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Completely off topic but... Althlon64 was a swift kick in the nuts for Intel, but AMD really didn't followup until Ryzen. I wonder if they're going to stick a

Completely off topic but... Althlon64 was a swift kick in the nuts for Intel, but AMD really didn't followup until Ryzen. I wonder if they're going to stick around and fight this time.

topbanana 7y ago
They've got momentum on their side now, but intel won't bow down without a fight. I expect we'll see some real innovation over the next five years.
- cptskippy 7y ago
  The real question isn't if Intel will fight back but how. They've been known to innovate shady marketing tactics just as much as their CPU architecture.
kbenson 7y ago
Sometimes when the swift kick in the nuts is delivered to an 800-pound gorilla, it doesn't matter if you stay around to fight, you're outclassed. This time, AMD may have stepped up with a steel pipe. We'll see how well they can use it...
- lsofzz 7y ago
  > This time, AMD may have stepped up with a steel pipe. We'll see how well they can use it... :-))))
tyingq 7y ago
Back then, AMD kind of had to license the x64 stuff to Intel for cross license reasons. They aren't under any pressure this time to give away anything.
- cptskippy 7y ago
  Really? When did that change? I thought they had some sort of in-perpetuity cross licensing agreement going back to when AMD was a second source for x86 for Intel with Government contracts.
  - tyingq 7y ago
    Their advantage this time isn't the ISA. There's no "cross licensing" for the silicon design, fab choice, etc.
lozaning 7y ago
I've still got my AMD Athlon 64 3200+ in a bin somewhere. I remember being in sheer awe that i could just drop in a dual core cpu into my nforce4 based mobo. It felt revolutionary at the time.
robothread 7y ago
Well Intel wasn’t exactly sitting idle during the Athlon 64 era. It was just unfortunate that none of their plans worked out. NetBurst was a bust. IA-64 flopped too. Both were attempts to progress from the P6 architecture - which they felt had reached its limits. In the end, the market spoke, they want the P6. No one was willing to rewrite software (or even recompile). So back to the P6 in the form of the Pentium M followed by the Core /Core dual series and finally the i3/5/7/9 that we use today - which you would notice hasn’t improved much per core; as mentioned the P6 style design is pretty much tapped out and all they can do is “squeeze blood from stone” for a few percentage improvements here and there. AMD recently caught up but frankly, they aren’t doing much better. Performance per core is just on par with Intel. Their main selling point is that they made it cheaper by splitting the L3 cache in 2 - the Ryzen is basically 2 quad-cores glued together for better yields.
- benou 7y ago
  > which you would notice hasn’t improved much per core Not sure which data you refer to? I just made a comparison on a single-threaded integer-heavy code between my old Core2 Duo and a Skylake, and just got x16 normalized perf improvement (from 2.5-cycles/byte to 0.15). Same code, same compiler. So sure, progress have slowed down and they are adding more and more specialized stuff (AVX-512, AES-NI...) but still. Edited for clarity.

Completely off topic but... Althlon64 was a swift kick in the nuts for Intel, but AMD really didn't followup until Ryzen. I wonder if they're going to stick around and fight this time.

topbanana 7y ago

They've got momentum on their side now, but intel won't bow down without a fight. I expect we'll see some real innovation over the next five years.

cptskippy 7y ago
The real question isn't if Intel will fight back but how. They've been known to innovate shady marketing tactics just as much as their CPU architecture.

kbenson 7y ago

Sometimes when the swift kick in the nuts is delivered to an 800-pound gorilla, it doesn't matter if you stay around to fight, you're outclassed. This time, AMD may have stepped up with a steel pipe. We'll see how well they can use it...

lsofzz 7y ago
> This time, AMD may have stepped up with a steel pipe. We'll see how well they can use it... :-))))

tyingq 7y ago

Back then, AMD kind of had to license the x64 stuff to Intel for cross license reasons. They aren't under any pressure this time to give away anything.

cptskippy 7y ago
Really? When did that change? I thought they had some sort of in-perpetuity cross licensing agreement going back to when AMD was a second source for x86 for Intel with Government contracts.
- tyingq 7y ago
  Their advantage this time isn't the ISA. There's no "cross licensing" for the silicon design, fab choice, etc.

lozaning 7y ago

I've still got my AMD Athlon 64 3200+ in a bin somewhere. I remember being in sheer awe that i could just drop in a dual core cpu into my nforce4 based mobo. It felt revolutionary at the time.

robothread 7y ago

Well Intel wasn’t exactly sitting idle during the Athlon 64 era. It was just unfortunate that none of their plans worked out. NetBurst was a bust. IA-64 flopped too. Both were attempts to progress from the P6 architecture - which they felt had reached its limits. In the end, the market spoke, they want the P6. No one was willing to rewrite software (or even recompile). So back to the P6 in the form of the Pentium M followed by the Core /Core dual series and finally the i3/5/7/9 that we use today - which you would notice hasn’t improved much per core; as mentioned the P6 style design is pretty much tapped out and all they can do is “squeeze blood from stone” for a few percentage improvements here and there. AMD recently caught up but frankly, they aren’t doing much better. Performance per core is just on par with Intel. Their main selling point is that they made it cheaper by splitting the L3 cache in 2 - the Ryzen is basically 2 quad-cores glued together for better yields.

benou 7y ago
> which you would notice hasn’t improved much per core Not sure which data you refer to? I just made a comparison on a single-threaded integer-heavy code between my old Core2 Duo and a Skylake, and just got x16 normalized perf improvement (from 2.5-cycles/byte to 0.15). Same code, same compiler. So sure, progress have slowed down and they are adding more and more specialized stuff (AVX-512, AES-NI...) but still. Edited for clarity.