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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 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.
Got a Phenom II x4 as it was the best bang for the watts and I was building an always on multi-purpose rig.
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.
As others have pointed out, AMD have historically beaten Intel when Intel fscks up. Intel needed the P4 to keep ramping up clock speed because it had sucky IPC, and it hit a brick wall, so AMD beat them because they had significantly better IPC at similar clock speeds. Intel wanted everyone to switch to Itanium, so that was their 64-bit push, while AMD pushed 64-bit into the x86.
As soon as Intel realized they needed good IPC on a 64-bit x86 you couldn't fry eggs on, AMD was back to second place, and have been stuck there since.
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.
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.'"
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.'"
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.
Another reason to avoid the unqualified term "architecture" when speaking either of instruction sets or chip designs; person A may read "architecture" as "instruction set architecture" and person B may read it as "microarchitecture". I suspect they're talking about a new microarchitecture, implementing the x86-64 instruction set architecture, here.
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!
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.