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Their 'true quad core' competes alright but what I would question is whether the 5% competive advantage is worth the amount of money spent, market share lost and lag between the Intel release and AMD's.

Unfortunately AMD is a company run by engineers who are unwilling to acknowledge when a cool idea is not worth persuing because the benefits promised cannot offset the risks it entails taking a more complex path.

That is why Sun is offering Intel workstations and servers; they've slowly started to realise that when push comes to shove, in terms of reliability of product delivery, its better to place your bets on Intel. Its the same reason why Apple went with Intel as well.

The Athlon X2 didn't perform better than Intel's P4D, but that went on to be a huge success for AMD.

Phenom, for me, is about having four cores available yet paying the power price of a single core when in idle. Cool-n-quiet 2.0 has not been delivered yet, and I look forward to those power numbers. Supposedly, Barcelona and Phenom have 4 on-die PLLs and power islands to allow for this low power mode.

Also, AMD cpu motherboards are usually cheaper than Intel ones... this could affect sales.

What are you talking about? The X2 _killed_ the P4D. It wasn't even a ballgame until Core 2 came out.

...and then Core 2 buried X2, and still does, for cheaper, I might add.

It's unfortunate, but after being a staunch AMD supporter for years and years, I had to face the facts. Intel got it right in the Core 2, even over the Opteron....numbers don't lie. I think Quad Core is frivolous, so I haven't looked into it, but it sounds like AMD is still not competing at the same price point.

Unfortunately AMD is a company run by engineers...

LOL!!!!

No comments...

Yeah, their marketing is working wonderfully - what was their profit last year..........?

"Unfortunately AMD is a company run by engineers who are unwilling to acknowledge when a cool idea is not worth persuing because the benefits promised cannot offset the risks it entails taking a more complex path. "

Quotes like this makes me wish there was a Heisman-like trophy for Armchair Quarterbacks...

Edited 2007-11-20 21:43

How so? they designed something that was needlessly more complex than their competition, delivered it late and it is barely competitive with the Intel offering. Explain to me how that engineering decision of making something more complex than required, was a good idea given the lateness and lack of competitiveness with Intel's offerings.

Most of the issues for AMD's current predicament are not due to microarchitectural decisions, but rather process/fab issues.

The reasons for the stumbling that the 65nm AMD process is experiencing (process shared by IBM and Hitachi) are far deeper and more complex than most people in this thread know or have a remote familiarity with.

So I find it amusing to see people with passing knowledge to make statements that are so off the mark as to be laughable. For some reason, anyone who can assemble a PeeCee nowadays thinks he/she is an "expert" in the field and can figure out what a company is doing right/wrong.

Being inside the belly of the beast it is amusing to see some of the comments. Naive doesn't even begin to capture the nature of a lot of these posts. Provides a nice comedic relief though...

Edited 2007-11-21 13:01

I look at the AMD/Intel landscape from a different perspective... Intel is the natural dominator in the x86 market. The only way that AMD can compete favorably is if Intel makes a huge strategic blunder. That happened with NetBurst, and it's unlikely to happen again anytime soon. Intel will always be 12-18 months ahead in process technology, they'll always have more fab capacity, and they'll always have more R&D resources to throw around.

AMD has consistently made wise design decisions to mitigate their inherent disadvantages. The Athlon K7/8 rested on two essential pillars: the on-die memory controller (IMC) and the serial, point-to-point system bus (HyperTransport). Intel didn't have them, and they still don't, because they don't need them. Because of their process lead, they can shove double the cache onto their chips, making them less vulnerable to bus performance.

This will change next fall with Nehalem, which will all of a sudden catch them up to AMD in terms of design sophistication. It will feature an IMC, a system bus called QuickPath (formerly CSI), and a unified L3 victim cache--just like Barcelona/Phenom. AMD needs to stay at least a year ahead of Intel on design because they're always a year behind on execution.

That's going to get a lot more difficult for AMD next year. I don't know how they're going to continue to remain competitive against Nehalem, especially after the tick-tock cadence takes this architecture down to 32nm in 2009. Intel has completely recovered from its NetBurst misstep, and they're catching up to AMD's design lead.

Then there's the battle between Fusion and Larrabee, where, IMHO, Intel has the better strategy. By treating graphics as a first-class citizen of the ISA, they're developing a true MPU with pipeline integration rather than just die/bus integration. Combined with HyperThreading (to which AMD has no answer), Intel could dispatch ALU and SP instructions in parallel through the same core.

AMD looks all kinds of screwed in their head-to-head competition with Intel. They desperately need to find a way to keep making x86 processors, but ones that don't compete directly with Intel's. Because what you see right now, with Barcelona up again Penryn, is the best it's going to be for AMD from here on out. Intel's going to pulverize them next year, and their new friends in Abu Dhabi are going to want them out of Intel's bread-and-butter markets.

What exactly is the importance for AMD of following Intel into an x86 death match in which it can impossibly ever compete, let alone win? I'd choose for making Intel EMT64 and AMD64 each their own architectures and create optimised OS's for either, at least in the longer term.

I've been working on an OS port to little-endian MIPS because it's free from the shackles of x86 in that it doesn't have to run Windows, is under no pressure to have a clock frequency high enough to make the bloated Vista seem fast and doesn't have any legacy software base to support (it's all free software anyway).

The advantages are streamlined RISC cores with low power consumption, low cost to manufacture since it doesn't have so many transistors and therefore doesn't have to be manufactured in the latest and greatest process, i.e. it can easily be done in 90 nm.

I'm looking forward to ARM (Cortex A9 and OMAP34xx), MIPS (Tilera64 and Loongson 2F/3) and PPC(Pwrficient and AMCC's Titan processors based on Intrinsity's Fast14 technology), because they don't even try to compete with Intel and AMD, but instead try to achieve what we were headed for 10-15 years ago.

That is, low power RISC processors with efficient UNIX implementations, except this time around it's called GNU/Linux. Wintel has set back computing for more than 10 years, but its domination is coming to and end.

The end result is the same software running equally well on all architectures, so you can choose the best one for your needs. If you need raw speed, choose x86 or POWER6. If you need low power (as most consumers do, particularly now that Vista is out) then choose ARM, MIPS, POWER (which is a superset of PPC nowadays) or another efficient one.

People are asking me to completely wipe Windows from their systems or even buy completely new computers with GNU/Linux. Not because they haven't tried but because they're tired after years of dissatisfying computing experiences.

They'd even choose AIX or Solaris on their desktops over Windows, if they had to. So what's the importance of x86 for most people nowadays compared to 10-15 years ago, really?

Additional info:

Linux 2.6.21.7 #1 SMP PREEMPT Wed Oct 17 04:27:14 CEST 2007 x86_64 AMD Hammer Family processor - Model Unknown AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux

Linux 2.6.21.5 #1 PREEMPT Mon Jul 9 23:00:10 CEST 2007 i686 Pentium III (Coppermine) GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

Linux 2.6.18.1 #2 Sat May 12 18:57:10 CEST 2007 mips GNU/Linux

I have a SPARC machine too and will have POWER hardware soon. They're all running the same software. Are AMD and Intel as important as they think they are or have they fooled themselves into thinking so and do they live by the grace of Microsoft and Windows?

Edited 2007-11-20 23:28 UTC

>So what's the importance of x86 for most people nowadays compared to 10-15 years ago, really?

Depends on the market: while the market for Smartphone and other appliance has grown with RISCs CPUs, the server/workstation market went from RISCs and x86 to mostly x86.

Intel has announced that they will target low-power x86: so it's possible that x86 will gain market share from RISCs in embedded markets too: even Linux OSs works better on x86 than on other CPUs..

@psychicist

I am saying much the same thing, but I'm focusing heavily on SPARC lately due to the ease of licensing, and the availability of open sourced chips. What is needed is the will to say "No more market domination" and push for diversity.

I think most people here haven't seen anything other than Intel vs AMD, it looks like their lives revolve around it. Whereas in the real world people choose the right solution for their servers and desktops based on several criteria such as price, performance and power consumption.

AMD may be in a less favourable position now than it was a few years ago, but that doesn't mean their processors are worthless. They just have lower performance, which will probably be offset with lower prices like it is now with their K8 processors.

They are fast enough for most people with efficient operating systems. You only need to keep this contest going on if your world consists only of x86 and Windows. The rest of the people are enjoying their computers for some real work.

P.S. thanks for voting my other post down. Even though it was slightly off-topic, it was actually directed at butters because he's someone I can actually have a discussion with along with kaiwai, who's finally enjoying his MacIntel (and doesn't have much choice for a processor) and a few others. The rest of the posters I don't care much for actually.

Death knells sells, balanced facts doesn't.

Yep, from customer point of view it is the price/performance ratio that counts (plus reliability, power consumption and such things), not so much who happens to have the fastest product on the market at the moment. Newer and faster processors are developed all the time, and the fastest products are usually all too expensive for most people.

Besides, when AMD seemed to be leading CPU development and Intel seemed to be a bit slow, it was in fact very active time in Intel development labs. The results show now. The same could perhaps be said about AMD/Ati now, and I'm sure they have lots of internal development going on nowadays.

Anyway, Intel has been doing very well in the CPU power consumption front lately, and that may actually mean a lot more for their business success than who happens to have a slight lead in the most recent CPU speed comparisons.