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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 conc

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.
vsync 11y ago
I'll always call the ISA "amd64".
burnte 11y ago
They were able to lead with AMD64 because of their incredibly price/performance at the turn of the centry. Late 90s the K6x chips were breathing new life into Socket 7 motherboards and existing systems, and a couple years later the Athlon was saving peple a hundred or more dollars to get a system that outperformed the Pentium 4 and produced significantly less heat. This helped them grow their marketshare significantly, which meant when we needed 64bit computing, we had two viable companies to pick from, rather than one giant and one minor also-ran. Intel still acted like they were the market dictator (which they weren't at that time) and said "IA64 is the way forward, dump x86!" This was astounding from Intel as for decades they had been the key drummer on the backwards-compatible drum, making sure each new x86 CPU could run the old existing code. Now suddenly they're saying dump decades of installed base. AMD took advantage of their increased marketshare and said, "Hey, we have a 64bit solution for x86 that keeps your old code, and lets you create 64bit code for the future without relearning a new, complicated architecture." IA64 was EPIC, meaning Extremely Parallel Instruction Computing. AMD64 was x86 with a whole new set of 64bit extensions but with x86 compatibility and familiarity, which is exactly what Intel did when they extended x86 into the 32bit world with the i386. Those two factors combined are why AMD64 became the defacto standard. Neither would have helped without the other.
- mnw21cam 11y ago
  EPIC - Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explicitly_parallel_instruction_computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explicitly_parallel_instructio... That means that the compiler works out the parallelism rather than the CPU, which is meant to reduce the amount of silicon wasted on instruction decode/parallelism. Anyone remember Transmeta?
  - yvdriess 11y ago
    Yes, Transmeta was bought by Intel. x86, despite its quirks, does not seem to be holding back the hardware too much. The silicon for decode/ILP does a fantastic job.
    - 11y ago

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.

vsync 11y ago

I'll always call the ISA "amd64".

burnte 11y ago

They were able to lead with AMD64 because of their incredibly price/performance at the turn of the centry. Late 90s the K6x chips were breathing new life into Socket 7 motherboards and existing systems, and a couple years later the Athlon was saving peple a hundred or more dollars to get a system that outperformed the Pentium 4 and produced significantly less heat. This helped them grow their marketshare significantly, which meant when we needed 64bit computing, we had two viable companies to pick from, rather than one giant and one minor also-ran. Intel still acted like they were the market dictator (which they weren't at that time) and said "IA64 is the way forward, dump x86!" This was astounding from Intel as for decades they had been the key drummer on the backwards-compatible drum, making sure each new x86 CPU could run the old existing code. Now suddenly they're saying dump decades of installed base. AMD took advantage of their increased marketshare and said, "Hey, we have a 64bit solution for x86 that keeps your old code, and lets you create 64bit code for the future without relearning a new, complicated architecture." IA64 was EPIC, meaning Extremely Parallel Instruction Computing. AMD64 was x86 with a whole new set of 64bit extensions but with x86 compatibility and familiarity, which is exactly what Intel did when they extended x86 into the 32bit world with the i386. Those two factors combined are why AMD64 became the defacto standard. Neither would have helped without the other.

mnw21cam 11y ago
EPIC - Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explicitly_parallel_instruction_computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explicitly_parallel_instructio... That means that the compiler works out the parallelism rather than the CPU, which is meant to reduce the amount of silicon wasted on instruction decode/parallelism. Anyone remember Transmeta?
- yvdriess 11y ago
  Yes, Transmeta was bought by Intel. x86, despite its quirks, does not seem to be holding back the hardware too much. The silicon for decode/ILP does a fantastic job.
  - 11y ago