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Comment by DonPellegrino | Hacker News Reader

Impressive what they manage to do on 28nm compared to Intel.

If you forced both companies to use the same die size then AMD compares favorably to Intel. But on the leading edge of performance, AMD lags Intel by quite a bit (Intel was selling 14nm processors at the end of 2014, and AMD isn't planning to release them until 2016). It forces AMD to compete in other ways, because they just don't have it when it comes to raw speed and efficiency. Putting CPU and GPU on the same chip is nice, but I long for the days when AMD and Intel were duking it out and high end users actually had to debate which was better.

I wonder why they don't double down on Open Source. Their architectures, since the ATi merge, have been very creative, providing a lot of heterogeneous computing power but it seemed it was unusable unless you were using their Windows drivers.

In the videogame space, optimized drivers represented a competitive advantage with some drivers detecting a title and substituting a particular kernel. This edge is somehow lost when going OSS.

I miss those days as well.

Silver lining is that the processor market is mature/saturated, so Intel still has some fierce competition: itself. Nearly everybody buying an Intel desktop/laptop CPU already has an Intel desktop/laptop CPU. So Intel still has a lot of incentive to improve - they need to beat the performance of the Intel CPU you already bought in 2011 or 2012 or 2013 or whenever.

I long for the days when AMD had Intel thoroughly beat. That brought us the Core2Duo.

Intel is not exactly lacking in competition these days, either. The ARM/mobile threat is pushing really hard against Atom.

I always have this bad feeling when it comes to Atom, like they are intentionally crippling it and are not exactly giving it a proper shot. They are so far ahead on the raw manufacturing that the Atom should have no problem stomping the competition outright, yet it's barely scraping by.

Early atoms where unquestionable intentionally crippled. During the netbook era, by leaving out stuff like out of order execution, SSE functionality, no x86_64 bit extensions and forcing vendors to bundle crappy intel GPUs and limiting systems to 2 gigs of ram and XP only. I'm shocked there was never a lawsuit over this.

Its hard to say how much that continues today, but one gets the distinct impression that atom is still held back much like the other low end intel processors (pentium, celeron) with stuff like AES-NI and AVX disabled.

Seems to be part of a ploy to preserve high end margins and fend off ARM on the lowend with "just barely good enough" chips.

Intel is definitely making a play for the low-powered market (including wearables and embedded) and experiencing an uphill battle, but they're still pretty much uncontested everywhere else. I seem to recall some discussion of ARM trying to move into servers but I haven't heard anything about it since.

If only AMD was at least on the most cutting edge non-Intel process. But they can't even seem to be able to do that.

Imagine what they could do with Samsung's money and process (Samsung's 10nm process is almost ready - http://www.tweaktown.com/news/43761/samsung-stuns-world-show...) if they were acquired.

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