AMD on the road to recovery.

[humbug]

You're almost as bad as Bencher with your selective comparisons; at least chose the same years for each.

The simple point that it is silly to argue against is that for years Intel held folks back with just 4 cores for main stream and it wasn't really until AMD gave us the 3900x/3950X at decent pricing did it really put the cat amongst the pigeons for Multi-core performance and then the follow up with the 5000 series for single thread performance.

If it wasn't for AMD we almost certainly wouldn't have the performance gains we have now across the board.

You need to read more of the thread to get the context of this.

 

[humbug]

And if it wasn't for Intel, Dell and other builders might have used AMD chips in a fairer market back then which likely would have led to performance gains sooner..

This. For context because its worth reminding every generation.

In around 1979 Intel created the X86 architecture, a set of instructions that basically made it so that you didn't need a Phd in computer science to use one.
It was a revolutionary breakthrough, no question about that, IBM saw its potential and developed a UI interface operating system for it, the precursor to Windows.
So together Intel and IBM created the Personal Computer (PC) and called it as such, The IBM Personal Computer, every home could have one.

IMB was worried about how much supply Intel could provide, so part of the deal was that Intel would also source manufacturing from who were then the world's second largest semi conductor manufacturer, Advanced Micro Devices, (AMD)

Intel never sent AMD the engineering tapes, so they reverse engineered the CPU and manufactured them anyway, there were allowed to do that, AMD had the X86 licence.
AMD manufactured and sold copies of Intel's X86 CPU's through the 1980's, by the end of that decade AMD were tired of reverse engineering iterations on Intel's designs and started designing their own X86 architecture, through the 1990's AMD's designs surpassed Intel's in performance and efficiency.
AMD was small scale with only about 10% market share, but with the quality of their X86 designs they started to grow, and grow at Intel's expense.
By the late 1990's 32Bit instruction sets had reached their limitations, everyone was trying to develop 64Bit architectures, not easy, its a very complex thing, AMD was late to that party, by the time they started developing their own others had been trying for near a decade, in 2003 AMD cracked it, AMD 64 was born, but the real genius was to design it to plug right in to X86 (X86_64) so all existing software needed was a modification, pretty quickly there were two versions of Windows XP, a 32Bit version that would run on Intel and AMD and a 64Bit version that would run only on AMD Athlon64 CPU's.
This was a potential disaster for Intel, they quickly rushed out their own 64Bit CPU they had been working on for near a decade, Itanium, it was massive, slow, inefficient and broken, it didn't work, it was no where near ready.
By the mid 2000's AMD tipped in to 51% market share to Intel's 49% and growing rapidly, Intel could see the writing on the wall.
Intel licenced AMD64, they had to, no choice.
AMD at this point was up and coming, but unlike Intel they didn't have decades of accumulated wealth, Intel did and they used that wealth to buy AMD out of business. When AMD's orders abruptly stopped they to tried figure out what was going on, they offered Dell 1 million CPU's for free, Dell told them they couldn't accept them, they told them if they did they would actually lose money, AMD launched an investigation and found out that Intel had been paying vendors like Dell, HP ecte.... not to use AMD CPU's, AMD focused on Dell and revealed that Intel had been giving them their CPU's for free and on top of that had been paying them $850 million annually not to use AMD CPU's in any of their products, it was the same with HP and the rest of them on a smaller scale.
AMD took Intel to court and put a stop to it but by this point AMD was flat broke, they used what little cash reserves they had to buy ATI, $5.9 billion and tried to make a success of it in GPU's, starting with the HD 4870, a damned good GPU i might add. Unlike Intel's first GPU it actually worked and worked well.

In 2008 the market crashed, that added to AMD's problems and Bulldozer was a flop which almost finished them, the rest is history.

To those of you who vowed for whatever reason not to have anything AMD, you're running an AMD base architecture, even if it is branded Intel, also the multicore aspect of it, that as it is today in all X86 CPU's was another AMD invention and adopted by Intel.

 

[humbug]

And they lost. Intel was found innocent lol

Not quite, AMD won but Intel never stopped trying to overturn that verdict, they succeeded in that a couple of years ago.

Too late though, Intel just don't have the financial muscle today to do that and AMD are now a wealthy company in their own right, its a fights Intel would lose.
They do try, you can see it in Intel's finatials, in datacentre, where this matters Intel's margins are 2-4%, compared with AMD's 30-40%, Intel are still giving thier CPU's away to try and stop AMD, they are failing, AMD marketshare today stands at around 30 to 40% and growing.

 

[humbug]

AMD are a semi-conductor engineering firm, i would argue the best of the best.

What they are not is a software firm, historically they have not been good at that, but improving all the time, they are aware of their shortcomings in software and are tying to do something about it, with increasing success.

Nvidia enjoy being both a very good semi-conductor engineering firm and one of if not the best software firms, i would argue the latter is true.

Intel are not as good at hardware as Nvidia and certainly not as good as AMD, but still very good, in software i think they are second only to Nvidia.

 

[humbug]

That part is definitely not true. They are much better than AMD, it's the node battle that they are losing against TSMC. Just looking at how long it took for AMD to reach the ST performance of the 14nm 2014 skylake architecture, lol.

From the moment AMD started designing their own X86 architecture they beat Intel, yes they made a pigs ear of it with Bulldozer but before and since they have beaten Intel at every turn.

 

[humbug]

I don't like making excuses for Bulldozer, in my view its better for AMD to just own that calamity and move on.....

However.

I forgot, which company has more personnel, resources, money, etc.? And who was on the verge of collapse? . It's quite impressive what AMD has achieved, considering they were almost bankrupt, and despite their limitations, they managed to surpass the mighty Intel. What does that tell us? If someone with fewer financial resources can achieve more and perform better, then who is the superior hardware company? I suppose Intel would need ten times more money just to be on par with AMD. Intel is indeed a highly efficient company. .

Exactly that ^^^

 

[humbug]

It took 3 iterations of Ryzen and TSMC's 7nm to beat 2014's skylake in ST performance on 14nm.

The node plays a huge role and you can see that historically, everytime AMD was on the ropes was because they were using an inferior node and had slow execution, which is kinda what Intel is going through right now by trying to use their own nodes. Think about phenom or phenom II, those would be great CPUs - would definitely beat or at least tie Intel Quad cores but they launched too late having to go up against the i7s.

Zen 1 was on an immature Global Foundries 14nm node, a node one might consider a budget node, Zen 1 was at least as efficient as Intel whilst also being on a very mature 14nm.

Separate from that amazingly Zen 1 IPC was only a few % behind Coffeelake.

 

[humbug]

I think Zen 1 would have clocked a lot better on Intel's more mature 14nm node, yes, that is what i'm saying.

 

[humbug]

Nvidia and AMD are examples of excellent hardware companies. Nvidia consistently remains at the top and effectively utilizes the resources and funds they have. Despite having fewer resources, AMD surpasses Intel and if they had the same resources as Intel, they would bury Intel permanently. Therefore, Intel is an inefficient company, and their products are also inefficient, consuming a lot of power and offering lower performance. This pattern repeats across all their products, including desktop and server processors that are inferior despite larger chip sizes and lower performance. The same inefficiency is observed in their GPUs, with large chip sizes and high power consumption relative to performance. The pattern persists, and their overall efficiency is generally zero.

Its also about getting complex engineering challenges to work.

AMD was last to 64Bit and first to crack it, AMD were the only ones to crack it full stop, we have true multicore X86 CPU's now thanks to AMD.
MCM and 3D stacked semi conductors had been the final fronter of semi conductor companies again for decades, IBM was the first to crack that, so while AMD was not the first once they did put their hand to it they were the ones who made it work properly, to this day no one does it as well as AMD, AMD was first to 3D stacking, HBM memory, and first to do it on logic dies, Ryzen 5800X3D, still the only ones doing that. AMD was first in MCM GPU's, again no one else has managed that yet.

AMD are a machine pumping #### out where everyone else fails.

 

[humbug]

Sure, but how about 7nm TSMC vs 14nm Intel. I mean come on, every time you dodge the actual point im convinced you know the truth, you just don't want to admit it

It just made it that much better, my point was we have a like for like comparison. if even that.

 

[humbug]

Intel innovation .

That being creative accounting.

 

[humbug]

5m 30sec on in that video, that is classic marketing miss direction, take a true fact, like for example the fact that more people are moving to lighter more moble devices that usually contain ARM based processors, take that truth and the reason for it and turn it on its head, to say people are actually moving away from these ARM devices to PC's because PC's are more desirable to people.

Instead of trying to make an argument for your product as opposed to that other guys, pretend everyone already thinks that and you're the daft one for not following that trend.
Its quite narcissistic manipulation. Its gaslighting, something sociopaths do.

 

[humbug]

So nvidia hits 60% margins, "oh my god they are terrible". Intel has 35% margins "oh my god they are terrible". What the actual heck do you people want? lol

Those are gross margins, AMD was going bankrupt with 30% margins. and Intel have a far greater expenditure to margins ratio than AMD had at the time.

 

[humbug]

Yeah so? So the negative part about intel's margins is that they are selling expensive stuff for cheap, while amd sells cheap stuff for more money? Oh god, intel is the devil


At least that explains why they offer so much more performance than amd at same pricepoints. Cause they don't sell them with skyhigh margins like amd does.

If Intel don't turn that around we wont have a competitor for AMD to worry about.

This is why i also don't join the "they should give their stuff away" crowed. Its about the right balance.

 

[humbug]

AMD is our friend,

no

 

[humbug]

AMD's job is to make money for its self and its investors. they are no different to Intel, at least in that sense.

 

[humbug]

From another thread.

Its part of the flaw in the system, IMO, you invest in a company you expect a return, why else would you do it?

For that company to keep giving investors their return they have to keep growing how much money they generate, not just make money, but keep increasing how much of it they make.
They can do that by growing their customer base, eventually there is no where left to grow in to, then what? Well then you start cutting costs to increase your margins, you've cut to the bone, now what? You increase your margins by pushing prices up, at that point you might start to look a bit deranged in trying to justify that to your consumers, sound familiar?

All the while investors never stop wanting more.

No matter how well intentioned a company may well be when it starts on its journey, success will ultimately change its culture.

So to expand on that a company might start out making products for its consumers, and in that way be consumer focused, but as it grows and grows other parties become interested in it, people who see it as something to extract money out of, people who would say i give you money to help you grow and as a reward when you grow you pay me back with interest.
That's all well and good but eventually to keep those with a view to extract money from the company happy the culture must change from consumer focused to investor focused, at that point its consumers become the thing to extract money from, they become a commodity.

There are signs in AMD's typically bad marketing and some of its pricing and product placement decisions that they are starting to view its consumer base as a commodity.

 

[humbug]

Ι've been seeing this since Zen 3 and that's when I completely turned my back on them. Not that they care I guess

Well maybe.

What i'm talking about is this.

RX 7900XT: $899.

1, that's not a 7900XT, its a 7800XT.
2, $900? come off it...

Don't pretend like its a 6900XT replacement for $100 off, we know its not that, we can easily see its not that.
If you want to price us out of your products AMD you do that, we just wont buy them, but to brand something as if its a higher end product with money off when in fact its a lower end cheaper product over priced is just insulting to our intelligence, that's the egregious bit, don't assume we are stupid.

 

[humbug]

That card is now $750.

They should have just called it what it is, priced it at $750, $100 more than the card its replaced, be honest about it, say look its more expensive, we know, our costs have gone up, it needs to be done, but its got AV1, its got 4GB more memory so its got better longevity and we think you will like it.

 

[humbug]

Intel went from a 6 core flagship to an 8 core flagship, i7 8700K to i9 9900K, i don't have a problem with that branding, you are getting more and Intel are alright for communicating that.
Intel don't tend to try and pull the wool over their consumers eyes with branding, that's an Nvidia speciality and i don't want AMD learning that from them.

Zen 3 was more expensive, but Zen 2 was cheap, in the context of pricing it wasn't that bad, Intel had some better offerings than AMD in the lower end, still do, i do have a problem with that but Intel didn't have 12 and 16 core CPU's and in my case the 5800X was cheaper and better than the 10900K.