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When did it go wrong for AMD?

O

O-P-M

Gawd
Joined
Apr 7, 2005
Messages
822
Last time I was into computers I had a very nice AMD64 3000+ Venice core and AMD was rulling the CPU market.

Then came the awesome Opteron 165, great overclocking dual cores.

AMD was killing Intel with the AMD64 compared to the Pentium D?

When did it go wrong?

Was it the Core2Duo's?
 
During the Athlon 64 era, intel bought off oem companies not use AMD cpus and add issue of AMD buying ATI for more than it was worth cut into their R & D money.

Hence why things are as it is now, with intel having generation gap over AMD for at least another year.
 
it went wrong when Intel released the C2D cores.. that was basicly the beginning of the end for AMD's reign ...
 
i used Athlon since slot A big times, and I dont use Intel processor for the fact that i got it change mobo with other new chipset from Intel, Still AMD is giving me speed and performance for the money.
 
colonel said:
i used Athlon since slot A big times, and I dont use Intel processor for the fact that i got it change mobo with other new chipset from Intel, Still AMD is giving me speed and performance for the money.
Click to expand...


exact same reason i use AMD as well.. especially since im an overclocker.. i really dont feel like re-learning how to overclock on an intel system..
 
The original Phenoms were really...lackluster. Right now I would say AMD had the lead in the lower price segments. Anything below i7 I would just go AMD I think...
 
Jospeh said:
The original Phenoms were really...lackluster. Right now I would say AMD had the lead in the lower price segments. Anything below i7 I would just go AMD I think...
Click to expand...

Pretty much true.

If your building a new computer and don't have the budget for i7 or your needs doesn't need an i7 then AMD Phenom II is your best route.

The C2Ds and C2Qs have been lingering around the same price range for months. So far no signs of them price dropping.
 
If the original Phenom had performed like a Phenom 2 then AMD would be in a much better situation today. Phenom just couldn't hang with the C2D, besides Intel technology was first to market. This is even true with the i7 as AMD doesn't have a proper response currently lined up. The Athlon series up through the 64 and x2 got a lot of peoples attention and created some loyalists, but even with price over performance AMD needs something to catch the public eye again.
 
AMD is going to have problems soon, though.
Since AM2+/AM3 is the way to go right now if you're looking below i7, that's pretty good for them.
But as soon as socket 1156 comes out and the Nehalems are released for that socket, assuming the prices aren't too high, Intel is going to completely dominate.
 
Not to mention when AMD finally released Barcelona, the rumors of the TLB errata scared off customers in droves. AMD was beating Intel against the Netburst architecture, while Intel was also working on another roadmap for the next generation release that destroyed both.

So what hurt AMD was its delay in coming out with next gen parts, the lackluster performance of the next gen parts, and the really good performance of the newer Intel parts.
 
I believe it was when Amd went from 939 socket to Am2. No real increase in performance, plus intel haymaker out of nowhere (Core 2 Duo). But I wouldnt count Amd out to quick, they may have few surprises .
 
It went wrong when Hector Ruiz couldn't run AMD. :p He was handed K8 on a silver platter and blew everything after that with absolutely incompetent leadership.
 
O-P-M said:
Last time I was into computers I had a very nice AMD64 3000+ Venice core and AMD was rulling the CPU market.

Then came the awesome Opteron 165, great overclocking dual cores.

AMD was killing Intel with the AMD64 compared to the Pentium D?

When did it go wrong?

Was it the Core2Duo's?
Click to expand...

AMD never ruled the market. They had a better performing line of CPUs than Intel did but fell short in revenue and market share. Since Intel launched the Core 2 Duo, Intel has dominated in both sales and in performance tests.

lt_shiro said:
During the Athlon 64 era, intel bought off oem companies not use AMD cpus and add issue of AMD buying ATI for more than it was worth cut into their R & D money.

Hence why things are as it is now, with intel having generation gap over AMD for at least another year.
Click to expand...

I think its more accurate to say that AMD made some bad business decisions during that time and Intel made some decisions that *may* have been questionable, or even immoral, but were exceptional for business. While I don't believe that Intel is nearly as evil as many people make them out to be, I do believe that from a business standpoint, Intel was more competitive than AMD was at the time. I am not privy to all the things Intel may or may not have done, and I don't know the details of the EU's court cases or final decision on the matter in regard to forcing Intel to pay penalties for their business practices. Is Intel a harsh competitor? You bet. Do they resort to illegal strong-arm tactics to prevent their competition from gaining market share? Possibly. Though to be fair, excluding the time frame in which the Athlon 64 and X2's dominated the market Intel wouldn't have had to resort to such tactics. For most of the last 20 years Intel has had the superior products. At best AMD has managed to meet Intel's performance or exceed it slightly in certain areas, but those CPUs always fell short in others. Most of the time either due to weaknesses in application specific performance or because the motherboards and platforms built around their processors were vastly inferior to those offered for Intel CPUs.

sirmonkey1985 said:
it went wrong when Intel released the C2D cores.. that was basicly the beginning of the end for AMD's reign ...
Click to expand...

What reign? AMD had the faster CPUs yes. There is absolutely no denying that fact. They were better performers in most applications (video encoding aside) but Intel has always made more money than AMD has and therefore has always been more financially successful. Intel was still out selling AMD during the Athlon 64's "reign" as you call it.
 
+1 on the AM2 change. I think AMD would have been well off keeping 939 around longer. I know a lot of us here would have been kept happy. Instead, many people were forced off of 939s to the Intel side as there wasn't a great amount of benefit going to AM2. edit: Yea I know AMD never dominated the general market and sales there to oem. But I think and hope the op was questioning at what point did AMD drop the ball onto the enthusiast sector. Last time I checked.. We account for 1 to 3 % of total sales.
 
MrkXCeL said:
+1 on the AM2 change. I think AMD would have been well off keeping 939 around longer. I know a lot of us here would have been kept happy. Instead, many people were forced off of 939s to the Intel side as there wasn't a great amount of benefit going to AM2.
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I don't think that had much if anything to do with it. I think the fact that the Core 2 Duo killed the Athlon X2 and later the Phenom processors in all areas of performance had more to do with it than anything. Intel was also very competitive in regard to pricing the Core 2 Duo which helped them sell more of them. This is why AMD had such a hard time in the last couple of years.
 
AMD would be in a better position if the transition from S939 to AM2 was as smooth as the transition from AM2+ to AM3. A lot of people with a single core S939 CPU won't jump to C2D if they could buy a new CPU that would work in their existing mobo and they can upgrade the mobo and RAM later. At that time a lot of people already have a good mobo like nForce 4 mobos. If they did back then what they are doing now, Brisbane and C2D would be just like PII and i7.

The timing for the ATI acquisition was also bad but it is proven now that it was the right move by Hector to merge ATI into AMD. Now that they have their own platform, it will be much easier for them to compete in the OEM market, not to mention that Intel now won't give dodgy rebates to OEMs anymore, hopefully...
 
Any hope I had for AMD left me when Intel allowed license for SLi on their X58 boards.
As long as I can get Intel chipsets and SLi, I'll keep buying Intel CPUs.

I do recall that my FX-53 was pretty badass, though; and I really thought the X48 board I had with dual 4870 X2s was slick...........it was a good combination of Intel and AMD products.
 
magoo said:
Any hope I had for AMD left me when Intel allowed license for SLi on their X58 boards.
As long as I can get Intel chipsets and SLi, I'll keep buying Intel CPUs.

I do recall that my FX-53 was pretty badass, though.
Click to expand...
It was nVidia who allowed SLi on X58 since they couldn't do a chipset for i7 themselves. AMD can't stop nVidia from allowing SLI in their driver on AMD chipsets if nVidia want to do so.
 
pxc said:
It went wrong when Hector Ruiz couldn't run AMD. :p He was handed K8 on a silver platter and blew everything after that with absolutely incompetent leadership.
Click to expand...

I think this sums it up pretty well. While Hector was talking shit at press conferences Rome was burning.
 
O-P-M said:
Last time I was into computers I had a very nice AMD64 3000+ Venice core and AMD was rulling the CPU market.
Click to expand...
AMD has never ruled the CPU market. When have they had more than, 20%, say, of the market?

They didn't go wrong--they never had it right. They didn't have the capital or IP to stay competitive, and ended up borrowing just to stay afloat. The friction their debit caused never let them gain any momentum, and their failure to build enough manufacturing capacity. Buying ATI was just stupid, and they just continue to hemorrhage money.

It was obvious all along. I have held short positions in AMD at various times, and made thousands on their decline.
 
Jesus Christ I should have made this more clearer so some people won't have a meltdown.

I meant performance wise. Not who sold more.
 
O-P-M said:
Jesus Christ I should have made this more clearer so some people won't have a meltdown.

I meant performance wise. Not who sold more.
Click to expand...

No one outside of certain circles at AMD really knows why. We can only speculate.

1.) AMD underestimated Intel and was caught completely off gaurd by the Core 2 Duo.
2.) AMD lacks the market capital to match Intel's R&D capabilities and thus, weren't blind sided as much as they were unable to match Intel on their terms and counter the Core 2 in a reasonable amount of time.
3.) AMD's advantage wasn't really based on the Athlon 64 being THAT good but rather just that the Pentium 4/Netburst was THAT bad. In other words, Intel fell far short of expectations with the Netburst CPUs and AMD simply due to a fluke had a superior design on their hands.

Bear in mind that while fairly competitive the Athlon was never a true Pentium killer until the Athlon 64 came out and Intel even helped them out for awhile when they took a step backward with the Prescott core Pentium 4's. Previous Athlons held their own nicely against Intel's Pentium III and early Pentium 4 offerings and managed many victories in certain applications but fell short in others. The Athlon also used to generate more heat, use more power, and ran on fairly crappy motherboards with absolutely aweful chipsets. The combination of the Athlon 64's integrated memory controller and NVIDIA's excellent nForce 4 chipset really helped AMD defeat Intel's best performing processors during this time.

My take on this is really a combination of all three above mentioned scenarios. I believe that the Athlon 64 was a great CPU but the reason for AMD's performance lead was mostly due to Intel's Pentium 4 and Pentium D being "that" bad. I think Intel felt the pressure of AMD's Athlon very strongly since its introduction as they had never dealt with any company in their entire history that could produce an x86 processor that could match their own on any serious level. I think Intel bet on their superior manufacturing technology to give them the edge they needed to create a CPU that would far exceed the clock speeds of their competition and thus secure their performance crown that way. In other words, they felt the pressure, they gambled on a strategy which ultimately failed. They had hoped for 5GHz, and similar designs to later bring them to the 10GHz mark. Really it is easy to see how they could have made this bet feeling that it would have done the job given how far behind AMD and other companies usually are in terms of semi-conductor manufacturing processes.

Ironically they never exceeded 3.8GHz as a factory clock speed on any of their CPUs to date. In fact the 4.0GHz mark has been a barrier that seems more elusive to the x86 market place than the 1.0GHz or 2.0GHz barriers ever were. (3.0GHz never seemed to be much of a problem either.) Though in all truthfulness I do not know why Intel hasn't released a 4.0GHz CPU given the fact that the Core 2's and Core i7's have been capable of 4.0GHz+ clock speeds for some time. I suppose they don't need to, and prefer to "under rate" their clocks given current market and manufacturing conditions. The launch of the Core 2 Duo was really Intel's return to business as usual.
 
Dan_D said:
Though in all truthfulness I do not know why Intel hasn't released a 4.0GHz CPU given the fact that the Core 2's and Core i7's have been capable of 4.0GHz+ clock speeds for some time. I suppose they don't need to, and prefer to "under rate" their clocks given current market and manufacturing conditions. The launch of the Core 2 Duo was really Intel's return to business as usual.
Click to expand...

Reliability. The manufacture and support of components that reliably perform at a certain spec, with affordable and easily-installed cooling equipment, is of paramount importance to the chip manufacturers. They don't want the expense or stigma of returns. A few enthusiasts who can build and tune PCs that are lucky enough to reach higher-than-rated clock speeds is a far cry from being able to reliably manufacture and sell such equipment. They also don't want to bother with liquid cooling or fancy cooling solutions that are difficult to machine-assemble, as none of the final equipment vendors can afford to do this.
 
Intels P43/P45 overstock issues has really saved AMD in the last 8 months. No i3 or i5 has left big gap where AMD's Phenom 2 have been doing very well. Hopefully when Q1 2010 AMD next gen of CPU will bring them back to more even position in terms of speed 1 to 1.
 
alg7_munif said:
AMD would be in a better position if the transition from S939 to AM2 was as smooth as the transition from AM2+ to AM3. A lot of people with a single core S939 CPU won't jump to C2D if they could buy a new CPU that would work in their existing mobo and they can upgrade the mobo and RAM later. At that time a lot of people already have a good mobo like nForce 4 mobos. If they did back then what they are doing now, Brisbane and C2D would be just like PII and i7.

The timing for the ATI acquisition was also bad but it is proven now that it was the right move by Hector to merge ATI into AMD. Now that they have their own platform, it will be much easier for them to compete in the OEM market, not to mention that Intel now won't give dodgy rebates to OEMs anymore, hopefully...
Click to expand...

I'll agree to a certain point on the change in sockets. However, I don't think the transition to a new socket was the reason why people didn't jump to the AM2 socket. It was more that there was really no compelling reason to make the switch. The new AM2 processors at the time were using the same architecture that S939 cpus were using. Basically put, the performance kept people from jumping to the AM2 socket. Even had they released the Phenom right away instead of having some transition period it still wouldn't have mattered because the performance stunk compared to the C2D. On the other side of the fence, Intel changed from S775 to 1366 and while that jump requires a new motherboard, cpu, and memory, it hasn't stopped enthusiasts (might have stopped the more casual consumer in the beginning because of DDR3 prices) from dumping everything and going for the more expensive Core i7 platforms. And the reason for that is because the Core i7 is the undisputed top of the line processor out there from any camp.
 
mikeblas said:
Reliability. The manufacture and support of components that reliably perform at a certain spec, with affordable and easily-installed cooling equipment, is of paramount importance to the chip manufacturers. They don't want the expense or stigma of returns. A few enthusiasts who can build and tune PCs that are lucky enough to reach higher-than-rated clock speeds is a far cry from being able to reliably manufacture and sell such equipment. They also don't want to bother with liquid cooling or fancy cooling solutions that are difficult to machine-assemble, as none of the final equipment vendors can afford to do this.
Click to expand...

I realize this. However given the fact that the Core i7 and Core 2 Quads can already reach 3.6GHz and beyond with ease, I think they are being more conservative with their clock speeds than they need to be.
 
bigdogchris said:
It sure was.The parent company of ATI. They used to make Microprocessors. I don't know what they do now days.
Click to expand...
They are a design company at heart. Well they are now that they traded off their fabs for a handfull of magic beans. :p
 
Dan_D said:
I think Intel felt the pressure of AMD's Athlon very strongly since its introduction as they had never dealt with any company in their entire history that could produce an x86 processor that could match their own on any serious level.
Click to expand...

Dan, AMD has been doing JUST THAT since the advent of their i386 processor... course it's been going back and forth between them since...

AMD 486 DX40 vs Intel 486 DX33
AMD DX2-100 vs Pentium 60 and 66
AMD K6-2 vs Pentium 2 (tho Pentium 2 had a superior FPU)
AMD Athlon vs Pentium 3 (Amd was first to 1ghz without issues)
Athlon XP vs Pentium 4 (back and forth till Mhz was ramped)
AMD 64 Vs P4 Northwood/prescott (largest performance gap against Intel)

Other than that line I agree with your post.

Edit: I ran AMD since 486 days but note that I'm running Core i7, it's just that good right now. :)
 
When did it go wrong for AMD?
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Core 2. Enough said.

That CPU was such a huge leap from anything previously made by AMD or especially Intel. It must have caught AMD off guard. I mean everyone expected it to be faster but not by that kind of margin.

However the problems for AMD started before that. The Athlon was always a static target. First there was K7, and it was good. Then came the SocketA version which was basically the same CPU but with on-die L2 cache. Then came K8 which was just a K7 with an on-die L2 cache and memory controller (and 64-bit which would not be useful for another 3-4 years).

So, this means that the cores of the 65nm Brisbane released in late 2006 are essentially identical to the original Athlon64 released in 2003, which wasn't all that different from the original Athlon from 1999. So it's no surprise that the Core 2 owned it. Three years of standing still with no innovation and that's what happens.

Meanwhile Intel went through Banias/Dothan/Yonah and finally Conroe, each bringing significant improvements and IPC enhancements.

The enhancements made to K10 were good, but they should have come much earlier. Most of them are minor tweaks that could probably have been implemented a few years earlier in dual core CPUs. This would have made them more competitive when Intel unleashed C2.
 
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It didn't really go wrong for AMD instead it went right for Intel. Remember Intel is a much bigger company than AMD, having about 8 times the revenue than AMD. It is a surprise the mouse beat the elephant for so long.

2006
A) Intel caught up with the core2duos
B) ATI side of AMD produced a too complicated of chip with the r600 (2900 series of ati) in 2006. Now by the time the revision came out with the 3870, it was a good chip but this was the time nvidia had the 8800gtx and 8800 ultras.

2007
C) Amd bundled up the original phenoms. It was too big and too complicated chip to be made well for 65nm. Instead of going for the first true quad core AMD should have been doing two combined chips like the core2quads.
 
SulSeeker said:
Dan, AMD has been doing JUST THAT since the advent of their i386 processor... course it's been going back and forth between them since...

AMD 486 DX40 vs Intel 486 DX33
AMD DX2-100 vs Pentium 60 and 66
AMD K6-2 vs Pentium 2 (tho Pentium 2 had a superior FPU)
AMD Athlon vs Pentium 3 (Amd was first to 1ghz without issues)
Athlon XP vs Pentium 4 (back and forth till Mhz was ramped)
AMD 64 Vs P4 Northwood/prescott (largest performance gap against Intel)

Other than that line I agree with your post.

Edit: I ran AMD since 486 days but note that I'm running Core i7, it's just that good right now. :)
Click to expand...

I disagree with much of the above post. Excluding the Athlon 64 vs. Pentium III, and Athlon XP vs. Pentium 4's I don't remember any of AMD's "victories" being that clear cut. The AMD 486's were not as fast as their Intel counterparts clock for clock. Back in the day I benched them and tested them in games and found that with identicaly clocked CPU's, it went Intel > AMD > Cyrix in regard to performance. The Cyrix DX2 80MHz for example was slower than the Intel DX2 66MHz. AMD 486's were better than Cyrix 486's, I'll give you that, but they weren't quite a match for their Intel counterparts. They were probably 10% to 15% slower if I recall correctly. Given the examples you used above, a significant clock speed increase was had on the AMD side. If you compare them like that, then sure, I can agree but frankly when you compare them apples to apples that's not how it went. K6-2 vs. Pentium II? Don't kid yourself. There were a few benchmarks the K6-2 could win, but the truth of the matter is that the K6-2 wasn't all that. It sure as hell wasn't faster than the Pentium II. I had both and the K6-2 fell short most of the time. Lets also not forget the terrible Super-7 boards and chipsets. Just about every K6-2 based system I ever saw was a piece of shit because the motherboard in it was junk. AGP compatibility issues, poor BIOS support, the list goes on and on. During this era I encountered what I consider to be the worst motherboard of all time. The Super-7 FIC VA-503+.

The Athlon vs. the Pentium III, well again I can agree with that to some extent. AMD's reaching 1.0GHz first is significant, but again the Athlon wasn't a Pentium III killer either. It won here and there but wasn't decisively better in everything. Again the initial Athlon's had suffered from having poorly designed motherboards with half assed chipsets. At the service center where I worked, we had dozens of Athlon CPUs and motherboards that died because their VRM's were underspec'ed and many of them were catching fire.

I agree with you concerning the Athlon XP and the Pentium 4. The Athlon 64 vs. Pentium 4 goes without saying. The Pentium 4 got its ass handed to it unless you were talking about video encoding which was really the Pentium 4's only strength.
 
I am putting together a Phenom II 945 BE system, my first venture back into AMD since the Socket A days. When the time came for me to upgrade my Barton 2400+ system the C2D was totally the best option next to the Phenom or some variation of the 754/939 that was available at the time.

I picked up the E6600 and it's quite amazing how powerful those chips were at release, three years ago, and still are today. My E6600@3ghz could do superpi 1M in about 16 seconds, this current Phenom II system at 3.5ghz just barely squeeks past 20 seconds and my memory timings are already fairly aggressive.

Intel was so far ahead of the game with the C2D that they gave themselves literally years of breathing room, and AMD is only just now catching up. But AMD is very competitive in a certain pricing range. Around 250 bucks, which is actually pretty much their top 955 BE product, I'd say they're the better option than Intel, which is better in every other price category, and whose only real competition are its own new products.
 
SulSeeker said:
Dan, AMD has been doing JUST THAT since the advent of their i386 processor... course it's been going back and forth between them since...
Click to expand...
Which of the processors on your list were built with technology licensed from Intel?
 
SulSeeker said:
AMD 486 DX40 vs Intel 486 DX33
AMD DX2-100 vs Pentium 60 and 66
Click to expand...
AMD's "486" was a 386-based design and came out almost 2 years after the i486DX33.

The AMD DX2-100 (actually called the DX4-100) also came out 2 years after the Pentium 60/66. Intel was shipping the Pentium 133 by that time.

Neither of those 2 examples was in any way competitive with what Intel was shipping at the same time. The Athlon was the first time AMD took an overall lead from Intel. Otherwise, AMD had always played the value card before that, or didn't even try to compete with mid to higher end x86 chips.
 
Socket Am2 + C2D killed AMDs lead in the enthusiast segment.

I was completely happy with my 3200+ OC'ed for a while.

When time came to upgrade, AMD screwed up from my perspective. They alllowed the competition in. If they would have released a better chip on the 939 platform so I could do a gradual upgrade I would have. But since they switched to AM2, I was looking at a new CPU, RAM (ddr2 from ddr), and motherboard.

With a $500 budget, I took one look at what performance I could get from Intel and a c2d and never looked back.
 
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