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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.'"
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.
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.'"
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.
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.
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.
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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?
Got a Phenom II x4 as it was the best bang for the watts and I was building an always on multi-purpose rig.
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.
Yeah? Well the original Athlon 64 dual core isn't compatible with modern Window's operating systems. The instruction set which prohibits it from being used was around at the time, AMD just didn't put it in.
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
Liquidation isn't entertaining...
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 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?
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.'"
By 2016 AMD will have a CPU that beats the sh*t out of Intel's 2014 best offerings.
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).
You do realize that this run towards ARM is not a full stampede, and is driven by price and operating costs and only useful for Unix/Linux systems as windows server isn't really interested in supporting ARM yet. This is more like a trickle of some large specialized systems off onto Red Hat (or similar) systems where one can afford to just change processors and recompile everything in an effort to same a bit of operating power and hardware costs. But you have to be looking at enough servers to make this worth the labor cost.
So, where I don't care for the X86 family and would love everybody to switch to ARM, I know it's not going to happen in my career without there being that "killer" app that pushes everybody off of Windows. Right now, with "Office" being the "killer got to have" application of all time, and that generally only running on Windows, guess what? X86 is here to stay.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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...
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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.
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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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!
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
I've been hearing "x86 is holding is back" for, oh, over 20 years now.
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.
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.
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.