7 ms·

It's high time for somebody to disrupt Intel and their model. I really hope this can happen soon.

by gchokov 8y ago

growlist 8y ago
AMD are doing a pretty stunning job recently.
- DCKing 8y ago
  AMD is not trying to "disrupt Intel's model", it's trying to outcompete them on mostly the same model. I have no idea what "disrupting Intel's model" would actually mean. But I would be fine if Intel is just outcompeted at their own game, and this already seems to be happening.
  - lallysingh 8y ago
    ARM is doing well on most fronts.
  - ethbro 8y ago
    Disrupting the model would prolly look more like Transmeta or Cavium.
    - DCKing 8y ago
      Although I think Intel derives substantial value from x86 lockin, I don't think "doing things like Intel but with a different CPU architecture" really qualifies as a disruption of Intel's model. I'd say disruption of Intel's model would mean different ways of selling CPUs, fast storage or other silicon. All I see is Intel's competitors trying to mimic Intel to some extent because the enterprise market is the most lucrative. AMD, Qualcomm, Cavium and IBM all consider Intel a main and direct competitor. So I'd be interested if anyone has an idea on disrupting Intel's way of doing business.
      - dragontamer 8y ago
        Note that Power9 and ARM both support for relaxed atomics, which would be a substantial difference from x86's stronger cache coherence policies. That would likely make "properly coded" Power9 or ARM synchronization to be more scalable. Possibly a major advantage as 32-cores and higher are beginning to hit mainstream (or at least, high-end mainstream)
      - ethbro 8y ago
        To that point, cloud is probably the biggest disruption. It may run on Intel now, but once "runs on AWS/GCP/Azure" becomes more important than running on an ISA, there's no reason compute couldn't transition much faster.
- paulie_a 8y ago
  Amd has had better chips at a lower price point since always. You can get a 8 year year old octocore that still destroys anything Intel has put out recently. Intel relies on inertia. Amd consistently beats them on actual performance at a lower price. I remember my 386 dx 2 had better performance than an Intel 486. And let's not forget the p4 issues with their garbage ram. Plus they backdoor their chips with stupid insecure crap
  - uhhhhhhh 8y ago
    Performance per watt/cost vs performance AMD has not been consistently beating them. There is a reason multiple companies continue to get intel after reviewing AMD's current offerings every few years (I'm in one of them to remain nameless) I absolutely don't believe an 8 year old AMD octacore will "destroy" anything intel has. Sure I imagine a single highly specific and biased test could give AMD the advantage in that one instance, but overall performance AMD has been behind since the pentium M/core2 with only a few products that initially compete or win, only to fall behind again.
  - ethbro 8y ago
    K10 v Nehalem? Bulldozer v Sandy Bridge? We may be remembering a different history, but Intel has had single threaded performance locked up for awhile. AMD prices aggressively and glues more cores together, but hyperbole isn't doing your point any favors.
    - paulie_a 8y ago
      I personally don't give a shit about single thread performance. That is a metric that is meaningless. And Sandy bridge was pretty awful.
  - mywittyname 8y ago
    I'm not sure where you get this impression, but Intel held the performance crown over AMD since releasing the Core architecture. In fact, things were looking pretty dire for AMD during the Phenom days when their highest-tier offering could only match mid-tier Intel chips in performance, so they had to compete solely on price. [1] AMD's stock price during this era was the lowest it's been since like 1980. It's only with Ryzen that AMD reached performance parity with Intel once again. [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-phenom-ii-x6-1090t-890fx,2613-7.html https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-phenom-ii-x6-1090t-...
coldtea 8y ago
Well, if there's no one (or very few) out there doing any CPUs that are as good, then why consider Intel as doing a bad job (as you seem to imply)? Bad compared to whom?
- rahul24 8y ago
  Hi
- beagle3 8y ago
  Around the year 2000, Intel decided that the future is Itanium. It didn't matter that the market hated the idea - there was no alternative to Intel, so Intel completely ignored the market's plea for an x86 compatible 64-bit processor that would be able to run old x86 code at native speed. Intel's 32 bit offering at the time wasn't any good either; the pentium had such a deep pipeline (and not so smart prefetch/speculative) that the chips ran at a high frequency, ate a lot of power, but pipeline stages were idling or working on useless stuff a large amount of the time. Luckily for the world, AMD managed to produce that alternative, the AMD64 architecture, which kicked intel's ass so hard that eventually they had to adopt it. If it weren't for AMD's AMD64, and their cross-licensing deal with Intel (that allowed them to make an x86 compatible chip without specifically asking for Intel's permission), we'd be in an Itanium dominated world right now (or .. ARM would have stepped up, it's hard to predict an alternate reality) but surely with less efficient and less effective processors. History does not repeat, but it rhymes. Intel has no Itanic this time, but it did become numb enough to let AMD outmaneuver them again. It's not that Intel is doing a bad job, as much as they have too little incentive to do a good job.
  - acdha 8y ago
    > If it weren't for AMD's AMD64 … we'd be in an Itanium dominated world right now This is far from certain: Itanium shipped years later and much, much below the advertised performance thresholds. In the meantime even Intel’s own x86 had closed the raw performance gap and since IA-64 was such a huge bet on brilliant compilers that the early benchmarks for most business code favored the P-III even before you factored in cost. Similarly, the original claim that it’d offer competitive x86 performance turned out to be half a decade behind years behind when it shipped so it wasn’t even remotely competitive for legacy code and businesses back then had even more weight of code which was difficult to recompile. It’s equally plausible to me that Intel would have continued to see strong x86 sales and weak demand for Itanium and ended up shipping their own 64-bit extension a few years later with less pressure from AMD simply because businesses weren’t keen on the “recompile everything, make a bunch of expensive optimizations, and it might be faster than the system it’s replacing”
DC-3 8y ago
Hopefully at some point in the vaguely near future we'll see RISC-V come to the fore as a credible desktop architcture.
- blitmap 8y ago
  :-) https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive-unleashed https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive-unleashed https://www.crowdsupply.com/microsemi/hifive-unleashed-expansion-board https://www.crowdsupply.com/microsemi/hifive-unleashed-expan... https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive1 https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive1
  - DC-3 8y ago
    There's a big difference between a dev board and a credible desktop system, but things are certainly looking promising.
    - blitmap 8y ago
      I wholeheartedly agree. I hope we can establish RISC-V for embedded stuff first, and that it does not stay there.
adrianN 8y ago
It looks like Intel's manufacturing advantage will slowly disappear over the next couple of years. So it seems likely that alternative CPUs will become more competitive, ARM for example.
walshemj 8y ago
AMD Seems do be doing well.

It's high time for somebody to disrupt Intel and their model. I really hope this can happen soon.

growlist 8y ago

AMD are doing a pretty stunning job recently.

DCKing 8y ago
AMD is not trying to "disrupt Intel's model", it's trying to outcompete them on mostly the same model. I have no idea what "disrupting Intel's model" would actually mean. But I would be fine if Intel is just outcompeted at their own game, and this already seems to be happening.
- lallysingh 8y ago
  ARM is doing well on most fronts.
- ethbro 8y ago
  Disrupting the model would prolly look more like Transmeta or Cavium.
  - DCKing 8y ago
    Although I think Intel derives substantial value from x86 lockin, I don't think "doing things like Intel but with a different CPU architecture" really qualifies as a disruption of Intel's model. I'd say disruption of Intel's model would mean different ways of selling CPUs, fast storage or other silicon. All I see is Intel's competitors trying to mimic Intel to some extent because the enterprise market is the most lucrative. AMD, Qualcomm, Cavium and IBM all consider Intel a main and direct competitor. So I'd be interested if anyone has an idea on disrupting Intel's way of doing business.
    - dragontamer 8y ago
      Note that Power9 and ARM both support for relaxed atomics, which would be a substantial difference from x86's stronger cache coherence policies. That would likely make "properly coded" Power9 or ARM synchronization to be more scalable. Possibly a major advantage as 32-cores and higher are beginning to hit mainstream (or at least, high-end mainstream)
    - ethbro 8y ago
      To that point, cloud is probably the biggest disruption. It may run on Intel now, but once "runs on AWS/GCP/Azure" becomes more important than running on an ISA, there's no reason compute couldn't transition much faster.
paulie_a 8y ago
Amd has had better chips at a lower price point since always. You can get a 8 year year old octocore that still destroys anything Intel has put out recently. Intel relies on inertia. Amd consistently beats them on actual performance at a lower price. I remember my 386 dx 2 had better performance than an Intel 486. And let's not forget the p4 issues with their garbage ram. Plus they backdoor their chips with stupid insecure crap
- uhhhhhhh 8y ago
  Performance per watt/cost vs performance AMD has not been consistently beating them. There is a reason multiple companies continue to get intel after reviewing AMD's current offerings every few years (I'm in one of them to remain nameless) I absolutely don't believe an 8 year old AMD octacore will "destroy" anything intel has. Sure I imagine a single highly specific and biased test could give AMD the advantage in that one instance, but overall performance AMD has been behind since the pentium M/core2 with only a few products that initially compete or win, only to fall behind again.
- ethbro 8y ago
  K10 v Nehalem? Bulldozer v Sandy Bridge? We may be remembering a different history, but Intel has had single threaded performance locked up for awhile. AMD prices aggressively and glues more cores together, but hyperbole isn't doing your point any favors.
  - paulie_a 8y ago
    I personally don't give a shit about single thread performance. That is a metric that is meaningless. And Sandy bridge was pretty awful.
- mywittyname 8y ago
  I'm not sure where you get this impression, but Intel held the performance crown over AMD since releasing the Core architecture. In fact, things were looking pretty dire for AMD during the Phenom days when their highest-tier offering could only match mid-tier Intel chips in performance, so they had to compete solely on price. [1] AMD's stock price during this era was the lowest it's been since like 1980. It's only with Ryzen that AMD reached performance parity with Intel once again. [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-phenom-ii-x6-1090t-890fx,2613-7.html https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-phenom-ii-x6-1090t-...

coldtea 8y ago

Well, if there's no one (or very few) out there doing any CPUs that are as good, then why consider Intel as doing a bad job (as you seem to imply)? Bad compared to whom?

rahul24 8y ago
Hi
beagle3 8y ago
Around the year 2000, Intel decided that the future is Itanium. It didn't matter that the market hated the idea - there was no alternative to Intel, so Intel completely ignored the market's plea for an x86 compatible 64-bit processor that would be able to run old x86 code at native speed. Intel's 32 bit offering at the time wasn't any good either; the pentium had such a deep pipeline (and not so smart prefetch/speculative) that the chips ran at a high frequency, ate a lot of power, but pipeline stages were idling or working on useless stuff a large amount of the time. Luckily for the world, AMD managed to produce that alternative, the AMD64 architecture, which kicked intel's ass so hard that eventually they had to adopt it. If it weren't for AMD's AMD64, and their cross-licensing deal with Intel (that allowed them to make an x86 compatible chip without specifically asking for Intel's permission), we'd be in an Itanium dominated world right now (or .. ARM would have stepped up, it's hard to predict an alternate reality) but surely with less efficient and less effective processors. History does not repeat, but it rhymes. Intel has no Itanic this time, but it did become numb enough to let AMD outmaneuver them again. It's not that Intel is doing a bad job, as much as they have too little incentive to do a good job.
- acdha 8y ago
  > If it weren't for AMD's AMD64 … we'd be in an Itanium dominated world right now This is far from certain: Itanium shipped years later and much, much below the advertised performance thresholds. In the meantime even Intel’s own x86 had closed the raw performance gap and since IA-64 was such a huge bet on brilliant compilers that the early benchmarks for most business code favored the P-III even before you factored in cost. Similarly, the original claim that it’d offer competitive x86 performance turned out to be half a decade behind years behind when it shipped so it wasn’t even remotely competitive for legacy code and businesses back then had even more weight of code which was difficult to recompile. It’s equally plausible to me that Intel would have continued to see strong x86 sales and weak demand for Itanium and ended up shipping their own 64-bit extension a few years later with less pressure from AMD simply because businesses weren’t keen on the “recompile everything, make a bunch of expensive optimizations, and it might be faster than the system it’s replacing”

DC-3 8y ago

Hopefully at some point in the vaguely near future we'll see RISC-V come to the fore as a credible desktop architcture.

blitmap 8y ago
:-) https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive-unleashed https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive-unleashed https://www.crowdsupply.com/microsemi/hifive-unleashed-expansion-board https://www.crowdsupply.com/microsemi/hifive-unleashed-expan... https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive1 https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive1
- DC-3 8y ago
  There's a big difference between a dev board and a credible desktop system, but things are certainly looking promising.
  - blitmap 8y ago
    I wholeheartedly agree. I hope we can establish RISC-V for embedded stuff first, and that it does not stay there.

adrianN 8y ago

It looks like Intel's manufacturing advantage will slowly disappear over the next couple of years. So it seems likely that alternative CPUs will become more competitive, ARM for example.

walshemj 8y ago

AMD Seems do be doing well.