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AMD Withdraws From High-Density Server Business
An anonymous reader sends word that AMD has pulled out of the market for high-density servers. "AMD has pulled out of the market for high-density servers, reversing a strategy it embarked on three years ago with its acquisition of SeaMicro. AMD delivered the news Thursday as it announced financial results for the quarter. Its revenue slumped 26 percent from this time last year to $1.03 billion, and its net loss increased to $180 million, the company said. AMD paid $334 million to buy SeaMicro, which developed a new type of high-density server aimed at large-scale cloud and Internet service providers."
Looks like they're focusing on ARM chips:
"AMD still sees growth potential in the server market, but not from selling complete systems. It's returned its focus to x86 chips and to the development of its first ARM server processor, code-named Seattle."
8 core 64 bit ARM chips with GPU built in are fairly common and 10 core chips already announced (Mediatek), with 16-48 core vaguely hinted at for servers by other vendors. So if AMD plan on entering the ARM processor market they'd better get something special out and fast, and be prepared to stick at it and upgrade it and take the initial losses. Because they're unlikely to win companies over first time till they're confident AMD are in it for the long run and won't leave them hanging without a supplier.
On the other hand they could focus on x86 chips where Intel is already deep discounting at the low end, and likely will have to do that all the way up the range to compete.
AMD face a tough time either way.
Sadly, I don't see an "out" for AMD. Their x86/amd64 chips don't perform as well as Intel's. The ARM market is saturated. They don't have their own foundry.
What does modern day AMD bring to the table that anyone wants? Even at cut-rate pricing, they've saturated their channels with chips and can't even manufacture and ship new inventory until the backlog clears.
It's a shame, but I think they're on their last legs. :(
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Actually AMD defined the 64 bit extensions to the 32 bit x86 architecture, and Intel had to follow and is letting the Itanic sink.
Of course Intel does not even remotely admit it (and even Linus ranted on this fact in a mail a decade or so ago), but they have still not come over the NIH syndrome that it caused them.
This said, amd64 (as Debian calls it) could and should have been better designed.
The trouble is that Intel really needs some competition, this will take years, but it may come now that they put MBA at their head. Their lead on process technology won't last forever once we hit fundamental physical limits. Also they have a tendency to forget that they are where they are thanks to IBM: if IBM had chosen another architecture 34 years ago, Intel would be an also ran. Unfortunately the rumor is that IBM selected the 8086 crapitecture (segemented addressing) because it was so weird that it would never come to compete with their own high-end proprietary products.
AMD has played a losing strategy for as long as I have can remember. It is sad, but I remember my first few PCs were all AMD machines. I bought AMD on principle, and because they were price/performance leaders. They were even outright leaders for a while, but failed to capitalise on that. I think, however, that the whole Sledgehammer/Clawhammer phase has ultimately ruined them. Obviously, those processors were streets ahead of the Intel offerings at the time, but it was always a long term losing strategy, in particular if they were depending on selling CPUs to make money. Their obsession with OEM deals also hurt them.
AMD could have done one of a few things, in my opinion, to reinvent themselves.
- They could have become a whole-hog PC builder, using their own chips and pricing their laptops and desktops accordingly.
- When Android happened, AMD, without as much baggage as Intel, could have produced an Android phone and Android tablets, and gone to market with that, using their chip making expertise to develop offerings that would have been more competitive than Qualcomm, Samsung etc.
AMD was obsessed with being a mini Intel, which was never going to work out for them.
AMD should have taken a page out of Apple's playbook. At best, they might be taken over by a Chinese company, otherwise they are doomed to irrelevance.
...we need AMD. Because if AMD goes away, Intel has zero competitors in the x86/64 market. Most people here probably aren't old enough to remember that CPU's used to cost an arm-and-a-leg in margins, and then when a bunch of hot shots like the 6502 came out, prices dropped literally over night. How could they drop so much? Because it was nothing but margin to begin with.
If AMD goes the way of the dodo bird, so do our cheap processors. Moreover, we'll likely lose a great deal of software freedom as what Intel says becomes law across the whole board. UEFI and TPM? Disneyland to what Intel can demand under the guise of "security" from every future computer.
They were even outright leaders for a while, but failed to capitalise on that.
Wow, that is the understatement of the century. AMD at one point did decide not to be a "mini Intel" and become a technology leader. Do you realize that while AMD had a far superior product for several years, Intel threw money (and threats - as was proved) to every retailer/integrator/etc out there to not carry AMD (and did other "interesting" things such as rig their industry standard compilers etc). Intel was allowed to use strong-arm tactics that "scream" anti-trust and after many years an almost bankrupt AMD was allowed to accept a small payment and Intel went scot-free.
If you have a product that is far ahead of the competition, you should be allowed to capitalize on that. If you are illegally not allowed by thepowerful players, there should be some sort of protection for that, before it is too late. But I guess the DoJ was sleeping at the wheel...
You have to remember, the Athlon was getting a firm lead on the P3 and Intel got out the P4 as a "response". The P4, the processor now universally known as the biggest "dog" by virtually everyone (even in its final and much, much improved incarnations), eventually abandoned even by intel to go back to a saner P3-derived architecture, was actually welcomed with laurels, both by (most of) the press and the integrators. AMD put all this R&D effort and they got nothing out of it, instead the were bleeding money for years, while Intel was making money with the current situation being a very weak AMD next to a behemoth. It is too bad for us, because the sole reason Intel CPUs are affordable is AMD - I won't remind you how much Intel charged per-CPU before there was competition. The sole reason Intel CPUs are this fast (or even that their consumer products are 64bit) is AMD. I only hope in some miracle for AMD to survive and get some competition going, otherwise there will be no-one left to keep Intel in check and consumers will pay for it...
So, yeah, the greatest industrial robbery of all time has been largely forgotten. AMD just "failed to capitalize", they were "obsessed with being a mini Intel"...
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Segmented addressing is actually a clever idea for 8-bit (8080/Z80) software compatibility, it's definitely easier that bank switching on 8-bit CPUs (2600 carts, mappers on NES carts, C64 and CoCo RAM/ROM swap, etc.) IBM probably designed the PC as a generic, but superior machine to run 8-bit CP/M software, and compete against Apple ][. Too bad they did not consider improving their '70s 5100 portable computer.
There were lots of practical reasons for IBM to use the 8086 in the form of the 8088. It had compatibility with the existing base of 8080 CP/M software, the 8 bit external bus could use 8080 peripherals and halved the memory granularity, and Intel was willing to allow alternate sources. The prime alternative was the 68000 which lacked an 8 bit external bus and was more expensive to produce.
They were even outright leaders for a while, but failed to capitalise on that.
Because if Intel's illegal business practices, for which they didn't receive any criminal sanctions. All they had to do was pay $1e9 to AMD, which is far less than they've profited by it.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I am writing my own (multi-threaded) software and recently I had a chance to do a test run on an intel i7 processor (8-core, 2.67GHz) to compare it with my old Athlon II X4 (3GHz). Both programs compiled with the same version of GCC (4.6.1), both compiled with -O3 optimization. Running 8 threads on the Intel machine was only marginally faster than running 4 threads on the old Athlon. The threads were independent, so no threads were inactive while waiting for something else to finish.
Where Intel have the lead is in the compiler business. Back in 2003 or so they released their ICC 8.0 for free for Linux users. I was writing only single-threaded software at the time, and simply re-compiling it with ICC made it run about 5 times faster than the version compiled with GCC 2.96. And that was on a 2GHz Athlon XP.
What AMD have done right is the integration of the CPU and GPU allowing them to gobble up the console market. However, their bet that all developers will jump on the heterogeneous computing bandwagon did not pan out. But with HSA 1.0 coming up their lead will be too large and neither Nvidia not Intel will have a competitor ready for the next console refresh. All that Nvidia will do is to continue to pay game developers to optimize their engines for GeForce cards, and refuse to optimize for Radeon. AMD's resources are so limited that they will be forced to have a desktop version of their console processor, and maybe an ARM core for good measure.
Exiting the "dense server" are makes perfect sense, as the market is very limited. Running across many small cores is hard and developers will avoid it. It is the same story as taking advantage of the GPU, which also provides many simple cores.
So no, they are not dead, they are simply adapting to market realities and accept that they made a mistake when they jumped in the dense server bandwagon. Unlike Intel, who even now refuse to let go of the Itanium.
I've personally played around with the Moonshot and being able to squeeze 45 blades in a 5U rack (the specs say 4.3U...) is a nice thing. Each blade has two DIMM spaces and a SSD, which is good enough to load a hypervisor, then use the onboard bus for going to a storage array.
I wouldn't say that each blade is as powerful as a blade in HP's conventional 16 blade enclosure (which takes 10 rack units), nor as powerful as a 1U standalone server... but you can choose what goes in, from a low end Xeon on the m710 to an AMD offering, to an Intel Atom, to ARM based procs.
High density enclosures like the HP Moonshot are quite useful. VM farms come to mind as well as privilege separation for security sensitive tasks. VDI also comes to mind (so the extremely sensitive stuff can be used and manipulated by RDP or Citrix Receiver as seamless applications, but a compromise of a user's desktop doesn't allow the entire database to be taken.) It also makes a decent testbed when doing production to test copies and staging OS/program updates for soak testing before they updates are pushed into the field. I wouldn't say high density server platforms will replace everything else (due to physical limitations, the blades are not going to outperform standard 2 Xeon machines), but they are a useful thing to have and help save space in the server room.
AMD chips run all three latest-gen gaming consoles...
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Look up "Shadowplay" by nVidia. That is their software that uses the "nvenc" feature of their new GPUs. It has near zero CPU and GPU load, just load on the disk. All encoding is done by a special dedicated encoder on the chip. It's a fast encoder too, it can do 2560x1600@60fps.
The downside is it is not as good looking per bit as some of the software encoders (particularly X264) so if the target is something low bitrate you may wish to capture high bitrate and then reencode to a lower bitrate with other software later.
Bandicam also claims to support the hardware encoders of all the platform (Intel calls their QuickSync, AMD calls there's AMD APP).