The Ups and Downs of AMD (hackaday.com)

szczys writes: In 2003 AMD was on top of the world. Now they're not, but they're also still in business. AMD continues to produce inexpensive, well-engineered semiconductors. The fall over the last 10 years is due to Intel, who used illegal practices and ethically questionable engineering decisions to knock AMD off their roost while still keeping them in business. The latter prevents the finger of antitrust from being pointed at Intel the way it was for Ma Bell.

Comments

AMD settled

[cfalcon]

AMD settled their entirely valid lawsuit:
http://www.cnet.com/news/intel...

Intel's actions were shocking and absurd, and they seem to be willing to play by legal limits only when failing to do so would visibly get them hammered with monopoly lawsuits. It was a poor resolution to a very real issue. The other part? It prevents Intel from having to do anything rash or aggressive with their chip power, because by neutering their only competitor they were able to focus more on profitability and less on performance and perception. In my *opinion*, I think this is a big part of why we saw chips mostly become stagnant compared to in years prior- Intel is actually keeping in range of what AMD is capable of on purpose. They are holding back.

Re:AMD settled

[vux984]

Remember when a story on this site would bring down servers? I'll bet that C|Net article barely tweaks the bandwidth meter.

That says as much about the march of progress as it does about the decline of slashdot. Even if slashdot were at it's peak, times 2, the capacity of the hardware and the internet has grown many times that, plus dynamic loadbalancing and scaling and content delivery networks...

These days even trending on facebook and twitter won't bring anybody significant down.

Re:AMD settled

[Rockoon]

AMD settled one of their entirely valid lawsuits:

Fixed that for you.

In another lawsuit, Intel was convicted of anti-trust violations.

The European Commission has imposed a fine of €1 060 000 000 on Intel Corporation for violating EC Treaty antitrust rules on the abuse of a dominant market position (Article 82) by engaging in illegal anticompetitive practices to exclude competitors from the market for computer chips called x86 central processing units (CPUs). The Commission has also ordered Intel to cease the illegal practices immediately to the extent that they are still ongoing. Throughout the period October 2002-December 2007, Intel had a dominant position in the worldwide x86 CPU market (at least 70% market share). The Commission found that Intel engaged in two specific forms of illegal practice. First, Intel gave wholly or partially hidden rebates to computer manufacturers on condition that they bought all, or almost all, their x86 CPUs from Intel. Intel also made direct payments to a major retailer on condition it stock only computers with Intel x86 CPUs.

Re:AMD settled

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't say that ATI was a bad purchase, arguably its the only reason AMD is still competitive, and they can leverage that design work into making better desktop chips.

AMD was their own worst enemy

[Anonymous Coward]

Read Ars Technica's history of AMD, the issue was with spectacular mismanagement more than with Intel's practices.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/04/the-rise-and-fall-of-amd-how-an-underdog-stuck-it-to-intel/

Re:Permanently disabling?

[ClickOnThis]

The article mentions Intel "Permanently disabling AMD CPUs through compiler optimizations". Am I reading this right, did they find a way to brick AMD processors? It doesn't say anything else about it in the article that I can see, if so, and I'm really curious.

No. TFA explains that Intel's compilers were written to ignore certain optimization-friendly parts of the instruction set if they were compiling for a non-Intel CPU. AMD actually supported the instructions, but Intel's compilers just pretended that AMD didn't. And surprise! Intel's processors beat the crap out of AMD's in benchmarks. Really shitty of Intel to do that.

While Intel played dirty, Core was a killer

[Kjella]

July 24, 2006: AMD buys ATI, stretching their credit to the limit
July 27, 2006: Intel launches Core 2 Duo (Conroe)

To get an idea of how quickly AMD was in trouble, here's Anandtech in November 2007 at the launch of Phenom:
If you were looking for a changing of the guard today it's just not going to happen. Phenom is, clock for clock, slower than Core 2 and the chips aren't yet yielding well enough to boost clock speeds above what Intel is capable of. While AMD just introduced its first 2.2GHz and 2.3GHz quad-core CPUs today, Intel previewed its first 3.2GHz quad-core chips. (...) Inevitably some of these Phenoms will sell, even though Intel is currently faster and offers better overall price-performance (does anyone else feel weird reading that?). Honestly the only reason we can see to purchase a Phenom is if you currently own a Socket-AM2 motherboard; you may not get the same performance as a Core 2 Quad, but it won't cost as much since you should be able to just drop in a Phenom if you have BIOS support.

Up to July 2006: K8 > Netburst
July 2006 - November 2007: K8 < Core (AMD sales tank)
November 2007 - October 2011 K10 < Core (successor lagging behind)
October 2011-2016? Bulldozer < Sandy Bridge (late and underperforming)

Why didn't AMD have the cash to burn in 2006-2009 to come up with something better? Oh, a $5.4 billion purchase of ATI. It sucked all the R&D out of CPUs and into APUs and "synergies", but even today you see no major differences between an APU and pairing a CPU + dGPU unless you've written very special code for just that situation.

Re:Permanently disabling?

[ClickOnThis]

If I were AMD, I'd devote effort and resources to GCC development. (Maybe they have?)

It appears they have indeed.

The Intel compiler still anti-competitive

[steveha]

Intel's compilers still use the CPUID instruction to decide whether to emit efficient code or not. Intel has an official notice to this effect. Charmingly, the notice is only available as an image file. I presume this is to make it harder to search for the notice.

https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/optimization-notice/

Every time I see benchmarks now, I wonder whether the results were affected by the use of an Intel compiler.

I try very hard to not buy Intel products.

Re:The Intel compiler still anti-competitive

[at0mjack]

Oh come on, this has been beaten to death. Nobody is saying that Intel has to optimise for AMD products. There is a standard mechanism (introduced by Intel!) to query a chip to find out what instruction sets it reports. Intel's compiler uses this mechanism to decide what code branch to run, but *only* for Intel chips. The literal code path is

if (Intel chip) then if (supports SSE2) then run SSE2 code else run non-SSE2 code else run non-SSE2 code endif

All people are saying is that the code path should be

if (supports SSE2) then run SSE2 code else run non-SSE2 code else

See the difference?

Yes, you can get extra speed by ordering the instructions differently for different architectures, and Intel's compiler quite rightly does that to product Nehalem-optimised code or Skylake-optimised code. I don't expect the compiler to produce Bulldozer-optimised code, but I expect it to allow me to run the Nehalem-optimised code on a Bulldozer. Where does this meme that this request is "forcing Intel to optimise for the competition" come from? I want Intel to do *less* work, not more - all they need to do is *remove* a small amount of code from their compiler and I'd be happy.

Re:The Intel compiler still anti-competitive

[The_countess]

that's a easy answer: when performance no longer goes up when you change the ID to 'genuine intel'. changing that id should have NO effect on performance. the fact that it does is a CLEAR indication intel does things with the compiler it shouldn't be doing.

Re:Um writer of this an AMD fanboy?

[Rockoon]

No, they weren't convicted.

Yes they were, and here is the courts press release of the conviction.

A settlement is not a conviction

A settlement is not a conviction for sure, and the fact that there was an unrelated settlement doesnt negate the fact that Intel was convicted of flagrant monopoly abuse and ordered to (among other things) "cease illegal practices" (a direct quote.)

Why are Intel shills such lying fucks?

Intel was CONVICTED of monopoly abuse.

[Rockoon]

Links to the FACT that Intel was convicted of anti-trust against AMD keeps getting modded down.

So here it is again:

E.U. Commission press release detailing their conviction of Intel.

The European Commission has imposed a fine of €1 060 000 000 on Intel Corporation for violating EC Treaty antitrust rules on the abuse of a dominant market position (Article 82) by engaging in illegal anticompetitive practices to exclude competitors from the market for computer chips called x86 central processing units (CPUs). The Commission has also ordered Intel to cease the illegal practices immediately to the extent that they are still ongoing. Throughout the period October 2002-December 2007, Intel had a dominant position in the worldwide x86 CPU market (at least 70% market share).

Intel was CONVICTED of monopoly abuse. This is an irrefutable fact. There are a lot of people here either claiming that they were never convicted or downmodding those that are revealing the truth. The site I linked to is the official press release site of the E.U. Commission.

Lets help the readers of /. ;-)

[RuffMasterD]

Optimization Notice

Intel’s compiler may or may not optimize to the same degree for non-Intel microprocessors for optimisations that are not unique to Intel microprocessors. These optimisations include SSE2, SSE3, and SSSE3 instruction sets and other optimisations. Intel does not guarantee the availability, functionality, or effectiveness of any optimisation on microprocessors not manufactured by Intel. Microprocessor-dependant optimisations in this product are intended for use with Intel microprocessors. Certain optimisations not specific to Intel microarchitecture are reserved for Intel microprocessors. Please refer to the applicable product User and Reference Guides for more information regarding the specific instruction sets covered by this notice.

Notice revision #20110804

As written by Intel, but written in text for the convenience of visually impaired slash-dotters with screen readers. Highlights mine.