Will the AMD 64 bit stategy beat Intel

daveirl

This post has been deleted.

Gerry

This question concerns only the high end server market. Itanium will have nothing to do with the home market at all, since it won't run existing software, and will be very expensive to make. If amd's hammer line does well enough to threaten intel, they will build x86 - 64 extensions into their own x86 chips, but they won't do this unless forced because this would put their own chips competing against each other.

As far as the "big iron" high end server market goes, well there aren't any performance numbers on the hammer yet, amd's a0 stepping samples are only 800mhz. The Itanium II ( McKinley ) was launched last week, and seems to be able to trounce everything in the specFP benchmark, including ibm's latest power4 design. The current expectations are though that the hammer will be able to hold its own when it comes out.

In this market, amd do have the advantage of easy support for their chip, but intel have massive clout, and are greatly experience at writing compilers to wring the most out of their chips. Still, people will have to port to EPIC, and so there will be a limited amount of software available for it.

marauder

since it won't run existing software

Gerry,
I think an important clarification here is that the ITANIUM II does not NATIVELY run 32 Bit code but WILL RUN IT. Obviously there is a performance penalty and this is AMDs selling point....

Gerry

Erm, nobody will use that feature, since it is so slow in emulation. Its more than just a major performance penalty, it crawls on 32 bit code. Emulation will be used for running non-cpu intensive programs, but not for server applications.

astrofool

as gerry said, the initial itaniums were at 486/pentium75 level when running 32bit code

daveirl

This post has been deleted.

Gerry

Originally posted by Gerry
If amd's hammer line does well enough to threaten intel, they will build x86 - 64 extensions into their own x86 chips, but they won't do this unless forced because this would put their own chips competing against each other.

Sorry, I should have stated "threaten intel in the home market". As I mention there, intel can integrate x86-64 into their x86 chips ( the p4 design ). It can be done very easily, and does not take up much space on the die. But they will only do it if clawhammer is beating xeon on the home desktop or in workstations, because an x86 - 64 xeon would threaten the performance of itanium II/deerfield, have a much better price/performance ratio, the trusted intel name, and the advantage of easy porting.

JustHalf

Home users won't need 64-bit computing for 5 years at least.

Workstation users will need it much sooner.

daveirl

This post has been deleted.

Hairy Homer

Not a chance. AMD is a piss ant company and never forget it.

Why do they get such good press? Because good technology journalists are in short supply, and many of those who write for American online publications are believers in fairy tales.

In their world, Intel is the wicked ogre with all the money and AMD is the poor raggedy arsed peasant with the widowed mother who might just be able to steal Intel's golden goose and chop down its beanstalk.

Fact: AMD is now about one seventh the size of Intel, up from one tenth the size a few years ago.

Fact: AMD has consistently managed to grab a fair sized chunk of the consumer PC market, one which Intel leaves to them by cutting the prices of its most mature chips to peanuts while continuing to screw the market for professional and server systems. This sends AMD's fan club 'plucky old AMD- tweaking Intel's nose again' into transports of delight but does very little for AMD's bottom line. How many PC makers are making money in the consumer PC market? Wasn't that the one that Gateway played so strenuosly in? Look what happened to them? And to Siemens Nixdorf? And to AST, Mitsubishi/Apricot, Wang, Olivetti and God knows how many others.

Fact: AMD has had one year making a profit since 1995 —as far back as my records go. That was in 2000 and was largely attributable to selling off subsidiaries.

Fact: Success and failure are relative terms. AMD wins sales to drowning PC companies. Hooray!!!

Intel makes a mere billion dollars profit in a quarter and it's bad news. Quick! Sack a few thousand people!!!

AMD has built (I think) one new fab in the past five years. In Germany. This helped it to make money for the first time in a decade before Intel stirred itself. Intel is throwing up capacity all over the world, not least in Leixlip, to drive down the price of processors and grind AMD into the dirt.

As Andy Grove once said: Amd's last original thought was to copy Intel. And they can't do that in sufficient numbers to dent Intel the least little bit. Steer well clear of AMD-powered machines. Unless you want a piece of cheap rubbish that you can discard with all the remorse you would feel at chucking a dried up biro into the bin.

_CreeD_

LMAO Homer, you're funny (Just way too much to bother going into this early, and I'm not going to get into what would inevitably be a pointless oppinion-war after seeing that style of pointless rant....LMAO should suffice).

In regards to the actual topic I think Intel will still be greater in the server market. But AMD will continue to grow in the desktop area (How long will it be before 64 bit server applications start having optional 64 bit clients? That's how I see 64 bit trickling down to the desktop at first, and AMD will be in pole position for Hybrid workstations).

Hairy Homer

3/4??1/2±ti]Originally posted by _CreeD_ [/i]

In regards to the actual topic I think Intel will still be greater in the server market. But AMD will continue to grow in the desktop area (How long will it be before 64 bit server applications start having optional 64 bit clients? That's how I see 64 bit trickling down to the desktop at first, and AMD will be in pole position for Hybrid workstations). [/QUOTE]

The original question was would AMD's strategy beat Intel's? The short answer is no.

AMD doesn't have the manufacturing muscle to compete with Intel.
It doesn't have the financial muscle to do much about it. (Go read their balance sheets. They're readily available)
The cobblers in the Wired article about 64bit processors remaining compatible with old x86 code is a red herring. It's my understanding (I run Windows 2000 at home and Macintosh in the office) that if you run the Windows XP operating system you can't run old DOS games anyway so that's a software rather than a hardware issue.
AMD is being forced by Intel to compete only in the cheapest area of the market-consumer desktops. That's good for the entry-level customer but at the end of the day it's only a flea bite for Intel and it doesn't do AMD much good financially.

Read the history between the two companies. AMD have a manic missionary zeal to compete with Intel in the processor market, born of Intel shafting them out of a long-standing co-operation deal in the mid 80s. AMD's chief at the time, Colonel Sanders, has retained this obsession with having to compete with the Great Satan at all costs.

Here's a long shot: With Sanders' departure, AMD will sooner or later realise that bankrupting itself to fuel this obsessive competition with Intel that it cannot possibly win is bad for business and it will pull out of the microprocessor market, or at least the PC CPU segment, altogether.

Want to give me odds on it?

Gerry

ARgh, lost my post in the void.

Homer, you are mostly on the ball with your observations about the market, in your last post but your technical pronouncements are way off. In your first post you describe amd chips as rubbish. Not true, but a good indication of your ignorance. The athlon is a more efficient design than the p4, but perhaps not quite as scalable. Intels manufacturing expertise is what has gotten it ahead.

You can't go round taking what andy grove says as gospel, the amd athlon design was far more original than intels designs when it came out. The athlon is a no-compromise design, which has led to it running hot etc, but the engineers were allowed to have their way. If the p4 was released the way it had been originally designed, it would have run much hotter, and had lower yields, but would have competed with the athlon on a clock for clock basis.

Windows 2000, and most apps written for it, are written in x86 32bit code, dos is mostly 16 bit. The x86 - 64 chips will run this x86 - 32 bit code no problem.

Hairy Homer

Originally posted by Gerry
ARgh, lost my post in the void.

Homer, you are mostly on the ball with your observations about the market,

Hairy Homer is never wrong.

in your last post but your technical pronouncements are way off. In your first post you describe amd chips as rubbish. Not true, but a good indication of your ignorance.

I did not say that. I said AMD was a piss ant company.

The athlon is a more efficient design than the p4, but perhaps not quite as scalable.

This may well be true. But so what? My point is that Intel has the manufacturing muscle to make so many of its inefficient poorly designed, heat generating gigachips that the law of diminishing returns will ensure that their products will blow everybody else's out of the market.

Intels manufacturing expertise is what has gotten it ahead.

Ah, you're agreeing with me. Good man!

You can't go round taking what andy grove says as gospel,

I don't. I merely quote as a fact that he said it. And I agree with him on this point. Not on everything, though. I'm not paranoid. And I've survived.

the amd athlon design was far more original than intels designs when it came out. The athlon is a no-compromise design, which has led to it running hot etc, but the engineers were allowed to have their way. If the p4 was released the way it had been originally designed, it would have run much hotter, and had lower yields, but would have competed with the athlon on a clock for clock basis.

All of which means diddly squat. The Alpha was a 'no-compromise' '64bit' 'pure RISC' 'no legacy artifacts' design. Ultra powerful. What happened to it? It's got a 'This architecture will self destruct as soon as we can persuade its current user base to migrate to Intel' sign on it.

Ditto for the sooper dooper PowerPC. 'Oh it's got fewer transistors. It 's a fraction of the size of the Pentium. Which means we can make it more economically than the Pentium.' (Yeah but with only three customers, you can't sell it more economically) 'It's a really clever design. It's got pipelines' So why are two of its customers (Apple and Bull) perenially in the **** and its other big user shifting its focus more and more away from computer hardware?

Windows 2000, and most apps written for it, are written in x86 32bit code, dos is mostly 16 bit. The x86 - 64 chips will run this x86 - 32 bit code no problem.

What are we arguing about here? I haven't said anything to contradict you on this matter. I believe, because I don't use Windows XP,. that you cannot run old DOS apps including games under this operating system. I think I read it somewhere. Is it true? My point being that that is a software issue, nothing to do with the hardware and therefore one of the main points of the originally quoted article was a red herring.

Gerry

Originally posted by Hairy Homer
. Steer well clear of AMD-powered machines. Unless you want a piece of cheap rubbish that you can discard with all the remorse you would feel at chucking a dried up biro into the bin.

quote:

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in your last post but your technical pronouncements are way off. In your first post you describe amd chips as rubbish. Not true, but a good indication of your ignorance.

---

I did not say that. I said AMD was a piss ant company.

You seemed to contradict yourself there.

Originally posted by Hairy Homer
.
As Andy Grove once said: Amd's last original thought was to copy Intel

I then stated the athlon is an original design, not a copy. If anything, it borrows more from alpha, but it doesn't have the alpha handicap of requiring alpha code.

You then say "That doesn't matter diddly squat". Hmm. Perhaps you should stick to comments about the marketplace, since you seem to know plenty about that.

Alpha's new chips will still be launched, you are quite correct about the intel enforced migration though.

The point about windows 16bit dos apps not running under 2k/xp is indeed a software issue.

x86 - 32 bit software not running on itanium is due to the hardware, and so is completely different.

I'm fully with you on the powerpc issue, apple and motorola have really dropped the ball on that one. The fastest duel mac now gets thrashed by a single p4 in photoshop and 3d rendering. And this comes at a time when apple actually have a decent os to offer. However, they can't go selling OS X for x86, because then apple would have lost their "difference" and would disappear completely.

Hairy Homer

---

Originally posted by Hairy Homer
. Steer well clear of AMD-powered machines. Unless you want a piece of cheap rubbish that you can discard with all the remorse you would feel at chucking a dried up biro into the bin.

---

in your last post but your technical pronouncements are way off. In your first post you describe amd chips as rubbish. Not true, but a good indication of your ignorance.

---

I did not say that. I said AMD was a piss ant company.

---

You seemed to contradict yourself there.

No contradiction at all, although I will admit that the point is a subtle one. I said that machines powered by AMD chips were cheap rubbish. Which they are. They're priced accordingly and aimed at the fag end of the market. Why? Because none of the computer makers see AMD as being a supplier of top-end chips, for several reasons which might take us off at a tangent.

Show me one AMD-powered machine that outperformed all of its Intel-powered contemporaries (either desktops or notebooks) and I'll eat it.

I then stated the athlon is an original design, not a copy. If anything, it borrows more from alpha, but it doesn't have the alpha handicap of requiring alpha code.

Now Gerry. In one sense all of AMD's processors (since the 80286 anyway) are of original design. They had to be so as not to infringe Intel patents and copyright. The point is, the basic design premise was that they had to run native Intel binaries. So in that sense they were, and are, copies of Intel. Or copies of the Intel strategy of supplying PC engines anyway. Which is what, I suspect, Grove meant.

The only reason the Athlon is so called is because Intel trademarked words like Pentium and Itanium because they weren't allowed to trademark numbers like 586 and 686. Otherwise AMD would have named its chips exactly the same as their Intel counterparts, like they did with 386 and 486.

You then say "That doesn't matter diddly squat".

[

It doesn't. Look at Intel's financials. Look at AMD's. For the past 10 years. Find me an AMD-powered machine that competes with the fastest Intel-based machine from Dell, or HP or IBM. The original question was 'could AMD beat Intel'? Answer: nope.

Alpha's new chips will still be launched, you are quite correct about the intel enforced migration though.

How many new customers do you think The New HP is going to attract to that architecture? They have to let the existing ones down gently though. Bit like how do you migrate people away from mainframes.




Pleasure locking horns with you. :-)

Gerry

Erm, less of the patronising, please.

I know they are all x86 designs. I'm well aware of the backwards compatibility, and the problems it brings, ( clunky cisc ISA, flat fpu stack, etc ).
I'm talking about originality within the constrictions of x86, and there is plenty of this if you are interested in chip design.
The p6, ( and p4/netburst ) architecture is only cisc on the outside, it decodes these into risc and is purely risc on the inside, same with the athlon except it has better instruction decoding, and basically is able to keep itself busy with work much better than the p6 line.

You were talking about originality in terms of intel coming up with x86 in the first place, and amd copying it, which is 100% true, amd have no originality in terms of overall architecture. So its just a misunderstanding.

About amd machines being rubbish, fair enough, most of the off the shelf systems are. However the point I was trying to make was that having an amd chip in the machine doesn't definitely mean the machine is rubbish.

_CreeD_

Should have just left it at 'LMAO'.
When Attack of The Quotes rears it's head the thread's already usually lost.

'Amd doesn't outperform contemporary P4 systems?
Systems are rubbish?
RISC/CISC/Originality/Pentiums Actually decoding CISC to RISC for most operations.'

Hmmm, would you buy a used car off this man? Definitely not a PC anyway. If that's your experience fair enough, the fact that it runs completely contrary to at least 90% of other folks who've built/used both shoudln't deter you from it.

I said I wasn't going to get into this didn't I? Damn, need more coffee.

Hairy Homer

Originally posted by Gerry
Erm, less of the patronising, please.

Wasn't meant to be patronising, Gerry. It's hard to convey mood through the sterile medium that is the Web, so sometimes people can mistake enthusiasm for vehemence and take offence where none was intended.

I can call you a git if you prefer. :-)

Hairy Homer

Originally posted by _CreeD_

Hmmm, would you buy a used car off this man? Definitely not a PC anyway.

I would be loath to buy a used PC off anyone. Not much value in that, with Pentium 4's costing less than a grand.

Never mind the quote war: Answer the original question and one other.

1) Do you think AMD's strategy will beat Intel?

2) I've got 20 euro says AMD will withdraw from the CPU market within three years. Will you give me odds on it?

Gerry

Well creed, I don't normally use quotes, in fact I hate quote wars also. But it seemed that when I replied without quoting which sections my points referred to, I was ignored.

To answer homers questions, no I don't think AMD's strategy will beat intel, I think amd will come back into the high end of the home market, definitely into workstations, but will probably not gain much ground in the server market at all. I think they will be able to co-exist for the forseeable future. So the odds would be extremely high.

netman

not trying to step on anyone's toes, but lets not forget that a cpu is just a small part of a computer, whether it's a workstation or a server.

intel has been in the server and workstation market for ages. and amd has let other companies produce chipsets for their processors, most of which are unreliable to say the least. combine that with the fact that amd's own chipsets were underperformers with very few features and you quickly realize that they're going to have a huge problem penetrating the server market.

Gerry

Hmm, not sure exactly what you mean by features on a chipset. The only features on a chipset corporates are concerned with are scalability and stability, ultimate performance per cpu is not a concern. Amd's chipsets are actually very good stability wise, and the hammer chipsets scale extremely well to 2 cpu's, and better to 4 cpu's than intels do. Amd's problem is lack of experience and proven stability, they will be countering that with low price, the problem is that only small businesses are really concerned with that. Software and maintainence costs make up most of the cost for big business.

_CreeD_

This is very true.
We're replacing all our systems world wide with P4's. Not what any of the 'techy' guys wanted but mgt. thought processes went summat like 'we know intel - intel good. - pretty adds - change bad'.Its the same mentality that keeps most large businesses coming back to underpowerd and overpriced 'servers' for the sake of a known brand.