[arcanus]

I've been recently reading reports from some of my banking friends (and actually chatted with some folks I know at AMD) because I'm curious about AMD's turnaround. Even just last year AMD looked to be in very dire straights, and are still operating at a loss.

However, they seem to have a strong technical pipeline and they have historically punched above their weight-class. Does it look like they are going to make it?

[snovv_crash]

The issue is the long lag time between new ideas being implemented at a design level, and the many iterations of fabbing and tweaking that need to take place before it can actually be sold. The majority of people in tech are too used to something being written in the morning and deployed in the afternoon to understand what it is like having a 3-month lag in your testing cycle, and minimum twice that till release.

Just like Intel had the P4 hole that it had to drag its way out of, so now AMD has had Bulldozer. Notice how Intel has been quite conservative with each individual tick/tock, trying to keep their pipeline full. Doing crazy changes risks causing a pipeline stall which could last years. Each new architecture is risky, and AMD screwed up with Bulldozer. From early signs it looks like Zen is a winner, hopefully AMD can stick with it for a while.

[tormeh]

I think bulldozer was just ahead of its time. I am fortunate to have one, and it has aged a lot better than the same-price alternatives from Intel due to the more multithreaded nature of e.g. games nowadays. That's not much comfort for AMD, since being ahead of your time is just another way to fail, but at least AMD had vision.

Mankind Divided's recommended specs are FX-8350 or i7 3770. The price difference between the two in their heyday was $100 in AMD's favor.

[merb]

price was always in AMD's favor. problem is more and more the energy consumption. also the i-series of intel was really really solid and good, at least until broadwell (didn't seen too much skylake yet). that especially lost amd a lot of ground in the server space. and a lot of "high end" gamer favored the Intel i7 series aswell, even when they weren't as cheap as amd.

[tormeh]

The i7 was a lot better for gaming than the 8350 was at the time. Hell, an i3 was better at the time. The 8350 was priced accordingly. There was no price advantage. What I'm saying is that AMD's design has aged a lot better.

[merb]

AMD was cheaper (always) not better. You can be cheaper and worse and people will still buy the worse since it's cheaper even if price / quality on intel would've been better.

[tormeh]

You obviously haven't actually checked the prices.

[CarVac]

How exactly?

I see the evidence of that happening with AMD GPUs versus Nvidia, but versus Intel processors?

Can you explain?

[AnthonyMouse]

When Bulldozer was released, most software only used one or two threads. Which meant that the 8-thread FX was slower than the 2-thread i3 because the extra threads did nothing and it had lower single-thread performance.

Now that newer software is using more threads, the old FX gets a big performance boost while the old i3 is only the same speed it ever was.

[milcron]

How did Intel lose ground with Broadwell?

[clevernickname]

IIRC it took much longer to deliver than expected, didn't improve much upon Haswell, sold in a limited set of SKUs, then was succeeded by Skylake a few months later.

[phire]

AMD started work on Zen back in 2012 after it became clear the Bulldozer was a complete failure. It's taken them 4-5 years to get it ready for release. They still had Steamroller and Piledriver in the pipeline, so they released those anyway, despite the fact that line of processors is now dead.

It took about the same amount of time for Intel to release the Core and Core 2 architectures after realising they had made a huge mistake with the Pentium 4.

I've heard some people theorising that Intel might have worked their current architecture into a corner and they might have problems innovating out of it. I guess we will see when information about Zen's performance shows up.

[yvdriess]

What is shown on the slides is not that innovating. If anything, they seem to have thrown the bulldozer innovations out of the window and moved the architecture closer to the sandybridge-era processors.

[phire]

> If anything, they seem to have thrown the bulldozer innovations out of the window

That's basically the point of Zen, Bulldozer was an architectural dead-end that wasn't going anywhere.

Besides, it's not like Intel have massively innovated since Sandybridge. Ivy, Haswell, Broadwell and Skylake are little more than successive perfections of the Sandybridge architecture.

It's hard to tell from the slides, but it looks like Zen is a much wider architecture than Intel, with 10 execution ports (4 ALU, 2 AGU, 2 FP ADD, 2 FP MUL). Sandybridge had 6, Haswell and later have 8 execution ports. Bulldozer had 4 integer execution ports plus 2 float ports, which are shared between each pair of cores.

The most interesting thing about those slides is the layout of the blocks marked "Scheduler". Intel chips all have a single scheduler, Bulldozer had one float scheduler (shared) and one integer scheduler. But I'm counting 7 schedulers on the Zen slides, one float scheduler managing the 4 floating point execution ports and 6 integer schedulers, one for each execution port.

[yvdriess]

> It's hard to tell from the slides, but it looks like Zen is a much wider architecture than Intel, with 10 execution ports

The text mentions it has to fuse the four FP ports to do a single 256-bit AVX per cycle. This is significantly less wide than Intel architectures (half/quarter). We can interpret the width thus as 4+2+1 ports, which is in the Haswell ballpark.

What is maybe more telling here is the 16-byte load/stores, Haswell is doing 32-byte at the same rate. It points to Zen abandoning FP bandwidth in both client and server. Perhaps they want to rely on GPGPU with the on-chip GPU to do compute workloads?

> The most interesting thing about those slides is the layout of the blocks marked "Scheduler". Intel chips all have a single scheduler, Bulldozer had one float scheduler (shared) and one integer scheduler. But I'm counting 7 schedulers on the Zen slides, one float scheduler managing the 4 floating point execution ports and 6 integer schedulers, one for each execution port.

Depends what they mean with Scheduler. If it means reservation stations for micro-ops, then that's already the case in other micro-architectures. If Scheduler means assigning micro-ops per port, than there can logically only be a single one.

[phire]

> The text mentions it has to fuse the four FP ports to do a single 256-bit AVX per cycle. This is significantly less wide than Intel architectures (half/quarter). We can interpret the width thus as 4+2+1 ports, which is in the Haswell ballpark.

4+2+2, no need to combine all 4 ports, just the two multiplies or the two adds.

The text is speculation of the journalist. There It's possible that each port is actually 256 bits wide and fusing them is only needed for the 512bit AVX instructions that Intel don't even support yet.

Even if AMD are splitting the 256 bit fpus in half, that is still a huge win over average code, because 128bit SSE instructions are much more common than AVX instructions, and AMD can execute upto four of them per cycle.

Even Intel disable the upper half of their FPU most of the time to save power, AVX instructions get split into two 128bit micro-ops unless until a threshold is encountered and the upper half powers up.

> If Scheduler means assigning micro-ops per port, than there can logically only be a single one.

I assume that means one Re-order buffer per port. Bulldozer already had two Re-order buffer, one for float instructions and one for interger instructions, which proves multiple ROBs for different ports are possible. You just need to track dependencies across ROBs.

I'm guessing that tracking deprbdiencies across 7 schedulers is not much harder than tracking deprbdiencies across 2.

[makomk]

With the current state of the tech press, that's probably a good idea as any difference from how Intel does things is spun as a negative. Take this paragraph for the Anandtech article, for example: "Unlike Bulldozer, where having a shared FP unit between two threads was an issue for floating point performance, Zen’s design is more akin to Intel’s in that each thread will appear as an independent core and there is not that resource limitation that BD had. With sufficient resources, SMT will allow the core instructions per clock to improve, however it will be interesting to see what workloads will benefit and which ones will not." Intel-style SMT actually has more contention for shared processor resources than Bulldozer did, not less, because far more is shared. Despite that, AMD's switch to it is being spun as a positive simply because it's closer to what Intel do.

[greggyb]

I'd say that it's not just spin and trying to be closer to what Intel's architecture is.

The FP contention between the cores in a Bulldozer module makes all recent AMD chips perform objectively worse in most benchmarks than their peers from Intel.

Intel's architecture isn't a priori a goal to achieve. Intel's performance in real-world workloads is a good goal.

There are some heavily-threaded, integer-heavy workloads that Bulldozer and related parts are still incredibly competitive at, even compared to current-gen Intel parts. For the right workload, a Bulldozer-family processor can be a real screamer and they are priced incredibly aggressively. We should recognize, though, that the architecture is high performance only for these specific workloads.

Perhaps AMD should have pursued more innovative architectures. I am not saying that Intel's is perfect. But it is important to note that for current general purpose computing workloads, Intel's architecture is superior to Bulldozer.

[koolba]

AMD seems to operate like a middle America mom and pop sandwich shop. Products are decent, lots of people rooting for them to succeed, they never seem to pull ahead, yet they also manage to live on (if only to continue their struggle).

[PedroBatista]

Story of my life.

[tcoppi]

I don't think they are in any danger of bankruptcy. Whether they return to profitability is still an open question but it seems likely that they should be by some point next year. How profitable, and what happens after that, is anyone's guess. There is a lot of room to grow in the graphics and CPU space, but they have tough competitors. I do think their stock is very fairly valued at ~$6 though, I think any potential gains from Zen over the next year or so are priced in to that. It definitely isn't a value buy anymore.

Edit: As the day goes on it seems like they're trading back over $7, so obviously the market disagrees with me :) They were trading around $10 before losing profitability, and in the $20-$40 range during their mid-2000s heyday, so maybe the market is expecting performance closer to that. I think that is optimistic still, but again who knows.

[blueprint]

IMHO it's not actually possible for something to ever be 100% priced in, which has the surprising meaning that people need to also discuss how much of an event is priced in when they speculate whether something is or isn't priced in.

[Obi_Juan_Kenobi]

People tend to ignore the inherent risk of time when considering something 'priced in'.

If an event is set to happen in an hour, you can be fairly certain it will happen, so it should be strongly 'priced in'. If it's happening months or years out, a lot could happen in the meantime, thus it's not 'fully' priced in. It's not a discrete event, but rather some sort of curve (perhaps sigmoid?) that depends on perceived risk.

[vanattab]

Can you elaborate on your meaning?

[blueprint]

Please see my reply to eximius.

[eximius]

Why is it impossible?

[blueprint]

It can be virtually guaranteed that not everyone who might buy or sell will know about and properly understand a given event.

[eximius]

People can be correct for the wrong reasons, though. Wisdom of the crowds (and the Central Limit Theorem) would make me expect that it would be very close is most cases, with random noise being the most common distance from the truth.

[vegabook]

What you have to keep in mind, is that AMD is valued at a quarter of Nvidia, and at 1/25th of Intel. Therefore the market has a huge scepticism discount built in. AMD doesn't have to hit the ball out of the park with Zen. It just needs to get to 85% area of Intel at same tdp, and the market will call it a winner. If it does 95%, call AMD stock 50% undervalued, minimum.

Obliquely, also remember that while Nvidia is winning on the "pure" GPU front with the awesome 1080 etc, the major problem for Nvidia is that its tech needs a host processor, and its ARM attempts are going nowhere (Nintendo NX notwithstanding). AMD does not face this problem. It's becoming clearer that pure-parallel is not always optimal. Hybrid GPU/CPU architectures have a lot of upside as we are seeing with the Xeon Phi use cases, which smackdown on Nvidia bigtime as soon as you mix even the slightest bit of dependency in your algorithms.

I am very bullish on AMD. I believe its stock has double potential, because the price is so catastrophically pessimistic already. And without even talking market valuations, I think we have had enough of monopoly-style price gouging on Xeon and Tesla.

[barkingcat]

There is an extremely long lag time between research, development, product, and having that reflect in the financial numbers. I'd say it's on the scale of 6 or 8 years. So whatever dire straights or whatever recovery that you see now, was in the works since the early 2010's.

Whatever is happening in the company now is what you will be seeing in 2021 or 2023. Whether they will make it depends on how well the managing team handles that long lead time - for their leaders to give the engineers and product people as much time as possible to keep the company alive until each product comes into being.

[phonon]

Well, Jim Keller returned to AMD August 2012, so I would say around then :-)

[vanattab]

And then left AMD in Sep 2015 to join Tesla in Jan 2016 as Vice President of Autopilot Hardware Engineering.

[daveguy]

After completing the Zen design. From leaked benchmarks it looks like he did an excellent job on the design (yet again) and they have been testing and ramping up for fabrication since he left. After they have milked this design with iterative improvements for 5-10 years maybe he will come back for the next generation.

[Tuna-Fish]

He did not just complete Zen, he completed the high-level design of Zen and it's two successors.

CPUs are designed in a pipelined manner -- once the high-level team finishes up their work and passes it on to the low-level guys, they immediately start working on the next version, with the first version still years away from release. The total cycle from drawing board to store shelves is >5 years, and the skill sets required of high-level designers are very different than those required to turn it into silicon, so this just allows them all to have something to work on.

The long lag time is why chip companies can have disasters like P4 or Bulldozer, and they last so long. When some of the basic assumptions are wrong, the designers won't actually find out until after the design hits silicon, at which point the next two versions are already pretty much locked.

[VT_Drew]

>and are still operating at a loss.

No their not, there Q2 financials had them in black.

[mtgx]

> Does it look like they are going to make it

Probably, but I still think they would do far better with an owner like Qualcomm (granted Qualcomm would still have enough money in the bank to actually do something interesting with AMD after the acquisition).

[tcoppi]

Any acquisition of AMD will be seriously complicated by potentially needing to re-negotiate the patent cross-licensing agreements with Intel. There are lots of companies that could have been great buyers for AMD in the past that have passed or not even looked into it because of this, I don't think it will change for the foreseeable future unfortunately.

[arcanus]

> re-negotiate the patent cross-licensing agreements with Intel

I've always wondered why intel does not buy AMD... is it just because of an expected anti-trust lawsuit? With Nvidia, ARM, IBM, it does not seem that a monopoly in x86 would dominate ALL architectures, but perhaps it would not be viewed that way.

[tcoppi]

Probably anti-trust, otherwise I think Intel would have bought them a few years ago just for the huge discount on their graphics division, which Intel has never seemed to be able to do well.

[VanillaCafe]

This has been the same story of AMD for approximately 20 years.