP too was enthusiastic, since Intel's fabs would give them the manufacturing edge.
AMD64 was exactly the iceberg that sunk the Itanic - not b'cos it was AMD, but b'cos it was x86 compatible. And to add insult to injury, when Intel came up w/ their own extensions, Microsoft told them that they weren't re-spinning 64-bit Windows for them, forcing Intel to be AMD compatible for a change. Also, x64 - initially the Opterons and later the Xeons - started being used everywhere that Itanium was supposed to have been used. Before long, the Itanium workstation market was dead, and later, every server manufacturer that used it was gone as well. Today, it's only used by some Chinese vendors in a few places, other than HP's Integrity servers. Also, now even HP/UX is being ported to Xeon, completing the irony. Previously, when Windows NT dropped support for PowerPC, MIPS and finally Alpha, it looked like a nail in the coffin for RISC. But when everybody - Windows, Monterrey UNIX, Solaris, and even Linux dropped support for Itanic, it was really funny. You know you're bad when even Debian ultimately drops you. Right now, it's just HP/UX and FreeBSD left on Itanic
You're missing the point. Itanium's target market changed b'cos AMD came up w/ a compatible 64-bit x86, and Intel was forced to join. While a major portion of the market may not have switched to AMD, they did switch to Xeon, Core and other 64-bit x86s from Intel. Which was supposed to have been dominated by the Itanium in the first place - Intel didn't want there to be a 64-bit CISC
Especially seeing this http://slashdot.org/comments.p... after your utter line of crap above it here http://slashdot.org/comments.p... so how stupid do you feel asshole? APK fried you like an egg yet again, lol!
Since apk made you "eat your words" (lmao)? Please http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Sardaukar86 "FoaMiNg-@-The-MouTh" ReAcTioN #1 http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
Sardaukar86 "FoaMiNg-@-The-MouTh" ReAcTioN #2 http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
Why?
He had to "eat his words" vs. APK http://it.slashdot.org/comment...
Then, Sardaukar86 the reprehensible little lying jackass did a post on "rational discourse" pointing out APK directly in it too AFTER the above? LMAO - please: Give me a break! See here http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
No way; the Core2 was essentially a thoroughly reworked Pentium III. Moore's law has stalled terribly when it comes to single-thread performance; what we did get is more cores. Even more so when looking clock-for-clock; in that department, both Intel and AMD only had incremental increases of 5~20% since the Athlon 64, with the big exception of the Nehalem architecture, which was the only truly big jump in single-core per-clock performance of the x86-64 era.
Concerning power consumption, technically probably not, but I suppose I'm referring to home users. Even if you work out all the math for difference in electricity costs, it's not going to make a difference unless you're putting heavy loads on your computer every single day (busy servers, your whole life is gaming, etc). Realistically for home users the difference would only be a few $ per year. Of course it's obvious for data centers that they will save money by paying more for power saving CPU's. For home users the computer is idle most of the time anyway. Reference for cost/CPU wattage: http://www.tomshardware.com/fo... http://www.bit-tech.net/blog/2...