[listenandlearn]

Things just keep getting better and better for AMD... it’s like once you have a little bit of luck things just keep snowballing from there.

They are on track to have an amazing year with CPUs that may take a very significant chunk of the cloud compute away from intel and then maybe even on the performance side.. it’s just fascinating that a company that almost died just a few years ago is now a big contender on multiple fronts.

[NetBeck]

This reminds me of AMD's launch of the 1.4GHz Athlon Thunderbird. People were shocked that benchmarks proved AMD dethroned Intel.

>The Athlon 1.4GHz is far and away the fastest PC processor you can buy. Well, OK, it's not that much faster than the 1.33GHz Athlon, but it's a heap faster than Intel's 1.7GHz Pentium 4. Through a range of tests measuring a variety of applications and abilities, every one of our Athlons from 1.2GHz to 1.4GHz beat out the Pentium 4 with regularity."[1]

[1] https://techreport.com/review/2523/amd-athlon-1-4ghz-process...

[ksec]

And history repeating again. It was a perfect Storm, Pentium 4 requires Rambus DRAM that no one wants and was expensive. The later Pentium 4 switched back to DDR but it was slower, which Pentium 4 in itself was already quite slow / not much of an improvement. Then AMD made Athlon Thunderbird, and later AMD 64.

It is happening again, Intel has been sitting on 14nm for 5 years, and now with many security issues and they won't be able to react with 10nm until early next year, and even the 10nm CPU will likely not have a hardware fix. Last time this happen Intel started a price war and FUD against AMD.

The timeline somehow always synced when AMD executed their plan to perfection and Intel somehow messes up at the same time. And then Intel woke up, last time it was Pat Gelsinger who saved them ( And later forced out of Intel ), and then somehow AMD make some missteps. This time Intel got Jim Keller, I hope Dr Lisa Su wont repeat the same mistake again.

[unicornfinder]

Not to mention there's a fair bit of evidence suggesting that Intel won't even have 10nm ready next year either.

[djsumdog]

You could also run dual AthlonXPs in SMP motherboards (even though it was only the AthlonMPs that were officially supported).

[tasty_freeze]

It wasn't just luck. It was Jim Keller. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_%28engineer%29

[ac29]

Given that he was only at AMD for 3 years and now works for Intel, I wonder if AMD will be struggling again after Zen 2/3 -- I seem to recall he designed "multiple" Zen versions before leaving, but cant find any comments from AMD to that effect.

[clarry]

Regardless of who designed it, I'm concerned about how much progress Zen3 (and so on) can make. Zen was a massive leap, Zen 2 looks like it'll be a great upgrade, but can it go on like this? If not, what happens next? "AMD didn't absolutely blast Intel out of the water, so let's all go back to buying nothing but Intel."

[nullwasamistake]

Bulldozer was mistake that cost AMD years of advancements. They tried to do what Intel did a few years before. Design for clock speed and nothing else, figuring the 4ghz ceiling was easy to break.

Intel did this with P4 "netburst" architecture. They hit a frequency wall that made thier new deeply pipelined CPU worthless. This is when AMD caught up last time with the athlon series.

Intel actually went back to the design of the Pentium III!! With higher IPC, a few upgrades lifted from the P4, and new processes, it gave birth to the Core series.

The Intel processors we have today still share more design history with the P3 than the P4. And since then, Intel has focused on IPC over clock speed.

The crazy part was AMD making the same mistake years later with Bulldozer. Makes me wonder if the remedy was the same... Go back and update the Athlon cores.

The ancient Athlon/P3 IPC is amazingly good compared to today's chips if you scale them by clock speed and core count. Perhaps half, which is impressive for the age of the chip. All these bugs affecting over a decade of CPU design tells us these chips share a lot of the same logic, if not entire blocks unchanged for more than a decade.

[rjsw]

I'm typing this on a Bulldozer system. It is still fine for what I need it for - mostly compiling software, and provided a lot more cores than the equivalent Intel CPU at the same price point.

[eropple]

Nobody's saying they were unusable. But like--I do video production and was pricing out my first live video mixer around that time. I was ready to throw down for a Bulldozer build immediately because of how wide the processor was and had to do the proverbial "hard pull up away from the mountainside" because of how bad the throughput was.

Instead, ended up going i7-875K -> i5-3570K -> Ryzen 1600 -> Ryzen 3700X (probably, this year). So like, I'm glad to see AMD back in the game, but Bulldozer was pretty rough.

[potta_coffee]

I'm still using mine for gaming daily, obviously it's not high end, but it was $99 like...9 years ago? I don't remember when actually. I've been computing since I was young and it's the best value I've ever purchased. I can still do just about anything I want to right now.

[ShinTakuya]

> The crazy part was AMD making the same mistake years later with Bulldozer. Makes me wonder if the remedy was the same... Go back and update the Athlon cores.

I mean at the time the only thing on the minds of consumers was those GHz. So the only way to stay in the market was to hunt those GHz even if it meant some long term pain. After hitting the 3GHz/4GHz frequency walls consumers began to realise that processors are distinguished by more than frequency (obviously the lay person still doesn't quite understand but they're more likely to buy based on i7 > i5 than 3Ghz > 2.5Ghz these days).

[clarry]

> I mean at the time the only thing on the minds of consumers was those GHz.

No, AMD dispelled that long before Bulldozer, and even Intel had abandoned the GHz game years ago with the Core lineup.

You're thinking late 90s, Bulldozer happened in 2011. People got over the GHz mindset in the early-mid 2000s when the market told 'em we're now going to increase core count instead, and before that when Athlon labeled CPUs like 1800+ (it's not 1.8GHz but it's as fast as one!).

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

Hilariously, the one takeaway I have from that article is that no one wants to lead the autopilot arm of Tesla.

[Traster]

It's certainly not a great sign that less than 1 month before Musk is parading around screaming that they've got self-driving solved, the head of the project has jumped ship.

[auiya]

Also - https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/17/tesla-shares-fall-on-report-...

[vectorEQ]

maybe they can put that department on autopilot :O

[CodeArtisan]

And the expiration of a few patents, like the ones about simultaneous multithreading. Zen is the first AMD's architecture to implement SMT, Bulldozer had CMT (https://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/zen.j...).

https://patents.google.com/patent/US3728692

https://patents.google.com/patent/US3771138

https://scalibq.wordpress.com/2012/02/14/the-myth-of-cmt-clu...

[BeeOnRope]

Don't Intel and AMD have a fairly comprehensive patent cross-licensing agreement?

Not sure if SMT parents would fall under that, but it was my impression that AMD was relatively unconstrained wrt Intel patents due to this agreement.

[CodeArtisan]

The agreement can be read here https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2488/000119312509236...

I would say that only the Instruction set is cross licensed, implementation techniques and hardware interfaces aren't (AMD CPUs shall not be compatible with Intel sockets, for example). Intel's SMT is known as hyper-threading, the patent has expired too but the name "hyper-threading" is still copyright protected and the property of Intel.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US5361337A/en

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-threading#History

[dbcooper]

Has he ever written about his management technique? He must be a great engineering manager.

[electic]

There are some tidbits here about how he views his team and some stories: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOTFE7sJY-Q

[otakucode]

Yeah, once AMD was desperate enough to kick the MBA CEOs to the curb and finally put an engineer in charge, things started working better. Imagine that.

[dasmoth]

I hadn't realised he'd ended up at Intel! Will be interesting to see how much impact he has there.

[otakucode]

From what I've read about Intel's corporate structure - don't hold your breath.

[friendlybus]

Oh he's the guy JP mentions every now and then when talking about AI.

[chrisseaton]

> may take a very significant chunk of the cloud compute away from intel

My understanding is that they don't have the manufacturing capacity to ship this many processors, even if data centre operators wanted to buy them.

[ksec]

>My understanding is that they don't have the manufacturing capacity to ship this many processors, even if data centre operators wanted to buy them.

That is the current situation as they Fabbed on 14nm with Global Foundry, together with their GPU and APU. So AMD is completing against itself on capacity. Once they moved off GF to TSMC with 7nm Zen 2, things should [1] hopefully be a lot better.

[1] That is assuming the yields are good, and I/O chip's production will not let down by who ever is fabbing it. Current guess it would still be Global Foundry for IO.

[syn0byte]

Seems like a FUD-y non sequitur. Everyone isn't going to run out and completely replace their infrastructure with AMD overnight.

I doubt intel could keep up much better.

[adventured]

I'm a fan of AMD, I hope they succeed. However, how do you figure things are getting better and better based on actual results?

Right now it looks like they're going to be reset back to 2017 numbers, losing the business gains they made in 2018. Their sales have fallen for the last three quarters in a row, quarter over quarter, and they barely turned a profit last quarter. Sales imploded by 23% last quarter year over year. When does the amazing year start?

[wtallis]

You can't compare 2018 numbers to 2019 numbers without taking into account the intervening cryptocurrency crash. Setting that aside, their CPU and GPU sales have actually improved, even though both are nearing the end of a generation (and so are the console SoCs). The fact that AMD's still profitable even without cryptocurrency GPU sales is a pretty strong indicator of financial health, the likes of which they couldn't even dream of a few years ago.

[aoeusnth1]

Look at their own disclosures for 2019 H2 from their earnings statement - don't do your own estimate based on a linear projection of the last 3 quarters.

2019 is going to be an absolutely phenomenal year for AMD.

[jimbob45]

It starts when they get free positive publicity from scandals like this.

[greenknight]

Once Rome and Ryzen3000 are shipping. They have been hyped so much & everyone is waiting for those releases, no point buying when it will be (probably) severely outdated in a few months.

[yogthos]

I'm much more excited about RISC V and MIPS myself because they're actual open architectures.

[JohnFen]

> Things just keep getting better and better for AMD

I'm happy to hear that AMD does better with this. I'd already decided that I won't be buying Intel CPUs anymore, so I like that AMD is a reasonable replacement.

[chungleong]

Persistent memory is going to a big thing in the cloud computing space in the coming years. Without an answer to Optane AMD is going to have a tough time competing with Intel.

[ksec]

That is assuming Optane is the only Persistent Memory solution. Micron, Samsung, all have something similar ( whether it is by technological design or function ) in the work.

Optane used to be very attractive when it promised all the performance at cheaper than DRAM price. But now DRAM price has sunk, and we will have to see whether 2nd gen Optane will deliver what Intel promised.

[chungleong]

Persistent memory can greatly reduce application start-up time. In SaaS usage that's pretty important. Downtime during software updates is a big headache.