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Intel has been "dead" before. AMD has "beaten it" before. AMD knocked it out of the park with x86_64, which allowed a seamless transition to 64bit. Intel end

Intel has been "dead" before. AMD has "beaten it" before. AMD knocked it out of the park with x86_64, which allowed a seamless transition to 64bit. Intel ended up having to license x86_64 implementation from AMD. AMD beat Intel with their K6 and similar series of chips where, just like this time around, they were able to get way more performance per tick out of the CPU. Intel was supposedly dead in the water due to their toaster era P4 chips that ran hot as hell, and consumed way more power to get the same job done. AMD started making some serious inroads in the server CPU market with early era Opteron processors. Following that era, out came Centrino era of mobile processors, which took a different approach to the CPU architecture from the P4 and set things up for the Core2Duo etc series of processors and on in to the i7s and the like. I'm highly skeptical that Intel is any more dead now than it was then. It has a track record of going away and completely changing the whole story all over again, and they've got the financial resources to keep on doing so.

pjmlp 9y ago
While true, open source, mobile OSes and IoT wave were less relevant when those situations happened. Nowadays it seems they will get cornered on desktop and server CPUs, unless they happen to buy ARM licenses or try to re-invent CPUs with builtin FPGAs.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Twirrim 9y ago
  Intel already has ARM licenses. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-16/intel-licenses-arm-technology-in-move-to-boost-foundry-business https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-16/intel-lic...
nolok 9y ago
False similarity; as the EU case showed that the reason Intel remained on top then was because they pressured everyone, from OEM to hosting providers against going AMD. I doubt they have the clout to pull that one again, especially when you consider how the courts would react to them doing it again.
c0nfused 9y ago
Don't forget that whole illegally strong arming manufacturers at the same time centrino came out. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc._v._Intel_Corp https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc.....
nickpeterson 9y ago
Also keep in mind, the Pentium M was sort of a random bush project that ended up being at the right time. Basically, it was a revert to the Pentium 3 style of doing things designed by an intel team in Israel to compete in mobile. I'm not convinced Intel is going to be so fortunate again.
- dkhenry 9y ago
  I dont know I could see something like the MIC product line or the Larabee work making a similar pivot for Intel.
jp555 9y ago
What do you think about Intel's monolithic dies vs. AMD's approach to packaging smaller dies together onto a socket-mount and linking them with "Infinity Fabric" into a single CPU? Seems to me yields would be a lot better with AMD's approach while allowing it to scale to huge core counts (I think the EPYC 32core CPU is 8x 4-core dies in a package?). Do you think Intel's integrated graphics is a big strategy tax that's holding them back?
kbenson 9y ago
> AMD beat Intel with their K6 and similar series of chips where, just like this time around, they were able to get way more performance per tick out of the CPU. There was in interesting submission the other day about performance of the Ryzen vs i7, and how their AVX2 instruction support isn't what it's racked up to be[1]. I'm not really qualified to assess the source or claims accurately, so I'll let others read it themselves and come to their own conclusions, but it was interesting. 1: https://hashcat.net/forum/thread-6534-post-35415.html https://hashcat.net/forum/thread-6534-post-35415.html
- AlphaSite 9y ago
  I don't doubt Intels AVX2 will be faster, but I suspect there is more to it than what this guy is saying. I suspect there is a big element of overspecialisation for Intel CPUs and that these programs will need to be tweaked for Ryzens AVX implementation.
- Laforet 9y ago
  This has been known since Ryzen's release - it struggles a lot with AVX2-heavy codecs such as VP9 and x265. If hashcat was compiled to take advantage of AVX2 then this is expected.
- jamesaross 9y ago
  I may be somewhat qualified to speculate...Based on my experience with both Intel's and AMD's OpenCL implementations for their CPUs, I suggest that Intel has a much better vecorizing compiler than AMD. The benchmarks they are running have different compilers. If it was a simple C code compiled by GCC for each CPU, the comparison would be better. It would be interesting to see the results for AMD's OpenCL compiler on the i7 and Intel's compiler on Ryzen.
- Dylan16807 9y ago
  It's complicated. Skylake/Kaby Lake have two full-fledged 256-bit vector units. Ryzen has four partial units. There are two 128-bit adders, and two 128-bit multipliers. Intel's best case is a constant stream of 256-bit FMA instructions. They can do two per cycle, while AMD can do one. The more plain adds and multiplies, the better Ryzen does. The same for 128-bit vector instructions. With enough of both, it can actually do significantly more work per cycle.
johngalt 9y ago
That was Intel as a powerful incumbent pushing out one major competitor in the same market. AMD made better chips for years, but couldn't displace Intel due to Intel's entrenched advantages (Market share/Legal etc...). Now the market is moving and Intel remains entrenched. This is generally how dominant companies die. ExxonMobile doesn't die because someone built a better oil company. They die when someone builds a better battery.
- crazypyro 9y ago
  I believe your analogy is flawed unless there has been some massive shift in the chip industry that invalidates a large body of pre-existing knowledge about the industry. How is today's chip industry compared with yesterday's chip industry as dramatic of a shift as going from oil to batteries? That seems like a much more significant leap than x86 to ARM. What am I missing?
  - Sargos 9y ago
    Intel makes x86 (Exxon makes oil). Most things are moving to ARM (batteries). Intel (Exxon) now loses the market it built its entire business on as the world moves on to different products. Exxon can make batteries and Intel can make things like ARM chips. But they aren't really because they aren't good at it.
    - crazypyro 9y ago
      Yeah, but what I'm saying is how is the scale of a move of x86 to ARM comparable to oil to batteries? From the outside, looking in, it seems like the two leaps are on massively different scales which I feel is important when talking about things that will kill a large corporation. I guess my key question is what makes ARM so much different than x86 that it invalidates Intel's existing knowledge? Batteries have a completely different product life cycle than oil. For one, batteries don't burn away and they recharge. This creates completely different business models. Is there some major difference between ARM chips and x86 chips that I am missing?
jimbokun 9y ago
The commonality is all of those cases were competing on the x86 instruction set playing field. Intel will probably still win at that game. But now there are many areas of computing where x86 doesn't matter. (As noted, even Windows is moving to support ARM.)
- XorNot 9y ago
  Windows is moving to support ARM but the applications are not which was the original problem with Windows on ARM. And in the business world backwards compatibility is everything.
  - zeta0134 9y ago
    With Surface RT I would have agreed wholeheartedly with this. But Microsoft is doing it right this time around by introducing x86 emulation, which gives you a fast, efficient ARM platform that has amazing battery life most of the time, and which can still open up that odd business application you need that hasn't recompiled itself for the new platform yet. The critical thing to observe here is that, while obviously x86 applications will be slower on this platform on paper, most consumers will not notice or care. This creates a better product for casual use and arguably a better product for business use, one where the power efficiency of ARM creates a direct benefit to the consumer that Intel can't match (battery life and efficiency) for which the occasional odd performance issue in some heavy "Desktop" app is a small price to pay.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    This is only an issue with C and C++ written applications that aren't recompiled or rely on x86 specific opcodes, the .NET ones will just run, unless they rely on native code, of course. Hence why they are doing a JIT this time around, but as we all know Intel isn't happy about it.
    - imtringued 9y ago
      The x86 emulation is completely irrelevant. Microsoft didn't want win32 applications to be recompiled to run on Windows RT. They now changed their mind. The only benefit of emulating x86 is for software that is no longer supported. If it's mission critical then those businesses that rely on x86 backwards compatibility will stay with x86 hardware because paying $600 more for a computer doesn't even register on their radar. The only reason I'd care about x86 emulation is to run old video games.
philjohn 9y ago
This time there's ARM, which was there before, but wasn't anywhere near Intel in performance stakes. ARM based chips will probably end up in the lower end products and take money away from both AMD and Intel. Servers are where Intel makes money, and if Epyc is looking as good as it promises, they are going to have a tough time there as well.
- baq 9y ago
  Intel used to make the best ARM CPUs on the market, check out xscale.
  - greglindahl 9y ago
    Sure, and then Intel discontinued it. Just like the i860.
  - abritinthebay 9y ago
    used to being the operative phrase there.
    - baq 9y ago
      of course it is. just saying that they could if they wanted.
      - seanp2k2 9y ago
        Could they, though? If all the dozens or so people who could really drive a new big ARM project are at Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm, and NVidia, they might struggle to assemble a team that could make the needed breakthroughs to differentiate it. They also don't seem to have much interest from a business standpoint, preferring instead to sell $2k+ Xeons all day...and I hope EPYC gives them a real competitor.
      - abritinthebay 9y ago
        I think, based on their past, that's a very optimistic "could". I see no reason to believe that they could do so, organizationally, even if there was a desire to.
smcl 9y ago
"AMD beat Intel with their K6..." I cannot speak for the K6 vs original Pentium but the K6-2 was what I had as a kid and even though it was cheap and cheerful it seemed handily bested by the P2. Synthetic benchmarks which took advantage of 3DNow were roughly even but games were pretty poor - with otherwise equivalent hardware (128MB ram, Voodoo3) my friend's Pentium II 300MHz outperformed my K6-2 366 @ 400-ish MHz comfortably in every game we played. The K6-3 maybe edged the P3 according to the magazines I devoured at the time, but I don't think it was pretty popular and it seemed like a stopgap until the Athlon came out. Athlon genuinely bested the P3 and P4 on price, power and performance for a good while. I still have fond memories of picking up a sub-GHz AXIA core Athlon for under 100 GBP and taking it to 1GHz and slightly beyond. That was pretty fun :-)
- Klinky 9y ago
  You are correct, the K6 did not beat Intel. It was the Athlon/Athlon64 that had better IPC than the Pentium 4.
- Already__Taken 9y ago
  When my athlon died it seemed quick and easy to get a shockingly fast celeron, i think they were nearly 3ghz? I couldn't believe how poorly that PC ran compared to the althon chugging at a lowly 2ghz. Got another athlon after a few months and firmly put to bed the ghz war for me.
- josefx 9y ago
  > my friend's Pentium II 300MHz outperformed my K6-2 366 @ 400-ish MHz comfortably in every game we played. How old is the Intel compiler again? Both the Pentium 2 and K6 had the MMX extension. Code compiled with the rather popular Intel compiler checked the CPU vendor ID to force programs into badly optimized code paths with disabled extensions on competitors products. It was a nice undocumented feature until 2005 and makes any experienced performance difference suspect.
  - smcl 9y ago
    Ahhhhh this is a great point!
andreiw 9y ago
Nothing is ever so simple, and I agree wih you that the sensationalism that pairs with schizo tech journalism, that seems to dash from one extreme to the next, is pretty tiring, with media analysts frequently glossing over important details that don't fit their current world view. However, mobile devices are the same kind of disruption to PCs as the later were to the UNIX workstations and servers of yore. Intel missed that transition and failed to see the threat. They've tried in early 2010 to establish any x86 Android presence but it didn't work out. Funny, but things might have been different if XScale wasn't sold off, who knows...mobile/handheld mostly stagnated back when it was WinCE/Palm, even though Palm invented the HPC and Microsoft practically invented the smartphone. IoT/IoE is another major disruptor, on many fronts, and Intel doesn't seem to get it. NFV is probably going to converge on ARM64, due to the "good enough" factor, TCO, specialized I/O accelerators, cheap customized server SoCs and cutthroat competition. Windows on ARM64 opens up VDI opportunities, as does the proliferation of "smart" Android-powered devices. Open source ended being the Colt of the computing world (Chip vendors create computers but Linux made them equal), so in the cloud, architecture is irrelevant, only the bottom line...it's a race to the bottom and we all get to win, but Intel might not make it.

pjmlp 9y ago

While true, open source, mobile OSes and IoT wave were less relevant when those situations happened. Nowadays it seems they will get cornered on desktop and server CPUs, unless they happen to buy ARM licenses or try to re-invent CPUs with builtin FPGAs.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Twirrim 9y ago
Intel already has ARM licenses. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-16/intel-licenses-arm-technology-in-move-to-boost-foundry-business https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-16/intel-lic...

nolok 9y ago

False similarity; as the EU case showed that the reason Intel remained on top then was because they pressured everyone, from OEM to hosting providers against going AMD. I doubt they have the clout to pull that one again, especially when you consider how the courts would react to them doing it again.

c0nfused 9y ago

Don't forget that whole illegally strong arming manufacturers at the same time centrino came out. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc._v._Intel_Corp https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc.....

nickpeterson 9y ago

Also keep in mind, the Pentium M was sort of a random bush project that ended up being at the right time. Basically, it was a revert to the Pentium 3 style of doing things designed by an intel team in Israel to compete in mobile. I'm not convinced Intel is going to be so fortunate again.

dkhenry 9y ago
I dont know I could see something like the MIC product line or the Larabee work making a similar pivot for Intel.

jp555 9y ago

What do you think about Intel's monolithic dies vs. AMD's approach to packaging smaller dies together onto a socket-mount and linking them with "Infinity Fabric" into a single CPU? Seems to me yields would be a lot better with AMD's approach while allowing it to scale to huge core counts (I think the EPYC 32core CPU is 8x 4-core dies in a package?). Do you think Intel's integrated graphics is a big strategy tax that's holding them back?

kbenson 9y ago

> AMD beat Intel with their K6 and similar series of chips where, just like this time around, they were able to get way more performance per tick out of the CPU. There was in interesting submission the other day about performance of the Ryzen vs i7, and how their AVX2 instruction support isn't what it's racked up to be[1]. I'm not really qualified to assess the source or claims accurately, so I'll let others read it themselves and come to their own conclusions, but it was interesting. 1: https://hashcat.net/forum/thread-6534-post-35415.html https://hashcat.net/forum/thread-6534-post-35415.html

AlphaSite 9y ago
I don't doubt Intels AVX2 will be faster, but I suspect there is more to it than what this guy is saying. I suspect there is a big element of overspecialisation for Intel CPUs and that these programs will need to be tweaked for Ryzens AVX implementation.
Laforet 9y ago
This has been known since Ryzen's release - it struggles a lot with AVX2-heavy codecs such as VP9 and x265. If hashcat was compiled to take advantage of AVX2 then this is expected.
jamesaross 9y ago
I may be somewhat qualified to speculate...Based on my experience with both Intel's and AMD's OpenCL implementations for their CPUs, I suggest that Intel has a much better vecorizing compiler than AMD. The benchmarks they are running have different compilers. If it was a simple C code compiled by GCC for each CPU, the comparison would be better. It would be interesting to see the results for AMD's OpenCL compiler on the i7 and Intel's compiler on Ryzen.
Dylan16807 9y ago
It's complicated. Skylake/Kaby Lake have two full-fledged 256-bit vector units. Ryzen has four partial units. There are two 128-bit adders, and two 128-bit multipliers. Intel's best case is a constant stream of 256-bit FMA instructions. They can do two per cycle, while AMD can do one. The more plain adds and multiplies, the better Ryzen does. The same for 128-bit vector instructions. With enough of both, it can actually do significantly more work per cycle.

johngalt 9y ago

That was Intel as a powerful incumbent pushing out one major competitor in the same market. AMD made better chips for years, but couldn't displace Intel due to Intel's entrenched advantages (Market share/Legal etc...). Now the market is moving and Intel remains entrenched. This is generally how dominant companies die. ExxonMobile doesn't die because someone built a better oil company. They die when someone builds a better battery.

crazypyro 9y ago
I believe your analogy is flawed unless there has been some massive shift in the chip industry that invalidates a large body of pre-existing knowledge about the industry. How is today's chip industry compared with yesterday's chip industry as dramatic of a shift as going from oil to batteries? That seems like a much more significant leap than x86 to ARM. What am I missing?
- Sargos 9y ago
  Intel makes x86 (Exxon makes oil). Most things are moving to ARM (batteries). Intel (Exxon) now loses the market it built its entire business on as the world moves on to different products. Exxon can make batteries and Intel can make things like ARM chips. But they aren't really because they aren't good at it.
  - crazypyro 9y ago
    Yeah, but what I'm saying is how is the scale of a move of x86 to ARM comparable to oil to batteries? From the outside, looking in, it seems like the two leaps are on massively different scales which I feel is important when talking about things that will kill a large corporation. I guess my key question is what makes ARM so much different than x86 that it invalidates Intel's existing knowledge? Batteries have a completely different product life cycle than oil. For one, batteries don't burn away and they recharge. This creates completely different business models. Is there some major difference between ARM chips and x86 chips that I am missing?

jimbokun 9y ago

The commonality is all of those cases were competing on the x86 instruction set playing field. Intel will probably still win at that game. But now there are many areas of computing where x86 doesn't matter. (As noted, even Windows is moving to support ARM.)

XorNot 9y ago
Windows is moving to support ARM but the applications are not which was the original problem with Windows on ARM. And in the business world backwards compatibility is everything.
- zeta0134 9y ago
  With Surface RT I would have agreed wholeheartedly with this. But Microsoft is doing it right this time around by introducing x86 emulation, which gives you a fast, efficient ARM platform that has amazing battery life most of the time, and which can still open up that odd business application you need that hasn't recompiled itself for the new platform yet. The critical thing to observe here is that, while obviously x86 applications will be slower on this platform on paper, most consumers will not notice or care. This creates a better product for casual use and arguably a better product for business use, one where the power efficiency of ARM creates a direct benefit to the consumer that Intel can't match (battery life and efficiency) for which the occasional odd performance issue in some heavy "Desktop" app is a small price to pay.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  This is only an issue with C and C++ written applications that aren't recompiled or rely on x86 specific opcodes, the .NET ones will just run, unless they rely on native code, of course. Hence why they are doing a JIT this time around, but as we all know Intel isn't happy about it.
  - imtringued 9y ago
    The x86 emulation is completely irrelevant. Microsoft didn't want win32 applications to be recompiled to run on Windows RT. They now changed their mind. The only benefit of emulating x86 is for software that is no longer supported. If it's mission critical then those businesses that rely on x86 backwards compatibility will stay with x86 hardware because paying $600 more for a computer doesn't even register on their radar. The only reason I'd care about x86 emulation is to run old video games.

philjohn 9y ago

This time there's ARM, which was there before, but wasn't anywhere near Intel in performance stakes. ARM based chips will probably end up in the lower end products and take money away from both AMD and Intel. Servers are where Intel makes money, and if Epyc is looking as good as it promises, they are going to have a tough time there as well.

baq 9y ago
Intel used to make the best ARM CPUs on the market, check out xscale.
- greglindahl 9y ago
  Sure, and then Intel discontinued it. Just like the i860.
- abritinthebay 9y ago
  used to being the operative phrase there.
  - baq 9y ago
    of course it is. just saying that they could if they wanted.
    - seanp2k2 9y ago
      Could they, though? If all the dozens or so people who could really drive a new big ARM project are at Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm, and NVidia, they might struggle to assemble a team that could make the needed breakthroughs to differentiate it. They also don't seem to have much interest from a business standpoint, preferring instead to sell $2k+ Xeons all day...and I hope EPYC gives them a real competitor.
    - abritinthebay 9y ago
      I think, based on their past, that's a very optimistic "could". I see no reason to believe that they could do so, organizationally, even if there was a desire to.

smcl 9y ago

"AMD beat Intel with their K6..." I cannot speak for the K6 vs original Pentium but the K6-2 was what I had as a kid and even though it was cheap and cheerful it seemed handily bested by the P2. Synthetic benchmarks which took advantage of 3DNow were roughly even but games were pretty poor - with otherwise equivalent hardware (128MB ram, Voodoo3) my friend's Pentium II 300MHz outperformed my K6-2 366 @ 400-ish MHz comfortably in every game we played. The K6-3 maybe edged the P3 according to the magazines I devoured at the time, but I don't think it was pretty popular and it seemed like a stopgap until the Athlon came out. Athlon genuinely bested the P3 and P4 on price, power and performance for a good while. I still have fond memories of picking up a sub-GHz AXIA core Athlon for under 100 GBP and taking it to 1GHz and slightly beyond. That was pretty fun :-)

Klinky 9y ago
You are correct, the K6 did not beat Intel. It was the Athlon/Athlon64 that had better IPC than the Pentium 4.
Already__Taken 9y ago
When my athlon died it seemed quick and easy to get a shockingly fast celeron, i think they were nearly 3ghz? I couldn't believe how poorly that PC ran compared to the althon chugging at a lowly 2ghz. Got another athlon after a few months and firmly put to bed the ghz war for me.
josefx 9y ago
> my friend's Pentium II 300MHz outperformed my K6-2 366 @ 400-ish MHz comfortably in every game we played. How old is the Intel compiler again? Both the Pentium 2 and K6 had the MMX extension. Code compiled with the rather popular Intel compiler checked the CPU vendor ID to force programs into badly optimized code paths with disabled extensions on competitors products. It was a nice undocumented feature until 2005 and makes any experienced performance difference suspect.
- smcl 9y ago
  Ahhhhh this is a great point!

andreiw 9y ago

Nothing is ever so simple, and I agree wih you that the sensationalism that pairs with schizo tech journalism, that seems to dash from one extreme to the next, is pretty tiring, with media analysts frequently glossing over important details that don't fit their current world view. However, mobile devices are the same kind of disruption to PCs as the later were to the UNIX workstations and servers of yore. Intel missed that transition and failed to see the threat. They've tried in early 2010 to establish any x86 Android presence but it didn't work out. Funny, but things might have been different if XScale wasn't sold off, who knows...mobile/handheld mostly stagnated back when it was WinCE/Palm, even though Palm invented the HPC and Microsoft practically invented the smartphone. IoT/IoE is another major disruptor, on many fronts, and Intel doesn't seem to get it. NFV is probably going to converge on ARM64, due to the "good enough" factor, TCO, specialized I/O accelerators, cheap customized server SoCs and cutthroat competition. Windows on ARM64 opens up VDI opportunities, as does the proliferation of "smart" Android-powered devices. Open source ended being the Colt of the computing world (Chip vendors create computers but Linux made them equal), so in the cloud, architecture is irrelevant, only the bottom line...it's a race to the bottom and we all get to win, but Intel might not make it.