9 ms·

How AMD Won, Then Lost

144 points by geerlingguy 11y ago

RUG3Y 11y ago
I love my AMD cpus, on paper they're not as "good", but they do what I need at a great price.
technofiend 11y ago
I guess the real question is will AMD have a compiler to match Intel's when ZEN is released?
- S_A_P 11y ago
  I'm surprised nobody's hacked the Intel compiler to compile for AMD chips. I'm sure it's for fear of litigation.
  - andrewflnr 11y ago
    I don't think you would have to do that. Couldn't you write a tool that just patches out the "be stupid if this is an AMD chip" code from an intel-compiled binary?
    - TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
      Intel's compiler would check for the presence of a feature (SSE etc.) and also for "GenuineIntel". So you could simply remove the latter part and it should work fine, I think.
  - berkut 11y ago
    You don't need to these days (since 2011) - there have been numerous benchmarks over the years showing ICC generate binaries that perform better than MSVC++ for AMD processors.
    - throwaway7767 11y ago
      Interesting. I guess they must have finally stopped intentionally crippling ICC for non-intel processors[0]. [0] http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49#49 http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49#49
  - raverbashing 11y ago
    Of course they did it, you just need to 'fix' the binary file, but there are several tools that do this
- _delirium 11y ago
  Afaict AMD is putting their compiler-engineering effort into trying to improve gcc performance on their chips, rather than starting a separate compiler project. They are a lot smaller than Intel, so I'm not sure they can spare the resources to build an AMD analog to Intel's icc.
  - Keyframe 11y ago
    Didn't Intel's compiler start out from Intel buying Digital's compiler stuff?
- mixmastamyk 11y ago
  Who uses Intel's compiler? I was under the impression most were using Microsoft's, or gcc/clang perhaps.
  - x0x0 11y ago
    people who care about performance, particularly simd or numerics performance. gcc has gotten better recently, but it's still slower ime.
    - nly 11y ago
      On the other hand, Intels compiler does really dumb things with vanilla application code and has never performed better for any code I've ever written.
      - x0x0 11y ago
        Yeah, ymmv. All high-perf code simply has to be meticulously performance tested; there's no other way to know on modern processors what is fastest.
  - lmm 11y ago
    Number crunching workloads, or the narrow HPC niche in which it works on a workstation rather than a cluster but you still need maximum performance from it - some physicists, astronomers, and geneticists. It's a fairly small niche but they buy new CPUs more than other people.
metrix 11y ago
According to this article, Zen has not taped out yet: Devinder Kumar, AMD CFO : Zen was a clean sheet design that started a few years ago. We are in the final stage of executing and you know the milestone that you want to hear us talk about is Zen taping out, which should be over the next several months, and then putting samples in the hands of our customers and then starting first full year of revenue in 2017. And by the way, because we have this reuse approach for cores, you will see us with Zen cores in the high-end desktops first and then the servers from our overall products standpoint. Read more: http://wccftech.com/amd-confirms-zen-coming-highend-desktops-2016/#ixzz3tsoNfrvK http://wccftech.com/amd-confirms-zen-coming-highend-desktops...
superbatfish 11y ago
This article omitted one interesting part of the story, which is how AMD led the way to the x86_64 architecture while Intel was attempting to migrate to a conceptually radical architecture in its own products (Itanium). As I understood it, AMD's success in the early 2000s was largely due to their leadership in 64-bit, and Intel had to play catch-up to adopt AMD's approach. (But when they did, they reclaimed the throne.)
- gh02t 11y ago
  AMD definitely did x86-64 better than the ill fated Itanic's reliance on fictional compiler magic that largely would never materialize, but I don't know how much of an edge of provided. It was still too early for 64bit to really provide any benefit and operating system support was weak. At least people I remember saw it for what it was- marketing. It happens that in the long term it ended up being the way to go, but at the time the Athlon64's were coming around there wasn't much point (for consumers at least). By the time 64bit came of age Intel had already buried AMD by a combination of foul play and legitimate innovation. IMO AMD could compete because the manufacturing and design processes were still accessible enough that they could still produce chips with competitive performance without the massive amount of capital Intel invests in new designs today due simply to diminishing returns in processor performance. Nowadays the difficulty of new processes means that very very few foundries are capable of using the latest fabrication processes and Intel has a stranglehold on them. It's harder for AMD to play catch-up, because there is less slack for them to work with using the next-best-thing. Nowadays, all the money AMD could spend on innovating with genuinely new technology is instead spent trying to keep up just keep up, whereas before they had more breathing room. There's a comparison to draw with the engine wars in Formula 1 in the 90s. The sport was in major trouble financially, because teams were spending gigantic sums of money chasing small gains in engine performance on the extreme tail end of diminishing returns. The small teams were imploding trying to keep up because while the performance delta might have only been a few horsepower between the big and small teams, those few extra horsepower had a big impact on how competitive you were. And engine development is astronomically expensive on the far side of the returns curve, so additionally even the big teams were outspending themselves trying to keep up with each other before they implemented rules changes to limit engine development.
atomicbeanie 11y ago
Payments to a customer to not buy a competitor's product is a form of price fixing. Other Intel customers would then not know what the real market price was. They were therefore undermining AMD's opportunity without the market being able to take advantage of the price war between them. Intel seems over-ripe for anti-trust action at this point. I think the government is codling them in all likelihood. This is not a technical issue, I suspect it is far more of Intel taking advantage of its strong political clout.
- raverbashing 11y ago
  But Intel did have an anti-trust action against them and settled
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  There was an anti-trust, but Intel got away lightly, I think.
smegel 11y ago
I remember the days of the Athlon X2 versus the Pentium 4...AMD was truly the king back then. Combined with nVidia producing an awesome AMD chipset (nForce), they were glorious days. Then AMD went weird and starting focusing on these dual-socket platforms instead of just improving their stand-alone CPUs...the Intel Core came out...and the rest is history. Sad really. Later (~2006) I remember because the Athlon X2 was produced in limited numbers, and the eBay price went through the roof as people were trying to upgrade from single-core without replacing every other component in their system to jump to Phenom.
- radoslawc 11y ago
  Not to mention first Duron processors, originally clocked at 600 MHz, that by shorting some bridges could run at 900 or even 1GHz, at this time there wasn't CPU that fast (customer grade) and that affordable. Other thing was bear dye that could be crushed while mounting heat sink. Later on I've got even more hands shaking while mounting heat sink on next generation Barton which could be overclocked from 2500+ to 3200+, ah old days.
  - theandrewbailey 11y ago
    The first heatsink I mounted was on a Athlon XP 2500+. To this day, I've never fried a CPU or let the magic smoke out, but it concerns me every time I mount a heatsink. That CPU ran at 3200+ speeds for a few years, until I noticed the capacitors getting nasty.
    - krylon 11y ago
      I have a Core2 Quad 2.4GHz that I use as a small-ish home server. About half a year ago, the power supply died, and when I replaced it, I left the chassis open and noticed the CPU fan was no longer rotating. At first, I was really scared, but the machine is running well to this day. On a hot day, the system log will show many messages about the CPU reducing its clock speed to prevent overheating, but that seems to work well enough. (The system, to be fair, mainly runs as a file and DNS server, so it is not exactly super-busy, but still. It might also help that the fan sits on top of a huge heatsink.)
systemshacker 11y ago
This article is a recounting of public story. The real truth is much more nuanced with enough internal reasons (AMD veteran here). AMD made a lot of profits with the x86-64 (Opteron family) around 2004-2005. However, that got to managements head and there were a series of missteps: * Inorganic growth: The company went from small teams with startup culture to larger teams with many projects. AMD went and acquired large teams from HP in Fort Collins and Sun in Boston (Millenium chip team) in one fell swoop. This slowed projects a lot while assimilating and learning to work together with very different cultures and methodologies. * Mid-management from IBM: Since the company was growing larger, a bunch of VPs from IBM were hired. They tried to bring IBM style processes which will not work when you do not have a captive market like IBM and your competitor is Intel :) * Too many projects: The people and management growth resulted in everyone wanting their own chip project instead of working on derivatives of existing projects. There were too many projects conceived, spent cycles on and then cancelled. * Paid too much for ATI: Bought them for 5.4 billion in 2006 when they could have waited till 2008 and bought them for 1 billion :) They had to write off most of the ATI value off their books and took charge for it.
- qb45 11y ago
  > Paid too much for ATI: Bought them for 5.4 billion in 2006 when they could have waited till 2008 and bought them for 1 billion :) They had to write off most of the ATI value off their books and took charge for it. But was it really that predictable back in 2006? 2008 sounds like the year when Intel killed 3rd party chipset market. Which, afaik, wasn't expected by anyone.
  - FreakyT 11y ago
    Ah, that was the year that happened? I still remember the dark ages of having to pick between one of several chipset manufacturers, each with their own sets of strange problems. Really, I think moving to chipsets made by the CPU manufacturer was an overall improvement.
    - qb45 11y ago
      A part of those chip's appeal was integrated GPUs. Not everyone wanted to buy discrete GPUs and Intel's own IGPs of early '00s were rather poor.
rdc12 11y ago
While I don't think the ICC situation was fair, I am not convinced that it played a big role in the story of AMD. Was ICC ever really used outside of niche markets, like HPC. I would bet that most of the mediap layers at the time would have been using hand written assembler for the bits that really needed SSE.
- Lan 11y ago
  There were notable instances of benchmarking suites being compiled with ICC. So even if most applications didn't exhibit the issue, reviews for AMD processors did. And it was a prominent enough issue that a tool was written to search your PC for software compiled with ICC and patch it to work correctly.
golergka 11y ago
I wonder how western mentality can bend morality rules to always favor the underdog. The "immoral" practices author accuses the Intel are developing favoring compiler and offering low prices and better deals to OEMs. Let me tell you something: when you give someone one billion dollars, you don't hold them on "ransom"; they're upholding an end of the deal that they voluntarily agreed to. And to lose money, to offer better prices, to get bigger market share is not something even remotely immoral. Now, about compilers: Intel have never pretended that Intel compiler is supposed to work just as good with Intel as with other compiler manufacturers. It says so even in the marketing benchmark picture provided with the post. It was individual developer's decision: whether he wanted to get equal performance on different platforms, or whether he preferred to sacrifice performance on AMD in order to get more on Intel. Microsoft, Borland, gcc, LLVM and other compilers exist; if a developer choses Intel compiler instead, it's his decision to make his software to run slower on AMD. How is offering such an option immoral? However, author completely glosses over the fact that AMD reverse-engineered Intel's product and released it's clone. To me, this actually seems like something not only immoral, but quite possibly, illegal, and definitely something worse than Intel's deeds. But of course, since AMD is smaller, it doesn't have to adhere to the same moral standard.
- blowski 11y ago
  > And to lose money, to offer better prices, to get bigger market share is not something even remotely immoral. I won't go into morality, but it can be illegal if it's considered predatory pricing. If a company has an inferior product but uses its power and dominance of the market to prevent another company with a better product from being able to compete, then laws preventing this from happening are not about favouring the underdog but encouraging innovation.
- bainsfather 11y ago
  As regards selling at a loss: if you do this with the aim of destroying or damaging your competition, so that in the future you may enjoy greater profits e.g. due to having a monopoly, then it is bad for society - the word immoral is not unreasonable. There exist laws that try to prevent this type of behaviour, because of the public harm it causes.
- 11y ago
ksec 11y ago
I am, naively thinking, may be we have hit the wall of single threaded performance, Skylake wasn't that much difference, even though i believe with some compiler optimisation and recompiling some software may get another 10% benefits. We could run at higher clock frequency, but CPU will heat up. And when most of the world don't need high performance PC any more, may be AMD do stand a chance this time around. As long as ZEN is within 10 - 15% of Intel's performance. They have lots of head room to work in the Server CPU sector. And their APU in the lower end. The problem with AMD is they have never been good with execution, so while even on paper Zen is good, AMD will likely mis position their product, fail to market it, or likely fxxked up by GF production issues.
- krylon 11y ago
  > And when most of the world don't need high performance PC any more Well, that is because we do have very high performance PCs these days. Somewhere on Wikipedia, there is a quote by somebody (I forget who...), that a supercomputer is a device for turning a CPU-bound problem into an IO-bound problem. By that definition, even modest PCs these days are supercomputers for the majority of programs ordinary people run on them.
  - BuildTheRobots 11y ago
    The quote is from Ken Batcher (- I liked it enough I went digging). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Batcher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Batcher
    - krylon 11y ago
      Thanks!
  - hga 11y ago
    a supercomputer is a device for turning a CPU-bound problem into an IO-bound problem Heh. I remember a tale from the days of the early generation Crays, where they were showing one off to an IBM guy, who said, yeah, impressive, but what about I/O? So a Cray guy ran something and got all the tapes to moving. The IBM guy was unimpressed until they pointed out they were writing data to all of them. At least in those days the problem was understood, don't know about current supercomputers, but as I understand it one of the things that makes them expensive is their board to board interconnects, so I doubt they neglect I/O at the same time.
scott_karana 11y ago
This seems to be missing some of the technical merits of Intel's failure and rebirth: Downturn: The heat- and power-intensive single-core Pentium 4s, and the stillborn & binary-incompatible IA64/Itanium lineups that prevented them from competing on both the multicore and 64-bit AMD marketing bullet points Rebound: Dedicated, efficient "premium" laptop chips in the Centrino lineup, to which AMD had no competitors, and which subsequently reunified with the P4's Hyperthreading, plus multicore, in the "Core" lineup/microarchitecture that debuted in the newly-Intel, no-longer-PowerPC Macbooks. (I seem to remember hearing that Core-era Xeons were good, serverside: Nehalem definitely was, just afterwards)

144 points by geerlingguy 11y ago

RUG3Y 11y ago

I love my AMD cpus, on paper they're not as "good", but they do what I need at a great price.

technofiend 11y ago

I guess the real question is will AMD have a compiler to match Intel's when ZEN is released?

S_A_P 11y ago
I'm surprised nobody's hacked the Intel compiler to compile for AMD chips. I'm sure it's for fear of litigation.
- andrewflnr 11y ago
  I don't think you would have to do that. Couldn't you write a tool that just patches out the "be stupid if this is an AMD chip" code from an intel-compiled binary?
  - TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
    Intel's compiler would check for the presence of a feature (SSE etc.) and also for "GenuineIntel". So you could simply remove the latter part and it should work fine, I think.
- berkut 11y ago
  You don't need to these days (since 2011) - there have been numerous benchmarks over the years showing ICC generate binaries that perform better than MSVC++ for AMD processors.
  - throwaway7767 11y ago
    Interesting. I guess they must have finally stopped intentionally crippling ICC for non-intel processors[0]. [0] http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49#49 http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49#49
- raverbashing 11y ago
  Of course they did it, you just need to 'fix' the binary file, but there are several tools that do this
_delirium 11y ago
Afaict AMD is putting their compiler-engineering effort into trying to improve gcc performance on their chips, rather than starting a separate compiler project. They are a lot smaller than Intel, so I'm not sure they can spare the resources to build an AMD analog to Intel's icc.
- Keyframe 11y ago
  Didn't Intel's compiler start out from Intel buying Digital's compiler stuff?
mixmastamyk 11y ago
Who uses Intel's compiler? I was under the impression most were using Microsoft's, or gcc/clang perhaps.
- x0x0 11y ago
  people who care about performance, particularly simd or numerics performance. gcc has gotten better recently, but it's still slower ime.
  - nly 11y ago
    On the other hand, Intels compiler does really dumb things with vanilla application code and has never performed better for any code I've ever written.
    - x0x0 11y ago
      Yeah, ymmv. All high-perf code simply has to be meticulously performance tested; there's no other way to know on modern processors what is fastest.
- lmm 11y ago
  Number crunching workloads, or the narrow HPC niche in which it works on a workstation rather than a cluster but you still need maximum performance from it - some physicists, astronomers, and geneticists. It's a fairly small niche but they buy new CPUs more than other people.

metrix 11y ago

According to this article, Zen has not taped out yet: Devinder Kumar, AMD CFO : Zen was a clean sheet design that started a few years ago. We are in the final stage of executing and you know the milestone that you want to hear us talk about is Zen taping out, which should be over the next several months, and then putting samples in the hands of our customers and then starting first full year of revenue in 2017. And by the way, because we have this reuse approach for cores, you will see us with Zen cores in the high-end desktops first and then the servers from our overall products standpoint. Read more: http://wccftech.com/amd-confirms-zen-coming-highend-desktops-2016/#ixzz3tsoNfrvK http://wccftech.com/amd-confirms-zen-coming-highend-desktops...

superbatfish 11y ago

This article omitted one interesting part of the story, which is how AMD led the way to the x86_64 architecture while Intel was attempting to migrate to a conceptually radical architecture in its own products (Itanium). As I understood it, AMD's success in the early 2000s was largely due to their leadership in 64-bit, and Intel had to play catch-up to adopt AMD's approach. (But when they did, they reclaimed the throne.)

gh02t 11y ago
AMD definitely did x86-64 better than the ill fated Itanic's reliance on fictional compiler magic that largely would never materialize, but I don't know how much of an edge of provided. It was still too early for 64bit to really provide any benefit and operating system support was weak. At least people I remember saw it for what it was- marketing. It happens that in the long term it ended up being the way to go, but at the time the Athlon64's were coming around there wasn't much point (for consumers at least). By the time 64bit came of age Intel had already buried AMD by a combination of foul play and legitimate innovation. IMO AMD could compete because the manufacturing and design processes were still accessible enough that they could still produce chips with competitive performance without the massive amount of capital Intel invests in new designs today due simply to diminishing returns in processor performance. Nowadays the difficulty of new processes means that very very few foundries are capable of using the latest fabrication processes and Intel has a stranglehold on them. It's harder for AMD to play catch-up, because there is less slack for them to work with using the next-best-thing. Nowadays, all the money AMD could spend on innovating with genuinely new technology is instead spent trying to keep up just keep up, whereas before they had more breathing room. There's a comparison to draw with the engine wars in Formula 1 in the 90s. The sport was in major trouble financially, because teams were spending gigantic sums of money chasing small gains in engine performance on the extreme tail end of diminishing returns. The small teams were imploding trying to keep up because while the performance delta might have only been a few horsepower between the big and small teams, those few extra horsepower had a big impact on how competitive you were. And engine development is astronomically expensive on the far side of the returns curve, so additionally even the big teams were outspending themselves trying to keep up with each other before they implemented rules changes to limit engine development.

atomicbeanie 11y ago

Payments to a customer to not buy a competitor's product is a form of price fixing. Other Intel customers would then not know what the real market price was. They were therefore undermining AMD's opportunity without the market being able to take advantage of the price war between them. Intel seems over-ripe for anti-trust action at this point. I think the government is codling them in all likelihood. This is not a technical issue, I suspect it is far more of Intel taking advantage of its strong political clout.

raverbashing 11y ago
But Intel did have an anti-trust action against them and settled
TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
There was an anti-trust, but Intel got away lightly, I think.

smegel 11y ago

I remember the days of the Athlon X2 versus the Pentium 4...AMD was truly the king back then. Combined with nVidia producing an awesome AMD chipset (nForce), they were glorious days. Then AMD went weird and starting focusing on these dual-socket platforms instead of just improving their stand-alone CPUs...the Intel Core came out...and the rest is history. Sad really. Later (~2006) I remember because the Athlon X2 was produced in limited numbers, and the eBay price went through the roof as people were trying to upgrade from single-core without replacing every other component in their system to jump to Phenom.

radoslawc 11y ago
Not to mention first Duron processors, originally clocked at 600 MHz, that by shorting some bridges could run at 900 or even 1GHz, at this time there wasn't CPU that fast (customer grade) and that affordable. Other thing was bear dye that could be crushed while mounting heat sink. Later on I've got even more hands shaking while mounting heat sink on next generation Barton which could be overclocked from 2500+ to 3200+, ah old days.
- theandrewbailey 11y ago
  The first heatsink I mounted was on a Athlon XP 2500+. To this day, I've never fried a CPU or let the magic smoke out, but it concerns me every time I mount a heatsink. That CPU ran at 3200+ speeds for a few years, until I noticed the capacitors getting nasty.
  - krylon 11y ago
    I have a Core2 Quad 2.4GHz that I use as a small-ish home server. About half a year ago, the power supply died, and when I replaced it, I left the chassis open and noticed the CPU fan was no longer rotating. At first, I was really scared, but the machine is running well to this day. On a hot day, the system log will show many messages about the CPU reducing its clock speed to prevent overheating, but that seems to work well enough. (The system, to be fair, mainly runs as a file and DNS server, so it is not exactly super-busy, but still. It might also help that the fan sits on top of a huge heatsink.)

systemshacker 11y ago

This article is a recounting of public story. The real truth is much more nuanced with enough internal reasons (AMD veteran here). AMD made a lot of profits with the x86-64 (Opteron family) around 2004-2005. However, that got to managements head and there were a series of missteps: * Inorganic growth: The company went from small teams with startup culture to larger teams with many projects. AMD went and acquired large teams from HP in Fort Collins and Sun in Boston (Millenium chip team) in one fell swoop. This slowed projects a lot while assimilating and learning to work together with very different cultures and methodologies. * Mid-management from IBM: Since the company was growing larger, a bunch of VPs from IBM were hired. They tried to bring IBM style processes which will not work when you do not have a captive market like IBM and your competitor is Intel :) * Too many projects: The people and management growth resulted in everyone wanting their own chip project instead of working on derivatives of existing projects. There were too many projects conceived, spent cycles on and then cancelled. * Paid too much for ATI: Bought them for 5.4 billion in 2006 when they could have waited till 2008 and bought them for 1 billion :) They had to write off most of the ATI value off their books and took charge for it.

qb45 11y ago
> Paid too much for ATI: Bought them for 5.4 billion in 2006 when they could have waited till 2008 and bought them for 1 billion :) They had to write off most of the ATI value off their books and took charge for it. But was it really that predictable back in 2006? 2008 sounds like the year when Intel killed 3rd party chipset market. Which, afaik, wasn't expected by anyone.
- FreakyT 11y ago
  Ah, that was the year that happened? I still remember the dark ages of having to pick between one of several chipset manufacturers, each with their own sets of strange problems. Really, I think moving to chipsets made by the CPU manufacturer was an overall improvement.
  - qb45 11y ago
    A part of those chip's appeal was integrated GPUs. Not everyone wanted to buy discrete GPUs and Intel's own IGPs of early '00s were rather poor.

rdc12 11y ago

While I don't think the ICC situation was fair, I am not convinced that it played a big role in the story of AMD. Was ICC ever really used outside of niche markets, like HPC. I would bet that most of the mediap layers at the time would have been using hand written assembler for the bits that really needed SSE.

Lan 11y ago
There were notable instances of benchmarking suites being compiled with ICC. So even if most applications didn't exhibit the issue, reviews for AMD processors did. And it was a prominent enough issue that a tool was written to search your PC for software compiled with ICC and patch it to work correctly.

golergka 11y ago

I wonder how western mentality can bend morality rules to always favor the underdog. The "immoral" practices author accuses the Intel are developing favoring compiler and offering low prices and better deals to OEMs. Let me tell you something: when you give someone one billion dollars, you don't hold them on "ransom"; they're upholding an end of the deal that they voluntarily agreed to. And to lose money, to offer better prices, to get bigger market share is not something even remotely immoral. Now, about compilers: Intel have never pretended that Intel compiler is supposed to work just as good with Intel as with other compiler manufacturers. It says so even in the marketing benchmark picture provided with the post. It was individual developer's decision: whether he wanted to get equal performance on different platforms, or whether he preferred to sacrifice performance on AMD in order to get more on Intel. Microsoft, Borland, gcc, LLVM and other compilers exist; if a developer choses Intel compiler instead, it's his decision to make his software to run slower on AMD. How is offering such an option immoral? However, author completely glosses over the fact that AMD reverse-engineered Intel's product and released it's clone. To me, this actually seems like something not only immoral, but quite possibly, illegal, and definitely something worse than Intel's deeds. But of course, since AMD is smaller, it doesn't have to adhere to the same moral standard.

blowski 11y ago
> And to lose money, to offer better prices, to get bigger market share is not something even remotely immoral. I won't go into morality, but it can be illegal if it's considered predatory pricing. If a company has an inferior product but uses its power and dominance of the market to prevent another company with a better product from being able to compete, then laws preventing this from happening are not about favouring the underdog but encouraging innovation.
bainsfather 11y ago
As regards selling at a loss: if you do this with the aim of destroying or damaging your competition, so that in the future you may enjoy greater profits e.g. due to having a monopoly, then it is bad for society - the word immoral is not unreasonable. There exist laws that try to prevent this type of behaviour, because of the public harm it causes.
11y ago

ksec 11y ago

I am, naively thinking, may be we have hit the wall of single threaded performance, Skylake wasn't that much difference, even though i believe with some compiler optimisation and recompiling some software may get another 10% benefits. We could run at higher clock frequency, but CPU will heat up. And when most of the world don't need high performance PC any more, may be AMD do stand a chance this time around. As long as ZEN is within 10 - 15% of Intel's performance. They have lots of head room to work in the Server CPU sector. And their APU in the lower end. The problem with AMD is they have never been good with execution, so while even on paper Zen is good, AMD will likely mis position their product, fail to market it, or likely fxxked up by GF production issues.

krylon 11y ago
> And when most of the world don't need high performance PC any more Well, that is because we do have very high performance PCs these days. Somewhere on Wikipedia, there is a quote by somebody (I forget who...), that a supercomputer is a device for turning a CPU-bound problem into an IO-bound problem. By that definition, even modest PCs these days are supercomputers for the majority of programs ordinary people run on them.
- BuildTheRobots 11y ago
  The quote is from Ken Batcher (- I liked it enough I went digging). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Batcher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Batcher
  - krylon 11y ago
    Thanks!
- hga 11y ago
  a supercomputer is a device for turning a CPU-bound problem into an IO-bound problem Heh. I remember a tale from the days of the early generation Crays, where they were showing one off to an IBM guy, who said, yeah, impressive, but what about I/O? So a Cray guy ran something and got all the tapes to moving. The IBM guy was unimpressed until they pointed out they were writing data to all of them. At least in those days the problem was understood, don't know about current supercomputers, but as I understand it one of the things that makes them expensive is their board to board interconnects, so I doubt they neglect I/O at the same time.

scott_karana 11y ago

This seems to be missing some of the technical merits of Intel's failure and rebirth: Downturn: The heat- and power-intensive single-core Pentium 4s, and the stillborn & binary-incompatible IA64/Itanium lineups that prevented them from competing on both the multicore and 64-bit AMD marketing bullet points Rebound: Dedicated, efficient "premium" laptop chips in the Centrino lineup, to which AMD had no competitors, and which subsequently reunified with the P4's Hyperthreading, plus multicore, in the "Core" lineup/microarchitecture that debuted in the newly-Intel, no-longer-PowerPC Macbooks. (I seem to remember hearing that Core-era Xeons were good, serverside: Nehalem definitely was, just afterwards)