They are on track to have an amazing year with CPUs that may take a very significant chunk of the cloud compute away from intel and then maybe even on the performance side.. it’s just fascinating that a company that almost died just a few years ago is now a big contender on multiple fronts.
>The Athlon 1.4GHz is far and away the fastest PC processor you can buy. Well, OK, it's not that much faster than the 1.33GHz Athlon, but it's a heap faster than Intel's 1.7GHz Pentium 4. Through a range of tests measuring a variety of applications and abilities, every one of our Athlons from 1.2GHz to 1.4GHz beat out the Pentium 4 with regularity."[1]
[1] https://techreport.com/review/2523/amd-athlon-1-4ghz-process...
It is happening again, Intel has been sitting on 14nm for 5 years, and now with many security issues and they won't be able to react with 10nm until early next year, and even the 10nm CPU will likely not have a hardware fix. Last time this happen Intel started a price war and FUD against AMD.
The timeline somehow always synced when AMD executed their plan to perfection and Intel somehow messes up at the same time. And then Intel woke up, last time it was Pat Gelsinger who saved them ( And later forced out of Intel ), and then somehow AMD make some missteps. This time Intel got Jim Keller, I hope Dr Lisa Su wont repeat the same mistake again.
Intel did this with P4 "netburst" architecture. They hit a frequency wall that made thier new deeply pipelined CPU worthless. This is when AMD caught up last time with the athlon series.
Intel actually went back to the design of the Pentium III!! With higher IPC, a few upgrades lifted from the P4, and new processes, it gave birth to the Core series.
The Intel processors we have today still share more design history with the P3 than the P4. And since then, Intel has focused on IPC over clock speed.
The crazy part was AMD making the same mistake years later with Bulldozer. Makes me wonder if the remedy was the same... Go back and update the Athlon cores.
The ancient Athlon/P3 IPC is amazingly good compared to today's chips if you scale them by clock speed and core count. Perhaps half, which is impressive for the age of the chip. All these bugs affecting over a decade of CPU design tells us these chips share a lot of the same logic, if not entire blocks unchanged for more than a decade.
I mean at the time the only thing on the minds of consumers was those GHz. So the only way to stay in the market was to hunt those GHz even if it meant some long term pain. After hitting the 3GHz/4GHz frequency walls consumers began to realise that processors are distinguished by more than frequency (obviously the lay person still doesn't quite understand but they're more likely to buy based on i7 > i5 than 3Ghz > 2.5Ghz these days).
No, AMD dispelled that long before Bulldozer, and even Intel had abandoned the GHz game years ago with the Core lineup.
You're thinking late 90s, Bulldozer happened in 2011. People got over the GHz mindset in the early-mid 2000s when the market told 'em we're now going to increase core count instead, and before that when Athlon labeled CPUs like 1800+ (it's not 1.8GHz but it's as fast as one!).
Instead, ended up going i7-875K -> i5-3570K -> Ryzen 1600 -> Ryzen 3700X (probably, this year). So like, I'm glad to see AMD back in the game, but Bulldozer was pretty rough.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US3728692
https://patents.google.com/patent/US3771138
https://scalibq.wordpress.com/2012/02/14/the-myth-of-cmt-clu...
Not sure if SMT parents would fall under that, but it was my impression that AMD was relatively unconstrained wrt Intel patents due to this agreement.
I would say that only the Instruction set is cross licensed, implementation techniques and hardware interfaces aren't (AMD CPUs shall not be compatible with Intel sockets, for example). Intel's SMT is known as hyper-threading, the patent has expired too but the name "hyper-threading" is still copyright protected and the property of Intel.
My understanding is that they don't have the manufacturing capacity to ship this many processors, even if data centre operators wanted to buy them.
That is the current situation as they Fabbed on 14nm with Global Foundry, together with their GPU and APU. So AMD is completing against itself on capacity. Once they moved off GF to TSMC with 7nm Zen 2, things should [1] hopefully be a lot better.
[1] That is assuming the yields are good, and I/O chip's production will not let down by who ever is fabbing it. Current guess it would still be Global Foundry for IO.
I doubt intel could keep up much better.
Right now it looks like they're going to be reset back to 2017 numbers, losing the business gains they made in 2018. Their sales have fallen for the last three quarters in a row, quarter over quarter, and they barely turned a profit last quarter. Sales imploded by 23% last quarter year over year. When does the amazing year start?
2019 is going to be an absolutely phenomenal year for AMD.
I'm happy to hear that AMD does better with this. I'd already decided that I won't be buying Intel CPUs anymore, so I like that AMD is a reasonable replacement.
Optane used to be very attractive when it promised all the performance at cheaper than DRAM price. But now DRAM price has sunk, and we will have to see whether 2nd gen Optane will deliver what Intel promised.