Slashdot Log In
Is AMD Dead Yet?
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Feb 25, 2008 03:24 AM
from the pining-for-the-fjords dept.
from the pining-for-the-fjords dept.
TheProcess writes "Back in February 2003, IBM predicted that AMD would be dead in 5 years (original article here), with IBM and Intel the only remaining players in the chip market. Well, 5 years have passed and AMD is still alive. However, its finances and stock price have taken a serious beating over the last year. AMD was once a darling in this community — the plucky, up-and-coming challenger to the Intel behemoth. Will AMD still be here in 5 years? Can they pose a credible competitive threat to Intel's dominance? Do they still have superior but unappreciated technology? Or are they finally old hat? Can they really recover?"
Related Stories
[+]
AMD To Shed 10% of Its Workforce 276 comments
stress_life writes "Recent rumors about AMD firing 5% of its workforce proved to be understated. AMD just announced that the company is going to deliver pink slips to 1600-1700 workers, or around 10% of its employees. AMD needs revenue of $2 billion per quarter, but Q1'08 is expected to come in around $1.5 billion. These firings have to be complete by Q3'08, the quarter by which Hector Ruiz promised to be profitable." We most recently discussed AMD's struggles in February.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Why did they buy ATI? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why did they buy ATI? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
It is all about the platform. (Score:5, Insightful)
They finally, now, have the platform.
Not just that - the difference between Intel is hubris vs economics. As nerds, WE have the responsibility to show people where they're wasting their money. If you're shelling out $6000 to get something bleeding-fucking-tomorrow-edge, yes, you want Intel. If you want something you can use for the next 3 years, but not top of the line (which most people don't need), then an AMD chip will cost you less than half as much as an equivalent-powered Intel.
My hope is that AMD continues to grow and gets their chips into lines from a few other commodity manufacturers. The best thing for the consumer would be two companies competing on approximately equal footing.
Parent
Re:It is all about the platform. (Score:5, Insightful)
the AMD based latitude 131L kicked the crap out of the 620 laptop in performance, so we went that route for the whole company. we ended up saving money as well as the AMD laptops were cheaper. the ONLY gripe was that the 620 still had pcmcia and the 131L was new tech and used the Expresscard. so several sales people were without cellular internet for a while until we got expresscard modems to replace the pcmcia modems. This was a year ago and we still are happy with the decision.
The only problem is it's hard to find high end servers that are AMD. All the Intel Dell servers are robust and real server hardware, the amd versions are glorified PC's. I want a 4 processor Dual Core server grade system to replace our aging 8 processor SQL server Only recently did Dell release a quad dual core opteron server platform. I have yet to inspect it to see if it's full server grade hardware though.
Parent
Re:It is all about the platform. (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:It is all about the platform. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Why did they buy ATI? (Score:5, Interesting)
What they originally wanted to do was merge with nVidia, it made sense at the time because nVidia was producing the best chipset for AMD CPUs. Anyway the communications between the 2 companies went sour, so AMD, still hot to do something picked the number 2 choice, ATI.
Now a merger between nVidia and AMD would have produced a powerful company. nVida has 3DFX tech, Telsa, chipsets and the 2 companies had already done a lot of joint work on the original X-BOX design (intel was a late entry). AMD brought CPU tech, flash and some other tech into the mix. However it was not meant to be.
So buying ATI was just a plan B, and not really optimal.
The Intel Core architechture is impressive. It's powerful enough over the Athlon that they can take shortcuts. Gives them more headroom for later, whereas the Athlon is reaching its maximum efficiency of instructions per clock so they have to be more thoughtful with their engineering.
Parent
For me, this story crossed a line. ATI excellence. (Score:5, Interesting)
I would like to see a statement added at the end of this Slashdot story that KDawson took no money for this story, and that no one at Slashdot or its parent company took money or will benefit from a drop in price of AMD stock. I'm not accusing anyone of anything; I am just concerned that this story is worded in a way that seems sleazy and possibly fraudulent to me.
Second, in response to the parent comment. ATI is the premier video CPU provider now. nVidia is so lame that there is an entire web site devoted to fixing nVidia driver issues: LaptopVideo2Go [laptopvideo2go.com]. I spent hours trying to get one of my laptops, which has an nVidia chip, to work correctly with an external monitor. It works well now, but I could never have done the work without the help of LaptopVideo2Go.
Third, Intel is suffering from very bad management. For example, see the comment [slashdot.org] I posted to an earlier Slashdot story, responding to someone saying, "Intel's behavior regarding the OLPC is reprehensible."
Fourth, AMD seems to be the more technologically dedicated company. Intel has a history of dumb mistakes. For example, see this December 2000 article about the Pentium 4, which calls Intel "Chipzilla": Pentium 4 Linux problem all Chipzilla's fault, apparently [theregister.co.uk]. Quote: "Intel... failed
I seem to remember that the entire Pentium 4 architecture was abandoned in favor of the Pentium 4 Mobile architecture, which is what Intel is shipping now.
Both AMD and Intel make VERY sophisticated processors. It's amazing that a product that is so tiny it is affected by quantum physics is cheap enough for everyone to own. When one is temporarily ahead, it is simply silly to say that the other is dying.
Stock prices are often affected by hysteria. This is especially true of prices of technical stocks, which are often owned by people who don't really understand the technology of the company they partly own.
Parent
Intel mistakes: CPU development is VERY difficult. (Score:5, Interesting)
"Finally, the thermal problems were so severe, Intel decided to abandon the Prescott architecture altogether, and attempts to roll out a 4 GHz part were abandoned, as a waste of internal resources."
"The original successor to the Pentium 4 was Tejas, which was scheduled for an early-mid-2005 release. However, it was cancelled a few months after the release of Prescott due to extremely high power consumption (a 2.8 GHz Tejas consumed 150 W of power..."
Parent
Re:Intel mistakes: Lack of competition (Score:5, Insightful)
When the competitive marketplace isn't driving you, you have to drive yourself. Once that starts to happen, the directions can become bizarre, with Itanium and Netburst being to very good examples.
Itanium: The problem Itanium was designed to handle was cloning. First and foremost, they sewed up the I.P. so that it was not subject to any existing cross-licensing agreements. Second, the architecture was sufficiently different that they were outside of the realm of existing art ahd cross-licensing, so their I.P. was "strong." Notice that I haven't said a word yet about performance, cost, or any of that normal stuff. When mere technical and marketplace concerns are that low in the priority schemes, guess what happens.
Netburst: It seemed like someone in marketing got overly focused on clockspeed as the Ultimate Metric. The rest falls from there.
The reality is that ANY corporate product, will turn to junk without a competitive marketplace to keep it focused on delivering value to customers. Once competition is gone from a specific marketplace, the company will either focus its development budget in other areas where it needs to respond to competition, or it's development will be driven by motivations internal to the company, that are likely irrelevant or even negative to customers
Parent
Links: Intel stock (Score:5, Informative)
See also this January 16, 2008 Bloomberg story: U.S. Stocks Fall on Intel Forecast, Extending Global Tumble [bloomberg.com].
Quote: "Intel, the world's largest computer-chip maker, tumbled the most in five years in Nasdaq Stock Market trading after saying first-quarter sales will be as much as 6.9 percent below analysts' estimates."
Parent
Shorting AMD stock: NASDAQ figures (Score:5, Interesting)
Often a company's stock price reflects market manipulation rather than any sensible estimate of the true value of the company. This Slashdot story is very likely to drive the price down, as short sellers want. Check the price after the market opens.
When AMD integrates ATI video with AMD CPUs, the resulting combination is likely to be very competitive. AMDs technical prospects seem good to me, although I have not done a thorough analysis. Remember that we are no longer in a CPU speed race; CPUs are fast enough now for the average user.
Parent
Re:Shorting AMD stock: NASDAQ figures (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, if the *only* things you are doing with your PC are looking at web pages and "doing email" (as some put it), or "office work", then our current PC's are fine. Of course, the same was true of the computers at the time I was quoted in the paper, too. I want to do *more* and I'm not alone.
Just look back to '93, then compare that with what we can do now. Now, try to imagine what we could be doing in another 14 years...
Parent
Re:For me, this story crossed a line. ATI excellen (Score:5, Informative)
now, why is it down? well, look at their earnings. they have done pitiful. turns out in a slugout pricewar, intel can stay profitable while AMD is on the ropes. last year they lost money and continue to show no signs of recovering from their tech deficit they have again built against Intel. Now adays, the fastest AMD chip not on the market yet is slower than what intel already has at full production.
FYI: they last 166 million dollars last year. I'm not sure why this looks like manipulation as compared to just poor performance by the company without much of an end in sight.
oh, and my disclaimer: following my advice will hurt my long position in AMD.
Parent
Re:Why did they buy ATI? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Why did they buy ATI? (Score:5, Interesting)
When you are designing architectures for 7 or so years out, you need a powerful crystal ball, but no such thing exists. AMD just guessed wrong about the nature of future applications. Intel guessed wrong with the Itanium also. Maybe the common thread is you have to fit existing apps instead of the other way around. But, betting against app change has risk also.
Perhaps AMD should focus on the low end rather than guess what the high-end app technology of the future will look like. This may be a better bet for them because they cannot absorb the kinds of gambles that Intel can, being a smaller company. Thus, if they focus on the low-end, they don't have to predict the future of the high-end apps, reducing their risk. They just have to make existing apps run faster and/or cheaper. This would essentially force Intel to be the pioneer (of app change guessing) and take the arrows so that AMD doesn't have to. Of course there are the arrows of internal technology changes, but at least having to guess what *apps* of the future will be like is out of their court.
Parent
The problem is (Score:5, Insightful)
So it can be hard to try and just compete on the low end of things, since you can't charge as much, and often the people doing the high end things get killer low end products as a side effect.
This is something companies have found out with graphics cards. There have been a number of companies who have tried to compete with nVidia and ATi in the lower end market. Their idea is that while they don't have the R&D to produce a top flight graphics card, that's ok because most people don't buy one of those anyhow. They'll make midrange and lower end cards and sell those.
Great idea, it seems, until you consider that ATi and nVidia get great midrange cards as a side effect of their high end cards. Graphics cards are highly parallel beasts so all they do to make a lower end card is cut some of the units off, put on less memory, maybe clock it down a bit to improve yields and they are good to go. An 8800 GTX and an 8600 GT are the same beast at heart. The 8600 basically just has 25% the number of shader units the 8800 does, and other things like a smaller memory bus. End result is nVidia has and extremely fast $100 card that cost them very little in terms of R&D that wasn't already done for their high end card.
So the companies that have tried have thus far met with little success. Their offerings just haven't been able to compete with the big boys and it is no surprise. You can pour a lot more in to R&D when you are going to sell graphics cards at $500+ and then make use of that very same technology in midrange and low end cards.
Parent
Re:Why did they buy ATI? (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is that the low end is probablly only a couple of years behind the high end. So if you try and stick to the low end you still have to design architectures 5 years or so out and each low end CPU makes far less profit than each high end CPU so you find it even harder to cover those R&D costs.
Parent
Re:Why did they buy ATI? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Why did they buy ATI? (Score:5, Informative)
Internet memes aside, Nehalem has been confirmed to have GPU cores glued together in the same package as the CPU. That means you could have a Nehalem chip with an Intel X4500 (or even the memory controller) in one package. Considering Intel is currently the largest producer of graphics processors and seems to be more capable of developing and launching such technologies than relatively-small AMD, I would not be surprised in the least if Intel's technology beats out AMDs Fusion technology to the market.
Parent
Re:Why did they buy ATI? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Why did they buy ATI? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Why did they buy ATI? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
AMD did it to thsemelf (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:AMD did it to themselves (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:AMD did it to themselves (Score:5, Informative)
Hewlett-Packard
IBM
Infineon
Intel Corporation
Lenovo Holdings Limited
Microsoft
Sun Microsystems, Inc
Parent
Re:AMD did it to themselves (Score:5, Funny)
For full disclosure, I should add that last I checked was twenty years ago.
Parent
So wrong it's harmful (Score:5, Insightful)
2) You're assuming that your ISP is going to allow you to connect without 'trusted' software running.
TCPA is designed to "secure" whole networks of computers for the trusted computing group, not just your own device(as if *anything* you own is going to actually be your own). Unless you are solidly sure that you'll always be able to connect to a 'non-trusted' network, this is fine. But for the rest of us, this stuff is *not* our friend.
Parent
Re:Wrong marketing did them in, clock *does* matte (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not going to question your personal experience as the others did. It's certainly believable that there's an application where the AMD processor performs 1/4th the speed of an Intel one (and vice versa).
I just want to point out that if the AMD processor actually was 2200 MHz, then you still could have found that the application that interests you performed at 1/4th the speed on that processor than the equivalent Intel one. Meaning that without the performance modeling numbers, you still would have found the equivalent "numbers" to result in an invalid comparison.
Clock frequency is not an automatic benefit for number crunching. If you don't change the architecture, then obviously yes a faster clock helps. But you don't go from a 1600 MHz chip to a 2200 MHz chip in the same time period without changing architectures. Performance is Clock Frequency * Insructions per Cycle, and a wide machine (many execution units) with low memory latency is going to tend to have higher IPC. However, the IPC value varies wildly by benchmark, and a benchmark that reveals certain deficiencies or strengths of the architecture may fall well outside normal, as was your case.
AMDs "modelhertz" or "markethertz" numbers became strained when the new generation of Intel products came out, but for most of the life of the Pentium 4 they were extremely generous to Intel's architecture. It's not just office applications -- go check benchmarks on Tom's, HardOCP, Ace's Hardware, and you'll see the AMD processor outperforming in a wide variety of benchmarks from games to high-performance scientific computing (the true number-crunching benchmarks), even including some media encoding benchmarks though Intel was very strong there and generally dominated.
My point is that if what you're looking for is a singular number by which to compare performance, then there is no "truth" to be stretched. MHz is an actual measurable number, true, but to equate that number with performance is "stretching the truth" to a greater extent than taking an aggregate of a wide variety of benchmark scores and relating that to performance. Marketroids can and do manipulate which benchmarks are chosen, but at least the resulting number means something regarding the performance of those benchmarks. MHz, by itself, means essentially nothing for a cross-architecture comparison.
So next time if you want to get the truth about performance, then the truth is that you have to measure the performance of the application you personally care about on the two processors in question. You can get an idea from reading reviews with benchmarks and looking at the results of similar applications (i.e. media encoding, or games, or what have you), but even that won't get you the real picture.
Parent
Don't think so. (Score:4, Funny)
For instance the AMD Athlon X2 64-bit dual core chip i use, is quieter, less power hungry and more powerful than its intel-equivalent.
I have always thought of Intel chips as a short, well-built sprinter, whose ting pegs can carry him over a short distance quickly but in the longer haul (marathon), it can keep up only by downing copious amounts of glucose fluids and sweats a lot.
AMD is a picture of a tall (6.5 feet), lean, kenyan man, whose stamina, endurance make him take the 15 mile marathon easily without breaking a sweat.
AMD would be either bought over by IBM or even by Microsoft.
Re:Don't think so. (Score:5, Interesting)
Now the situation is different:
-Since the introduction of the Core 2 Duo Intel has the better architecture (minus memory controller though).
-Intel is smoking the rest of the industry with 45nm high-k/metal gate in therms of process technology. Compared to what has been published by IBM about their hkmg technology IBM/AMD has a long way to go to catch up.
And let me say this: Intels technology is extremely clever, they did one fundamentally different thing (gate first) against conventional wisdom which took them onto an entirely different path. Getting the fundamental flaws out of this approach enables a flurry of additional optimizations that IBM/AMD will not be able to apply in their technology. (full metal gates, not using any exotic materials for the gate)
The only disadvantage for intel could be higher cost/lower yield associated with the hkmg process. However they have the benefit of scale (in therms of volume) on their side. In addition they went go through the painful hkmg transition two years earlier and hence things will be much easier for them at the 32nm node. IBM/AMD will be in even more trouble than they are now. I predict that Intel will have a very quick 32nm ramp around the time IBM/AMD managed to get their 45nm hkmg process to manufacturable yield.
Parent
Re:Don't think so. (Score:5, Funny)
Some kind of Microsoft-themed manga?
Parent
Re:Don't think so. (Score:5, Interesting)
I've used several AMD processors (couple of Durons and now an Athlon X2). I chose them on a value for money basis. I never buy the fastest chips that command a heavy price premium, so the arguments over who has the top chip of the moment are irrelevant to me. I considered an Intel for my current PC, but the price difference was minimal and I know the AMD-based chipsets a bit better so I knew it should work for me. I do like to support the underdog, but not if it exceeds my budget.
Even in the last few years I have met people who consider AMD to be inferior or less reliable than Intel chips. Intel's marketing millions must be doing something for them, but I find their jingle intensely annoying when it crops up in the middle of an ad.
Parent
Darling of the community! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Darling of the community! (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Of course AMD will survive. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Of course AMD will survive. (Score:5, Insightful)
Fixed that for you. Anyway, the mass market is where the money is. Pandering to gamers is more of a prestige thing, 90-something percent of the PC buyers don't care about that.
Parent
IBM habitually declares competion dead (Score:5, Informative)
Free Software friendly (Score:5, Interesting)
Does anyone have any detailed information on this? Perhaps the Free Software community can support AMD's openness by buying AMD hardware, *and letting them know this is the reason*.
Prediction made 2 months bef. the Opteron release (Score:5, Informative)
I inadvertently switched to Intel... (Score:5, Interesting)
Before I switched to using Macs, I would always build my own PC's from components, and I always chose an AMD processor (starting with the 450 MHz AMD K6-III).
Until Macs start coming with AMD chips, I doubt I'll buy another one any time soon.
"Is AMD Dead Yet?" (Score:5, Funny)
Not if I can help it... (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the offices was broken into lately, and the thieves bypassed the "wimpy" micro-ATX cases and stole big, heavy machines... which happened to be older, slower stuff.
Let's hope they don't die! (Score:5, Insightful)
In other news, IBM reported dead (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Apparently not (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Paernt is the liar (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Paernt is the liar (Score:5, Funny)
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
Parent
Re:Paernt is the liar (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Slow/quick end.... (Score:5, Funny)
I should like to take this opportunity to introduce you to a friend of mine.
The Paragraph break.
Parent