| > At some point you just have to accept that AMD is not a serious company, but is a second rate copycat and there is no way to change that without firing everyone from middle management up. AMD has always punched above their weight. Historically their problem was that they were the much smaller company and under heavy resource constraints. Around the turn of the century the Athlon was faster than the Pentium III and then they made x86 64-bit when Intel was trying to screw everyone with Itanic. But the Pentium 4 was a marketing-optimized design that maximized clock speed at the expense of heat and performance per clock. Intel was outselling them even though the Athlon 64 was at least as good if not better. The Pentium 4 was rubbish for laptops because of the heat problems, so Intel eventually had to design a separate chip for that, but they also had the resources to do it. That was the point that AMD made their biggest mistake. When they set out to design their next chip the competition was the Pentium 4, so they made a power-hungry monster designed to hit high clock speeds at the expense of performance per clock. But the reason more people didn't buy the Athlon 64 wasn't that they couldn't figure out that a 2.4GHz CPU could be faster than a 2.8GHz CPU, it was all the anti-competitive shenanigans Intel was doing behind closed doors to e.g. keep PC OEMs from featuring systems with AMD CPUs. Meanwhile by then Intel had figured out that the Pentium 4 was, in fact, a bad design, when their own Pentium M laptops started outperforming the Pentium 4 desktops. So the Pentium 4 line got canceled and Bulldozer had to go up against the Pentium M-based Core, which nearly bankrupted AMD and compromised their ability to fund the R&D needed to sustain state of the art fabs. Since then they've been climbing back out of the hole but it wasn't until Ryzen in 2017 that you could safely conclude they weren't on the verge of bankruptcy, and even then they were saddled with a lot of debt and contracts requiring them to use the uncompetitive Global Foundries fabs for several years. It wasn't until Zen4 in 2022 that they finally got to switch the whole package to TSMC. So until quite recently the answer to the question "why didn't they do X?" was obvious. They didn't have the money. But now they do. |
Seven and a half years.
The excuse is threadbare at best. They are not doing a reasonable job of making compute work off the shelf.