Comment by 1e-9 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 1e-9 | Hacker News Reader

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I whole-heartedly welcome AMD's new offerings and have completely switched to buying servers with AMD CPUs, but I have to disagree with the characterization of "ruthless milking" by intel. There was no instituted monopoly here. Others were free to compete, but they failed. Intel's high prices motivated AMD to create something better and now they have. If anything, the high pricing was a screwup on intel's part and good for the consumer. Intel could have better protected their lead by charging less (but not as less as now) to discourage competition. I'm glad they didn't, even though it cost me for the last few years. Now that there is a valid competitor again, maybe we will see better conformance to Moore's Law.

Edit: To clarify, I will not argue that intel has a clean record of competitiveness. My point is that they didn't "ruthlessly milk" the consumer with high prices. Instead, they stuck a knife in their own back by charging excessively high prices without sufficiently innovating. This created an opportunity for AMD and motivated them to create something better.

> Others were free to compete, but they failed.

This is...not accurate. Extensive cross-licensing agreements between AMD and Intel formed over the years are the only thing that permit AMD to compete. New competitors are effectively locked out of the x86-64 market entirely at this point. There is a decided lack of freedom to compete in this market at the moment.

Intel has also been found to have illegally engaged in anticompetitive measures on a number of occasions in order to lock AMD out of competing in many market segments.

And it doesn't require an overly suspicious mind to note the per-core performance margin Intel were able to claim for most of the last decade is pretty much the drop in their processor performance when you disable all the security holes.

I've said it before, the whole speculation-exploit mess seems like chip design's answer to the real-estate-securitisation highjinks which caused the last financial crisis. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16105385 And that's not an analogy which puts all the spotlight on Intel, by any means.

> I'm finding it hard to escape the suspicion that Spectre and (to a lesser extent) Meltdown is another failure of expertise on the same rough scale as the run-up to the financial crisis, the decades of bad or poorly-justified dietary advice, and the statistical problems in experimental psychology. On the face of it, it seems obvious that speculation + cache + protected mode was a combination likely ripe for exploitation, but the response seems to have been "nah, it'll be fine, probably"? And even if it for some reason wasn't obvious, it's now clear that it actually was the case. So the academic and industrial and bad-boy "security community" collectively more or less let the CPU manufacturers take a flyer on this for, what, a decade?

Sure, there's an imperfect competitive framework in place. It can be improved. Regardless, AMD failed to compete effectively in that framework over the last few years. The fact that AMD now has a superior offering attracting significant orders implies that competition is possible in spite of the unfairness. AMD probably would have done much better previously if they had produced better products.

So maybe it's time to create a successor to x86-64. Nobody is preventing that from happening.

Depending on what qualifies, ARM is there today, or will be soon if Apple has anything to say about it.

Apple's not really in the server market, though.

We are far past time for a successor. The x86 family has been an architectural mess since the 8086. It's time for someone to provide an alternative that motivates the market to dump the baggage and start with a clean slate focused on security and efficiency, as opposed to compatibility. Unfortunately, I see nothing on the horizon. Neither ARM nor RISC-V qualify in my view. We need something more radical that has dramatic advantages.

There is a lack of viable non x86-64 hardware. Most ARM server vendors have shutdown before they even released their hardware.

Sadly, POWER is going to get hurt in this Intel vs AMD price war. POWER 9 was until recently competitive in price/performance with high-end Xeons but, sadly, IBM would need to cut prices and that's something they are not going to do.

> Others were free to compete, but they failed.

Intel engaged in a lot of anti-competitive practices, lost a civil lawsuit over it and was fined 1bn by the EU. [1]

They almost killed AMD in the process.

Every company this size with a quasi-monopoly (in a certain segment) will squeeze the market and try to buy or push out competition any way they can get away with.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel#Litigation_and_regulator...

>There was no instituted monopoly here

You're talking about the Intel that was used for monopoly practices, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc._v....

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