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'We've an Unexpected Manufacturing Advantage For the First Time Ever': Intel's Manufacturing Glitch Opens Door For AMD (theinformation.com)
Over at The Information (paywalled), reporter Aaron Tilley has a splendid interview of Forrest Norrod, a senior executive who joined AMD four years ago. Mr. Norrod describes the challenge AMD has faced over the years and how, for the first time ever, it sees a real shot at making a significant dent in the desktop market. From the report: Advanced Micro Devices' battle with chip giant Intel has often seemed like a gnat fighting an elephant, with AMD struggling in recent years to gain even a tenth of the market for the chips that power PCs and data center servers. Forrest Norrod, a senior executive who joined AMD four years ago, says the company suffered from "little brother syndrome" where it tried and failed to compete with Intel on lots of different chips. Now, though, AMD may have a shot at coming out with a faster, more powerful chip than Intel for the first time. Intel in April said it was delaying the release of a more advanced chip manufacturing process until sometime in 2019. AMD has its own new, advanced chip, which it will now be able to release earlier than Intel, potentially giving it an edge in the market for high-performance chips for PCs and data center computers.
It's a market opportunity worth around $50 billion. That's what Intel makes from selling chips for PCs and data center servers, and it dominates both markets. The data center market is particularly important because of the growth of new technologies like artificial intelligence-related applications, much of which is handled in the cloud. Companies that buy chips for data centers or PCs could gravitate to AMD chips as a result of Intel's delay. "I think we have a year lead now," said Mr. Norrod, who oversees AMD's data center business. AMD now has "an unexpected [manufacturing] advantage for the first time ever," he added.
It's a market opportunity worth around $50 billion. That's what Intel makes from selling chips for PCs and data center servers, and it dominates both markets. The data center market is particularly important because of the growth of new technologies like artificial intelligence-related applications, much of which is handled in the cloud. Companies that buy chips for data centers or PCs could gravitate to AMD chips as a result of Intel's delay. "I think we have a year lead now," said Mr. Norrod, who oversees AMD's data center business. AMD now has "an unexpected [manufacturing] advantage for the first time ever," he added.
This is why the rumor about Apple making their own Mac CPUs is believable. Intel lost their 18 month chip fabrication lead and they are now 9-12 months behind TSMC.
Back in 2005 time AMD was making significant headway in becoming the Chip for your PC right before Intel released the Core duo chip. The Pentium Line was getting aging and the Pentium-5 wasn't that popular and AMD was the chip for your PC. AMD had about a year or two of popularity.
Then Intel made the Intel Core Duo and the Core 2 Duo chip (64 bit) which put AMD back. But right before then, Intel was seen as the dying giant.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Isn't capitalism grand! You stubble and you failed!
Intel isn't in any danger here. AMD may gain market share and Intel may make less money, but this isn't the beginning of the end of Intel. Not by a long shot. It may mean that AMD finds it easier to be competitive, but Intel will get it's manufacturing back on track eventually and recover.
It's going to take more than a couple of stumbles for Intel to fall to second place to AMD.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
If I've learned anything about Intel from their past behavior then it's that they will lie, cheat and steal if that's what it takes to suppress AMD. I wouldn't be surprised if they paid off a bunch of companies to have a supply disruption occur, bad firmware updates bricking machines or creating a shell company to make purposefully shitty AMD machines.
Honestly, the FTC should have had their boot on Intel's neck decades ago and kept it their.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
AMD with 90% performance at 50% cost of Intel has always been better IMO. By the time you get the chip in and socketed its half obsolete anyway so why would I need to squeeze 10% more for 2x the price? Plus there are always multi socket boards. The only block to this I can think of is specific licensed software that charges per socket and not per core.
You forgot about AMD K7, the Athlon series, that make a big dent in the intel market share and it just didn't had more success due to Intel dirty moves and AMD manufacturing problems.
But yes, Ryzen and friends are good CPUs with more potencial growth and intel plans will be lagging, giving the opportunity for AMD leapfrog intel.
I do hope so, competition is good and while ARM did add more competition, it failed to enter the desktop and just barely entered server market
Higuita
Sorry but this wouldn't be the first time they came out with faster and more powerful chips. Just last time Intel broke laws to sabotage them setting compilers to intentionally run worse in AMD processors to make up for that and strong arm computer companies not to carry AMD chips and starved them of billions in revenue which they could have used to expand and invest in RnD.
This isn't the first time, just hoping Intel doesn't break laws again to kneecap them a second time.
K8.
Intel tried to make its next chip in Bangalore and screwed up so the K8 Opteron was a better chip and for a year AMD was the darling of the markets.
Intel caught up and ate AMDs lunch. AMD instead of using the windfall from the Opteron to build a sustainable chip pipeline (3-4 chips in dev instead of 1-2) used the moeny to buy ATI.
People in the CPU div were pissed when the 40 dollar RSUs went to 3 dollar.
But with AI and computation shifting more towards GP-GPUs than CPUs the ATI purchase has now started to payoff.
**Life is too short to be serious**
My roommate in college had one of these.
Once I was on a date with a cute girl. It was going pretty well, so I brought her back to my place. When I got there, my roommate bolted up from the couch and said he had to talk to me urgently. He said the girl had to leave. So I told her bye and she left.
He reached down and scratched his asshole. Then he brought his finger up, and there were little bits of white on it. They looked like tiny pieces of rice.
I said what the fuck is that. He said he didn't know.
We forgot about it, but a month later it happened again. Then a month later, again. His asshole would get all itchy, then it would get covered with little white rices.
Eventually we started calling this his ass period, because it came once a month and made him grouchy. The only other side effect was that he developed disgusting gas and burps that we called "vomit burps" because they smelled like vomit. if he vomit burped, it could stink up an entire car like vomit and make everyone else want to barf.
Well, he was pre med, so he started researching it. One day he went to the clinic, and he came back really grouchy. He had a pill that he called "the horse pill." He said that it was a nuke and it would destroy his problem.
We didn't ask what the problem was, but a few days later he got an awful stomach ache and went for a shit. He said he felt something dying inside of him, wiggling around and fighting.
Basically he went to shit, and he pooped out the mother. The mother would "segment" once a month and send out the little rices, which were its babies. That's what we found out. So the mother came out of his butthole, but only part way. He had to grab it and pull it out of his ass bit by bit. Hand over hand, like a sailor pulling a rope. It was very long, he said.
When he came out of the bathroom he was white as a sheet, and all he said was "it's over" and "never tell anyone about this."
> If you want to factor cost then, maybe
Performance is measured as "X per Y", such as "miles per hour", "miles per gallon", etc.
In a phone, the most important measurement is "instructions per watt", how fast can you go for the amount of power you use. Per dollar is also important in a phone. If you didn't' care about power usage / heat, and didn't care about dollar cost, your phone might have four Core i7 CPUs. It would have a ten pound battery and cost $2,000, and it would be fast.
On the desktop, power usage isn't nearly so important - it's plugged in. Your budget isn't a power budget on the desktop, it's a dollar budget. The main measure is instructions per dollar. AMD gives you better performance. If you didn't care about dollar cost, if what you cared about was instructions per second, you'd have a $97 million Cray OLCF-3 at your home office. You don't choose the OLCF-3 because cost is the primary measurement of interest. You want the performance for the $500 you intend to spend.
TSMC will be killing it in the 7nm space and with rumors of Apple switching to their ARM chips for future computers Intel is about to face a drop of some CPU business.
Intel also hurt them selfs by sticking it to users.
On stuff like jacking up prices / cutting pci-e lanes.
raid keys
The X299 UP to X pci-e lanes sucks!
Desktop have been suck on 16+DMI for to long. Amd has 20+4+USB on die.
Not for the first time. How old are you, 15? AMD's Athlon was faster than the P3, especially when the latter couldn't keep up with clock speeds (there was even a P3 that was unstable at the rated speed and had to be recalled), and then Athlon 64 was much faster than the P4 (esp. with 64 bit OSes) but most publications at the time were at Intel's pocket and were trying to pass off that absolute turd Netburst architecture as gold, while at the same time Intel was strong-arming or bribing system integrators into not using the superior AMD. So AMD has had better solutions for years in the past, but due to Intel's illegal tactics they did not gain a big enough market share. In the end, Intel was forced to pay a fine which was nothing compared to the revenue AMD lost over that time and that lost revenue when they had superior technology meant they eventually were not competitive which meant consumers lost.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
On the desktop, power usage isn't nearly so important - it's plugged in.
Less important than on a phone, but it still depends on local price per kilowatt hour (1 kWh = 3.6 MJ).
Your budget isn't a power budget on the desktop, it's a dollar budget.
Cost of kilowatt hours in dollars leads many PC users in areas with expensive electric power to choose integrated graphics or a laptop-as-desktop. The latter is especially practical in areas with an unreliable power grid because of the internal UPS in every laptop. These users' needs overlap somewhat with those of a seminomadic group who want the ability to run (at least lightweight) desktop applications while away from home and office, such as on the transit commute therebetween.
Has everyone forgotten AMD64?
Back when Intel was trying to sell Itanium as the 64 bit successor to the x86 instruction set, AMD came out with what is now known as x86-64. It was worlds better than Itanium and Intel was forced to license it from AMD in order to stay in business (Of course, AMD had no choice but to offer Intel such a license on reasonable terms because it was built on the x86 architecture which AMD licensed from Intel).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
You silly little dingbats
the only reason AMD exists
is for Intel not to be considered a monopoly.
you silly little dingos
AMD is making good chips again, but what is their ability to actually produce enough of them to meet market demands? Intel must have a massive advantage in that area.
The i5-8400 is now popping up in pre-built Dell, HP, and Lenovo computers. The B360 and other boards were launched in April. The Ryzen 2200G launched in February and I've only found it in some HP Pavilion towers.
The same is true for laptops, where Ryzen is only in a handful of models.
when AMD was good Intel bullied dell and others to not use AMD
i like this story
> if you need a certain number of instructions per second, it is likely that 8 full Intel systems, even though the cpus cost more, would be cheaper than 10 full AMD systems.
Server clusters have different requirements. AMD may still be a good choice, but the analysis is very different. You don't add two more DESKTOPS in order to have higher IPS. The number of systems for desktops is determined by the number of users. The question is which CPU to put in the system. Either a Ryzen or a Core i9 is going to be sufficient for any desktop, so it'll be a single system with a single CPU whether you choose AMD or Intel. For $850, you can either get a top-of-the-line CPU from AMD, or a much lower performing CPU from Intel.
In a server cluster, you'll probably find that you'd end up with the same number of systems, maybe slightly fewer with the AMD Ryzen processors. That's a completely different analysis, though.
AMD had the lead for a while in the early days of the opteron, they introduced the 64bit architecture and were quite handily beating intel's p4 in benchmarks and power consumption, they also had the first dual core x86 chips, a faster memory controller and various other advantages.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
> run hotter, have a higher TDP
You realize TDP is the measurement of heat, right?
So you sad "hotter, and hotter".
>Mr. Norrod describes the challenge AMD has faced over the years and how, for the first time ever, it sees a real shot at making a significant dent in the desktop market.
And then we remember how the first Athlon wiped the table with Pentium 3 and Pentium 4.
32 bit extensions and a graphical shell for a 16 bit patch to an 8 bit operating system originally coded for a 4 bit microprocessor, written by a 2 bit company, that can't stand 1 bit of competition.
The original Athlon was roughly the same speed as a Pentium 3 of the same clock rate, the late models were actually faster. They were simultaneously cheaper. The Athlon XP was comparable in power to the Netburst Pentium 4s. The Athlon X2s, having been designed from the beginning for dual-core operation due to their server heritage, were more efficient at multi-core operation than the Pentium Ds.
AMD has been neck and neck more than once, and ahead at LEAST once.
As a new Ryzen 2700X owner, I couldnt be happier.
I haven't owned an Intel CPU since a P133 back in 1996. Everything since has been AMD. It's upgrade time and if Ryzen hadn't rolled around I would have given up and gone Intel.
I'm sick of these political stories about Trump. Enough with them. It was locked room talk. He wouldn't have explained about it if he knew it was being recorded.
my kingdom for mod points. gross, but hilarious