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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.
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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.
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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.
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
AMD hasn't been better since Core2Duo came out. If you want to factor cost then, maybe.
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.
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> 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.
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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
when AMD was good Intel bullied dell and others to not use AMD
It will take time for the consumer sales to shift, but not as much time as it will take Intel to catch up in fabrication, assuming they do.
TSMC, AMD's current fab partner, is producing 7nm chips in two fabs. Intel isn't yet producing their close-to-equivalent 10nm node. TSMC's production at this level is therefore vastly greater than Intel's.
TSMC will be entering volume production of their next 7nm+ node when Intel finally hits volume on their 10nm. Hopefully, AMD will tape something out on that as soon as it is available to compete with Intel's first volume 10nm product.
TSMC has also already started building their 5nm fab with volume scheduled for 2020. Intel needs to start running.
Also, in terms of tons of silicon, TSMC and others already lead Intel. Currency exchange rates are the only thing that kept Intel as the leading chip maker in terms of sales dollars until Samsung recently eclipsed them in that measure.
> 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.
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And that's the point. if you don't care how much money you spend, then Intel is better. But if you would like to save 50% (or more) on the price and still get ~90% of the performance, then you go with AMD.
Yes, Intel was faster (not better) at the cost of the Meltdown vulnerability. Patch that vulnerability and Intel is no longer faster (perhaps slower) than AMD.
> 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.
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.
my kingdom for mod points. gross, but hilarious