Slashdot Mirror
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.
"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."
That is what a fanboy would say, but ignore the fact that AMD when they got the lead sat on said lead and got beat down. On top of last 3-4 years claiming so many things about how great their product would be, how fast it was gonna be but when release comes out it fails to meet all the claims AMD made on it. AMD needs fire their Marketing and PR department's, they been a constant source of embarrassment for them. Making claims of how great their new product will be but when real world use comes in to play it falls way short, Case in point the Fury X. Claimed to 30% faster then a nvidia gtx980ti but when real world settings came in to play not the cherry picked settings AMD used to make those claims it was even to even 10% slower in some things.
Intel knows they have to let AMD live for at least 4 reasons:
1. Avoid anti-trust lawsuits over x86 chips.
2. Have a second-source option so that vendors don't switch to ARM. Contracting practices for critical equipment often require more than one part source (vendor).
3. Keep the x86 market viable. Without producer competition, x86 may die a slow death.
4. Have someone to steal ideas from.
Table-ized A.I.
- AMD was on top of the world with Opteron / AMD64
- Intel was losing everywhere it went. You'd be hard-pressed to find an Internet / financial shop *not* buying AMD
- But Intel responded with Merom / Core2Duo. That mostly closed the gap, though initially the memory subsystem was still inferior
- Had AMD met expectations with the follow-on part (Bulldozer), there is no reason they could not have continued to win
- But in my mind, their ATi acquisition initiated their downfall. They became schizophrenic.
To beat Intel (like most market leaders) you have to have a non-trivial advantage. When AMD had one, they kicked Intel's ass to the point that they severely altered Intel's roadmap. When they no longer had one, they lost.
Does it hurt to hear them lying? Was this the only world you had?
In the past Intel did them dirty and there's no argument about that.
AMD's curren't problems are entirely their own fault. They fired the development team that made the K8(and then K10), the processor family that completely destroyed all of Intel's products from desktop to enterprise.
Intel had the Netburst CPUs, AKA the Pentium 4. Power hungry, low IPC, stuck with the FSB, hamstrung because they were developed around another failed Intel venture - The RDRAM debacle. The arch was utterly unable to go multicore (Pentium D was one of the worst processors ever made and was multi-chip packaged.)
And lets not forget fucking Itanium. Intel fucked that up so hard they had to backpedal and introduce the 64 bit tech that AMD pushed.
Enter the K8 - Scalable chip interconnect, 64 bit, later developed in to the first true multi-core cpu available to consumers. Took over the server space completely. For a time, Xeon was dead. Not even kidding.
And then AMD threw it all away. A bunch of fucking MBAs decided they didn't really need to pay a bunch of expensive chip designers to make chips, and that it would be a better idea financially to sell of the fab so their remaining development team could be isolated away from the fabrication process. Brilliant plan.
That's the shit that gave us bulldozer, and that is why AMD sucks today.
The rest is history. Intel cleaned up their act, released the core 2, and AMD has been irrelevant ever since.
Intel has learned. They have not slowed down. AMD almost killed them. Every iteration is faster, lower power, cheaper. They're 2 generations ahead of everyone else in fabrication tech. Skylake CPUs are CRAZY fast and sip power.
So, why didn't AMD write their own compilers that would use all those instructions on AMD processors? It isn't as if the instruction set was secret.
An excellent question.
If I were AMD, I'd devote effort and resources to GCC development. (Maybe they have?)
Unfortunately, as others have mentioned in this thread, for the past decade AMD hasn't been well-known for acting in its own best interest.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
This is the short version, but yes, AMD screwed themselves over. It's really bad management that's to blame for their issues, management at the very top.