techreport.com
1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athlon#Athlon_.22Classic.22
2: http://semiaccurate.com/2011/10/17/why-did-bulldozer-underwh...
During the Athlon/Opteron days, the silicon capabilities were much closer (does everyone remember the "paper launches" of various PIII speed bins, and of course the recall when they pushed a little too far?).
When Intel introduced Core 2 Duo, performance per clock in many cases doubled, on the same socket and process node. I'm unaware of a precedent for that, at least in recent history.
Then Intel a couple of years later rolled out Nehalem, with an integrated memory controller and hyperthreading, cementing their advantage in the server market. AMD has been playing catch up ever since.
If Intel's chips were half the performance today, AMD would be winning; though not by quite as much.
Core 2 Duo review (compare it to the Pentium D, which is dual core): http://www.anandtech.com/show/2045/11
i7 3770k review (the FX 8150 is AMD's flagship 8 core Bulldozer CPU): http://www.anandtech.com/show/5771/the-intel-ivy-bridge-core...
Until very recently, AMD basically conceded the entire mobile market to Intel, which it turns out is also a profitable market to dominate.
Before intel essentially copied HT from AMD with their QPI, (I believe that Nehalems were the first QPI xeons) AMD servers nearly always came in dramatically lower power than the FBDIMM using Xeon-based servers.
Also note, in the early days of hyperthreading, it was a great way to run your two active processes on one core, while your second was idle. My understanding is that even now, in the best case, it's not a particularly huge boost.
I mean,yeah; between the release of the QPI xeons and now, for most things, intel has had the superior chip. But before QPI? man, if you paid for your own power, AMD was dramatically superior for high-ram applications.
At the time ATI was 1/2 AMD's market cap. Too much of their capital got tied up in the acquisition and R&D fell off.
The overall vision is still very, very compelling (integrated FP co-processing). At the time, AMD figured it could beat Intel to the punch by buying one of the best FP companies out there. Instead they both(AMD/ATI)fell behind as merging the two companies took far more time, attention and capital than was originally anticipated.
I think AMD success is simply better viewed as Intel stumbling. The P4/Itanium split product lines were designs defined more by marketing and ideal market segmentation than they were by engineering, and they both also had some really bad design decisions. This caused Intel to fall from their technology leadership position for ~5 years, during which AMD produced steady, if slow, improvement, eventually overtaking Intel. After Intel got it's act back together, AMD hasn't been able to catch a break.
Athlon era:
1) Got HyperTransport - correct
2) Memory controller/north bridge into CPU - correct
3) lower price point than intel
They had a better product, at a lower price == market share.
Mobile:
They missed (as did intel) the ultra-low power/mobile market
1) ARM owns the market here
Bulldozer:
Made their bet on a high throughput/high latency micro-architecture, which didn`t pay off. So their now stuck with un-competitive technology at a lower price point which to the market == cheap knock off.
To make it worse, their process technology is a generation behind intel which increases costs thus eats further at any price discount.
GPU:
Meanwhile, Intel is eating their "Fusion" style cpu/gpu integration with every release they make. Can`t remember the last time some buzz about AMD fusion but intel HD 2k/3k/4k is in the news all the time.
They should have made Pat Gelsinger CEO when he was turned down for the same job at intel.
Also, is AMD going to do anything in mobile or is that all ARM moving forward?
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5770/lava-xolo-x900-review-the...
Actually depending on the benchmark, the low-clocked Ivy Bridge CPUs tend to do quite well in "performance per watt" vs. ARM SoCs too. They lose big in idle power, but under load those enormous L3 caches and the uOp cache can give them 2-3x the performance per clock of the in-order A9 (and they run about 2x as fast, and draw about 4-10x as much power at peak, so it actually comes out very (!) roughly even).
ARM has a long way to go before they are legitimately competitive in the server space. But Intel still isn't anything more than "broadly competetive with 2-year-old devices" in the mobile world. Over time I'd expect the architectures to converge from both directions, but I don't feel lucky enough to guess at which one will "win".
I think it's common to extrapolate Atom vs ARM to Xeon vs ARM in HPC, without thinking through the implications. We may well get higher performance/watt for single threads under ARM - I'm not disputing that, especially for integer work.
However, Amahdl's law is going to raise its head. In the same machine, a higher number of lower performance threads is going to cause lock contention. You'll also have to split computations over more boxes, since the absolute performance of an Intel server will remain far higher (by 2014, we're talking 64 core/128 thread Haswell). Both of which are likely to be a massive tax on performance.
To fight this, performance per core is likely to see a substantial rise, both in clock frequencies, and as a result of single core complexity. However, this will directly work against the two things that makes ARM performance/watt so impressive currently.
Also, Intel and AMD both are built around making those 100 watt scale processors fast and well. They really stumbled entering the Atom market; both because of a weak design (the chipset drew more power than the CPU itself!), as well as a lack of commitment (using 2-4 year old process nodes).
I think we're likely to see a similar teething pains with companies trying to enter the server market for ARM. The instituational knowledge just won't be there. Make a cache architecture that effectively feeds 64 cores? Way different to improving power drain on a mobile CPU, for the seventh generation. I expect it will be at least a few generations before design teams are fully up to speed.
I'm not saying we won't see certain workloads that are better off under ARM; memcached and static http serving are both likely to do well, since they're effectively just shuffling bits around, aren't particularly CPU intensive, and are embarassingly parallel. But I believe they'll turn out to be the exception, not the rule.
Which is to say, there's nothing magic about ARM that will let them beat x86 at the high end. They'll have to fight for it, and against Intel and AMD on their own turf no less.
[I copied this from a post I made a few months ago after I realized I was typing out basically the same thing]
It is possible it will work out, but theory and reality are so far off now that I am keeping my options open, was going to start a business in this space but very much keeping the options open at this stage.
I'm not aware of any AMD ARM products. I don't know if they're working in that space. I've heard that Intel is making ARM chips, even though they still have the x86 crown.
I'm not aware of any ATI mobile GPUs either, while Tegras have been prominent in recent products.
Edit: I did find this: http://www.amd.com/US/PRODUCTS/NOTEBOOK/APU/Pages/tablet.asp...
AMD bought SeaMicro a ARM server company.
AMD has a pair of processors, one named "bobcat" and one on the way that was just announced named "jaguar", which are supposedly aimed at light laptops and tablets. I haven't heard of any AMD products aimed at cell phones, though.
Intel, on the other hand, does appear to be looking to get into the smartphone market, so you may see some Atoms in future smartphones trading paint with ARM.