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The Ups and Downs of AMD (hackaday.com)

Posted by samzenpus on from the winning-is-everything dept.

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.

12 of 225 comments (clear)

  1. AMD settled by cfalcon · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:AMD settled by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  2. AMD was their own worst enemy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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/

    1. Re:AMD was their own worst enemy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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...

  3. Re:Permanently disabling? by ClickOnThis · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
  4. While Intel played dirty, Core was a killer by Kjella · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  5. The Intel compiler still anti-competitive by steveha · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
    1. Re:The Intel compiler still anti-competitive by at0mjack · · Score: 5, Informative
      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.

    2. Re:The Intel compiler still anti-competitive by The_countess · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  6. Re:Ive always prefered AMD by unixisc · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  7. Re:Um writer of this an AMD fanboy? by Rockoon · · Score: 5, Informative

    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."
  8. Intel was CONVICTED of monopoly abuse. by Rockoon · · Score: 5, Informative

    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."