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Were you surprised at how AMD was able to bounce back strongly?

E

Estellex

Member
Back in the day, Intel processors were the only viable choice for hardcore gamers. AMD processors were outdated and there were no company at the time that manufactures desktop CPUs other than those two and as a result Intel had a monopoly over the market for quite a while.

In 2017, AMD launched a new series of processors called "Ryzen" that changed the whole playing field. Ryzen processors were finally able compete with Intel's in terms of cost effectiveness. While Ryzen processor felt short in single-threaded throughput compared to the Kaby Lake series, it compensated by offering more multi-core performance.

I am still surprised to this day that AMD is able to bounce back after suffering years of losses to Intel. I guess I am a sucker for David vs Goliath type stories.
 
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K

Knch

Member
Estellex said:
Back in the day, Intel processors were the only viable choice for hardcore gamers. AMD processors were outdated and there were no company at the time that manufactures desktop CPUs other than those two and as a result Intel had a monopoly over the market for quite a while.

In 2017, AMD launched a new series of processors named "Ryzen" that changed the whole playing field. Ryzen professors were finally able compete with Intel's in terms of cost effectiveness. While Ryzen processor felt short in single- threaded throughput compared to the Kaby Lake series, it compensated by offering more multi-core performance.

I am still surprised to this day that AMD is able to bounce back after suffering years of loss to Intel. I guess I am a sucker for David vs Goliath type stories.
Click to expand...
Phenom and K6 were beastly compared to the utter shitbag that was the Pentium IV.
 
Tesseract

Tesseract

Banned
Knch said:
Phenom II was discontinued in 2012.
Ryzen was released in 2017.
Click to expand...
latest
 
nemiroff

nemiroff

Gold Member
Yes, but when learning about the context of the situation it's not that surprising. I even feel for Intel, they've been really struggling out of the blue.

Their 7nm is so fucked.
 
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llien

llien

Banned
nemiroff said:
Their 7nm is so fucked.
Click to expand...
It's their 10nm, actually.

Intel is caught in a perfect storm:
1) Its 10nm process, which has higher density than TSMC's 7nm, didn't deliver (goals were very aggressive, but so what). They only were able to roll out mobile CPUs.
2) Chiplet concept is amazingly effective. AMD is face-rolling Intel with all those "glued together" CPUs, which are so much cheaper to produce than monolithic dies
3) Architectural issues (opportunism in code execution) hit hard and are still not fixed even in the newest CPUs
4) AMD has concentrated the effort and beat them on IPC front. Even the very first Zens on inferior process were beating Intel CPUs at perf/watt.
 
jshackles

jshackles

Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the capability to make the world's first enhanced store. Steam will be that store. Better than it was before.
Gamerguy84 said:
Yes pleasantly surprised. My next build is pure AMD.

I didn't think they would make it a few years ago.
Click to expand...
A few years ago, on GAF, I was told that investing in AMD was a dead end and a waste of time. I recommended it to someone looking to put together a budget PC and was dogpiled for even suggesting it. Fuckers.

I've been putting AMD in all my personal builds ever since the AMD-K5-PR166.
 
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Tesseract

Tesseract

Banned
Elektro Demon said:
You got it wrong OP. Intel was not the only choice for gamers back in the day. In fact, a lot of their cpus were better then Intel's offerings.
The only time they so called suffered were the bulldozer/pilediver years. The rest of their architectures were fucking solid.
Click to expand...
absolutely, there was a period where amd was on fire

i still boot my phenom x2 550 from time to time
 
godhandiscen

godhandiscen

There are millions of whiny 5-year olds on Earth, and I AM THEIR KING.
Knch said:
Phenom and K6 were beastly compared to the utter shitbag that was the Pentium IV.
Click to expand...
I had the top Phenom and no, the Pentium IV equivalent of the time had better single core speeds which mattered for all games during that generation. The Phenom was only better in multi threaded synthetic benchmarks.

I also couldn’t OC the Phenom, it required a lot of voltage which fucked the thermals. It was a piece of shit processor. I got a Core i7 950 as soon as I could.
 
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TaySan

TaySan

Banned
It's kinda amazing how behind Intel now considering they practically had a monopoly for ages. Love my 3900x :)
 
Mista

Mista

Banned
Elektro Demon said:
You got it wrong OP. Intel was not the only choice for gamers back in the day. In fact, a lot of their cpus were better then Intel's offerings.
The only time they so called suffered were the bulldozer/pilediver years. The rest of their architectures were fucking solid.
Click to expand...
This is 100% true. AMD weren’t garbage back in the day. They just had a period of time were they were lost and then got their shit together. Intel the overpriced garbage can piss off.
 
AquaticSquirrel

AquaticSquirrel

Member
The OP is kind of not well informed about the history of AMD/Intel.

AMD were very competitive with Intel for a good while, in fact they were soundly beating Intel in performance and mindshare in some segments.

So much so that the 64 bit architecture that we use on all desktop CPUs, including Intel was designed by AMD and became the standard 64 bit CPU architecture.

The Athlon 64 was flying high in both performance and sales and was a well regarded CPU. AMD was doing so well that they eyed up ATI, the GPU manufacturer who were completing well with Nvidia at the time and they ended up purchasing ATI.

Where things went badly for AMD is that they were doing too well. This prompted Intel to use illegal shady practices, to which they were eventually taken to court for and AMD won the case, it is a matter of record so you can look into the details. Although AMD was flying high Intel was still an absolute giant in CPUs and still the market leader but were afraid of the rising stiff competition potentially dethroning them eventually.

Although Intel was fined, the fine amount was nothing compared to the revenue and market share growth that AMD lost during that critical time period, a slap on the wrist really.

Furthermore with bulldozer etc.. AMD saw trends moving towards massive parallelism in programing/functional programming so they bet the farm on much slower chips but with many cores to make the most of mulithreading and parallelism. Unfortunately for AMD this was the wrong bet at the time as despite trends and predictions, most programs stayed firmly in the single threaded space for much of the decade. After this it was a vicious cycle for AMD where they became more starved each year for revenue for R&D which in turn meant they could not compete on tech.

Intel realizing they had what they assumed an insurmountable lead, rested on their laurels and started price gouging and stopped innovating. Happy to keep eveyone on small core numbers while keeping their higher core chips for the server market.

AMD eventually got back into gear with Zen/Ryzen and brought us out of the Dual/Quad core Intel ghetto. Now they are eating Intel's lunch pretty badly. In the GPU space they have made a pretty good recovery with Navi/5700xt in the mid range market (driver issues not withstanding) so if they can capitalize on RDNA2/Big Navi they could really give Nvidia a run for their money in the high end GPU space. Their goal is to repeat the Ryzen strategy but in the GPU market, we will see how they fare against Ampere/Nvidia in the coming months but all accounts seem to point to them having a winner on their hands.
 
diffusionx

diffusionx

Gold Member
See above. AMD had better chips than Intel before, and were very successful. Bulldozer sucked, but unlike Intel and P4, they couldn't rely on clout and moneyhats to see them through, so they just had to come up with a better architecture.

It would be interesting to peer into the alternate history where Bulldozer is a viable competitor to Intel's Core line, and AMD has a solid 15 years of putting out equal or better chips than Intel.
 
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MaestroMike

MaestroMike

Gold Member
Ryujin said:
The OP is kind of not well informed about the history of AMD/Intel.

AMD were very competitive with Intel for a good while, in fact they were soundly beating Intel in performance and mindshare in some segments.

So much so that the 64 bit architecture that we use on all desktop CPUs, including Intel was designed by AMD and became the standard 64 bit CPU architecture.

The Athlon 64 was flying high in both performance and sales and was a well regarded CPU. AMD was doing so well that they eyed up ATI, the GPU manufacturer who were completing well with Nvidia at the time and they ended up purchasing ATI.

Where things went badly for AMD is that they were doing too well. This prompted Intel to use illegal shady practices, to which they were eventually taken to court for and AMD won the case, it is a matter of record so you can look into the details. Although AMD was flying high Intel was still an absolute giant in CPUs and still the market leader but were afraid of the rising stiff competition potentially dethroning them eventually.

Although Intel was fined, the fine amount was nothing compared to the revenue and market share growth that AMD lost during that critical time period, a slap on the wrist really.

Furthermore with bulldozer etc.. AMD saw trends moving towards massive parallelism in programing/functional programming so they bet the farm on much slower chips but with many cores to make the most of mulithreading and parallelism. Unfortunately for AMD this was the wrong bet at the time as despite trends and predictions, most programs stayed firmly in the single threaded space for much of the decade. After this it was a vicious cycle for AMD where they became more starved each year for revenue for R&D which in turn meant they could not compete on tech.

Intel realizing they had what they assumed an insurmountable lead, rested on their laurels and started price gouging and stopped innovating. Happy to keep eveyone on small core numbers while keeping their higher core chips for the server market.

AMD eventually got back into gear with Zen/Ryzen and brought us out of the Dual/Quad core Intel ghetto. Now they are eating Intel's lunch pretty badly. In the GPU space they have made a pretty good recovery with Navi/5700xt in the mid range market (driver issues not withstanding) so if they can capitalize on RDNA2/Big Navi they could really give Nvidia a run for their money in the high end GPU space. Their goal is to repeat the Ryzen strategy but in the GPU market, we will see how they fare against Ampere/Nvidia in the coming months but all accounts seem to point to them having a winner on their hands.
Click to expand...

Felt like I was reading the intro to a star wars movie and Intel is the empire and AMD is the rebel alliance.
 
Rentahamster

Rentahamster

Rodent Whores
To your point though, OP, I am a little surprised, but not by a lot because it's not like they bounced back from nowhere. Intel completely took their lead for granted, so it was only a matter of time. The surprising aspect is not that they did it, but the magnitude of it. I wasn't expecting their new CPUs to be as good as they were, and to have even better ones right around the corner.
 
K

Knch

Member
godhandiscen said:
I had the top Phenom and no, the Pentium IV equivalent of the time had better single core speeds which mattered for all games during that generation. The Phenom was only better in multi threaded synthetic benchmarks.

I also couldn’t OC the Phenom, it required a lot of voltage which fucked the thermals. It was a piece of shit processor. I got a Core i7 950 as soon as I could.
Click to expand...
https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/ and the 20 stage Pentium IV pipeline disagree.
 
Starlight Lotice

Starlight Lotice

Member
All I know is that they got the contracts to put their chips in the PS4/XB1 which is a massive win for them whilst Nvidia had to make do with Nintendo.

Intel have no presence in the Console market AFAIK (of course I don't mind being corrected on this). Perhaps they should have pitched better to the Console Manufacturers to get a bigger share.
 
GeorgPrime

GeorgPrime

Banned
Estellex said:
Back in the day, Intel processors were the only viable choice for hardcore gamers. AMD processors were outdated and there were no company at the time that manufactures desktop CPUs other than those two and as a result Intel had a monopoly over the market for quite a while.

In 2017, AMD launched a new series of processors called "Ryzen" that changed the whole playing field. Ryzen processors were finally able compete with Intel's in terms of cost effectiveness. While Ryzen processor felt short in single-threaded throughput compared to the Kaby Lake series, it compensated by offering more multi-core performance.

I am still surprised to this day that AMD is able to bounce back after suffering years of losses to Intel. I guess I am a sucker for David vs Goliath type stories.
Click to expand...


I always bought AMD, never changed.
 
Y

YCoCg

Member
Starlight Lotice said:
All I know is that they got the contracts to put their chips in the PS4/XB1 which is a massive win for them whilst Nvidia had to make do with Nintendo.

Intel have no presence in the Console market AFAIK (of course I don't mind being corrected on this). Perhaps they should have pitched better to the Console Manufacturers to get a bigger share.
Click to expand...
For the first part that's because Nvidia fucked over both Microsoft and Sony with the shady shit they pulled.

The second comes hand in hand as naturally picking AMD for graphics they also turned and said "Well if you need a CPU..."
 
-Arcadia-

-Arcadia-

Banned
Not really, although it is quite an accomplishment.

People are always talking about companies surely going out of business or definitely abandoning product lines after a few bad years, but the fact is that these goliaths, in most cases, can hang in there near indefinitely, and certainly until they onboard criticism and make real changes.

Take a look at Kodak, extreme worst case scenario, in death throes for decades, but landed a government contract for a corona therapy (seriously), and has seen its stock price hit ridiculous day-on-day jumps.

Too big to fail has multiple meanings.
 
supernova8

supernova8

Banned
I expected something might change once Lisa Su took over. Those Taiwanese-Americans are bloody good.

On a more serious note, I bought into their stock a few months back and........... let's just say I'm sitting on a very nice return on investment.
 
Hudo

Hudo

Gold Member
I am not really surprised by it. I am actually more surprised how Intel have blown their comfortable lead so easily. Like no one there expected any competition, which is crazy if that's how they really thought at Intel. I am also baffled at how much they blew it when it comes to the whole low-power/mobile CPU market, which ARM-based CPUs now own. I am also baffled that they have lost the market for FPGAs to Xilinx and Altera, with Intel being a footnote there at best. So many missed opportunities make me wonder whether their management and market analysis departments actually exist, lol.

AMD absolutely wiped the floor with Intel a couple of times in its history. The K6 architecture was a beast, the Athlon64 series was doing 64 bit before Intel could come up with a reasonable response. The Phenom series had discrete cores that were independent of each other instead of whatever the first couple of Core2Duo 4-core CPUs were (certainly not a native multicore architecture but some kind of stop-gap hackjob). Now, Intel also released a couple of absolute technological bangers in its history but given the size and R&D budget of Intel, one should expect more. And let's not forget some of Intel's anti-competitive practices to get OEMs to not use AMD CPUs in their products.
 
Starlight Lotice

Starlight Lotice

Member
YCoCg said:
For the first part that's because Nvidia fucked over both Microsoft and Sony with the shady shit they pulled.

The second comes hand in hand as naturally picking AMD for graphics they also turned and said "Well if you need a CPU..."
Click to expand...

Could you tell me what happened with that as I can never find what went down between Nvidia and Sony/MS. :)
 
bender

bender

What time is it?
A bit. It helps that Intel has left their front door open now going on three years and are probably another 2+ from course correcting.
 
DonMigs85

DonMigs85

Member
I guess Intel's hubris and past shady transgressions finally caught up with them. I just hope AMD makes the most of this opportunity and kills Intel's data center marketshare.
 
DonMigs85

DonMigs85

Member
Hudo said:
I am not really surprised by it. I am actually more surprised how Intel have blown their comfortable lead so easily. Like no one there expected any competition, which is crazy if that's how they really thought at Intel. I am also baffled at how much they blew it when it comes to the whole low-power/mobile CPU market, which ARM-based CPUs now own. I am also baffled that they have lost the market for FPGAs to Xilinx and Altera, with Intel being a footnote there at best. So many missed opportunities make me wonder whether their management and market analysis departments actually exist, lol.

AMD absolutely wiped the floor with Intel a couple of times in its history. The K6 architecture was a beast, the Athlon64 series was doing 64 bit before Intel could come up with a reasonable response. The Phenom series had discrete cores that were independent of each other instead of whatever the first couple of Core2Duo 4-core CPUs were (certainly not a native multicore architecture but some kind of stop-gap hackjob). Now, Intel also released a couple of absolute technological bangers in its history but given the size and R&D budget of Intel, one should expect more. And let's not forget some of Intel's anti-competitive practices to get OEMs to not use AMD CPUs in their products.
Click to expand...
The Phenoms were monolithic dies I believe, whereas Core 2 Quads were just 2 Core 2 Duo dies in one package that communicated via the FSB.
 
Blond

Blond

Banned
Not really, the moment they snagged complete and total domination for the X1/PS4 it was only a matter of time.
 
V2Tommy

V2Tommy

Member
laser_printer said:
Not really, the moment they snagged complete and total domination for the X1/PS4 it was only a matter of time.
Click to expand...

Not sure if serious. Because by that logic, Nvidia and ATi/AMD have been in consoles forever and it's made no difference to their bottom line.
 
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