“The thing I find most interesting in [the] battle of silicon supremacy is just how unbelievably thick (or perhaps slow) AMD has been lately. For the entire life cycle of the Pentium 4 family, AMD was far ahead. The company made the best processors in terms of performance with cost efficiency in mind. However, it had a nice 1-1.5 years of time span where it could’ve evolved or innovated enough, but it didn’t. Granted that AMD is still leading the desktop and server markets in terms of performance, it’s not the point. The point is the lack of evolution and innovation from AMD.”
Chip design is difficult and we’ve seen many false announcements and expectations before.
“Lack of evolution and innovation” is just what happened to Intel the last years, which made AMD getting the lead. So if one expects AMD with much less ressources, a difficult competition against Intel as marketleader, and so on, will hold the leading position forever, this is just hilarous.
So it’s just AMD did a very, very good job, and perhaps does a good job as well nowadays, but intel just got to do something about it and did. And finally will catch up again, for sure.
Intel has always been playing catch up…
they havent been better than AMD in, well I cant remember when their chips were better
they cost more, they are slower (price perfomance ratio) and now they run hotter)
they were never a leader (except in sales)
Apparently you missed the K6-2, K5, and on down. I remember when Cyrex was better than they were.
I had a k6-2 500, and while not the fastest at math functions, that little darling did everything I needed it to, for 5 years, though the k5 was crap, I agree
The K6-3 was actually faster then intels processors at the same hz (on int calcs). K5 was a mised opportunity, it started out looking very good but development delays put it almost a generation behind in the end. Luckily the already had a parallell team doing the K6 design. And then we enter into a classic area with the Athlon. From hte Athlon and onwards there simply is no way one can deny that AMD has been very successful in their execution. Very good performance at a very good price.
This is not true. In times of the 386, 486 processors Intel had the problem of Noname-competitors like AMD who brought in some “compatible” processors which weren’t as performant as the original ones.
This lead Intel to start a branding like “Pentium”, as it wasn’t only a number so others couldn’t call their processors the same.
Others started to bring out “586” processors or AMD the K5. It wasn’t as good as the Pentium, floating point lacked a lot in performance compared to the Pentium!
Even the K6 was still behind Intel. One have to say that it also was much cheaper.
Well AMD provided “value” because of savings like no heat spreader over the core on it’s K7’s. Is Intel anyware near AMD on FPU performance because as we know the FPU unit on the Athlon is awesome. Also from what i’ve seen Duel core dont offer much better performance than say a A64, since they need time for apps/games to be optimized for it.
AMD didn’t have a heatspreader because Intel didn’t have one, and AMD stuck with one socket for too long. Early on, socket A was physically compatible with socket 370, so any PIII heatsink could be used, which meant no room. Technically, it still is, but flanges were added to accomdiate heftier heatsinks. Several of heir earlier socket CPUs did have heatspreaders.
Dual-core is issue, right now, of how you use the PC. I’ve had the pleasure of playing with a DC A64, and a faster SC A64, and the dual is amazingly responsive. Try transcoding some music and doing just about anything else at the same time. Windows will lag severely on the single core machine (Linux w/ a 2.6 kernel does much better in this regard, BTW
). I multitask, and don’t like waiting on the computer. DC makes that possible with consumer-level parts.
OTOH, I’d not recommend buying single-core if you can afford dual-core (I’m holding off upgrading at all until I can), because the games are being optimized for them. Right now. Drivers are, too. The Xbox360 is made for easy porting (except the SIMD code), and also has multiple cores. In a year, I bet DC will actually be faster than a faster single core. I doubt desktop apps will get optimizations, though, simply due to not needing the extra performance as much.
Hilarious, like great earth shattering break throughs in chip technology are just a matter of effort and wishing them so.
AMD of course must be working on their next chips, but their product line for this year is not as good as it have been in the past:
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=850
“The Athlon FX series is approaching thermal envelopes reminiscent of Prescott, and it seems clear to all parties involved that something more innovative needs to occur to counter that trend”
On a possibly related note, I haven’t heard anything about their lawsuit against Intell for a while now. Died out or still in progress? I wonder if it has anything to do with AMD staying silent; one could imagine AMD not attacking the chipmarket head first in order to strengthen their position in court (making the ‘illegal monopoly by Intell’ position more tenable).
Very astute observation. An AMD with guns all out blazing in the market would indeed stick a knife in their anti-trust claims.
Yeah, great desktop chips, but laptops?? My hp has a athlon in it. It’s way to hot(granted there are fans), but the laptop wieghs nearly 10 pounds or more.
AMD needs to innovate!
I am buying a Sempron HP laptop for myself and a sempron 64desktop for my girlfriend this week. Guess what, I disposed all Intel alternative. I think Intel is doomed by the new ultra mobiles C7M and by open sourcing UltraSparc. I am waiting for a nice Desktop Sparc station sometime soon and a light OpenSource C7M laptop. If Intel wants to remain in business, they must consider XScale desktops seriously. They lack innovation and performance but XScales are a marvel. They should push them seriously. Linux/NetBSD is there to help them.
whould you like to share some of your pot with me? :] i’d be grateful :]
“My hp has a athlon in it. It’s way to hot(granted there are fans)”
1. Athlon runs hot : First of all, the Athlon is not a mobile CPU. So for a fair comparison with the Athlon, you would need to compare it with a P4 in a laptop – and guess what – it runs damn hot as well.
2. Turion vs Pentium M: I have the Acer Travelmate 8104wmli (PentiumM, 2.16Ghz), the rest of the office has the Acer Ferrari with Turion – the rest of the laptop are practically the same. Which one runs better? The Turion – hands down – its faster and has longer batteri. (Oh and by the way, our company’s software really exploits hardware 100%)
3. Intel Duo Core : Look at the new MacBook – now, if THAT doesn’t run hot, I don’t know. Its really too hot to have on your laps (no, I’m not bashing Apple, just stating the fact that the Intel Duo is also an oven).
So .. back to your “one liner” : AMD needs to innovate. Well, correct .. and so does everyone else (Intel) in this game, because we (users) are demanding more and more performance and we are complaining about heat, power, noise and what not. Big surprise.
-CEO
Now come on. If we all had at least that much bucks that every man woman and dog claimed AMD is doomed and will disapper, we’d all be rich in a blink.
To sp29: you can bet your a** that it’s not the the athlon cpu that makes that laptop that heavy.
Edited 2006-02-27 18:00
“The important thing is, Intel has beaten AMD to notebook dual-cores, and more importantly, the notebooks with Core Duo processors are already shipping.”
Actually AMD released a mobile dual core processor before Intel though it was not based on 65 nm design (ie: AMD 64 X2). Another significant point is that AMD released a mobile dual core 64-bit processor first. The current Intel Core Duo processor (codename Yonah) is only 32-bit capable. Intel is delaying releasing Merom (mobile Core Duo with EMT/64) till Q3 of this year.
Edited 2006-02-27 18:08
The point being, if it works in a notebook and delivers well on power, it will most certainly reduce power consumption in its desktop counterparts, though it’s not as simple architecturally.
Presler is a 65nm processor. Please someone buy this man a Pentium D 920.
http://www.cooltechzone.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=1…
Now there’s a much more interesting article.
Now there’s a much more interesting article.
Actually, it’s a pretty inane article, and has nothing to do with AMD.
No, it’s not about AMD, it’s written by the same person. It’s interesting because it shows the pattern of behavior quite clearly whereas this one is muddled in lots of face-saving language implying possibilities rather than certainties.
Agreed, his other article on MS pretty much sums up his credibility.
Yay! One more person to put on my shill list! I think that makes 5 or so already.
…therefore you don’t have as many security threats for other software as most of the people developing Linux probably sit at night writing up malicious code for windows!
😀
AMD as delayed the release of its dual core on purpose , my guess AMD whent agressive and we will see a realease of Quadcore this year with dual core as cheaper option.
Just wait for the Quadcore DDR3 capable AMD (X4?) processor with Z-RAM for cache. That will be an interesting thing
This article has little information of substance. It offers conjecture and speculation based on little more than what appears to be a fascination with die sizes (65n is passe? what?) and murky declarations.
This sentence: “Once it launched its X2 series, it sat back and relaxed.” is immediately followed by a contradiction to the author’s argument in this sentence: “Whereas AMD opened a plant (a logical and worthwhile step, by the way).” There are several other contradictory arguments, such as the only valid metric cited, which is immediately dismissed as non-consequential: “Despite AMD’s carelessness, market reports stated that AMD has crossed the 20 percent mark a while back. Well, yeah, too little too late.” What carelessness? Why present a statistic with such a caveat, not to mention a caveat that approaches libel?
I would rather have the author present their research regarding company performance to persuade me to join him in reaching such a damning conclusion. There is evidence that AMD is doing quite well and is far from doomed. From Information Week: “Thanks to strong sales of PCs based on AMD dual-core, 64-bit processors by Acer and Hewlett-Packard, the company saw quarterly revenue jump 45 percent to $1.8 billion. On the flip side, Intel posted $10.2 billion, well off its forecast of $10.4 billion to $10.6 billion, with much more modest growth of 6 percent.”
Full article: http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=178…
And this: “Dell has also reopened negotiations with Intel rival Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), according to one well-placed source.” Scroll down for that tidbit plus a few other interesting comments that show AMD to not be “resting on their laurels.”
Full article:
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/feb2006/tc20060223_7…
Is the author is fostering an “AMD is dying” troll to keep BSD and Apple company?
The phrase “trolling for dollars” comes to mind.
Agreed. This guy is a simple troll. Let’s hope we don’t have to see his retardation on OSnews again.
This article is rediculous. He is almost trying to depict Intel as the David and AMD as the Goliath.
He claims that AMD is sitting back and watching money flow into its bank account and all the engineers are patting each other on the back and smoking a cigar. As if AMD is watching idly by as Intel works like mad to catch up and over-take AMD in innovation. Puhleez. What do you think Intel was doing all that time while AMD was pumping out innovation after innovation? Do you think they have come up with all their new stuff in just 1-1.5 years?
What this guy wants is an unsustainable improvement and innovation in CPUs from a company with 20% of the market. He wants AMD to do everything Intel can’t or doesn’t with less than a quarter of the resources that Intel has. What Varun Dubey needs is a smack in the head with a reality-stick.
“We recently published our review of Intel’s Core Duo platform and confirmed that Intel has in fact leapt ahead.”
All the benchmarks I have seen is that AMD cleans intel clock in all but a few benchmarks where they tie. In some cases even AMD’s cheapest dual core cpus, beat Intel’s top of the line dual core.
AMD also has a 4 core chip nearly ready to ship, but they are waiting for intel to provide a competor. sorry but AMD is exploiting its lead, and not releasing the 4 core chips. But it holds the lead in performance, lower heat production, and uses less power everyone is moving towards AMD and I bet they are scared that they can’t even meet current and expected future orders, if they delivered the quad core today, they wouldn’t be able to meet demands.
Has the article writer been on crack lately?
How does one come ahead of the others in the first place?.
Who whas miles ahead with real X86_64 where the other only had a crippled extra instruction set?
Who started the x86(_64) dual-core era with the X2 CPU’s?
The X2 still outperforms every other Intel desktop CPU.
My guess:Now Apple depends heavily on Intel and MS allways has (Cough Vista) it’s time to push overall sales a little with some FUD.
New materials needed.
Quad is fine but they need a material edge.
Some new transistor material like Quantum Tunneling juctions. Using silicon and trying to compete with Intel will be difficult.
Or some new photolith process.
They need to be on the bleeding edge !
And..I saw that I could now buy 2 dualcore opterons 265 for 2 x 316$….
Too bad, I bought a nice little Athlon X2 3800+ (overclocked to 2450Mhz) 5 months ago…or..I would buy these 2 beauties and have a powerhouse of a 4 cores workstation at home for rendering…
Man, I can’t wait for the new AMD comp I’ll buy 2 years from now…Just thinking about it makes me salivate.
The thing is…AMD makes good CPUs…and brings power to the normal user, at affordable price…
I wonder what it would cost to buy now a 4 cores config from INTEL (/me laughs madly in the distance)…
Considering that fact that I just (yesterday) ordered two 270s for ~1000$ (+17% tax), I find this article hilarious…
Around ten years ago, I bought a dual Pentium Pro setup for ~1000$ per CPU.
Now I’m buying 4 cores for half the price.
I doubt that this could have happened without AMD.
And if this isn’t giving the best value for my money, I don’t really see what is…
As for innovation, well, last time I checked (A month ago), our single/dual core Opteron based HP 385s stepped all over comparable (price-wise) single – and – dual core Xeon machines. (Also HP).
Again, better performance, for a lower price.
Beyond that, this guy has very limited understanding of the internal structure of a CPU core (beyond transistor count and process size, that is)… he’s the last man on earth to pass judgement on CPU core design.
Process size != performance.
Transistor count != performance. (E.g. bad memory / bus design may force you to use huge cache just to save face… AKA Itanium, Xeon MP)
This article has no place in this OSNews. Period.
Gilboa
P.S. The Core Duo, though pretty impressive by itself, is still 32bit and still runs slower then the fastest X2 (and FXs).
Edited 2006-02-27 19:52
If you read the Anandtech benches, the 2 ghz processor CoreDuo from Intel is juast as fast as a 2 ghz 64 bit Athlon. I say Intel is on par. But will they beat AMD? I doubt it but time will tell.
To add some facts to some of the speculation…
I actually own an AMD Turion powered Fujitsu laptop. I can watch a full dvd movie on battery power and still have half my battery reserve left over. In my opinion, the Turion’s are a very advanced product from AMD and I’m very happy with the performance and battery savings. Don’t believe all the hype you read from Intel.
Intel may indeed be able to get the lead with Merom but AMD have an awful lot of stuff in the pipeline to fight back with. Some is a new version of an old technology some is completely new, some is to allow them to enter new markets.
Read the news, they’re certainly not standing still.
Is this OSNews or OS-Speculation?
While i agree that Intel has had a string of innovations and successes (especially in the mobile sector), its premature to count out AMD as “doomed”.
This article was extremely biased in its handling of AMD. The X2 is still a force to be reckoned with on the desktop even if Intel may soon regain the performance lead.
even without the article bias, it neatly dances around the deciding factor for most people I know; PRICE.
While Intel may have caught up technologically…
The following chips all come in at about the same on benchmarks:
Intel Yonah T2500 (2ghz) – $423
Intel P4D 830 (3ghz) – $334
AMD X2 3800+ (2ghz) – $297
(prices off New Egg)
The highly touted Yonah isn’t even a contender against their own P4D… While I applaud intels efforts to FINALLY make a processor who’s clocks to processing matches the equivalent AMD, it’s entirely a game of catchup, something sad for the ‘market leader’. The ONLY reason to waste money on the Yonah is for low power/low heat applications (which is the ONLY area I’m impressed with Yonah on)- aka Laptops/Embedded, a market where price is usually the first thing NOT taken into consideration.
Meanwhile – what would happen if AMD suddenly tread into territory Intel already explored; processors FASTER than 2.4 ghz. AMD has remained competative (if not superior) to Intels entire product line for over five years now – pretty much since the introduction of Socket A… all without ever going past 2.4ghz.
Lots of directions AMD could go – counting them out now is silly.
You’re got to love the bits he missed. Such as Intel needing 65nm to match AMD clock-for-clock at 90nm (Yonah vs. X2). Or AMD getting 64 bit into laptops first. Or AMD having the fastest chips at the current time (broadly speaking). And finally, he failed to mention AMDs superior on-chip memory controller, compared to Intel’s aging FSB that will hold back performence in the coming couple of years as multiple cores are starved of bandwidth.
Shame on AMD for failing to replace their leading-performance chip after a whole six months!
I like what Intel have done with Yonah and look forward to seeing their next generation of chips, but this article is just the pits in selective reporting.
This is a bit of ignorant dribble. This seems like the sort of seed that Intel would plant in the media. This article doesn’t do anything but address the false shortcomings of AMD. AMD is still ahead of the game with multi-core, low power CPU’s, mobility chipsets and benchmarks to prove the superiority. Is this person crazy?
…there are sites with more worthless articles than lxer!
Can we agree on never, ever submit an “article” from “cooltechzone” ever again?
AMD hasn’t done anything in the last 1 1/2 years? What rock did you crawl under?
Arguing about things like this is really stupid but all I have to say is that if it was up to Intel you would be using 32bit cpus and OSes for the rest of your life. Oh and just because Intel was the first to introduce a half-ass dual core solution really doesn’t make them better. If nothing else it’s still a p4 with all the memory bottlenecks that come with it.
I can’t believe that anybody would actually defend a company ( Intel that is ) that discarts an architecture for a newer one only to find out that the older was better a whole 4 years later.
I did not write the article, but I did read it and I think he has a point.
Stop thinking everything on the internet that has points that you don’t agree with trolling.
Well AMD might be doing something other than adding DDR2 to their chipset. I sure hope so.
According to The Register, Intel is releasing their next generation of chips the second half of this year and they are to compete with AMD specifically with lower power and performance. Now if those chips are fast or end up beating AMD and they don’t have a solution that will come back then that is not good.
We saw this with the Pentium 3 and AMD came back and beat that so Intel put out the Pentium 4 and eventually AMD beat that out as well.
By the way I am not for Intel or AMD, I am for the best money for the best performance.
AMD may have a secret weapon, we have not heard much from them of a solution that is a lot faster than what they have now and if Intel comes back with a faster solution it would be interesting.
Also yes, because Intel is bigger they have more resources to do 6.5 micron and yes they are now going to move to 4.5 micron and AMD hasn’t released any processors that even do 6.5 micron yet.
IMHO Intel is not innovating, is simply trying to offer, with next generation of CPU, what AMD is offering right now since two years ago: 64-bit, dual core, reasonable tdp.
AMD is selling his 8 generation x86 cpu, the K8, while Intel has failed to develope properly the 7th generation, the P4, and rolled back to a improved P3 (however, a really good CPU), which heavily relyed on the awesome design (for those days) of the P2.
And, as I said, it’s a good CPU, innovation is not only in developing new architectures, but also in optimization… that’s what Centrino lines did and Netburst line didn’t, and that’s what AMD continuously did for K7 and K8 lines.
The 8 generation x86 CPU of Intel, thougt for the era of 64 bit and multicore, is coming; the AMD alternative was here years ago and is now mature and is continuing to give his fruits, that may be more mobile oriented CPUs, more cores etc, while Intel CPUs will still need to be tested to see what they really worth.
Talking about mobile Turion, I think that was not a priority for AMD since mobile market is actually more dominated by large vendors, that are usually more attracted by Intel’s brand and large scale production Probably while the situation changes (and while AMD becomes a larger company, that means more strong brand and capability of more massive scale production and sales) AMD will invest mre resources in Mobile Turion…
In lithography, well, Intel is really a leap haead
so, in that sense, Intel represent the top compared to AMD, however last few transitions shown that core shrinking, in those years, is more related to marketing (to produce more CPU at a lower cost) rather than in improving performances, so we may expect more reasonable priced CPUs (if marketing and promotion doesn’t impose an heavy toll…) closer to AMD price/performance, rather than a significative performance bump.
to a life of idiocy and bad writing.
Honestly, the linked article looks like intentional flamebait to me.
My first clue:
Opened a plant? More like started working on one. Right now, AMD still has issues keeping up with demand.
Then, he expects them to be able to pull a rabit out of their hat in 1-1.5 years, when the market leader is taking 3+ years (since Merom isn’t out yet!).
Finally, we know the dual-core Turion will be out after the new sockets launch. I never read anything about January from a reliable source–just some time in ’06.
Intel has nice stuff out now, and nice stuff on the way. I fail to see how that makes AMD not innovative.