Could IBM be the downfall of AMD?

Ricochet J · 16 Jan 2006 at 10:25

Okay this only a theory speculation type thing. But with all the news of Intel Macs performing nice and the demand for them is high, will Intel neglect the PC market and go for Macs?
It'll therefore leave IBM in the cold as they used to make the chips for Mac meaning they may take another shot at the PC market in terms of processors.
Now my understanding is IBM have a lot of money so whats to stop them? Intel may perform better in the Mac market in the next few years than in the PC market.
Will it happen?

lemonkettaz · 16 Jan 2006 at 10:46

doubt intel would totally neglect the pc market

monaco87 · 16 Jan 2006 at 10:52

eXSBass said:
Okay this only a theory speculation type thing. But with all the news of Intel Macs performing nice and the demand for them is high, will Intel neglect the PC market and go for Macs?
It'll therefore leave IBM in the cold as they used to make the chips for Mac meaning they may take another shot at the PC market in terms of processors.
Now my understanding is IBM have a lot of money so whats to stop them? Intel may perform better in the Mac market in the next few years than in the PC market.
Will it happen?

IBM are doing quite nicely. Supplying cpu's to both leading consoles will make the lost Mac business look like small fry.

M@rt · 16 Jan 2006 at 10:53

Also bear in mind that while IBM may have lost 1million annual chip sales with Apple, they are, or will be, the manufacturer of the chips powering all 3 of the next generation of consoles. I doubt they will be too upset tbh.

edit - doh moments too late

M@rt

Corasik · 16 Jan 2006 at 11:06

Intel is not designing chips for Macs. Apple have redesigned the Mac to use more 'standard' PC hardware.

Intel may sell a million chips to Apple, but last year they sold around 6 Million processors to dell in the USA alone. The PC market is far bigger than the market for Macs, and while Intel fast stiff competition from AMD, the next generation of processors scheduled for release this year could well see intel winning back the performance crown, while at the same time considerable reducing both heat output, and power consumption.

The days of the 3.8GHZ processor are over, as the next generation of intel processors will follow AMD's principle of doing a lot of work per cycle, at a far lower clock speed. The laptop processors will clock at around 2.33Ghz, although the desktop clock speed is still unknown, although I believe Intel have specified that desktop processors will be specified to draw almost 3 times the power of a laptop chip, so there will be some room for increased performance.

NathanE · 16 Jan 2006 at 11:35

IBM don't have an x86 technology license, so no they won't ever displace AMD. AMD got their x86 license through an out of court settlement with Intel going on for two decades ago IIRC.

Intel's biggest market is the PC market. Apple will account for about 0.5% of their sales by 2007.

Apple have been wanting to make the jump to x86 for years. When IBM got the Xbox and Playstation contracts they basically gave Apple forewarning that they wouldn't be able to keep up their supply in a couple years so that was possibly the biggest impetus behind Apple making the switch now.

Corasik said:
intel processors will follow AMD's principle of doing a lot of work per cycle

AMD's principle? Did you forget the P6 (er, Pentium Pro, II, III/M) architecture which predates AMD's K7 and K8? The only thing we can give credit to AMD for is AMD64 (the instruction set) which will be in widespread use in a year or two.

hogfather · 16 Jan 2006 at 11:59

Apple is small fry indeed. Intel are probably far more happy with the deal from a marketing impact, than an economic one imo.

Zip · 16 Jan 2006 at 13:36

I would like to see IBM make an entire new Arcitecture for the PC world. A nice brake through or 2 would be good

mcmad · 16 Jan 2006 at 13:43

IBM is primarily a foundry now (make chips for others), they wont enter the PC market directly with a product of their own.

m3csl2004 · 16 Jan 2006 at 14:45

i didnt know ibm were fabbing cell's for the ps3?????

mcmad · 16 Jan 2006 at 14:56

m3csl2004 said:
i didnt know ibm were fabbing cell's for the ps3?????

yup, its a joint venture between Sony, IBM & Toshiba (all3 were involved in the design).

All 3 are manufacturing them (mainly IBM initially but Sony are ramping production at their new fab in Japan, a lot of new kit is going in there only to make PS3 chips).

NathanE · 16 Jan 2006 at 14:58

m3csl2004 said:
i didnt know ibm were fabbing cell's for the ps3?????

Yeah they designed it... so they aren't exactly going to let the manufacturing contract goto someone else

hogfather said:
Intel are probably far more happy with the deal from a marketing impact, than an economic one imo.

Saying that (I agree), Intel was on damage control recently because of Apple's new marketing campaign slagging off PC's

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=28929

monaco87 · 16 Jan 2006 at 15:34

Zip said:
I would like to see IBM make an entire new Arcitecture for the PC world. A nice brake through or 2 would be good

Unfortunatley with x86 we are stuck with an architecure that goes back to 1981. Oustide of the PC world there are some eye-popping developments, e.g. Sun's UltraSPARC T1 has 8 cores with each core handling 4 threads. Benchmarks against a 3.6GHz Xeon server show the Sun box averaging at 4 to 6 times the performance of the Xeon box The Sun CPU is clocked at 1GHz and uses only 73W !!!

tomos · 16 Jan 2006 at 17:54

how long do you think well be stuck with x86?

will the big boys in this game ever announce a planned end to this? kinda like the analogue tv shutoff?

Goksly · 16 Jan 2006 at 18:07

Inquirer was pondering on the same thing... and compared to the PC market, mac sales are very poor. With AMD eating up market space (mainly in the server sector) they are doing quite nicely atm.

NathanE · 16 Jan 2006 at 18:44

tomos said:
how long do you think well be stuck with x86?

will the big boys in this game ever announce a planned end to this? kinda like the analogue tv shutoff?

Well Intel was planning a major shift to Itanium architecture. But when AMD came up with their x86-64 instruction set (AMD64) Microsoft liked it (being the software company that they are) and told Intel that they were going to adopt it so they'd better make chips compatible with it.

Unfortunately for us, AMD64 has secured x86's future for at least another decade.

Nixeh · 16 Jan 2006 at 19:31

Couldnt really see AMD failing anytime soon. Though would be good to have another CPU maker in the market to give us moe variation to chose from.. but that only means moe sockets.

tomos · 16 Jan 2006 at 20:51

NathanE said:
Well Intel was planning a major shift to Itanium architecture. But when AMD came up with their x86-64 instruction set (AMD64) Microsoft liked it (being the software company that they are) and told Intel that they were going to adopt it so they'd better make chips compatible with it.

Unfortunately for us, AMD64 has secured x86's future for at least another decade.

if that had come off tho, wouldnt intel be in the lead? and in control again? would prefer this future than that tbh.

i would just like the big players to get together and develop a new system - something with sections left open so it can be a bit more dynamic/fluid than the current

monaco87 · 16 Jan 2006 at 20:53

NathanE said:
Well Intel was planning a major shift to Itanium architecture. But when AMD came up with their x86-64 instruction set (AMD64) Microsoft liked it (being the software company that they are) and told Intel that they were going to adopt it so they'd better make chips compatible with it.

Unfortunately for us, AMD64 has secured x86's future for at least another decade.

I think Microsoft withdrew Itanium support because it was a rubbish chip. With Itanium, until code is ported to the new weird and wonderful EPIC architecture, any current code runs at less than half the speed of the old x86 chips. Itanium was, and still is, a dead end. Even where it is still used by HP, in the Unix space, it is being slaughtered by IBM's Power 5 and Sun's UltraSPARC IV+.

AMD have actually done us a favour, otherwise we'd still be at the mercy of Intel, trying to crank every last MHz out of their ancient P4 design, with customers having to put up with computers that double as room heaters. AMD's solution is actually quite elegant and borrows heavily from the high end chips from IBM and Sun which have had on-board memory controllers and high speed interconnect interfaces like Hypertransport for years. As a result companies like Sun and IBM refer to AMD's chips as x64 to differentiate them from the old stuff.

NathanE · 16 Jan 2006 at 21:07

monaco87 said:
I think Microsoft withdrew Itanium support because it was a rubbish chip. With Itanium, until code is ported to the new weird and wonderful EPIC architecture, any current code runs at less than half the speed of the old x86 chips. Itanium was, and still is, a dead end. Even where it is still used by HP, in the Unix space, it is being slaughtered by IBM's Power 5 and Sun's UltraSPARC IV+.

Granted Itanium is a dead stick now because Microsoft has withdrawn support for it. It wasn't rubbish though. People just got the wrong idea about it because they compared it almost directly to x86 and, basically, didn't like what progress looked like. It was a pure 64-bit chip with 32-bit tacked on afterwards (because of the intention to remove it later on when the transition was over.) Sure it wasn't particularly fast either but it was still 90% a research project by Intel. The only reason it went into production (so soon) was because a couple OEMs expressed interest, AFAIK.

What I'm saying is, Intel would have used Itanium as a stepping stone to bigger and better things. They are actually reusing some of the technology from it in current chips - but of course as they are x86 it sort of limits what can be reused.

monaco87 said:
AMD have actually done us a favour, otherwise we'd still be at the mercy of Intel, trying to crank every last MHz out of their ancient P4 design, with customers having to put up with computers that double as room heaters. AMD's solution is actually quite elegant and borrows heavily from the high end chips from IBM and Sun which have had on-board memory controllers and high speed interconnect interfaces like Hypertransport for years. As a result companies like Sun and IBM refer to AMD's chips as x64 to differentiate them from the old stuff.

AMD64 (the instruction set) is far from elegant I'm afraid. I was speaking entirely about the instruction set and not their implementation of it (e.g. the Althon 64 and its on-die memory controller and HTT, like you mentioned

)

Intel dabbled with the idea of an x86-64 instruction set almost a decade ago but they decided against it (which gave rise to the Itanium project). Intel wanted a clean slate instead of hacking an existing antiquated instruction set into doing new things - which is what AMD64 has done.