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I'd really like to know what happened at AMD between the great success of the original Athlon [1] and their recent struggles [2]. 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wi

I'd really like to know what happened at AMD between the great success of the original Athlon [1] and their recent struggles [2]. 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athlon#Athlon_.22Classic.22 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athlon#Athlon_.22Classic.22 2: http://semiaccurate.com/2011/10/17/why-did-bulldozer-underwhelm/ http://semiaccurate.com/2011/10/17/why-did-bulldozer-underwh...

ajross 14y ago
The big one is they fell behind on process technology. AMD (now Global Foundries)'s fab operations are at this point a full process node behind what Intel is doing. So as they release their bleeding-edge 32nm parts, Intel has long since worked out the kinks and is selling 32nm CPUs at budget prices. And simultaneously Intel is selling better-performing 22nm parts into the high end at much better margins. During the Athlon/Opteron days, the silicon capabilities were much closer (does everyone remember the "paper launches" of various PIII speed bins, and of course the recall when they pushed a little too far?).
reitzensteinm 14y ago
A lot of it is down to the Pentium 4 turning out to be a dead end. Intel designed it to scale to 10ghz, with a massively long pipeline. That turned out not to be possible, so all the design sacrifices that were made (primarily a ridiculously long pipeline) turned out to be bad bets. When Intel introduced Core 2 Duo, performance per clock in many cases doubled, on the same socket and process node. I'm unaware of a precedent for that, at least in recent history. Then Intel a couple of years later rolled out Nehalem, with an integrated memory controller and hyperthreading, cementing their advantage in the server market. AMD has been playing catch up ever since. If Intel's chips were half the performance today, AMD would be winning; though not by quite as much. Core 2 Duo review (compare it to the Pentium D, which is dual core): http://www.anandtech.com/show/2045/11 http://www.anandtech.com/show/2045/11 i7 3770k review (the FX 8150 is AMD's flagship 8 core Bulldozer CPU): http://www.anandtech.com/show/5771/the-intel-ivy-bridge-core-i7-3770k-review/6 http://www.anandtech.com/show/5771/the-intel-ivy-bridge-core...
- tedunangst 14y ago
  It's interesting to wonder if Intel went down the P4 path knowing AMD would follow them into oblivion. For years after Intel turned the ship around, AMD continued selling hot power hungry chips (now with 900 watts of power!). Until very recently, AMD basically conceded the entire mobile market to Intel, which it turns out is also a profitable market to dominate.
  - yuhong 14y ago
    In fact, I think Core 2 came from the Pentium M line.
- cma 14y ago
  AMD pioneered the integrated memory controller in the x86 space...
- cma 14y ago
  AMD pioneered the integrated memory controller in the x86 space...
- lsc 14y ago
  >Then Intel a couple of years later rolled out Nehalem, with an integrated memory controller and hyperthreading, cementing their advantage in the server market. AMD has been playing catch up ever since. Before intel essentially copied HT from AMD with their QPI, (I believe that Nehalems were the first QPI xeons) AMD servers nearly always came in dramatically lower power than the FBDIMM using Xeon-based servers. Also note, in the early days of hyperthreading, it was a great way to run your two active processes on one core, while your second was idle. My understanding is that even now, in the best case, it's not a particularly huge boost. I mean,yeah; between the release of the QPI xeons and now, for most things, intel has had the superior chip. But before QPI? man, if you paid for your own power, AMD was dramatically superior for high-ram applications.
  - justincormack 14y ago
    Hyperthreading is better now. They even had to add another instruction to fix some of the issues. Plus a lot of work on the scheduler. Not worth disabling now!
noobface 14y ago
ATI acquisition. At the time ATI was 1/2 AMD's market cap. Too much of their capital got tied up in the acquisition and R&D fell off. The overall vision is still very, very compelling (integrated FP co-processing). At the time, AMD figured it could beat Intel to the punch by buying one of the best FP companies out there. Instead they both(AMD/ATI)fell behind as merging the two companies took far more time, attention and capital than was originally anticipated.
- Tuna-Fish 14y ago
  I'm not convinced. The AMD product line fell into a ravine very soon after the acquisition -- CPU design has a half a decade of lead time, so their problems predated ATi. I think AMD success is simply better viewed as Intel stumbling. The P4/Itanium split product lines were designs defined more by marketing and ideal market segmentation than they were by engineering, and they both also had some really bad design decisions. This caused Intel to fall from their technology leadership position for ~5 years, during which AMD produced steady, if slow, improvement, eventually overtaking Intel. After Intel got it's act back together, AMD hasn't been able to catch a break.
wmf 14y ago
Barcelona was delayed a lot and Bulldozer looks like innovation that's new and different but not actually better.
zanny 14y ago
At this point, it just comes down to Intel spending more in R&D (http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2011/01/13/intel-reports-record-year-and-record-fourth-quarter http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2011...) than AMD makes in revenue (http://www.anandtech.com/show/5465/amd-q411-fy-2011-earnings-report-169b-revenue-for-q4-657b-revenue-for-2011 http://www.anandtech.com/show/5465/amd-q411-fy-2011-earnings...) means Intel is at this point just throwing money at rapid release fabrication tech combined with their tick tock being so effective (they had to be after getting wasted with the Pentium 4 stagnation). Even if AMD didn't blow tons of market cap on buying up ATI, they would still be looking at Intel just being an order of magnitude larger than them outright. They struck gold with the Athlon 64 line and that is the only reason they ever overtook Intel, which like other commentors mentioned, was because of Intels own hubris.
pheon 14y ago
AMD`s business and technology development failed. Athlon era: 1) Got HyperTransport - correct 2) Memory controller/north bridge into CPU - correct 3) lower price point than intel They had a better product, at a lower price == market share. Mobile: They missed (as did intel) the ultra-low power/mobile market 1) ARM owns the market here Bulldozer: Made their bet on a high throughput/high latency micro-architecture, which didn`t pay off. So their now stuck with un-competitive technology at a lower price point which to the market == cheap knock off. To make it worse, their process technology is a generation behind intel which increases costs thus eats further at any price discount. GPU: Meanwhile, Intel is eating their "Fusion" style cpu/gpu integration with every release they make. Can`t remember the last time some buzz about AMD fusion but intel HD 2k/3k/4k is in the news all the time. They should have made Pat Gelsinger CEO when he was turned down for the same job at intel.

ajross 14y ago

The big one is they fell behind on process technology. AMD (now Global Foundries)'s fab operations are at this point a full process node behind what Intel is doing. So as they release their bleeding-edge 32nm parts, Intel has long since worked out the kinks and is selling 32nm CPUs at budget prices. And simultaneously Intel is selling better-performing 22nm parts into the high end at much better margins. During the Athlon/Opteron days, the silicon capabilities were much closer (does everyone remember the "paper launches" of various PIII speed bins, and of course the recall when they pushed a little too far?).

reitzensteinm 14y ago

A lot of it is down to the Pentium 4 turning out to be a dead end. Intel designed it to scale to 10ghz, with a massively long pipeline. That turned out not to be possible, so all the design sacrifices that were made (primarily a ridiculously long pipeline) turned out to be bad bets. When Intel introduced Core 2 Duo, performance per clock in many cases doubled, on the same socket and process node. I'm unaware of a precedent for that, at least in recent history. Then Intel a couple of years later rolled out Nehalem, with an integrated memory controller and hyperthreading, cementing their advantage in the server market. AMD has been playing catch up ever since. If Intel's chips were half the performance today, AMD would be winning; though not by quite as much. Core 2 Duo review (compare it to the Pentium D, which is dual core): http://www.anandtech.com/show/2045/11 http://www.anandtech.com/show/2045/11 i7 3770k review (the FX 8150 is AMD's flagship 8 core Bulldozer CPU): http://www.anandtech.com/show/5771/the-intel-ivy-bridge-core-i7-3770k-review/6 http://www.anandtech.com/show/5771/the-intel-ivy-bridge-core...

tedunangst 14y ago
It's interesting to wonder if Intel went down the P4 path knowing AMD would follow them into oblivion. For years after Intel turned the ship around, AMD continued selling hot power hungry chips (now with 900 watts of power!). Until very recently, AMD basically conceded the entire mobile market to Intel, which it turns out is also a profitable market to dominate.
- yuhong 14y ago
  In fact, I think Core 2 came from the Pentium M line.
cma 14y ago
AMD pioneered the integrated memory controller in the x86 space...
cma 14y ago
AMD pioneered the integrated memory controller in the x86 space...
lsc 14y ago
>Then Intel a couple of years later rolled out Nehalem, with an integrated memory controller and hyperthreading, cementing their advantage in the server market. AMD has been playing catch up ever since. Before intel essentially copied HT from AMD with their QPI, (I believe that Nehalems were the first QPI xeons) AMD servers nearly always came in dramatically lower power than the FBDIMM using Xeon-based servers. Also note, in the early days of hyperthreading, it was a great way to run your two active processes on one core, while your second was idle. My understanding is that even now, in the best case, it's not a particularly huge boost. I mean,yeah; between the release of the QPI xeons and now, for most things, intel has had the superior chip. But before QPI? man, if you paid for your own power, AMD was dramatically superior for high-ram applications.
- justincormack 14y ago
  Hyperthreading is better now. They even had to add another instruction to fix some of the issues. Plus a lot of work on the scheduler. Not worth disabling now!

noobface 14y ago

ATI acquisition. At the time ATI was 1/2 AMD's market cap. Too much of their capital got tied up in the acquisition and R&D fell off. The overall vision is still very, very compelling (integrated FP co-processing). At the time, AMD figured it could beat Intel to the punch by buying one of the best FP companies out there. Instead they both(AMD/ATI)fell behind as merging the two companies took far more time, attention and capital than was originally anticipated.

Tuna-Fish 14y ago
I'm not convinced. The AMD product line fell into a ravine very soon after the acquisition -- CPU design has a half a decade of lead time, so their problems predated ATi. I think AMD success is simply better viewed as Intel stumbling. The P4/Itanium split product lines were designs defined more by marketing and ideal market segmentation than they were by engineering, and they both also had some really bad design decisions. This caused Intel to fall from their technology leadership position for ~5 years, during which AMD produced steady, if slow, improvement, eventually overtaking Intel. After Intel got it's act back together, AMD hasn't been able to catch a break.

wmf 14y ago

Barcelona was delayed a lot and Bulldozer looks like innovation that's new and different but not actually better.

zanny 14y ago

At this point, it just comes down to Intel spending more in R&D (http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2011/01/13/intel-reports-record-year-and-record-fourth-quarter http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2011...) than AMD makes in revenue (http://www.anandtech.com/show/5465/amd-q411-fy-2011-earnings-report-169b-revenue-for-q4-657b-revenue-for-2011 http://www.anandtech.com/show/5465/amd-q411-fy-2011-earnings...) means Intel is at this point just throwing money at rapid release fabrication tech combined with their tick tock being so effective (they had to be after getting wasted with the Pentium 4 stagnation). Even if AMD didn't blow tons of market cap on buying up ATI, they would still be looking at Intel just being an order of magnitude larger than them outright. They struck gold with the Athlon 64 line and that is the only reason they ever overtook Intel, which like other commentors mentioned, was because of Intels own hubris.

pheon 14y ago

AMD`s business and technology development failed. Athlon era: 1) Got HyperTransport - correct 2) Memory controller/north bridge into CPU - correct 3) lower price point than intel They had a better product, at a lower price == market share. Mobile: They missed (as did intel) the ultra-low power/mobile market 1) ARM owns the market here Bulldozer: Made their bet on a high throughput/high latency micro-architecture, which didn`t pay off. So their now stuck with un-competitive technology at a lower price point which to the market == cheap knock off. To make it worse, their process technology is a generation behind intel which increases costs thus eats further at any price discount. GPU: Meanwhile, Intel is eating their "Fusion" style cpu/gpu integration with every release they make. Can`t remember the last time some buzz about AMD fusion but intel HD 2k/3k/4k is in the news all the time. They should have made Pat Gelsinger CEO when he was turned down for the same job at intel.