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Apple Considering Adopting AMD Processors for Upcoming Macs?
- Thread starter *LTD*
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It's OK. I NEVER know WTF Morphing Dragon is talking about.
As for AMD, never say never. My 3.5 year old desktop PC running XP has an Athlon 5600+ (i.e. wasn't exact their top chip at the time by a long shot) and a mere Nvidia 7900GS and plays DOA and Mass Effect 2 just fine. The things can't be too horrible. The same PC still encodes movies faster most of the time than my 1.5 year old MBP (both using Handbrake with the same settings).
If you meant "sad" or "dissatisfied," ya shoulda said it, and I would have agreed (with "sad," at least).
In any event, when AMD loses 78 million in the upcoming quarter, check back in with me and explain why it's a good thing and everything will be fine.
Buy a dictionary.
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I never said that AMD was not in a bad state, just that your use of absolute terms is rather, well... bad.
Buy a dictionary.
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I never said that AMD was not in a bad state, just that your use of absolute terms is rather, well... bad.
Yeah. See - I'm back to not understanding what point you are trying to make.
I think you are letting your emotions get in the way. Parting was obviously sad for you, but very rarely there is only one emotion present in an event. Otherwise mental therapy wouldn't exist.
'...always suck...' is a very subjective and emotionally filled term. If you had said, "AMD sucks now and probably will for a while" is more reflective of the truth.
Your attempts at psychoanalysis are both inappropriate and ineffctual.
AMD will always suck because it is set up so as to suck, and it has insufficient time left to remedy things Further, in AMDs very long history, it had only a single 3 year period of success. Having spent nearly its entire existence sucking, on a clear path to continue sucking, and with dwindling cash on hand and nothing left to sell to obtain one-time profits, I'd say "always suck" is accurate.
No one has stated a single factoid of objective evidence to explai why I'm wrong. I state facts about their stock, their design methodology, their inability to meet roadmaps, their quarterly losses, their loss of personel, their competitive environment. You recite only new-age psychobabble about my emotions.
Sorry, psychobabble aside, I 've not heard a single verifiable argument by you, just unverifiable blanket statements. And your definition of sucking is pretty broad. I can't see the how a cpu company offering a 10-15% less powerful product than the competition at a 40% better price sucks. I can't see how said company sucks when their competitors are screwing the whole mac and pc world with igfx that suck more than any competitors. And I can't see how amd sucks when their cpu and igfx combined in soon to come apu (even the first iteration) won't be matched by anything similar by intel.
i've been into computers since the 1990's and my first PC had an AMD chip. i still have a home built a64 3200 in the closet that only needs a hard drive to make it work. i've followed AMD for 15 years or so. he's exactly right.
the 1990's they made cheapo overclocked 486's.
the K5 wasn't too bad but the motherboard chipsets were made by companies like Via and their drivers sucked. i had one of those systems in the late 1990's and i had to reinstall Windows every 30-60 days. all the Intel systems we bought around that time worked OK. all the Intel systems i built were also very stable.
the Athlon64 was the best CPU a few years ago when compared to the crap that was P4. Intel's marketing ruled the company and they needed a design that could scale up the GHz. but it performed like crap and Athlons running at half the speed whipped it and were more power efficient. only thing that saved Intel was it's Israeli design team that made the Centrino
AMD had the first memory controller integrated on the CPU years ago and Intel is only doing it now.
Nvidia's nforce chipsets were awesome for their single chip design. the original xbox had the first version and Intel is only now copying it.
AMD made the x64 instruction set that is on all Intel CPU's. we it wasn't for that we'd be stuck in 32bit mode or with the crapola that is Itanium.
my Athlon 3200 has virtualization instructions on board, while Intel disabled it on most of their consumer CPU's.
of course all this happened between 2003 and 2007 or so. before and after AMD was the cheapo brand when Intel CPU's were expensive. now that Intel has an awesome manufacturing system they release their new and better CPU's at the same price, or so close it's not worth it to use AMD
Alent has it right.
And, by the way, I define suck as "has an unsustainably money-losing product line." AMD needs ASPs of >$100 on its CPUs to break even. Being 10-20% slower, and not competing at all in laptops and low power devices, is never again going to get them there. Intel wised up and dropped itanium, integrated a memory controller, and qpi. AMD has a competitor that's awake now. At the one time in its history when AMD didn't suck, intel was busy with its Merced nonsense. Now it's back on track, and it won't screw up like that again.
And, by the way, I define suck as "has an unsustainably money-losing product line." AMD needs ASPs of >$100 on its CPUs to break even. Being 10-20% slower, and not competing at all in laptops and low power devices, is never again going to get them there. Intel wised up and dropped itanium, integrated a memory controller, and qpi. AMD has a competitor that's awake now. At the one time in its history when AMD didn't suck, intel was busy with its Merced nonsense. Now it's back on track, and it won't screw up like that again.
On paper bulldozer is a lovely chip. Bulldozer was on the drawing board (people were even working on it) even back when I was there. All I can say is that by the time you see silicon for sale, it will be a lot less impressive, both in its own terms and when compared to what Intel will be offering. (Because I have no faith AMD knows how to actually design chips anymore). I don't really want to reveal what I know about Bulldozer from my time at AMD. I know less about bobcat. From what I can tell it's just the latest name for a project that had been kicking around since 2005 when we acquired new design teams in two new locations. None of these designers had any experience with design in the <10W range. I don't know any of the people currently working on bobcat, but given the price it is likely to sell for, it's not going to make AMD a lot of money (and it will be competing not only against Intel, but against numerous ARM variations).
Let the Intel hate begin
the only thing that pisses me off about Intel is them denying nVidia licensing to be able to develop chipsets for the i-series chips.
Other than that, I couldn't care less what chip is inside, provided the performance is good.
Sorry, but yours are just unverifiable blanket statements, from someone who pretend to be "an insider", and clearly is no more.
We don't really know about AMD's future ...
They have a roadmap.
Doesn't AMD also have to deal with the illegal crap Intel throws out. For example the threatening to deal shipments or bribing companies not to use AMD.
Also they have the case where Intel was cause putting lines of code in the compliler they supply that basically boils down to
If not Intel Then
Run slower.
I remember reading AMD proved that when they did an experment on one their CPUs and change the identifier to Intel and found out that it ran a lot faster.
I almost feel AMD get screwed from multiple ways. You got the stuff you listed about their problem plus Intel doing illegal crap to keep AMD from getting traction. You would think Intel would want to keep AMD healthy because if/when AMD goes under Intel will be under a much closer eye for being a monopoly.
AMD's biggest problem was that Intel beat them in manufacturing. AMD always had problems supplying customers with enough chips so everyone was scared to sign any kind of big deal with them. Intel has fabs all over the world, AMD used to have 2 or 3.
the killer blow was last year when Intel announced 32nm. they went 45nm last year and they usually use a process for a few years. Last year they said it was going to last a year and then they were going to 32nm. AMD had a lot of trouble going to 45nm, and Intel announced they were going to jump another generation.
i don't know about the compiler since a lot of software has been bench marked to be faster on AMD. i do know the spec something test that Intel uses in marketing is a special optimized version of Linux and pretty much BS like most benchmarks these days
the killer blow was last year when Intel announced 32nm. they went 45nm last year and they usually use a process for a few years. Last year they said it was going to last a year and then they were going to 32nm. AMD had a lot of trouble going to 45nm, and Intel announced they were going to jump another generation.
i don't know about the compiler since a lot of software has been bench marked to be faster on AMD. i do know the spec something test that Intel uses in marketing is a special optimized version of Linux and pretty much BS like most benchmarks these days
Sure, the playing field hasn't always been fair. But at the same time, in the lawsuit, papers from AMD that said even AMD's head of sales thought intel chips were better also came to light.
In any event, it doesn't matter why. The result is the same.
As for the accusation I am only making unverifiable statements, that is nonsense. I've referred repeatedly to things like stock price (once over $42), the lack of an on-going (as opposed to one-time) profit since 4Q06, the performance lead of AMD chips in the Athlon 64/Opteron days that has since evaporated, etc. All of these facts are completely verifiable, as are other facts that have been mentioned (AMD's financial performance prior to Athlon 64/Opteron, AMD's failure with K5 and the fact that it bought Nexgen which took over K6 and K8, and directed the development of K7), the exodus of key architects like Fred Weber, the current lack of an actual architect, the lack of cash on-hand, the sale of the fab business to raise money, the sale of the flash business to raise money, the desperation investments by arab sheiks, etc. Also, all verifiable facts. The ascendency of Atiq Raza who moved the headquarters from silicon valley to texas, gave away corporate secrets, and had to resign. In its 40 year history AMD has had about 3 good years. Easily proven facts. The future is not hard to predict based on all this PUBLIC evidence. I add my non-public knowledge, and it merely verifies what should be apparent to everyone already.
(Rodimus - this wasn't directed at you. Others accuse me of merely stating unverifiable opinions).
Of course. AMD's yields have always been terrible compared to Intel. Also, AMD has never been able to compete in the entire range (from workstation to laptop) meaning that big customers were unwilling to try us and risk pissing off Intel since they couldn't be sure AMD could pick up the slack.
I don't know. It happened before I left, and there was very little cross-engineering going on. What did happen is that management decided there SHOULD BE such cross-engineering ,which meant we had to stop hand-crafting our CPU designs and switch to an SoC design style. This results in giving up a lot of performance, chip area, and efficiency. The reason DEC Alphas were always much faster than anything else is they designed each transistor by hand. Intel and AMD had always done so at least for the critical parts of the chip. That changed before I left - they started to rely on synthesis tools, automatic place and route tools, etc. I had been in charge of our design flow in the years before I left, and I had tested these tools by asking the companies who sold them to design blocks (adders, multipliers, etc.) using their tools. I let them take as long as they wanted. They always came back to me with designs that were 20% bigger, and 20% slower than our hand-crafted designs, and which suffered from electromigration and other problems.
That is now how AMD designs chips. I'm sure it will turn out well for them [/sarcasm]
Oh I figured it was not aimed at me. I also agree that in the past few years AMD has sucked compared to intel and AMD has never really had good mobile chips.
I mostly was wondering what illegal stuff Intel has been doing to help stack the deck against AMD. Even take away the illegal stuff AMD chips right now suck. It really sucks because AMD had a huge advantage for years. Their chips were better, faster and cheaper than intel. Intel seem to have no clue how to do x86-64 and they more or less had to go with AMD design to pull it off and get the patents from AMD. Also AMD also kick intel ass for a while on the first multicore chips but all those plus AMD had over intel they let slip away from them.
I do fear for our futures because unless AMD can get itself back together Intel will go back to just being a sleep giant who puts out crap again like the p4 line. The only reason intel started making great stuff again was because of AMD athonlon line kicking their ass.
AMD was also the first to go multi-core. when i bought my Athlon64 3200 back in 2005 they had multi-core but i decided it wasn't worth the extra cost. the long term plan was to integrate graphics into the CPU die as a separate core.
Intel is going to beat them when they do it next year
the only reason for the p4 was that everyone thought GHz was the big number. the P3 couldn't scale the way the P4 design could scale so Intel gave people what they wanted
And that GHz crap was also Intel fault for pushing. They would of kept shoving the crap like the p4 down on us if it was not for AMD. At the time with the p4 cranking out over 3-3.5 Ghz stock you had AMD chips out kicking its but at less than 2Ghz. I do not remember the PPC speeds at the time or how they compared.
As I said I built my computer in summer of 2004. It has a 2Ghz Athlon64 3000+ chip it that was out preforming the 3.5Ghz P4s
Hell Intel drop the Pentium M line not long after that was keeping pace with the p4 well under 2Ghz marker. Pentium M was based on the P3 design.
It was not apple who killed the Ghz myth but it was AMD who pulled it off. It was much easier to directly compared 2 x86 chips running the same OS than a PPC chip.