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Why? I think their R9 nano cards are quite good. Looks like they are rushed to market, but still gives a run to gigantic nvidia titan cards a run for its money.

I remind you that It was AMD who created 64 bit x86. This is why it is originally called (and still sometimes rightfully called) AMD64. I mentioned Jim Keller because he is the co author of x86-64 instruction set specification and lead architect of K8 (opteron) processors. He went back to AMD and working on the new Architecture since 2012. It is true that last 8 years was mostly disastrous for AMD, but I wouldn't count them off so fast, especially if they can ramp up on 14nm with a high IPC design. Time will tell.

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Doesn't deny his thesis, though? K7 out-of-order was great when Intel went on their P4 "Marketecture" boondoggle, AMD64 was great, K8 + Hypertransport plus on chip memory controllers blew Intel out of the water in pretty much every way, IA-64 couldn't compete.

But they took their eyes off the ball, bought ATI, took 4 and a half years to update their microarchtecture, and the first shipped K10h chips had a bad TLB, requiring them to stop shipping until the next stepping fixed that 6 months later.

I really liked them in that heyday, and, oh, back in the 486 DX4 days, but given their many decades losing corporate DNA (I'm sure it's still true they haven't in the long run made money for their shareholders), and their having to sell their foundries, it's doubtful they'll again be a big player.

I think a lot of people forget that 64-bit MIPS has been around for more than two decades - much longer than Intel, AMD or ARM.

For example, the Nintendo N64 game console had a MIPS64 CPU.

It was probably overshadowed in most people's minds by the DEC Alpha, which was also introduced in 1992.

But what's your point ? People don't buy CPUs based on the age of the brand.

I'm not talking about buying, I'm talking about engineering expertise.

AMD blew Intel out of the water in every possible way, except sales. They had trouble selling chips to mainstream OEMs because the OEMs had questionably-legal deals with Intel that penalized them for buying processors from anyone else. In some cases AMD literally couldn't give them away. And in the long run that killed them - without the income they simply couldn't keep up.

Note, when I say "blew Intel out of the water", I'm talking only about AMD64 K8.

As I understand it, this was true for "Big Iron" AMD64 sales, for one thing, AMD had a whole year's head start where they were the only ones selling it, and then Intel played catch up for a long time. For multi-chip machines, not until Intel had their own version of the Hypertransport + local memory controller architecture.

I believe what you're talking about only happened in consumer grade chips, although I know HP for instance found a way to sell AMD based consumer systems, my parents bought one in 2004-5.

The ~5 years between AMD's release of the Athlon 64 and Intel's Nehalem were truly AMD's glory days on the server. We had two clusters, one with pairs of 2.2 GHz Opteron 248 CPUs in its compute nodes and another with pairs of 3.4 GHz "Nocona" Xeons in its compute nodes. The Opteron nodes completely wiped the floor with the Xeon nodes in everything we threw at them, despite the Xeons enjoying a >50% clock speed advantage and a newer manufacturing process (90 nm vs. 130 nm).

Intel's "Core 2" CPUs scrapped the Pentium 4's NetBurst architecture in favor of an evolution of the Pentium M architecture (which was, in turn, an evolution of the Pentium III architecture), and Intel was competitive with AMD on the desktop again. Nehalem brought on-die memory controllers and QPI (Intel's HyperTransport-alike) in late 2008, which made Intel the performance champion on multi-socket servers. AMD's Bulldozer architecture was dead on arrival in 2011, and AMD never recovered from that.

Maybe AMD will pull a rabbit out of their hat with Zen...

> Why? I think their R9 nano cards are quite good.

Comparable performance to the GTX 970 at merely twice the price? Meh.™

Well, I don't think so. Lets see when reputable sites release their benchmarks next week.

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