AMD recently said that they’d be starting onto the 32nm track, beginning production around the fourth quarter of 2010. Intel, on the other hand, has already demonstrated some of its prototypes and will be rolling these babies out to the public come the fourth quarter of– ah– this year. AMD isn’t manufacturing these chips, however, and is instead laying the load on the newborn Foundry Company, which was created with the help of AMD out of ATI.
Hey hey…
> Perhaps one day AMD will be able to come up with
> something new for a change?
… I can still remember the glory days of the birth of the amd64 architecture and hypertransport from 5-6 years ago! Those two AMD did first. But, fine… on the process side of things AMD has always been playing catchup.
AMD wasn’t the sole developer of Hypertransport. Apple and IBM were big feet on that tree.
What a stupid summary.
“As usual, Intel takes the lead and AMD obediently follows six to twelve months later. Perhaps one day AMD will be able to come up with something new for a change?”
Are you joking? AMD has mainly been behind in terms of foundry and process but has otherwise often been at the forefront technologically.
Please don’t say “that is what I was talking about” because it is not what you were suggesting. I’m not particularly a fan of AMD, I just buy what is best from price/performance perspective. I’m just saying the summary is stupid.
What I was saying is that, these days, anyway, AMD has followed in Intel’s footsteps – not that AMD’s products are inferior to Intel’s. Intel does it first. AMD does it cheaper, later. I’m an AMD fan myself because I can generally afford it better than Intel. But there’s no denying that AMD generally does what Intel did six months to a year ago. Perhaps AMD thought of it first and have plenty of plans for the future that we can’t even imagine, but from a consumer’s point of view, they lag behind.
What you are saying is just wrong. AMD has *led* Intel several times “in recent years”. When did intel integrate a memory controller??? Oh was it last month? I believe AMD had this and many other innovations years ago. AMD follows on process and it isn’t for lack of vision, it is for lack of money. For IDMs moving forward to new processes is insanely expensive and only a few companies can stay at the cutting edge, Intel being of of them. Another one is TSMC who only stays there by dealing in huge volumes. AMD just doesn’t have the market share to produce the money to produce the new fabs.
Which is why they’re gradually moving to become fabless. IMHO the new spin off company should merge with TSMC and bring even larger economies of scale which should give this new ‘chipzilla’ enough grunt to match and over take when it comes to fabrication technologies.
AMD has always been able to bring together the technology (I remember back when the original Athlon was announced) – the problem has always been the fabrication side; either they were behind in technology or they didn’t have the capacity to keep up with demand. Push the manufacturing off to an organisation that specialises in it and focus on the development side. It would free up a massive amount of money and thus can be used to really focus on design and technology rather than the production side.
Edited 2009-03-01 12:18 UTC
Keep in mind that it was less than three years ago that Intel released the Core 2 series of processors and took the crown from AMD. Prior to that, AMD’s Athlon chips consistently destroyed the NetBurst based Pentium 4 in terms of performance, heat, power consumption, and price.
Intel is winning right now because they’re playing the fab game and AMD simply can’t keep up. But this is limited by processes and material sciences and will come to a stop fairly soon. The focus will return to chip design where AMD will have a chance to pull themselves back to the top.
And let’s hope they do, because another round of competition will be a win for us all.
Ugghh. People have such a short memory.
A. AMD was the first to introduce 64bit extension in an x86 CPU. (AKA AMD64 or x86_64.). If it was up to Intel you’d be using Itanium right now.
B. AMD was the first to introduce non-shared bus design in an x86 CPU. (The original Athlon; most notably the AthlonMP series.)
C. AMD was also the first to introduce on-die memory controller in an x86 CPU. Again, 5 years later, Intel has finally caught up. (Nehalem/Core 7i)
D. AMD was the first to introduce NUMA architecture in an x86 CPU. (Opteron/Athlon64). Intel has yet to fully caught up. (Core 7i/EP will be released later this month; Nehalem MP will be released in Q3).
E. AMD was the first one to introduce single die dual core CPU and the first to introduce single die quad core CPUs. As always, the Core 7i was the first one to achieve the same.
… and I can continue.
Granted, the Core 7i is the best single-socket-CPU right now. But many of the ideas (minus SMT) that make it so great, came from AMD. (Or actually from Alpha, but that’s another matter altogether.)
– Gilboa
Might I add, Intel paid Compaq [DEC at the time] $1 Billion to settle patent infringements up the wazzu regarding the thievery of the Alpha architecture.
There once was a time when CPU wars existed and they were a blast to follow.
Actually, if I can buy a 4 core CPU for 199$, there’s one hell of CPU war going on – just a different type of war.
People tend to forget that 15 years ago, we paid 999$ for a 60Mhz, single core Pentium I.
Never the less, I do agree that Intel vs. AMD is somewhat less interesting CPU-design-wise.
– Gilboa
Unless you’re talking about production, AMD has been leading the show for years. However, their manufacturing plants have not been as proficient as Intel’s and, since they have fewer of them, they haven’t been able to leave Intel in the dust like they should have years ago.
The Nehalem architecture is Intel’s version of AMD’s Hypertransport / true multicore platform that is now several years old. And despite what you may see on the web, AMD had been more power-efficient than Intel for a while.
Intel is retaking ALL those leads except, possibly, price / performance.
But can’t we mod down the article like we do to the comments…
I remember when AMD was ahead of intel in production… You know what happened? AMD got a good kick to the head. Show your cards too early causes problems. I can remember mistakes made first by intel opened up the AMD64 64bit to kick intel for a round intill production was changed.
And we all know that AMD at some point will provide a chip that is cooler and more efficient than intel at some stage. I hope they can bring out some more 45W TDP proc’s that consumers can buy. AMD need to be the first to bring out the 6-8 core proc and surprise intel.
I think differently.
AMD needs to integrate the northbridge, southbridge and 3D graphic chips into the CPU, getting closer to the “system on a chip” design.
With today’s desktop needs, faster/more cores are no longer the number one priorities. Less power consumption/decent speed for the overall system is much more important.
At a time when an Intel Atom consumes 5W TDP, but a northbridge chip consumes 20W, some paradigms have to be shifted.
We’re past the point where one size fits all, so actually both of you are right and it depends on the application which processor or system-on-chip you choose.
For my development server/workstation I’d like to have as many cores, as much memory and hard drive capacity and speed as I could reasonably afford. For a mobile computing device such as a (mini)notebook I could live with much less computing power.
As a matter of fact I’m using my current notebook with an Intel Pentium IV at 2 GHz containing 512 MB of RAM and 60 GB hard drive to connect to my development “server” with an AMD Phenom Q9650, 8 GB of RAM and terabytes of hard drive space. The combination works fine so it’s not “either/or” anymore, it’s “both/and”.
As far as I know, AMD were the first to do the following:
* Have a 64 bit processor
* Have more then one core on a single die (the first intel duel cores were two single cores stuck together). AMD were also the first to fit 4 cores on 1 die (albeit a flawed chip)
* Integrate the memory controller into the CPU
Seems that intel do all of those things now…
“Perhaps one day AMD will be able to come up with something new for a change?”
Intel just happens to have a lot more money ,manpower & marketshare .
Has Intel come up with any new great ideas ?
They seem to be following in a big part AMD’s design lead & using their far greater rescources ,to be able to move to smaller manufacturing sizes and technologies earlier .
I don’t know how old the idea of CPU-Graphics merging is ,but I heard it first from AMD ,although could be that Intel has the power to bring it to market first .
Comparing the PC space with embedded ,one could think that embedded are generally ahead ,in comparision to either of the two .
I remember a few years ago seeing company financial figures showing Intel about 10x bigger than AMD (Intel has a massive 6 billion dollar R&D budget!).
So it’s not surprising for AMD (“David”) to lag behind Intel (“Goliath”) in terms of foundary cycle (a notable feature in Intel’s framework is it’s foundry layout).
However, for it’s relatively much smaller size, AMD have done well in pushing the technology curve (e.g. quality math floating-point support, AMD64, hypertransport-based Opteron) that made the larger Intel look “flat-footed” (i.e. behind the curve, rather than leading the curve).
In essence, products from both camps “perform” and AMD should be commended for what they have achieved in view of the relative difference in company size/budget between Intel and AMD.
Having a more level playing field (i.e. a stronger AMD, reducing Intel’s monopoly) would be a good thing for the consumer as prices would be expected to be more competitive.