6 ms·

Isn't it a bit worrying to see AMD drop off so much? I've stuck to Intel CPUs since the Pentium 4, but I shudder to think where we'd be today without the compet

by sjm 12y ago

Isn't it a bit worrying to see AMD drop off so much? I've stuck to Intel CPUs since the Pentium 4, but I shudder to think where we'd be today without the competition AMD brought to Intel over the years.

chroma 12y ago
I find AMD's decline a little sad, but Intel has plenty of reasons to keep improving their products. Even though their fab tech is ≈18 months ahead of everyone, they can't seem to get a foothold in the mobile space. Cheap, low-power, ARM-based SoCs dominate mobile. ARM-based laptops are making inroads (Chromebooks), and there's a good chance they'll start getting into the server market. Intel makes the fastest, most efficient x86 CPUs, but fewer and fewer people are stuck on that architecture. If nobody needs x86, Intel's only differentiator is their fab advantage, which they could easily lose.
- detaro 12y ago
  The server market is going to get interesting. Right now Intel wins relatively easily against the first ARM servers, but you can tell from their recent developments that they feel the pressure (Atom C2000-series, upcoming Xeon D, ...)
- raverbashing 12y ago
  Yeah, that's the issue Nobody buys desktops anymore. Profits are falling Mobile is the new competition area. And if Intel wants to sell x86 there they'll have to earn it.
  - StillBored 12y ago
    "Nobody buys desktops anymore." Nobody buys desktops anymore because they haven't gotten faster in any real way in the last 5 years. Probably about 80% of intel's product line can be beaten by a 5 year old intel machine. Sure at the absolute top, there has been a few percent gain, but most people don't seem willing to buy a couple thousand dollar machine to gain a few percent. Sure it may be more power efficient, but I don't think most people buying desktops really care if the CPU draws 30 watts or 80 watts, as its plugged into the wall and the cost savings over years isn't enough to pay for the upgrade. Intel could be pushing features into the desktop space (say ECC for example) but that would further cannibalize their high profit chips.
    - agumonkey 12y ago
      Beside performance is not a marketing driver anymore since mainstream usage doesn't require anything faster than 5yo CPU, except maybe for HD Video. CPU is not a bottleneck since ages, memory / storage bandwidth is. With heat being a problem, manufacturers improve where it can be seen. A SSD has more impact on your life than the latest CPU. I've seen it numerous times. My neighbors latest SONY i5 laptop doesn't hold a candle to my uber aging ThinkPad simply because of this (and an OS that doesn't accumulate crap over time) And people bought desktops because that's how it was. Under the slightly fallacious upgrade-ability of towers. But a fanless mini-itx would please anybody in less space. I don't know how important this is for people, do they prefer to have a dedicated area for a large box vs tiny imac / vesa mounted box somewhere.
      - StillBored 12y ago
        "Beside performance is not a marketing driver anymore since mainstream usage doesn't require anything faster than 5yo CPU" Because software is constrained by the lack of performance improvement. If someone managed to double single threaded performance every 18 months for the next 5 years, I can assure you that it would force an upgrade cycle. If for no other reason than than FF/chrome/websites would bloat up enough that people would have to upgrade. Its not like people sat around for hours waiting for their 286's to boot, or to print word processing documents. Faster technology enables "features" which suddenly people cannot live without which drives the upgrade cycle. There are plenty of technologies which are not yet "mature" and could benefit from more single threaded computing power. Speech recognition, compression, and on and on, are algorithms which are tuned for available computing power rather than the best compression ratio, or the most accurate recognition.
        agumonkey 12y ago
        Agreed, but few things: 1) I firmly believe we've reached a plateau, I'm having a hard time imagining what new complex feature people would need that much. That's anecdotal and subjective but even amazing things like computer vision or speech recognition ended up in the gimmick side of things to me. The web is becoming bloated for no reason, old websites had more content, less chrome. Fast web is easy, no javascript, text. ps: bloated websites are enabled by more capacity. 2) Speed is not everything, there's a sweet spot between instantaneous and unusable. Most people aiming for speed are after user conversion, in the fear that response time would lower their numbers. For real usage, speed is not a real factor as long as its predictable and meaningful. I have soft machines with jaggy and unreliable behavior which annoy me more than my old 350MHz machine. 3) Hardware constraints are good. Without limitation nobody would have cared about space or time efficient algorithms (jpeg, mp3, or even zip). See how late Microsoft has been trying to improve storage use of its OS. All in all it goes both ways. I'm really open to ideas, but I'm failing to see what I'm doing now that I couldn't do under win2k days (except for HD video, 3D). I used to render cgi animation, compose multitrack, abuse photoshop...
- higherpurpose 12y ago
  Actually, Intel has very little reason to improve its chips in performance, and as we've seen basically since Ivy Bridge, their focus has mainly been dropping the power consumption of their chips, not increasing the overall performance of their chips (sure they've increased the IPC a bit more, but does it really count if the actual shipping chips then come out with a lower base frequency than the previous generation, making the overall performance at best stagnant, at worst significantly less than before - such as with Core M).
  - CHY872 12y ago
    Not totally true. Intel obviously builds its chips to fit its markets, and while the consumer chips have been improving mostly in power consumption (because of the shift to laptops and the miniaturisation of those laptops) their server chips have been improving in performance also, where there are no such constraints. For example, Intel will happily sell you an 18 core 2.3GHz Haswell Xeon with a design power of 145W, or a 10 core 3.1Ghz processor that puts out 160W.
- agumonkey 12y ago
  AMD fate is a little dramatic. The ATi merge wasn't pragmatically useful, but a financial burden. The idea of having CPU/GPGPU in one SoC was good[1], but AMD couldn't flip the market with their products at that time, they put a lot of efforts swimming against the mainstream, and now the mainstream is going their way, they lost steam while Intel seems unstoppable[2]. [1] AMD SoC architecture reviews showed originality and value, but you needed a different software stack to take advantage of it. Without that, it's just slower, hotter silicon. I think that's how mantle started. Again, it's not a competitive advantage anymore now that Vulcan is a standard. [2] I may be wrong, but I don't think ARM SoC are really a threat to Intel. They did eat a nice chunk of his lunch though, but Intel's IP and assets seem so huge...
bebna 12y ago
Don't worry. AMD was just replaced by ARM (and the manufactures who use their designs). That's why Intel did so much R&D in power efficiency. ARM CPU are sometimes still favorable to Intel ones, in some markets Intel still doesn't have a chance. PC is dominated by Intel. Smartphones by ARM. Intel invades the tablet market, ARM the notebook. Personally I would love me an nice ARM based notebook, but other factors like housing, keyboard and display are often better on Intel devices. But I don't think until ARM steps up and produces a high quality device like Google did for their Chromebooks, no manufacture will switch from the thinking that ARM is for cheap devices only. My god I could already live with a Apple A7 level CPU and modern E-Ink display, which I have in my ebook reader who also can run linux and all tools I really need to work, fast enough to not limit or annoy me. Only thing why I don't use it as daily driver is the missing physical keyboard. But you have to see, I use to roughly 80% of my time with just two consoles: vim and command window for running scripts and git. So I'm not the norm. But what about the norm? Germany has magazine called c't, who just recently published an article how the life with a smartphone as your work pc looks like. Speed wasn't the concern, because their ARM CPUs where powerful enough to run a browser or office software on a full screen monitor without problems. Connectivity was the only problem, which could negated with the right smartphone. There was also an online article about a reporter test drive, who switched from his notebook to a smartphone and a Bluetooth keyboard for his mobile work setup. He liked it, except it was harder to deploy on the lap and he often needed a table to work. (I think it was engadget, but I can't find at the moment and I run out break time, so please look for yourself.) TLDR: ARM is the new AMD.
- higherpurpose 12y ago
  Unfortunately, Microsoft has kind of killed ARM's entrance into Windows notebooks, now that Windows RT is essentially dead. And Google - Google of all companies, with their architecture-agnostic Chrome OS - has also helped push Intel into its now near-monopoly in Chromebooks. At least with Microsoft it's somewhat understandable why it would kill Windows RT - no compatible apps. But ChromeOS?! Google should be pushing ARM in notebooks like crazy. If ARM doesn't end up with at least 70% market share in Chromebooks (due to the multiple ARM chip makers, just like Android has the majority of market share in mobile operating systems), then I'll consider that a major competition failure. Granted it's not all Google's fault for pushing Intel. Intel managed to enter the Chromebook market with some shameless lies: 1) First lie: promoting the new Intel Chromebooks as "Haswell Chromebooks". I have a good memory and I remember at the time most people thought that was basically Core i5 Chromebooks - at least for a while. 2) Second lie: Those chips were Haswell Celeron, but at those device price points of $200-$250, it would've been impossible for Intel to sell them profitably. So they sold them below cost, so people then can have the choice between what is essentially a $110 chip and a $20 chip, yet the devices cost roughly the same ($250). So of course the choice was made for them, and people would rather get the $250 device with the $110-value chip than the $20 one. It still pisses me off to no end that governments aren't taking action against Intel over this. It's highly monopolistic and anti-competitive behavior. It's no different than Microsoft eating the cost of IE and bundling it with Windows. Intel has also wasted over $8 billion in subsidizing their mobile chips so far, to be able to sell them under-cost, and competitively against ARM. No ARM maker, not even Samsung or Qualcomm, could ever afford to do something like that. So why is Intel allowed to do it to take out the competition from the market in this way? 3) Third lie: After people got used to $250 Celeron (Haswell) Chromebooks - Intel did a bait and switch and switched those more powerful Haswell Celerons with Atom-based Celerons, which are no more powerful than ARM chips, but people now think those "Celerons" are. It gets worse. Now that people remember that the ~$110 or so "Celerons" were relatively powerful (thanks to the Haswell/Core architecture), they are now starting to charge that much for the Atom-based Celerons. Even though as I said, they are the equivalent of $20-$30 ARM chips. But this is what monopoly can get you (at least in Windows PCs and Chromebooks, where the ARM competition has been all but wiped out). The lies also continue with the way Intel is now calling its new Atoms - "Braswell", as if they had anything to do with Haswell or Broadwell. Intel has become (or perhaps has always been, I've only been following this stuff closely for the past few years) an incredibly shady company. And it saddens me that more people don't see it, and that Intel gets away with it stealing ever more market share in nefarious and anti-competitive ways.
zamalek 12y ago
I remember when AMD were the best performance per dollar: it took Intel a long while to catch up. They then released the Athlon 64 (which I was the proud owner of) and, again, Intel had to play catch up. I've never touched AMD because they simply became irrelevant. I really hope AMD pushes the industry ahead once again. Though, they haven't had the best track record when it comes to power and heat.

by sjm 12y ago

chroma 12y ago

I find AMD's decline a little sad, but Intel has plenty of reasons to keep improving their products. Even though their fab tech is ≈18 months ahead of everyone, they can't seem to get a foothold in the mobile space. Cheap, low-power, ARM-based SoCs dominate mobile. ARM-based laptops are making inroads (Chromebooks), and there's a good chance they'll start getting into the server market. Intel makes the fastest, most efficient x86 CPUs, but fewer and fewer people are stuck on that architecture. If nobody needs x86, Intel's only differentiator is their fab advantage, which they could easily lose.

detaro 12y ago
The server market is going to get interesting. Right now Intel wins relatively easily against the first ARM servers, but you can tell from their recent developments that they feel the pressure (Atom C2000-series, upcoming Xeon D, ...)
raverbashing 12y ago
Yeah, that's the issue Nobody buys desktops anymore. Profits are falling Mobile is the new competition area. And if Intel wants to sell x86 there they'll have to earn it.
- StillBored 12y ago
  "Nobody buys desktops anymore." Nobody buys desktops anymore because they haven't gotten faster in any real way in the last 5 years. Probably about 80% of intel's product line can be beaten by a 5 year old intel machine. Sure at the absolute top, there has been a few percent gain, but most people don't seem willing to buy a couple thousand dollar machine to gain a few percent. Sure it may be more power efficient, but I don't think most people buying desktops really care if the CPU draws 30 watts or 80 watts, as its plugged into the wall and the cost savings over years isn't enough to pay for the upgrade. Intel could be pushing features into the desktop space (say ECC for example) but that would further cannibalize their high profit chips.
  - agumonkey 12y ago
    Beside performance is not a marketing driver anymore since mainstream usage doesn't require anything faster than 5yo CPU, except maybe for HD Video. CPU is not a bottleneck since ages, memory / storage bandwidth is. With heat being a problem, manufacturers improve where it can be seen. A SSD has more impact on your life than the latest CPU. I've seen it numerous times. My neighbors latest SONY i5 laptop doesn't hold a candle to my uber aging ThinkPad simply because of this (and an OS that doesn't accumulate crap over time) And people bought desktops because that's how it was. Under the slightly fallacious upgrade-ability of towers. But a fanless mini-itx would please anybody in less space. I don't know how important this is for people, do they prefer to have a dedicated area for a large box vs tiny imac / vesa mounted box somewhere.
    - StillBored 12y ago
      "Beside performance is not a marketing driver anymore since mainstream usage doesn't require anything faster than 5yo CPU" Because software is constrained by the lack of performance improvement. If someone managed to double single threaded performance every 18 months for the next 5 years, I can assure you that it would force an upgrade cycle. If for no other reason than than FF/chrome/websites would bloat up enough that people would have to upgrade. Its not like people sat around for hours waiting for their 286's to boot, or to print word processing documents. Faster technology enables "features" which suddenly people cannot live without which drives the upgrade cycle. There are plenty of technologies which are not yet "mature" and could benefit from more single threaded computing power. Speech recognition, compression, and on and on, are algorithms which are tuned for available computing power rather than the best compression ratio, or the most accurate recognition.
      - agumonkey 12y ago
        Agreed, but few things: 1) I firmly believe we've reached a plateau, I'm having a hard time imagining what new complex feature people would need that much. That's anecdotal and subjective but even amazing things like computer vision or speech recognition ended up in the gimmick side of things to me. The web is becoming bloated for no reason, old websites had more content, less chrome. Fast web is easy, no javascript, text. ps: bloated websites are enabled by more capacity. 2) Speed is not everything, there's a sweet spot between instantaneous and unusable. Most people aiming for speed are after user conversion, in the fear that response time would lower their numbers. For real usage, speed is not a real factor as long as its predictable and meaningful. I have soft machines with jaggy and unreliable behavior which annoy me more than my old 350MHz machine. 3) Hardware constraints are good. Without limitation nobody would have cared about space or time efficient algorithms (jpeg, mp3, or even zip). See how late Microsoft has been trying to improve storage use of its OS. All in all it goes both ways. I'm really open to ideas, but I'm failing to see what I'm doing now that I couldn't do under win2k days (except for HD video, 3D). I used to render cgi animation, compose multitrack, abuse photoshop...
higherpurpose 12y ago
Actually, Intel has very little reason to improve its chips in performance, and as we've seen basically since Ivy Bridge, their focus has mainly been dropping the power consumption of their chips, not increasing the overall performance of their chips (sure they've increased the IPC a bit more, but does it really count if the actual shipping chips then come out with a lower base frequency than the previous generation, making the overall performance at best stagnant, at worst significantly less than before - such as with Core M).
- CHY872 12y ago
  Not totally true. Intel obviously builds its chips to fit its markets, and while the consumer chips have been improving mostly in power consumption (because of the shift to laptops and the miniaturisation of those laptops) their server chips have been improving in performance also, where there are no such constraints. For example, Intel will happily sell you an 18 core 2.3GHz Haswell Xeon with a design power of 145W, or a 10 core 3.1Ghz processor that puts out 160W.
agumonkey 12y ago
AMD fate is a little dramatic. The ATi merge wasn't pragmatically useful, but a financial burden. The idea of having CPU/GPGPU in one SoC was good[1], but AMD couldn't flip the market with their products at that time, they put a lot of efforts swimming against the mainstream, and now the mainstream is going their way, they lost steam while Intel seems unstoppable[2]. [1] AMD SoC architecture reviews showed originality and value, but you needed a different software stack to take advantage of it. Without that, it's just slower, hotter silicon. I think that's how mantle started. Again, it's not a competitive advantage anymore now that Vulcan is a standard. [2] I may be wrong, but I don't think ARM SoC are really a threat to Intel. They did eat a nice chunk of his lunch though, but Intel's IP and assets seem so huge...

bebna 12y ago

Don't worry. AMD was just replaced by ARM (and the manufactures who use their designs). That's why Intel did so much R&D in power efficiency. ARM CPU are sometimes still favorable to Intel ones, in some markets Intel still doesn't have a chance. PC is dominated by Intel. Smartphones by ARM. Intel invades the tablet market, ARM the notebook. Personally I would love me an nice ARM based notebook, but other factors like housing, keyboard and display are often better on Intel devices. But I don't think until ARM steps up and produces a high quality device like Google did for their Chromebooks, no manufacture will switch from the thinking that ARM is for cheap devices only. My god I could already live with a Apple A7 level CPU and modern E-Ink display, which I have in my ebook reader who also can run linux and all tools I really need to work, fast enough to not limit or annoy me. Only thing why I don't use it as daily driver is the missing physical keyboard. But you have to see, I use to roughly 80% of my time with just two consoles: vim and command window for running scripts and git. So I'm not the norm. But what about the norm? Germany has magazine called c't, who just recently published an article how the life with a smartphone as your work pc looks like. Speed wasn't the concern, because their ARM CPUs where powerful enough to run a browser or office software on a full screen monitor without problems. Connectivity was the only problem, which could negated with the right smartphone. There was also an online article about a reporter test drive, who switched from his notebook to a smartphone and a Bluetooth keyboard for his mobile work setup. He liked it, except it was harder to deploy on the lap and he often needed a table to work. (I think it was engadget, but I can't find at the moment and I run out break time, so please look for yourself.) TLDR: ARM is the new AMD.

higherpurpose 12y ago
Unfortunately, Microsoft has kind of killed ARM's entrance into Windows notebooks, now that Windows RT is essentially dead. And Google - Google of all companies, with their architecture-agnostic Chrome OS - has also helped push Intel into its now near-monopoly in Chromebooks. At least with Microsoft it's somewhat understandable why it would kill Windows RT - no compatible apps. But ChromeOS?! Google should be pushing ARM in notebooks like crazy. If ARM doesn't end up with at least 70% market share in Chromebooks (due to the multiple ARM chip makers, just like Android has the majority of market share in mobile operating systems), then I'll consider that a major competition failure. Granted it's not all Google's fault for pushing Intel. Intel managed to enter the Chromebook market with some shameless lies: 1) First lie: promoting the new Intel Chromebooks as "Haswell Chromebooks". I have a good memory and I remember at the time most people thought that was basically Core i5 Chromebooks - at least for a while. 2) Second lie: Those chips were Haswell Celeron, but at those device price points of $200-$250, it would've been impossible for Intel to sell them profitably. So they sold them below cost, so people then can have the choice between what is essentially a $110 chip and a $20 chip, yet the devices cost roughly the same ($250). So of course the choice was made for them, and people would rather get the $250 device with the $110-value chip than the $20 one. It still pisses me off to no end that governments aren't taking action against Intel over this. It's highly monopolistic and anti-competitive behavior. It's no different than Microsoft eating the cost of IE and bundling it with Windows. Intel has also wasted over $8 billion in subsidizing their mobile chips so far, to be able to sell them under-cost, and competitively against ARM. No ARM maker, not even Samsung or Qualcomm, could ever afford to do something like that. So why is Intel allowed to do it to take out the competition from the market in this way? 3) Third lie: After people got used to $250 Celeron (Haswell) Chromebooks - Intel did a bait and switch and switched those more powerful Haswell Celerons with Atom-based Celerons, which are no more powerful than ARM chips, but people now think those "Celerons" are. It gets worse. Now that people remember that the ~$110 or so "Celerons" were relatively powerful (thanks to the Haswell/Core architecture), they are now starting to charge that much for the Atom-based Celerons. Even though as I said, they are the equivalent of $20-$30 ARM chips. But this is what monopoly can get you (at least in Windows PCs and Chromebooks, where the ARM competition has been all but wiped out). The lies also continue with the way Intel is now calling its new Atoms - "Braswell", as if they had anything to do with Haswell or Broadwell. Intel has become (or perhaps has always been, I've only been following this stuff closely for the past few years) an incredibly shady company. And it saddens me that more people don't see it, and that Intel gets away with it stealing ever more market share in nefarious and anti-competitive ways.

zamalek 12y ago

I remember when AMD were the best performance per dollar: it took Intel a long while to catch up. They then released the Athlon 64 (which I was the proud owner of) and, again, Intel had to play catch up. I've never touched AMD because they simply became irrelevant. I really hope AMD pushes the industry ahead once again. Though, they haven't had the best track record when it comes to power and heat.