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Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

I'm not into hardware but I remember when AMD was sneered at, and all real CPUs were Intel. Then Ryzen happened. My meta conclusion is that its super hard to tell when someone is done, and it can change quickly.

Or not. Sometimes it if looks like terminal decline, it simply is terminal decline.

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These things go in cycles and predate Ryzen by a lot. The late-model Pentium 4 chips were overheating power-guzzling garbage compared to the Athlon XP, and the Athlon 64 was a serious competitor to the Core 2 series. Ryzen is the current incarnation of AMD coming into vogue in desktop, but it's not like it took them 40 years to get there.

AMD had been gradually working their way up for a long time - the K6-III was an excellent CPU for the time.

The K6 line was a functional CPU but I wouldn't call them "excellent". The K6-III was basically a K6-2 with integrated cache, much the same way the Pentium III was a Pentium II with integrated cache. Despite the fact that AMD tried to replicate Pentium branding on the K6 line, they very much competed with Celerons in terms of market place and performance.

Indeed that's how they were marketed where I worked (Office Max) and were priced and spec'd comparably to the Celeron based offerings from IBM, HP, and Packard Bell.

Another issue with the K6 line was they were always a generation behind at a time when Intel was rapidly rolling out technologies like MMX and SSE. Intel coordinated with software manufacturers and had launch day examples that presented significant performance gaps between the CPU lines.

The K6 also had a shorter execution pipeline than Pentium so it struggled to hit 400mhz when Intel was approaching 500mhz. That's why the Athlon was such a shock because it arrived at 700mhz and stomped everything.

Looking back at the K6 line now, they likely perform far better then they did at the time because software eventually got around to supporting the hardware.

Minor correction. Athlon arrived at 500MHz, 550MHz and 600MHz. But they were still a big shock when they arrived. They were the first chip in a long while to really take on Intel and succeed.

The 650MHz came two months after than, and 700MHz another two months later. 6 months later 1GHz! It is easy to forget just how rapid performance increased in the late 90s.

I'm trying to reconcile that with my memory. Pre-launch the AMD rep approached the electronics salesmen where I worked and offered us a deal to purchase a K7 700mhz for like $200. It came with a Biostar motherboard, a brand I'd never heard of back then.

I remember it was a K7 700 because it was the first from scratch PC that I ever built. Everything before and probably since has been a Ship of Theseus.

Athlons official announcement June 23 1999, official shipping date August 17, 1999. A week after announcement reservations started at Akihabara https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990703/p_cpu.ht... https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990703/price.ht...

"AMD Athlon 500-600MHz (bulk) price display. The product is scheduled to arrive in mid-July, and reservations are being accepted. However, there is no specific arrival schedule for compatible motherboards yet."

"the K7 revised "Athlon" has been given a price and reservations have also started. The estimated price is 44,800 yen for 500MHz, 69,800 yen for 550MHz, and 89,800 yen for 600MHz."

Those were Pentium 3 450-550MHz prices.

A week before official AMD shipping date retail Athlons arrive in Japan https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990813.html

"AMD's latest CPU "Athlon" will be sold in Akihabara without waiting for the official release date on the 17th is started. All products on the market are imported products, and 3 models of 500MHz/550MHz/600MHz are on sale. The sale of compatible motherboards has also started, and it is possible to obtain it alone, including Athlon"

https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990813/p_cpu.ht...

~$380-800 depending on speed.

https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990813/newitem....

Picture of one of the Akihabara stalls full of CPUs being sold retail before official AMD launch date :) https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990813/image/at...

For reference in US 4 days later on August 17 Alienware was merely teasing pictures of Athlon system https://www.shacknews.com/article/1019/wheres-my-athlon According to Anand "OEMs will start advertising Athlon based systems starting August 16, 1999" https://www.anandtech.com/show/355/24

K6-III was never excellent. It was a short lived overpriced option for desperate socket7 users unwilling to do the sensible thing and upgrade whole platform (brand new Celeron 300A + 440BX motherboard cheaper than just the K6-3 cpu alone). Paper launch in February 1999 with first real chips shipping in March. First K6-3 to show up in Japan was K6-III/400 at hilarious 35,500 yen = $295! https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/990313/p_cpu.ht... This is the price of full Pentium II 400MHz or over four almost year old by this point and still faster Celerons 300A.

By January 2000 prices corrected to saner bus still delusional levels https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/20000108/p_cpu....

K6-III/450 14,550 $140

K6-III/400 8,980 $85

Celeron 300A $57

First time Duron shows up in Akihabara is June 17 2000 https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/20000617/p_cpu....

Celeron 533A 10,570 $100

Duron 600MHz 9,990 $95

K6-III/450 24,800 $236 haha whats up with that price? Either AMD stopped shipping already and its leftovers or its a sucker tax for ss7 owners wanting to max out.

K6-III/400 14,800 $140

K6-2/550 7,949 $76

K6-2/533 5,970 $57

K6-2/500 5,350 $50

Week later https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/20000624/p_cpu....

Celeron 533A 9,980 $95

Duron 600MHz 9,480 $90

K6-III/450 24,800 $230 AHAHAHAHAHA

K6-III/400 15,800 $150

K6-2/550 7,940 $76

K6-2/533 6,700 $63

K6-2/500 5,300 $50

Looks like by the time Durons showed up nobody was bothering to stock K6-3, only 3 vendors in Akihabara had them. Those crazy prices werent limited to Japan, Poland September 1999:

Pentium III 450MHz 1260 $308

Pentium II 400MHz 943 $231

Celeron 366MHz 348 $85 (300A missing from the list, but was still available and selling cheaper)

K6-III/450 1108 $271 HAHA

K6-III/400 877 $215

K6-2/400 397 $97 haha

K6-2/350 230 $56

For a brief moment in 1999 AMD pretended K6-3 was equal to Pentium 2/3 and tried to price it accordingly but market corrected them swiftly. There was a 1/3 performance gap between K6-3 and overclocked Celeron.

https://web.archive.org/web/20080418185205/http://arstechnic...

https://web.archive.org/web/20070918073530/http://arstechnic...

https://web.archive.org/web/20070918135927/http://arstechnic...

The last time I built a PC was around a decade ago but I always bought AMD simply because they were cheaper for equivalent performance in the middle. Getting an adequate CPU for hundreds of dollars cheaper than the higher-end Intel chips meant that I could afford the second-highest-end GPU that NVidia had at the time. This made a lot more sense for gaming workloads as $300 towards the GPU had a much bigger effect on frame rate than $300 towards the CPU.

These days iGPUs run pretty much any game I care to play so it doesn't matter.

My desktop is now about 12 years old with a 1650 GTX GPU. Still does everything I need perfectly fine. It is funny seeing some lower powered offerings with iGPUs that run circles around this thing. It is looking like my next machine will probably not have a dedicated GPU, at least at first. The intergrated stuff is pretty decent when the newest games you have are about 4-5 years old or just target lower specs.

Athlon 64 competed with first-gen Core, but Core 2 thru Sandy Bridge is what left AMD in the dust for 10 years.

They made the amd64 architecture. Let’s not forget that.

In the past we had only x86 and they were produced by AMD and Intel, no other serious competitor left. Of course in that market it will swing back and forth between these two. The stronger competitor will not go for the kill due to government intervention.

Now we are in a different situation. There are several big competitors using ARM instead of x86. The software world is actually transitioning away from x86 in masses. Apple does their own CPUs better than Intel. AMD outsourced production already. Everybody is pumping money into TSMC who are are already ahead of Intel and they are moving faster.

Either Intel gets a really really lucky run with their new technology or they need to split off the foundry business. The government may put it on life support until TSMC themselves may run into serious problems.

The better way into the future may be to split up TSMC in multiple redundant and competing companies.

I don't think you can necessarily draw conclusions about Intel vs TSMC from Intel vs AMD.

Yes, building top-of-the-line CPUs is hard and it's impressive that we saw the dominance flip in the course of just a few years.

But I think frontier chip fabrication is a bigger juggernaut than "mere" CPU design.

(Your conclusion could still be correct, but I don't know if I buy the high-level reasoning).

Everyone thought AMD was done. Intel is going through a difficult transition, but if they can make 18a /14a work and keep improving their GPU line we could be having the same conversation about AMD in 10 years.

I used to be a die-hard Intel customer, and recommended to everyone that asked me what to but, to buy Intel. That has changed. Now it's price/performance that matters more than brand. Intel also had a few missteps that made the brand lose a bit of its luster.

My most recent computer is AMD Ryzen based, but we just bought an Intel-based Dell for my partner because the price/performance was better than comparable AMD machines at the time, possibly due to a sale. But the Intel chip is a lot faster than my laptop, so now I'm a little bit jealous of the Intel machine.

Sounds weird.

I have 2 intel/dell laptops and thinkpad/amd 14s laptop. Both Dells (a workstation-class 22 core cpu and a more power-efficient one) suck massively when compared to amd ai-something-something-ryzen.

What's worse, intel drivers are a mess on linux right now. Dell xps 13 plus is the worst laptop I had in a decade, and that's after owning every Linux-preinstalled Dell XPS 13 ever released.

"Sounds weird"???

Not really sure what you mean by that.

Both our Intel and AMD computers are doing great. Nothing "weird" about it.

No problems at all. YMMV.

What i mean is that it's relatively hard to find an intel laptop that would be meaningfully faster than an amd one. For a while Intel was surviving on quality software but even this moat is drying out.

The Dell Intel-based laptop has an Intel Core i9-13900HX @ 55W TDP. 24 cores, 32 threads, scores 43,067 on passmark. The AMD laptop I got has AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS @ 54W TDP, which scores 28,632 on passmark and I paid about the same price for it as the Dell about one year earlier, around $1200. At the time we bought the Dell, it was faster than comparable AMD based laptops in the same price range, and that was surprising to me too, but that's what happened. Trust me, I searched for the best deal, but the Dell being on sale at the time made it the best choice in terms of speed and features.

FWIW, Apple M4 Max 16 Core scores 43,818 on passmark and runs at 90 Watts TDP, so Intel certainly is competing on speed, as well as TDP.

We think of “Ryzen based” as recent, but the first generation of Zen was from 2017-2018. If it possible that your machine has earned retirement?

If you're comparing laptop to desktop keep in mind a lot of those top out at 5 to 45w (gaming) and desktop chips are 45-65w to 300w (threadripper) and have a lot more cooling behind them.

it's almost apples to oranges in most cases.

Not sure why you're trying to techsplain any of this to me. I never conflated desktop with laptop, not sure how you got that out of my comment.

I do have repeated, annoying instability with my Ryzen 5900X desktop. I find AMD to have a much narrower setup window in terms of memory speed, timing, etc. and that is before any kind of overclocking. And the motherboard / bios firmware situation always seems a bit more sketchy for AMD.

Maybe it is just bad luck on my end, but I have not had those issues with Intel in the past or currently.

It's bad luck on your end. I have 3 AMD-based "desktops", never had a single problem with any of them. I just throw whatever memory in and it just works. These are being used more as servers than desktops, with large RAID arrays, HBA cards, tape drives, etc. They're consumer-level systems - Ryzen 7 5700G, Ryzen 5 2600, Ryzen 7 7800X3D.

That’s a big if.

“If Intel can just get this next node they’ll be sitting pretty” is what people have been saying for over a decade isn’t it?

Just getting the nodes working and producing enough chips has been a huge issue for them, let alone having good chip designs on top of that.

“No one got fired for choosing Intel” has stopped applying. They’re even losing server marketshare, which was their rock.

AMD lost their foundry business on the way. To keep the foundry competitive you need a lot cash rolling in or you're out. Either they become competitive soon, somebody keeps pumping billions in for many years, or they're out and lose their foundry.

Intel as a brand may survive in some shape or form but it's not looking good for the foundry.

A big part of AMD's turnaround was going fabless.

I think the big fear here is that if Intel does the same, there won't be much competition left in the fab space.

Is Samsung still competitive with TSMC?

> A big part of AMD's turnaround was going fabless.

Part of it, sure, but they were still fabless and in the ditch before Zen. Unless you're referring to going with TSMC instead of GloFo as going fabless.

They had contracts which forced them to buy Global Foundries even lasting into Zen 2 (I believe they used it with the IO die).

Yes, but that contract was a result of going fabless and spinning off GloFo into its own entity longer before Zen. AMD went fabless in 2009 during K8 lifecycle. Since then, we had an entire dynasty of failed bulldozer CPUs. I fail to see how going fabless helped them?

What helped them is putting the right people in charge of Zen design and intel fumbling 10nm due to their own hubris.

The point is that AMD didn't really go fabless in 2009. They didn't own the fab anymore but were still tied to it, so they were not free to exercise the number one advantage of being fabless until much later.

In your mind, company that as a contract with a fab is not fabless? Do you think AMD can just stop ordering from TSMC today and call it a day?

AMD was fine with having GloFo as a fab until 20nm process. They were already behind, but not terribly.

AMD even used TSMC for their CPUs and GPUs before Zen. Ontario was fabbed at TSMC in 2011.

Point is AMD as free to shop around. Only in 2016 the agreement was amended that GloFo would be preferred for 14nm and 7nm, but since they decided not to work on 7nm, it freed up AMD.

AMD and GloFlo split in 2009 but AMD wasn't able to start actually manufacturing their chips with other foundries until 2019 when GloFlo got downgraded to only providing the IO die for Zen 2. This is because AMD was contractually obligated to continue using GloFlo for that time as a condition of the split.

Zen 2 is also where Ryzen went from "exciting and competitive, but not top of the line" to actually giving Intel a run for their money in more than just highly multithreaded workloads.

Improved architecture put AMD within striking distance of Intel and the move to TSMC allowed them to pull ahead.

UNtil 2009 to 2016 AMD was free to use any fab as long as GloFo still has something to do. In 2016, AMD had to pay GloFo to NOT use them for some node sizes.

AMD used TSMC for their CPUs (not IO die!) at least for one generation, and TSMC actually dropped the ball that time and AMD went back to GloFo.

Once again, AMD was fabless since 2009 it's a fact, and it's also a fact that it didn't help them at all.

turning anything around when designing chips is at year process. just going from a fully designed chip to shipped is ~2 years in the absolute best case.

What I don't get is: When AMD fabless is profitable and GlobalFoundries is profitable, why where AMD with the fab not?

That has happened like 4 times with AMD already since I've been buying PCs

Yup, though it's been never such a good run for them by far. Granted things were moving much faster back then overall, but amd has been dominating for 7 years now.

The problem for Intel is all the growth since mid 2000s is non PC.

Switching to TSMC broke their negative feedback loop, though. In the past AMD could be relied on to somehow not have the money to invest in their fabs at some point, resulting in another Intel era.

Nowadays, there will be another process node from TSMC. If AMD doesn’t pay for the R&D, TSMC’s other customers (like Apple and… actually, Intel) will instead.

Keep in mind Keller joined AMD during their dark period(Bulldozer?) and helped work on Zen.

He later noped out of Intel shortly after joining. Whatever he saw, either in leadership or product, had to be pretty bad in my opinion. AFAIK there's been speculation, but nothing really concrete.

AMDs fab in Dresden was highly respected as the most efficient fab in the world back in it's day. AMD really took off after they purchased NexGen and rolled out the K6.

AMD has supposedly been on the verge of being done for over 40 years now.

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