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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 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.
Attorney here. In the late 90's I worked on contracts between clients and Intel. Intel was offering payments if you put a banner on your website that said it was optimized for the Pentium II. They also helpfully provided code to slow your website down if it detected any non-Intel processor.
Sure, lots of controversy over their actions in the late 90s and early 2000s, but by 2005, Intel had recovered from the mistakes made in NetBurst. Starting with the Core microarchitecture, Intel made some very strong advances in process and gains in their CPU architectures in the consumer and server spaces. AMD got distracted with the APU designs and made a huge misstep with the Bulldozer line. I think the ATI acquisition was a distraction as well. Meanwhile, Sandy Bridge was in place and allow Intel to make gains all around. By the time Haswell was in place, their entire lineup was solid. They had the core counts to match the high end Opterons, they were pushing ahead on virtualization (VT-D, APICv) and AMD was and is in a rough spot.
Zen needs to have good parity with Skylake for AMD to regain market share, and that's a tough task. Also, Intel has major process advantages. They are at 14nm already, which helps keep yield up as transistor count rises (core count). They do have an advantage in the all in one market and do very well in the budget segments. We will see if their ARM based assets play out, but it's going to be tough going for AMD with Intel on one side and NVidia on the other.
didn't know your father, but i was there for a "long time" up till 2013, and mismanagement is about the only thing AMD had going on at the top. it was comically bad. and it still is... i get a chuckle out of fanbois hyping Lisa-this, Raja-that, whatever. i never met Raja, so can't comment on him; but Lisa is not terribly impressive technically, and seemed to be planning for her golden parachute from the moment she walked into our office.
she also, apparently/allegedly, told teams (who had dependencies on other internal teams) that different projects were "top priority". so you'd have a weird deadlock case of project A being held up by people who were working on project B (being told it was top priority), being held up be a different set of people working on project A (being top priority). was a way of bullshitting paying customers, best i could tell. that was a sign that it was time to move on...
as an ex-AMD-red guy, i can tell you that no one at the company was happy about AMD buying ATI. the AMD-green folks saw their stock price drop.. the red side saw ineffective leadership, weird internal politics, exceptionally-poor design methodologies, and a loss of a cool corporate culture. both saw tons of abandoned pre-pre-llano projects and strange re-orgs. i don't think the ATI acquisition was the downfall of AMD, they were already on that trajectory; but it didn't help anyone, that's for sure...
Actually, the K7 - which was the Athlon and the first processor made by the ex Alpha team - was their first great CPU which matched or beat Intel. They did a remarkable coup when they came out w/ AMD64, totally upsetting Itanium in the process and forcing Intel to adapt their architecture and do a cross licensing deal. Too bad that on the fab side of things, they failed to keep up, and thereby let their game plan implode. That's one thing Intel had been brilliant at. In the 90s, I recall people would speculate on which of the major RISC CPUs - SPARC, MIPS, POWER, Alpha, PA-RISC, et al would make it big. Just having far superior process technology enabled Intel to ultimately first catch up, and then beat each of them one by one.
While, yes, AMD management totally did destroy the company, the bit about selling the fab happened later, after the Barcelona disaster, and after they threw away all their money on ATI.
The fab was not competitive (as GlobalFoundries performance showed for the next few years), and they absolutely had to get rid of it to survive. Not having the cost of maintaining that thing is the reason they are not bankrupt (yet).
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
Pentium 75? Probably on the order of 32 MiB RAM and maybe 2 GiB of disk. My smart watch has roughly 16X the compute cycles, 16X the RAM and 2X the storage... though the watch's storage is 2-3 orders of magnitude faster. And it's not a particularly new or high end watch.
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The article is repeating a lie. The actual settlement and case do not contain the lie.
The Lie is Intel sold below cost.
Due to a fixed cost to operate a fab and process wafers, the cost per die is greatly impacted by line yield.
Due to the competitors line yield of about 50% at the time, it was assumed Intel had to be selling below cost. This was investigated and found to be false based on the number of raw wafers purchased and the number of die shipped. If two identical companies manufacture identical chips and one has 45% yield and the other 90% yield and offers bulk discounts that is 20% below the other companies cost to produce, it does in no way indicate the company is selling below cost. Read the lawsuit and settlement.
Intel agreed to change some business practices and settled, but still claimed they did nothing wrong such as dumping below cost, because they were not.
The cost per die was calculated based on the number of wafers purchased and the number of die shipped. Intel had much higher line yield than AMD.
AMD cut corners trying to compete, but did not solve the yield issue. AMD on the other hand had a policy of undercutting Intel on Price, but with their lower yield, they ran into the problem of having to sell below cost to meet their price points. This is where the incorrect assumption was made that Intel had to be selling below cost. This has been proven otherwise.
http://www.cnet.com/news/intel...
http://www.intel.com/pressroom...
"By contrast, AMD's investments in manufacturing capacity during this period were anaemic - because AMD had elected to change course. Through the late 1990s, AMD itself has acknowledged, AMD had persistent quality problems with manufacturing production and insufficient capacity."
Please do not repeat the lie that Intel sold under cost. They didn't. They had lower production costs due to higher yield.
The truth shall set you free!