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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.'"
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.
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.
ARM servers excel at some workloads. The only people looking at ARM are people running massive web server farms. Xeon still crushes ARM in performance per watt and absolute performance for almost every server workload. It's definitely an interesting area and somewhere I expect ARM to really grow but right now it's not much of a contest.
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!