AMD’s layoffs target engineering; Board incompetence dooms the company
semiaccurate.com
semiaccurate.com
Down goes the only graphics manufacturer offering proper graphics cards with documentation for open source developers.
Intel graphics card don't count if you're doing serious 3D work.
I believe I read earlier that they have promised to open source a lot of their drivers for OSS.
With AMD there is still some pressure that someday NVidia could follow. With AMD gone, NVidia does not need to worry any longer, because Intel really isn't a valid competitor in the professional 3D space.
(I started work on the 3D driver team at Intel in July, but everything I say is my own opinion.)
Historically, I think you might be right. Lately (the last few years) I think Intel significantly improved both its hardware and drivers.
The i965 driver is the only free software driver that supports OpenGL 3.1. The team I'm on is responsible for a huge number of improvements to the 3D stack, including rewriting the GLSL compiler which benefits the Radeon and Nouveau drivers as well.
We've had engineers visit Valve in person and make sure that their stuff will work well on our drivers. I'd consider what Valve is doing to be "serious 3D work."
Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge are pretty respectable. Haswell will be even better. You should reconsider your position.
And how does it perform in regards to ATI and NVidia cards?
Valve is surely doing serious 3D work, that is why on their Linux blog, they talk about a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680, not Intel graphics card.
And let's not forget that L4D is a DirectX 9 game level, so the requirements are pretty low in today's hardware terms.
> Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge are pretty respectable.
Not if you're blasting polygons. I have a dual core system that beats a Sandy Bridge system with the hands down, thanks to a NVidia GeForce GT 240M.
> You should reconsider your position.
Does the Intel's GPA finally support OpenGL?
Back in 2009 at Games Developer Conference Europe, I had the pleasure to talk with someone from Intel, stating that OpenGL support was important. This after hearing the guy spending one hour talking how to analyse DirectX with GPA.
For serious 3D, Nvidia proprietary drivers are so far the only good option.
AMD is not very relevant in the linux world.
So Intel is killing both AMD and Nvidia. Hopefully Nvidia has the last say with its ARM-based chips, though. If ARM ends up disrupting Intel in all its markets, and if Nvidia remains one of the best ARM chip makers, then Nvidia will ultimately win.
That can't be said about AMD, though. They're stuck in an x86 world where they're falling further and further behind Intel, and they haven't even begun to enter the ARM world, and even if they do, it might be too late now, because they lack the ARM engineering experience of their competitors. Buying the OMAP division from TI might help, but OMAP is not doing that great now either, and they always use overclocked last-gen GPU's to compete with the new mobile GPU's, which I find a bit annoying. Plus, I don't know if AMD can even afford them, or the turn-around that comes with that. Another interesting acquisition target could be MIPS, which is for sale, but AMD would have to also promote the benefits of that architecture on their own, which seems even harder.
Meanwhile Intel pushes out their Xeon Phi boards with huge memory bandwidth and OpenMP support. If there's not some kind of surprise in terms of performance either on Intel's or NVIDIA's side I see dark clouds coming for them.
I think you can safely remove "Intel's" from that sentence and it remains as accurate, or perhaps more so. I really don't mean to hate on marketing, but their job is to sell a story. Good marketers walk that fine line between outright lying and carefully walking the "happy path" that makes whatever they are selling the cure for what ails you and fails to mention the problems. In general once you dig into things you almost always start finding the trade-offs/drawbacks that marketing "forgot" to mention. Thomas Sowell was right when he said: "There are no solutions ... only trade offs".
2. I suspect the engineering barriers in developing an OMAP class processor are much lower than what AMD has to deal with it in x86 and graphics markets. There is a large amount of off the shelf IP for mobile application processors and they have lots of internal knowledge they could use to customize the ICs (graphics, core architecture).
The problem there is that I'm not sure who the buyers are - the two giants (Apple and Samsung) are making their own processors, so unless you're making cut price ICs (a very crowded market) you are somewhat limited. I don't think the Tegra is bad from a technical standpoint, it's just that the number of really high volume customers is not infinite.
Nevertheless I'd love to see AMD stepping away from the x86 game into a wide ARM portfolio. I'm sure ARM would play ball, it'd be a major win for them and with ATI's graphics/hpc expertise we could see killer solutions.
"By moving to 14nm finfet while keeping 20nm interconnect, GF has brought forward the introduction of its 14nm process by one year."
http://www.electronicsweekly.com/blogs/david-manners-semicon...
To clarify: ARMs business is the embedded and booming smartphone market, Intel has the never-going-to-cease-to-exist high performance server and workstation market. The fate of the thing between, consumer and "office" PCs, is very much unknown.
You haven't been an advisor to AMD by any chance?
Technically, VIA is still producing x86 chips.
In this new world we're watching unfold, boards no longer do what is in the interest of the company. This guy puts it well:
2)"Companies should not be run in the interest of their owners." Shareholders are the most mobile of corporate stakeholders, often holding ownership for but a fraction of a second (high-frequency trading represents 70% of today's trading). Shareholders prefer corporate strategies that maximize short-term profits and dividends, usually at the cost of long-term investments. (This often also includes added leverage and risk, and reliance on socializing risk via 'too big to fail' status, and relying on 'the Greenspan put.') Chang adds that corporate limited liability, while a boon to capital accumulation and technological progress, when combined with professional managers instead of entrepreneurs owning a large chunk (eg. Ford, Edison, Carnegie) and public shares with smaller voting rights (typically limited to 10%), allows professional managers to maximize their own prestige via sales growth and prestige projects instead of maximizing profits. Another negative long-term outcome driven by shareholders is increased share buybacks (less than 5% of profits until the early 1980s, 90% in 2007, and 280% in 2008) - one economist estimates that had GM not spent $20.4 billion on buybacks between 1986 and 2002 it could have prevented its 2009 bankruptcy. Short-term stockholder perspectives have also brought large-scale layoffs from off-shoring. Governments of other countries encourage longer-term thinking by holding large shares in key enterprises (China Mobile, Renault, Volkswagen), providing greater worker representation (Germany's supervisory boards), and cross-shareholding among friendly companies (Japan's Toyota and its suppliers).
source - http://www.amazon.com/Things-They-Dont-About-Capitalism/dp/1...
It's actually a common problem with 'money managers' as generally they share far more of the upsides than the downside risk. Yet, there is no way to consistently beat the market so trading risk is really there only option.
Suppose num_long shares of stock are held in long-term investments, as a permanent feature of the economy. Suppose further that the average duration of a particular long-term investment is two years. Then every two years, num_long trades will occur under the banner of "long-term investing".
Suppose num_hft shares of stock are held in HFT investments, and that the average duration of an HFT investment is one day. Then every two years, 730.5 * num_hft trades will occur under the banner of "high-frequency trading".
In other words, I'm afraid that the loss of competition for Intel will slow the approach of the future.
The other sources of competition that Intel faces might be strong enough to motivate it, but I'm not as familiar with the influences that, say, ARM chips and Apple's own CPU development have had on Intel.
This is more true than you'd think, unless you know how Intel is organized and operated.
When someone from Intel visits your company to discuss future product directions and you sign an NDA, they give you some documents with scary-looking bright yellow "CONFIDENTIAL - DO NOT DUPLICATE" covers.
The thing is, though, they don't much care if you turn the document over to AMD, Samsung, or whoever. They might yell at you or sue you or take you off of their Christmas card list, but they'll get over it. What the program manager is absolutely terrified about is that another manager at Intel will hear about the project and knife it.
Intel is a Darwinian dystopia. When Andy Grove titled his book, "Only the Paranoid Survive," he wasn't joking around or being overdramatic. It's an interesting company, quite unlike any other I've ever heard about.