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Comment by tankenmate | Hacker News Reader

AMD's execution being bad has been provably Intel's fault at times; Intel has been proven to use anti-competetive contracts in the past with their customers (HP, Dell, etc), i.e. limit good CPU prices/discounts unless customers limit their use of AMD.

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That was ten years ago. Ever since, AMD had a free playing field… not that it helped.

AMD is playing a fair field, but they aren't innovating. Their top of the line processors haven't received changes in 2 years.

Well they are trying to innovate: hbm, apus, vr.

The 22nm process node they wanted to use was cancelled, and now they're basically working to push it their 14nm products instead. Kind of such (edit:sux) for them to be fabless.

They'll have it. Zen will be 14nm process. I'm excited for Zen, AMD does good things when the wipe the board clean and start over.

Also they brought on the guy responsible for some of the earlier iPhone processors, which had great single-threaded performance (AMD's weakest point right now).

Jim Keller, their previous lead architect, has left again.

The Zen design would have been complete or nearly so by the time he left, but it looks like they're already slipping on their original time frame.

I'm looking forward to what they do, but it's not without some bumps in the road yet.

Like they did with Bulldozer…?

> Kind of such for then to be fabless.

Shouldn't have sold their fabs, then.

True. But you know how people say things like "people have been predicted AMD bankruptcy for 10 years, and they're still going". Well the reason they're still alive is because they flogged all the silver. And they hocked their teeth. And the company is deeply in debt. The company is worth negative equity, which the market still values at 2B.

There was a little while when AMD had the advantage, wasn't there? Putting out 64-bit and dual-cores while Intel was struggling with the Pentium 4 architecture.

That is what lead to Intel's behaviour; in doing so they limited AMD free cash flow, and in turn limited AMD ability to fund newer die shrinks. And Intel's main advantage over AMD at the moment is the fact that it is one die shrink generation ahead.

The Intel antitrust lawsuit was on Intel's behaviour in the 90s – it just took until 2005 to finally reach US courts (it was filed with the EC in 2000). By the time AMD had competitive CPUs, Intel had already stopped their practices to avoid further scrutiny.

AMD just stopped being competitive too quickly to gain a proper foothold.

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