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Yousuf Khan
Guest
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 Posted: Sat Feb 03, 2007 12:47 am Post subject: Re: My lack of enthusiasm for AMD |
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Spoon wrote:
Do you really not have anything better to do?
I rest my case. :-)
Yousuf Khan
--
There is no failure, only delayed success |
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gaffo
Guest
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| Posted: Sat Feb 03, 2007 8:07 am Post subject: Re: My lack of enthusiasm for AMD |
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chrisv wrote:
| Quote: | gaffo wrote:
Core is not from the ground up design. Intel did not work on this
one for 3-yrs. they wasted 2 yrs in denail over Itanic. The Core is
basically an improved p-3/p-m (mobile). They lucked out in that the
Israeli team was working on modile pentium-3 dez.
Had they not had that base to work from - Core would not be out yet.
(IMO).
Agree with pretty much everything you said, except I'd say that "luck"
has nothing to do with any of this. I think even the most dull-witted
Intel manager realized that the Netburst design wasn't right for
mobile applications. Thus the more-efficient Pentium M was
commissioned.
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I agree, from what little I know the p-4 is a power-drain chip. So the
Israeli team stayed with the p-3 and worked with it.
it was luck that the p-4 sucked on laptops and that there was the p3/m
to fall back on for Intel to offer a decent x86 for use from
Server-through-laptop.
IMO- I think the koolaid over Itanic was so much that Intel indeed in
fact "lucked out" in that there was the P-m to fall back on to save
themselves two yrs to make the Core chip when reality showed itself.
-- |
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gaffo
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| Posted: Sat Feb 03, 2007 8:34 am Post subject: Re: My lack of enthusiasm for AMD |
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chrisv wrote:
| Quote: | Has not AMD been
around 20% for some years, now?
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20-pecent +/- 5 for 15 yrs.
At AMD's low point - 1995/96 (K-5-before they bought NextGen's nx686
chips/company) they had 12-percent??
Cyrix (5x86/m1) had maybe 5 percent??????????????????
Winchip (GO WINCHIP!! winchip-1=dog: winchip2 not dog) maybe 1-percent.
(still got mine (the win-2) -- somewhere). IDT (Integrated Device
Technologies) bought them out around 1997?/98?
..............we also had Rise (forgot the chip name - actually a good
chip - equal to intel's offering at the time). (WTF happened to Rise
(the company) anyway ??????)
Winchip had a *** more sales than Rise. and that is not saying
much. rise was the ultimate "niche player".
kinda sad since all the alternatives at the time offered equal quality
alternatives to Intel/AMD and are now gone ;-/.
ST Micro Electronics was to make a x86 chip but cancelled at the last
minute.
and a couple yrs later we had Transmeta.
.................................
at the time AMD really offered only the doggy k-5. I remember. The
Cyrix, Intel, and NextGen 5x86 all ran circles around the AMD k-5.
there was a reason AMD(which had fabs) had a market share only a tad
above Cyrix (a Fabless company)
Cyrix in general offered a better product for several years from the
486 through the k-5/5x86 era.
AMD pulled ahead when they bought Nexgen and took the Nx686 and
re-named it the k-6.
even then the Winchip-2 was the k-6 equal in all respects and cost 1/2
the price!!...........and was old mobo backward compatable (took an old
motherboard and higher voltage).
............
now the k-7/k-8/etc is tops. but that is thanks to the Alpha guy
(forget name?)- which AMD hired.
IMO silicon is topped out. we will no longer see speed increases of
factors of 2 or 3 as we used to.
Core/k-8 is as good as it gets. make smaller...........and higher
clock............even that will hit a limit......then no more speed
increases worth mentioning.
-- |
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Robert Redelmeier
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| Posted: Sun Feb 04, 2007 10:53 pm Post subject: Re: My lack of enthusiasm for AMD |
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Robert Myers <rbmyersusa@gmail.com> wrote in part:
| Quote: | quote> Plus, vendors have been saying they prefer the design
flexibility of individual parts, he says. Low-cost parts
such as Intel's Celeron processors and 810e chip sets give
them more options, he says. > </quote
What a shock. Intel's decisions are driven by non-technical
considerations.
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There's also the small matter of yield: a process that yields
80% of 150 mm2 dice will only yield ~41% of 600 mm2 dice. Only
if you start with a process capable of 95% yield at 150mm2
could you hope for 80% at 600.
Hmm ... I wonder if inflating yield isn't the true reason for
ECC on cache. It hides both soft errors and hard defects.
-- Robert |
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gaffo
Guest
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| Posted: Fri Feb 09, 2007 6:31 am Post subject: Re: My lack of enthusiasm for AMD |
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Tony Hill wrote:
| Quote: | On Sat, 03 Feb 2007 02:34:04 GMT, "gaffo" <gaffo@usenet.net> wrote:
chrisv wrote:
Has not AMD been
around 20% for some years, now?
20-pecent +/- 5 for 15 yrs.
At AMD's low point - 1995/96 (K-5-before they bought NextGen's nx686
chips/company) they had 12-percent??
If you're talking installed base, maybe. However if you're takling
new unit sales AMD bottomed out at about 4% just before teh release of
the K6 (early '97).
Cyrix (5x86/m1) had maybe 5 percent??????????????????
Just before the release of the K6 Cyrix was actually outselling AMD
(at least if you count the Cyrix branded and IBM branded chips
together).
Winchip (GO WINCHIP!! winchip-1=dog: winchip2 not dog) maybe
1-percent. (still got mine (the win-2) -- somewhere). IDT
(Integrated Device Technologies) bought them out around 1997?/98?
The first Centaur Winchip came out in Oct. '97 according to
www.sandpile.org. At some point i think they might have managed to
creep over 1% of sales around early '99 or there abouts. I rather
liked this chip, VERY simple and cheap but offered not altogether
terrible performance for the time.
The Winchip design is essentially still around in the form of the VIA
C-series chips, though obviously they've diverged quite a bit since
VIA bought 'em out many moons ago.
.............we also had Rise (forgot the chip name - actually a
good chip - equal to intel's offering at the time). (WTF happened
to Rise (the company) anyway ??????)
Winchip had a *** more sales than Rise. and that is not saying
much. rise was the ultimate "niche player".
I'm not sure that Rise ever really sold any meaningful quantities of
chips.
kinda sad since all the alternatives at the time offered equal
quality alternatives to Intel/AMD and are now gone ;-/.
None of the alternatives ever matched Intel in terms of performance,
and they only matched or beat AMD at times when AMD was really
struggling (ie the K5 days). Cyrix and the IDT/Centaur/Winchip both
got bought out by VIA and that's the only real 3rd player left in x86
chips, but they're really targetting some specific niches. They still
have the VERY low cost design from Winchip so apparently they might
still be making money with their 1% marketshare, but that's about it.
and a couple yrs later we had Transmeta.
Transmeta's design was a really odd-ball way of doing things that had
a lot of people scratching their heads from the get-go. I don't think
I went so far as to say that it wouldn't work out well, but I
definitely didn't have very high hopes for their idea. It turns out
that my low hopes were overly optimistic. It was just an odd-ball way
of doing things, it was a REALLY bad way of doing things! At best
they were matching the performance of VIA chips while using 4x as many
transistors and costing at least 4x as much to build!
Transmeta now seems to have taken the Rambus approach to business and
have stopped concentrating on engineering in order to focus their
efforts on litigation and questionable patents.
at the time AMD really offered only the doggy k-5. I remember. The
Cyrix, Intel, and NextGen 5x86 all ran circles around the AMD k-5.
there was a reason AMD(which had fabs) had a market share only a tad
above Cyrix (a Fabless company)
Cyrix in general offered a better product for several years from the
486 through the k-5/5x86 era.
AMD pulled ahead when they bought Nexgen and took the Nx686 and
re-named it the k-6.
even then the Winchip-2 was the k-6 equal in all respects and cost
1/2 the price!!...........and was old mobo backward compatable
(took an old motherboard and higher voltage).
The Winchip-2 was a K6 equal but two years too late! By the time IDT
had much volume of their 200MHz Winchip, AMD was selling their 350MHz
K6-2. Even then the Winchip2 could only match the performance of the
K6 on integer workloads, the floating point performance was weaker
than the already so-so K6 FP.
I did like the design of the chip because it was SO cheap. It was
kind of elegant in it's simplicity, but it was never anywhere close to
the performance level that AMD or Intel offered at the time. What it
DID offer was a really good low-cost part that was a drop-in
replacement for MANY old motherboards. At they were selling this chip
there were lots of people with older Pentium 75-133MHz boards that
could drop one of these Winchips in for a VERY noticeable improvement
in performance for only ~$50. It was an EXCELLENT deal for these
people and I recommended it highly for this exact reason. However for
anyone building a new system from scratch it made no sense at all.
Only a few dollars more got you an AMD K6-2 or Intel Celeron (which
had cache by this time) based system with MUCH better performance.
now the k-7/k-8/etc is tops. but that is thanks to the Alpha guy
(forget name?)- which AMD hired.
AMD, like Intel, highered several old Alpha guys.
IMO silicon is topped out. we will no longer see speed increases of
factors of 2 or 3 as we used to.
Speed increases haven't actually slowed down that much, though they
aren't necessarily as obvious anymore because most chips are "fast
enough" for so many applications. However if you look at a plot of
something like SPEC CPU2000 (and especially CPU_rate) vs. time you'll
see that the performance is still doubling every 24 months or so.
Pretty impressive.
Core/k-8 is as good as it gets. make smaller...........and higher
clock............even that will hit a limit......then no more speed
increases worth mentioning.
I'm glad I don't share your pessimism for computer chip development! I
still expect noticeable performance improvements for at least another
5-10 years. Beyond that it's too tough to predict, however you can
bet that both AMD and Intel aren't going to just back and give up on
things. New performance improvements might not come from the same
sorts of obvious ways that we have seen in the past, but they aren't
going to stop.
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Howdy there!
good post, alot of info:
one thing about the winchip-2 though: True it did come out two years
after the k-6 (win-2 not win-1), but its FPU was equal to (and in fact
usually 5-10 percent FASTER) the k-6.
win-1 had a dog fpu,
but the win-2 had a pipelined fpu and could run x86 games which were
compiled for the Pentium Classics fpu 5-10 percent faster than the k-6
could even though technically the winchip2's fpu was "slower" than the
k-6.
but that "slowerness" only showed when running games written for the
486's fpu, and then it was "fast enough" since it was running faster
than any 486 clockspeed wise.
Winchip2 was offered in 200?mhz and 240 mhz. at the time the lower end
k-6's were offered at 233 and were slower ;-)........and cost more and
needed a new motherboard............and had to run on doggy VIA
chipsets.
- you can tell I never had a k-6 box. ;-).
-- |
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Tony Hill
Guest
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| Posted: Fri Feb 09, 2007 11:30 am Post subject: Re: My lack of enthusiasm for AMD |
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On Fri, 09 Feb 2007 00:31:39 GMT, "gaffo" <gaffo@usenet.net> wrote:
| Quote: | good post, alot of info:
one thing about the winchip-2 though: True it did come out two years
after the k-6 (win-2 not win-1), but its FPU was equal to (and in fact
usually 5-10 percent FASTER) the k-6.
win-1 had a dog fpu,
but the win-2 had a pipelined fpu and could run x86 games which were
compiled for the Pentium Classics fpu 5-10 percent faster than the k-6
could even though technically the winchip2's fpu was "slower" than the
k-6.
but that "slowerness" only showed when running games written for the
486's fpu, and then it was "fast enough" since it was running faster
than any 486 clockspeed wise.
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As always, measuring the exact performance of one FPU vs. another
isn't a straightforward thing, but I don't recall any of the Winchips
ever having a particularly impressive FPU. At best they were sorta-ok
for some situations.
| Quote: | Winchip2 was offered in 200?mhz and 240 mhz. at the time the lower end
k-6's were offered at 233 and were slower ;-)........and cost more and
needed a new motherboard............and had to run on doggy VIA
chipsets.
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The very first Winchip2 was released in Sept. of '98, a month after
AMD released their K6-2 350MHz and two months before they released the
K6-2 400MHz.
The Winchip and especially Winchip2 was a nice and extremely low-cost
upgrade solution. It had a lot of good points, but it was never
anywhere close to competing with either Intel or AMD at the high-end.
--
Tony Hill
hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca |
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Spoon
Guest
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| Posted: Fri Feb 09, 2007 2:30 pm Post subject: Re: My lack of enthusiasm for AMD |
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Tony Hill wrote:
| Quote: | AMD, like Intel, highered several old Alpha guys.
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How high are they now? ;-þ |
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Spoon
Guest
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| Posted: Fri Feb 09, 2007 2:32 pm Post subject: Re: My lack of enthusiasm for AMD |
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gaffo wrote:
| Quote: | now the k-7/k-8/etc is tops. but that is thanks to the Alpha guy
(forget name?) which AMD hired.
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Dirk Meyer?
| Quote: | IMO silicon is topped out. we will no longer see speed increases of
factors of 2 or 3 as we used to.
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Maybe, maybe not.
http://realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT012707024759 |
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Tony Hill
Guest
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| Posted: Mon Feb 12, 2007 12:13 am Post subject: Re: My lack of enthusiasm for AMD |
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On Fri, 09 Feb 2007 10:40:11 +0100, Spoon <devnull@localhost.com>
wrote:
| Quote: | Tony Hill wrote:
AMD, like Intel, highered several old Alpha guys.
How high are they now? ;-þ
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From some of the design decisions we've seen on the Itanium (where
many of the Alpha guys ended up), I would say VERY! 
--
Tony Hill
hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca |
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gaffo
Guest
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| Posted: Mon Feb 12, 2007 9:46 am Post subject: Re: My lack of enthusiasm for AMD |
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Spoon wrote:
| Quote: | gaffo wrote:
now the k-7/k-8/etc is tops. but that is thanks to the Alpha guy
(forget name?) which AMD hired.
Dirk Meyer?
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YES!! thank you!
........seems that there is a prototype "Quantum" computer too.
whatever/however that works.....................................
a different animal or so we've been told.
GaArsinide (using laser light within the chip instead of electrons) is
not moving forward after 30 yrs.........but you never know, maybe some
century.
Like Plasma TVs - been around since 1960's!!!!!!! - only now do they
"work" well enough and cheap enough to make to be viable.
-- |
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