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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.
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.
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/
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.
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?
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
Beat down by illegal practices that Intel was convicted of.
The fanboy here seems to be... you. Don't project your failings on others.
On top of last 3-4 years...
You mean the years that Intel failed to comply with the court ruling and pay AMD the damages it owed? Intel didnt pay AMD damages until late 2014, for a conviction in early 2009. Intel literally blew through an unprecedented amount of money on lawyers (several hundred million dollars), after being convicted, just to delay AMD getting the money owed to them.
You are the fanboy you accuse others of being. You are projecting. You are a disgrace.
"His name was James Damore."
AMD bet on 64-bit, and won (64-bit). Intel's effort was Itanium, it is pretty much done for.
Intel can compete better in low power, where owning its own fab which is also top notch, gives it considerable advantage. Even against superior architectures. AMD really fucked that up, along with everyone else who thought MFG should be done overseas. As a result their chips always run a bit hotter, and can't run quite as fast. So they have to sell them cheaper with lower margin... and AMD is spread a bit thinner... and has to outsource or reduce support on some of its products a bit more...and has less money to innovate...and the rest is history.
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.
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.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
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.
I kind of don't get the defeatured compiler hack.
It seems like all AMD needs to do is contribute the appropriate code generators to GCC.
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?
"His name was James Damore."
Insightful? Really mods? How are you supposed to capitalize on that lead when the competition bribes the OEMs not to use your chips no matter how much lead you have?
News Flash R&D? It costs TONS of money, money AMD simply couldn't make because Intel bribed all the major OEMs to not take AMD chips. People here keep bringing up that 2 billion "settlement" which was frankly wrong in the first place because what Intel did was a criminal offense not a civil one, but riddle me this...how much money did Intel make from 2000-2008 when it was settled? anyone want to bet that 2 billion wasn't even a full year's profit? 6 months? How is AMD supposed to pay for the R&D to stay competitive when Intel is allowed to profit from bribery and market rigging?
For there to be equal footing then Intel should have lost every dime it made when it was doing illegal activity otherwise all you have done is made crime profitable for that company, sadly because of intense lobbying after the MSFT case to pull the teeth of government regulators that is EXACTLY what we got, a company that got to profit from blatant criminal acts.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
"His name was James Damore."
I don't think Microsoft did that out of the goodness of their heart. AMD64 happened right in the middle of the Microsoft/Linux server wars when competition was really really stiff, and PCs were bumping up against 4G of RAM. AMD dumped a bunch of resources into GCC and so Linux distributions compiled and ran on the CPUs before they were even released to the public.
Microsoft saw that their #1 competitor was about to get access to much better CPUs at the same price, so they *had* to support AMD to stay competitive.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
Human Rights, Article 12: Freedom from Interference with Privacy, Family, Home and Correspondence
I pretty much agree with your timeline, and wasn't really aware of the business plan, but that sounds about right. The results were the same.
As for Intel learning. I am not as optimistic. AMD hasn't been competitive. Meaning Intel hasn't had to do much really. They have come out with several generations of solid CPU, however the increase in computational power year over year isn't what it used to be. You could chalk it up to physical limitations, or even lack of demand, or is it lack of competition? About the only thing that Intel has done well in the last several generations of CPU is to really reduce the power required year over year, for a marginally better CPU. Meaning they also just read the market to know that most CPU are going into laptops where that actually matters. For the CPU I buy for my desktop that is 5% faster but consumes 20% less power, who cares. However the important part is that it is still faster and better than anything AMD had for retail. Emphasis on "retail". AMD is still pretty competitive in the server market where low cost multi-core is what is desired. AMD has gone down a different path, intentionally or not. They still have money in the PC game, but they just don't seem that committed anymore to trying to go head to head with Intel anymore. I think they are looking for their niche to exist in.
Oh, one other sort of failure you forgot to mention was the acquisition of ATI. While AMD still continues like ATI in making some good video cards, the whole idea was integration and the "synergies" that might release. I'm sure some pieces of useful technology have been a result, however integrated video is no more far ahead that it ever was, and combined chip-set enhancements haven't really been overwhelming in their success.