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Breaking news: AMD makes sensational claims about future, unreleased products.

by smegel 10y ago

rubbingalcohol 10y ago
Before you get downvoted it's worth highlighting that AMD's pre-release hype and cherry-picked "leaks" are notorious for being over optimistic, to put it generously. In any case I'm glad to see they're still trying to compete in the desktop space.
- curt15 10y ago
  It seems like just yesterday when AMD was claiming in pre-release statements a 50 percent performance advantage over Intel's Core 2 offerings. http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1165926 http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1165926
  - daveguy 10y ago
    Was that when they followed through and kicked butt at the top end? It has been quite a while. Or was that when marketing started writing checks their engineers couldn't cash? (Which has been a theme throughout the bulldozer line)
    - phkahler 10y ago
      I always thought the problem with bulldozer was that marketing considered a module to be 2 cores, while someone in engineering meant for a module to compete with a single Intel core. If you go by the later definition, Bulldozer kicked Intels ass in multithreaded performance and can still compete. It makes sense because they touted a different variant of hyperthreading they claimed was better. The problem of course is that makes for a huge expensive core and only half as many per chip for marketing purposes. It also had shit for single thread performance either way. But I've always felt this difference of interpretation for the architecture was a big part of the failure.
      - wmf 10y ago
        Even if you compare a 4-module Bulldozer/Piledriver against a 4-core Intel Sandy/Ivy Bridge, AMD's die size and power consumption were much higher to deliver similar or worse performance.
        mjevans 10y ago
        They were also stuck at /least/ a process node back due to earlier anti-competitive practices that Intel didn't get sufficiently penalized for. (Those practices literally forced AMD out of the same /business/ as Intel; which is what cemented the situation they've ended up in.) A fair settlement would have broken up Intel in to isolated fabrication and pattern-design businesses.
    - curt15 10y ago
      Nope, ever since Intel's Conroe architecture, AMD never managed to catch up in either raw performance or performance per watt.
    - smitherfield 10y ago
      No, that's was the Athlon 64 vs. Pentium IV era, circa '04-'05. Since Intel introduced the Core 2 line of processors in '06 Intel took a permanent and growing lead.
      - rplst8 10y ago
        It was actually earlier than that. Regular Athlon vs. Pentium III. The K7 architecture is where they finally came out on top, which was released in 1999. I'm not sure how deep into the Athlon line they kept their lead, but the Pentium 4 was a miserable line which first debuted in 2000. I don't know any friends that were serious about gaming or performance computing at the time that would have chosen a P4 over an Athlon or Athlon 64 which came out in 2003. I think maybe part of AMDs downfall was their investment in the x86 64-bit micro-architecture extensions they added in the Athlon 64 (which Intel then adopted in their chips). During that time, Intel had refocused on heat and power usage which has paid dividends in the out years. That said, I think the 64-bit extensions came at a necessary time and allowed us to get past the 4GB barrier without having to resort to weird memory paging schemes like PAE.
        gpderetta 10y ago
        AMD64 and Opteron gave AMD an decent chunk of the server market. They unfortunately lost it again when Intel stopped playing with Itanic and decided to release a non-joke x86 Xeon.

Breaking news: AMD makes sensational claims about future, unreleased products.

by smegel 10y ago

Breaking news: AMD makes sensational claims about future, unreleased products.

Before you get downvoted it's worth highlighting that AMD's pre-release hype and cherry-picked "leaks" are notorious for being over optimistic, to put it generously. In any case I'm glad to see they're still trying to compete in the desktop space.

curt15 10y ago
It seems like just yesterday when AMD was claiming in pre-release statements a 50 percent performance advantage over Intel's Core 2 offerings. http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1165926 http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1165926
- daveguy 10y ago
  Was that when they followed through and kicked butt at the top end? It has been quite a while. Or was that when marketing started writing checks their engineers couldn't cash? (Which has been a theme throughout the bulldozer line)
  - phkahler 10y ago
    I always thought the problem with bulldozer was that marketing considered a module to be 2 cores, while someone in engineering meant for a module to compete with a single Intel core. If you go by the later definition, Bulldozer kicked Intels ass in multithreaded performance and can still compete. It makes sense because they touted a different variant of hyperthreading they claimed was better. The problem of course is that makes for a huge expensive core and only half as many per chip for marketing purposes. It also had shit for single thread performance either way. But I've always felt this difference of interpretation for the architecture was a big part of the failure.
    - wmf 10y ago
      Even if you compare a 4-module Bulldozer/Piledriver against a 4-core Intel Sandy/Ivy Bridge, AMD's die size and power consumption were much higher to deliver similar or worse performance.
      - mjevans 10y ago
        They were also stuck at /least/ a process node back due to earlier anti-competitive practices that Intel didn't get sufficiently penalized for. (Those practices literally forced AMD out of the same /business/ as Intel; which is what cemented the situation they've ended up in.) A fair settlement would have broken up Intel in to isolated fabrication and pattern-design businesses.
  - curt15 10y ago
    Nope, ever since Intel's Conroe architecture, AMD never managed to catch up in either raw performance or performance per watt.
  - smitherfield 10y ago
    No, that's was the Athlon 64 vs. Pentium IV era, circa '04-'05. Since Intel introduced the Core 2 line of processors in '06 Intel took a permanent and growing lead.
    - rplst8 10y ago
      It was actually earlier than that. Regular Athlon vs. Pentium III. The K7 architecture is where they finally came out on top, which was released in 1999. I'm not sure how deep into the Athlon line they kept their lead, but the Pentium 4 was a miserable line which first debuted in 2000. I don't know any friends that were serious about gaming or performance computing at the time that would have chosen a P4 over an Athlon or Athlon 64 which came out in 2003. I think maybe part of AMDs downfall was their investment in the x86 64-bit micro-architecture extensions they added in the Athlon 64 (which Intel then adopted in their chips). During that time, Intel had refocused on heat and power usage which has paid dividends in the out years. That said, I think the 64-bit extensions came at a necessary time and allowed us to get past the 4GB barrier without having to resort to weird memory paging schemes like PAE.
      - gpderetta 10y ago
        AMD64 and Opteron gave AMD an decent chunk of the server market. They unfortunately lost it again when Intel stopped playing with Itanic and decided to release a non-joke x86 Xeon.