4 ms·

I have, perhaps, a different perspective. I have been spending a lot of my income on computer hardware and power for the last decade or so; and being involved

by lsc 13y ago

I have, perhaps, a different perspective. I have been spending a lot of my income on computer hardware and power for the last decade or so; and being involved in spending other people's money on same for another half-decade back. My take? When Intel thinks they are ahead, compute doesn't get cheaper. In the DDR2 days, If you were on Intel, you had the choice between the stunningly inefficient and expensive rambus ram, or a stunningly shitty memory buss with (not very many) low-power ddr2 modules. At the time, the AMD HyperTransport system was absolutely beautiful. Even on cheap boards, you could get more than 2x the low-power ddr2 ram modules per CPU that intel could. (at the time, lower-density modules were dramatically cheaper, per gigabyte, than higher-density modules) It worked way better when you had multiple CPUs, too. Then ddr3 came, and Intel came up with their QPI systems, which were awesome. AMD came back with a competently built ddr3 platform, too; the G34 systems were a huge upgrade from the mcp55 chipset socket F platform. But the benchmarks came out in Intel's favor, even when AMD had twice the cores. I mean, you could argue that the AMD systems had advantages in some limited situations, but they had lost the dramatic advantage. As far as I can tell, intel has been largely resting on their laurels, price-wise. The E5-2620 is better than, but really not radically better than the E5520. Now, some of the higher-end E5s are pretty nice, but they are priced accordingly. Until Intel gets some real competition again, we have to pay for our performance gains. So yeah, really, until AMD gets their legs back under them, and I hope the A1100[1] will do it, I don't expect dramatic performance per dollar gains from Intel. [1]http://www.amd.com/en-us/press-releases/Pages/amd-to-accelerate-2014jan28.aspx http://www.amd.com/en-us/press-releases/Pages/amd-to-acceler...

lplplplplp 13y ago
I agree. HyperTransport was stunning when it came out. Revolutionary, even. Ditto for AMD64, still the standard as we speak. I'm not sure, however, if this is due to Intel resting on their laurels vs an entire Intel generation being shown the door because of epic (excuse the pun) fuckups. With the (largely wasted) effort expended on Itanium / Itanium 2 / EPIC / IXP / Netburst / etc, no wonder other vendors excelled. The MHz wars took a horrible toll on Intel for mainstream x86 with things like Prescott, with its 31 stage (!!) pipeline. Stalls on Prescott were horrific for performance. On IXP, microcode screwups (often due to explicit caching) were horrific for customers. On Itanium, everything was horrific. I doubt we will ever know exactly how much these escapades cost humanity. On the other hand, maybe we're all richer for lessons learned. It seems Intel is not interested in screwing up so badly anymore, so I think it's the competitors' turn to sweat. Intel still has a long way to go in recapturing territory it could have already had; ARM and MIPS have come a long way in the phone/server and NPU/packet processing space respectively, and they don't look as easily dislodged as AMD...
- hga 13y ago
  It's even worse than you enumerate: echoing lsc and his mention of "stunningly inefficient and expensive rambus ram", the highest level architects at Intel were petrified by DRAM size, I think it was, concerns, and ordered some stunningly stupid things that at least in some cases the engineers under them knew wouldn't work. Intel had not one, but two *1 million part recalls", one of which was for motherboards just before OEMs were going to start shipping. And AMD, which only occasionally manages this, did everything right for a short period of time with their K8 microarchitecture (P6 style, 64 bits, HyperTransport plus on-chip memory controller) while Intel was screwing up so much. I wonder how history would have gone if they hadn't then taken 2.5 years to start delivering the successor K10 microarchitecture, and another half a year to deliver one that didn't have a screwed up TLB. Intel is not the sort of adversary you can just give three years to get its act together, especially with their historical manufacturing prowess keeping them at least a process node ahead of you (and pretty much everyone else?).

by lsc 13y ago

lplplplplp 13y ago

I agree. HyperTransport was stunning when it came out. Revolutionary, even. Ditto for AMD64, still the standard as we speak. I'm not sure, however, if this is due to Intel resting on their laurels vs an entire Intel generation being shown the door because of epic (excuse the pun) fuckups. With the (largely wasted) effort expended on Itanium / Itanium 2 / EPIC / IXP / Netburst / etc, no wonder other vendors excelled. The MHz wars took a horrible toll on Intel for mainstream x86 with things like Prescott, with its 31 stage (!!) pipeline. Stalls on Prescott were horrific for performance. On IXP, microcode screwups (often due to explicit caching) were horrific for customers. On Itanium, everything was horrific. I doubt we will ever know exactly how much these escapades cost humanity. On the other hand, maybe we're all richer for lessons learned. It seems Intel is not interested in screwing up so badly anymore, so I think it's the competitors' turn to sweat. Intel still has a long way to go in recapturing territory it could have already had; ARM and MIPS have come a long way in the phone/server and NPU/packet processing space respectively, and they don't look as easily dislodged as AMD...

hga 13y ago
It's even worse than you enumerate: echoing lsc and his mention of "stunningly inefficient and expensive rambus ram", the highest level architects at Intel were petrified by DRAM size, I think it was, concerns, and ordered some stunningly stupid things that at least in some cases the engineers under them knew wouldn't work. Intel had not one, but two *1 million part recalls", one of which was for motherboards just before OEMs were going to start shipping. And AMD, which only occasionally manages this, did everything right for a short period of time with their K8 microarchitecture (P6 style, 64 bits, HyperTransport plus on-chip memory controller) while Intel was screwing up so much. I wonder how history would have gone if they hadn't then taken 2.5 years to start delivering the successor K10 microarchitecture, and another half a year to deliver one that didn't have a screwed up TLB. Intel is not the sort of adversary you can just give three years to get its act together, especially with their historical manufacturing prowess keeping them at least a process node ahead of you (and pretty much everyone else?).