Well we are on the verge of a new year and with it, the promise of a new lineup of AMD performance CPU's. Yes indeed friends AMD is getting ready to put on the old boxing gloves and try to go a few rounds with the Heavy weight of performance processors Intel. As most of us AMD fans already know this is a do or die situation especially when you take into consideration the $180 million dollar net loss the company suffered in Q1 of this year, not mention the whopping $403 million dollar loss in 2014. As I see these types of losses from a company that used to be the undisputed KING of the performance CPU world I just wonder...”what the hell happened”? More importantly I wonder if this next outing will be the “swan song”, the last stand of a storied company destined to fail, or if AMD will rise from the ashes of their short comings and show the world they can still run with the “big dogs” of the performance processing world.
Listen, I’m in no way here to bash AMD, actually I love them...no really! I’ve been building AMD based PC’s for over 16 years, it was my love of the power and performance of AMD based computers that inspired me to go to school and become a PC technician. AMD is indeed in my blood and I truly don’t know what I’ll do if the company goes belly up. I can tell you one thing, I’ll be heart broken for a long time to come. In this blog I’m going to discuss AMD’s latest attempt to become solvent not to mention successful once more and what it will mean for you the consumer if they fail. In order to understand how this successful CPU manufacturer fell so far we have to look back about 15 or so years to the glory days of the company.
A WALK DOWN MEMORY LANE:
In a nutshell AMD transformed themselves from a second-source supplier of Intel designs into a CPU juggernaut with their incorporation of the the system’s memory controller into the chip itself, which greatly reduced memory latency. They also took advantage of things like dual-channel memory and faster memory types like DDR2. One of their greatest innovations was their 64-bit extensions which enabled AMD CPU’s to run 64-bit operating systems that could address more than 4GB of memory at a time, but they didn’t sacrifice compatibility or speed when running the then standard 32-bit operating systems and applications. These extensions would go on to become the industry standard, beating Intel’s 64-bit Itanium architecture. Intel eventually ended up licensing the AMD64 extensions for its own compatible x86-64 implementation. It was around this time that AMD was riding a wave of success and it only made sense for the company to acquire ATi and leverage the success they were having with their CPU’s into the GPU market.
The Athlon lineup of desktop CPU’s was extremely successful for the company however it was the high-end server class of CPU’s “Opteron” which netted AMD its greatest profits. By 2006 AMD had accrued an estimated 25 percent of the server market while continuing to build on the success of the K8 for a few years, making several architecture tweaks and manufacturing process upgrades and even helping to usher in the multi-core era of computing with the Athlon 64 X2. So what the hell happened? Right? How could they have gone form masters of the universe to dire straights in a matter of about 5 years...well I’ll tell you how. Poor money management, despite all their successes the market had become saturated and CPU sales had begun to fall (drastically), to make matters worse AMD had far too much inventory that they couldn’t get rid of. They ended up taking a net loss of $61 million in 2001, $1.3 billion in 2002, and $274 million in 2003.
If all this wasn’t bad enough the biggest financial disaster for AMD had to be the facilities known as FAB 30,36,38 etc. Which where transferred over to Global Foundries and ended up costing the company around 2.6 billion. All these investments relied on AMD’s ability to sell processors, unfortunately Intel had plans of their own which culminated in the creation of their CORE architecture. The Core architecture hit AMD where it hurt, but the biggest damage to AMD's long-term health came from Intel's execution strategy. Beginning around the same time, Intel moved to a system of smaller but aggressively timed processor updates that it called "tick-tock."
Every year, Intel would introduce a new processor lineup—the "ticks" would gently tweak a CPU architecture and move it to a smaller, lower-power manufacturing process, while the "tocks" would remain on the established manufacturing process and introduce more drastic architectural changes. This system limits the risk that a new process or architecture will run into significant problems during the manufacturing stage, and new processor iterations can be introduced so quickly that a competitor with a superior architecture won't necessarily be able to stay on top for years, as AMD did with K8.
Neither Core nor any subsequent Intel architecture has left AMD behind all by itself, but Core 2 kicked off a relentless string of well-executed Intel CPUs. While AMD's CPUs continued to improve, they were over time shut out of the high-end market once more and forced to compete again mainly on price, mirroring the company's early struggles. It also didn't help that just as Intel was churning out its best products in years, AMD was dealing with the growing pains that come along with purchasing ATi and not creating a clear road map to the future. Not to mention their inability to unite the two companies, getting involved with too many projects and generally speaking, spreading themselves too thin. Next came the lawsuits and legal battles against Intel which at the end of the day amounted to an agreement with Intel and 1.25 billion in cash (which was small potato’s when you take into consideration that Intel made over 2 billion that quarter).
AMD’s situation hasn’t gotten any better over the years, even with some really solid engineering and promising developments with their GPU lineup AMD is losing money as well as market share. For example, ATi once commanded 20% of the GPU market share but recently reported about 5%. Let’s not even talk about AMD’s share of the CPU market which according to Forbes is less than 2%. All this brings us to AMD’s current situation...desperately in need of a major success. Saying that the embattled company needs to hit a home-run with its next lineup of CPU’s is an understatement. Well it seems 2016 will bring us AMD’s latest and greatest offering, the ZEN architecture. I’ve been doing a lot of research on these up and coming CPU’s and the information I’ve been able to come up with is promising, but like most AMD fans out there what I’ve been able to come up with also raises concerns.
A LOOK INTO THE FUTURE:
Let’s get one thing straight for all you AMD fans out there, (this IS AMD’s last chance) I don’t know what will happen to the company if these new CPU’s fail however, Microsoft and Samsung have both made it known that they are interested in acquiring the company. It has been said that Microsoft has been involved in talks with the company in regard to purchasing AMD out right. I’m not sure what this will mean for (US) the consumers if this deal gets made but I think it would be beneficial in some ways and not in others. I really don’t think Samsung has the money to compete with Microsoft so the idea that they would get the company is almost unthinkable.
So let’s think about what it would mean for AMD if “MS” gets it. The benefits are obvious, MS is worth about 290 billion so money for R&D would be virtually limitless allowing the company to develop chips that “could”, and “would” out perform anything Intel could produce. Remember one thing, AMD makes better chips and the architecture behind them are better than Intel’s. The only real reason Intel keeps out performing AMD is due to the money the company has and also their tick, tock chip release cycle that insures that no company can keep up with them, and even if a company does release a better chip it will be over-took by Intel’s aggressive release cycles.
All that will be a thing of the past if MS acquires the company, money and mismanagement are the only things holding AMD back from producing better chips then Intel. Microsoft would eliminate both of those problems however, at the end of the day what that will mean for the rest of us is ridiculous prices for their chips. The same reason why I refuse to support Intel will be the problem with AMD, there will be no refuge for people wanting quality and reasonable prices. So as you can imagine I’m not jumping for joy at the prospect of MS owning AMD.
But let’s get back to happier thoughts like this latest chip release. As I’ve said earlier I have some concerns about AMD’s latest chip “ZEN” is said to be 40% faster than their last FX offering (not counting the 9000 series) so is a 40% increase clock for clock going to be enough to compete with Intel and how much of the IPC gain AMD is talking about is actually single core performance? Keep in mind most software (including games are still single core) why I have no idea but developers are still in my opinion slow and yes (lazy) and don’t code their games/apps to properly utilize multi-core CPU’s. Sometimes I actually wonder why they even created multi-core chips since no one seems to want to use them properly.
What we really need from AMD is better per core performance than what they delivered last time around, the FX series to this day are still competitive with Intel’s i5 series when it comes to multi-threaded applications. Single threaded performance is where Intel really stomps on AMD, so if the 40% that AMD is boasting is mutli-threaded performance then what we can (realistically) expect from the chip when it comes to single threaded applications is about 20-25% performance gains and in my opinion that’s just not enough. AMD latest and greatest CPU to date is the FX 8350, (no I don’t even want to talk about the 9000 series which is only an OC’ed 8000 series chip that runs unstable in most peoples rigs) in any event the FX 8350 runs slower than an Intel i5 4590 and that’s AMD’s fastest CPU!
Here’s what we know so far...AMD is going to address the business market by releasing a new Opteron CPU and also address the High-end desktop market by releasing the multi-core Zen CPU. These new processors will be deployed on an all new AM4 socket, they will use all new DDR4 system memory, and they will support PCIe 3.0. The Zen CPU will be built on a 14 or possibly a 16nm process (jury is still out on that), now on to the question of cores. Intel is currently (I believe) sporting 18 cores on there business class CPU’s however for the average home user 4 cores is really just fine, and its going to be just fine for the rest of this generation of gaming, (for those of you who where wondering).
The point I’m slowly getting to is this, for home use anything over 8 cores for AMD is really TOTAL OVER KILL! Unless you have a home based server (doing real server based work loads) or if you just want to brag about something you will never truly utilize (and there’s a lot of that going on these days)! The reason I bring this up is due to the fact that it appears that AMD will be making a 16 core CPU for business (I hope) because if they plan on making a home version with that many cores I really don’t even want it, it will be a total waste of money not to mention time as no one will need or be able to utilize that many cores for home tasks. We do not have any information as far as pricing is concerned however I believe they will price the Zen 8 core chip at around the $300.00 price point. Tech power up has a great article on the new AMD chips here.I’d love to hear your thoughts (as long as they are constructive) PLEASE NO FAN BOYS OR FLAMERS!
