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#1
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Is AMD doomed?
I really like AMD, but it seems like lately they're getting deeper and deeper into trouble and have no discernible way out of it. Are they doomed? Do you see any way they can get out of this mess? I'm using a pc right now with an Athlon 64 X2 5600+. Somehow in my mind, Intel cpu's are nasty and I'd rather not use them. I guess I'm a perfectionist and I like how AMD always does things the right way, whereas Intel uses kludges and quick and dirty engineering solutions. I always believe in doing things right. |
#2
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Is AMD doomed?
Rich Billionaire writes:
I'm using a pc right now with an Athlon 64 X2 5600+. Somehow in my mind, Intel cpu's are nasty and I'd rather not use them. I guess I'm a perfectionist and I like how AMD always does things the right way, whereas Intel uses kludges and quick and dirty engineering solutions. I always believe in doing things right. I dunno, but I'm currently planning on picking up a phenom system sometime soon, mostly because I really like amd's 780G platform. It'll probably be N% slower than an "equivalent" intel quad system, but whatever; it'll be a nice system nonetheless. [My plan is to buy something slightly on the slower and smaller side, e.g. a micro-atx motherboard with a phenom 9550 cpu, and use the 780G's builtin GPU.] The big area where current intel systems really kill amd systems seem to be bloated cache-unfriendly apps that can really get a boost from intel's huge L2 caches. -Miles -- Conservative, n. A statesman enamored of existing evils, as opposed to a Liberal, who wants to replace them with new ones. |
#3
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Is AMD doomed?
Rich Billionaire pravi:
I really like AMD, but it seems like lately they're getting deeper and deeper into trouble and have no discernible way out of it. Are they doomed? Do you see any way they can get out of this mess? I'm using a pc right now with an Athlon 64 X2 5600+. Somehow in my mind, Intel cpu's are nasty and I'd rather not use them. I guess I'm a perfectionist and I like how AMD always does things the right way, whereas Intel uses kludges and quick and dirty engineering solutions. I always believe in doing things right. Doomed? Why? Don't be distracted by a little propaganda, AMD is still better for business machines. I speak from experience, I have worked with both. AMD is just more reliable, it's memory controller works with any compatible RAM, not something I could say for the Intel equivalent. AMDs are faster price / performance for the low cost market (in Europe) which business uses always are. And AMDs are more jumpy and responsive and more suitable in a hardware setup with moderate performance costs and heavy peripheral communication use, which is also a good description of dynamic office use. I choose AMD over Intel and my boss (who is no hardware freak but just needs a stable working multi-purpose computer) is very happy with my decision. My hardware combo is always: AMD, nVidia, LC Power, MSI, Seagate. Rock solid stable, technologically advanced and quite responsive. I don't get the merger with ATI tho, but hope they make something interesting as a result. I've heard they got in some interesting technologies with the purchase... including Cyrix's CPU/MCP/GPU hybrid prototypes. AMD's future could be quite interesting. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFIg3uSB6mNZXe93qgRAndbAKCK/0sFJDTRyBQ1SJndEhmT/bax8QCgoadN R++THluKy7LAEBHZdMxdHgU= =JS75 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- |
#4
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Is AMD doomed?
Miles Bader pravi:
The big area where current intel systems really kill amd systems seem to be bloated cache-unfriendly apps that can really get a boost from intel's huge L2 caches. I wouldn't think so. L2 cache is just another marketing trick, just like HyperThreading or Quadcore or NetBurst's high frequencies. They're things that look good on the outside, they're what people think is important, and do nothing on the inside. For example if Intel ever really cared about cache, they wouldn't have picked L2 which is really slow compared to L1. And AMD has far more L1 cache than Intel. L2 cache was originally invented in order to be a big number that can be shown to the costumers, it was originally introduced as a feature with the Pentium 2 slot processor, where the L2 cache was sitting on a card next to the CPU and was not actually any faster than the EDO RAM on the motherboard (benchmarked with memtest)... and guess what, it had 2 megs of it. Why in the world would anyone ever do something like that other than to fool people with a cheap trick? Intel's current CPUs have lots of cache for the same reason: it's a big number and people fall for big numbers. For another example, since Apple is even worse at this than Intel, remember the talks about how much CPU cache the PowerPC chip had? How it wisely didn't implement any special functions in the CPU and ingeniously used the remaining space for cache instead? Well turns out all of it was used to cache CPU microcode which implemented the missing functions in the Apple computers, so none of the cache was actually used to cache programs or their data. That didn't stop people from constantly talking about how large the cache was and how superior that was, did it? Lesson learned: Don't go to computer shop assistants and gamers for your benchmark data and recommendations, these people are clueless and their combined knowledge is nothing more than a bunch of commercial ads that they have read and believe out of hand. The reason for AMD's troubles is probably more complex. I have an idea, not saying this is the case, but it makes a lot of sense. In CPU design one of the first things you find in the book is that the CPU must implement as much functionality in hardware and as little in microcode as to minimize the number of cycles needed to execute a specific command. AMD likes this principle a lot and has designed all of it's CPUs according to it, check the instruction timings and you will see that the vast majority of the instructions take 1 cycle to execute, combine that with the point that the K7+ chips have 3 CPU pipelines and additional FPU pipelines and you realize it can do a whole lot of stuff within only a bunch of cycles, if only the code is organized about right. Intel on the other hand was never much of a fan of this principle and loaded their CPUs with complex microcode to do everything that they do. The complex microcode obviously means that most instructions take more than 1 cycle to complete, but they also mean that the microcode can collect data from the code it's executing to do more intelligent precaching, branch prediction, pipeline blocking, etc. The point is prooven with the ia64 architecture (Itanium or whatever), where they wanted to lock out the competition on the compiler market, by constructing an architecture where the microcode part has to be included in the compiler in order to produce code that runs right (Intel also sells a compiler, not only CPUs). Now since the benchmark of today is games and this means use of the FPU... let me mention that the FPU is a horrible thing to have in a CPU, it's a completely different architecture, a completely different technology, the FPU is a stack processor like the Motorola, it's memory is 24 and 48 bit aligned not 32 or 64, it doesn't belong in an x86 arch. As a result a lot of the processing taking place around FPU instructions is actually preparing the data, converting it from and into the FPU format. You could estimate just the conversion to anything up to 70% of the code. And here is where Intel's incorrect design has an advantage. It can predict data transport with it's advanced microcode and feed it into the FPU much faster, thus having an edge despite the fact that AMD's FPU is actually faster than Intel's. So the question about what AMD should do now is a complex one. Obviously for them to be good at what Intel is good at they may have to do something which is obviously flawed design. I don't think AMD will go there, I think instead they could entirely replace the FPU with the GPU they are integrating into the chip and then emulate FPU functionality with it on the outside. That could work a lot better since modern GPUs (while they don't belong in the x86 arch any more than the FPU) can do floating point operations very quickly and in parallel. It would be interesting but is pure speculation as of now. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFIg4L2B6mNZXe93qgRApXkAJ9QE1xowjEG2pDVPvWs6/BM8FXQzwCaAkeh TR/FtcpiX8bRg15E9msVLLI= =QpsB -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- |
#5
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Is AMD doomed?
Rich Billionaire wrote:
I really like AMD, but it seems like lately they're getting deeper and deeper into trouble and have no discernible way out of it. Are they doomed? Do you see any way they can get out of this mess? Yes, and I'm sure they will be doomed several more times in my lifetime. |
#6
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Is AMD doomed?
On Thu, 17 Jul 2008 22:42:35 -0700, Rich Billionaire wrote:
I really like AMD, but it seems like lately they're getting deeper and deeper into trouble and have no discernible way out of it. Are they doomed? Do you see any way they can get out of this mess? Yawn. They overpaid for ATI in a bid to grow and burped. They wouldn't be the first. |
#7
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Is AMD doomed?
"terryc" wrote in message news On Thu, 17 Jul 2008 22:42:35 -0700, Rich Billionaire wrote: I really like AMD, but it seems like lately they're getting deeper and deeper into trouble and have no discernible way out of it. Are they doomed? Do you see any way they can get out of this mess? Yawn. They overpaid for ATI in a bid to grow and burped. They wouldn't be the first. They will be back. AMD kicked Intels butt for a long time because Intel was busy milking all they could get out of the crappy Pentium processor instead of making something new and fast. They came out with Core a little too late, and there is now a lot of us that won't use Intel processors even if they are faster then Phenom. In a few years from now when the Core microarchitecture becomes old news, Intel will probably do the same thing again and try to milk it for all it's worth. AMD will come out with The Next Big Thing and once again kick Intels butt. The pendulum always swings back and forth, back and forth... |
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