How did AMD lose the performance crown to Intel?

magellan · Oct 30, 2015

I remember maybe 10 years ago the Athlon 64's were the dominant desktop and server CPU -- at least in performance. The best Pentium 4 and Pentium D's couldn't match the Athlon 64's or Optys. The 1st HPC cluster I ever worked on was Opteron based. I believe the Athlon 64's had a better IPC, better memory bandwidth and a superior connection (hypertransport?) to their I/O hub/PCH.

So how did AMD lose the performance crown to Intel? And why?

EarthDog · Oct 30, 2015

Oh, Doooooolk.....!

Janus67 · Oct 30, 2015

Our resident CPU architecture expert (Dolk/George) covered it pretty well if I remember here, mag.

http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php/762300-AMD-vs-Intel

Let us know if something isn't.

Johan45 · Oct 30, 2015

EarthDog said:
Oh, Doooooolk.....!

Just stop it, I like my coffee. :rofl:

Woomack · Oct 30, 2015

magellan said:
I remember maybe 10 years ago the Athlon 64's were the dominant desktop and server CPU -- at least in performance. The best Pentium 4 and Pentium D's couldn't match the Athlon 64's or Optys. The 1st HPC cluster I ever worked on was Opteron based. I believe the Athlon 64's had a better IPC, better memory bandwidth and a superior connection (hypertransport?) to their I/O hub/PCH.

So how did AMD lose the performance crown to Intel? And why?

AMD was never dominating on server or in general business market. Professional users have never trusted AMD enough. AMD was ( and still is ) only popular on home/gaming/entertainment hardware market. This is also one of the reasons why Intel had ( and still have ) for long years 60%+ graphics card market = almost all office computers were running on Intel CPUs.
Also Intel was matching AMD in performance but not in price. That's why AMD changed CPU naming scheme to xxxx+ like 2600+ was compared to 2600MHz Intel ... and price actually made them popular as similar performance CPU was 20-50% cheaper. In this case AMD was comparing their products to Intel to get higher sales as they were far behind in general sales. We know that A64 were better than P4 but business market didn't care as except CPU there is everything else like warranty, additional technology, stability etc.

All other stuff in Dolk's thread.

Dolk · Oct 30, 2015

Woomack, I wouldn't say AMD was never dominating. The opteron was used in the number 1 super computer for 3 years in a row.

http://www.top500.org/lists/2008/06/
http://www.top500.org/lists/2009/06/
http://www.top500.org/lists/2010/06/
http://www.top500.org/lists/2011/06/

There were many times when AMD had the chance to become the giant over Intel. Every time this opportunity arrived, AMD faltered. The biggest yet being the Phenom CPU. If AMD had come out with the Deneb rather than Phenom, it would have been a whole other story.

Please refer to my AMD vs Intel thread for more. I can certainly help with any questions.

magellan · Oct 30, 2015

Dolk said:
Woomack, I wouldn't say AMD was never dominating. The opteron was used in the number 1 super computer for 3 years in a row.

http://www.top500.org/lists/2008/06/
http://www.top500.org/lists/2009/06/
http://www.top500.org/lists/2010/06/
http://www.top500.org/lists/2011/06/

There were many times when AMD had the chance to become the giant over Intel. Every time this opportunity arrived, AMD faltered. The biggest yet being the Phenom CPU. If AMD had come out with the Deneb rather than Phenom, it would have been a whole other story.

Please refer to my AMD vs Intel thread for more. I can certainly help with any questions.

How did the Opteron stack up against the Itanium 2?

My question is why did AMD at one point have the best performing x86 CPU's (and I believe AMD held the x86 memory bandwidth lead all the way through Intel's Core 2 Quad architecture) yet now they're irrelevant as a CPU compute platform for HPC applications?

bob4933 · Oct 30, 2015

Dolk said:
Woomack, I wouldn't say AMD was never dominating. The opteron was used in the number 1 super computer for 3 years in a row.

There were many times when AMD had the chance to become the giant over Intel. Every time this opportunity arrived, AMD faltered. The biggest yet being the Phenom CPU. If AMD had come out with the Deneb rather than Phenom, it would have been a whole other story.

Isn't Deneb a name for a phenom chip?

DaveB · Oct 30, 2015

They started the downhill slide in 2006/2007 with the ill-fated Barcelona. Then bungled their attempted comeback with Bulldozer. While I'm looking forward to Zen, I'm getting less enthused the more I hear. Haswell-like performance in 2016? Really? That's all you got AMD?

Dolk · Oct 30, 2015

FYI, Haswell beats Skylake.

@magellen
The Itanium 2 is very old to me lol. It has been awhile since I studied that architecture. There was a flaw with one of the two Itaniums and I can't remember which one. Comparison wise, AMD was beating Intel at this time due to AMD's 64bit server chips. Itanium was still a 32bit chip, single core.

@Bob
Phenom I = Barcelona, the ugly age of AMD. Phenom II = Deneb/Thuban, the Monday after St. Pats day time for AMD.

EarthDog · Oct 30, 2015

FYI, Haswell beats Skylake.

Oh?????? In what?

DaveB · Oct 30, 2015

Dolk said:
FYI, Haswell beats Skylake.

I don't think so.

Dolk · Oct 30, 2015

I'm sorry I think Skylake is beaten by Broadwell, but on par with Haswell? I'm not completely familiar with all the names and PIDs for Intel.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-review-6700k-6600k-ddr4-ddr3-ipc-6th-generation/10
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/08/intel-skylake-core-i7-6700k-reviewed/

And again, I should mention that this is mostly seen in PC games, benchmarks are all over the place.

EarthDog · Oct 30, 2015

Broadwell is faster only when it can use the EDO ram or w/e it has last I recall...

Your are tech link only shows skylake losing in handbrake. Nothing else.

There shouldn't be a reason for games but in some cases it does, negligible though from your anand link.. and tbr arstech link shows negligble differences with skylake barely leading in most. Not to mention, I disagree with the method anand uses of lowering clocks to well below most stock clocks. Put em all to 4ghz and see where they stand.

But, nobody would say skylake is faster than haswell or Broadwell as a blanket statement.. for the most part, it's not as your links show.

RJARRRPCGP · Oct 30, 2015

bob4933 said:
Isn't Deneb a name for a phenom chip?

Deneb is a Phenom II.

EarthDog said:
EDO ram

LOL, that was all the way back in 1996 and 1995! Pre-ATX-era.

Dolk · Oct 30, 2015

I over-stated what I said.

EarthDog · Oct 30, 2015

RJARRRPCGP said:
LOL, that was all the way back in 1996 and 1995! Pre-ATX-era.

Lol, indeed. eDRAM.

magellan · Nov 2, 2015

Dolk said:
FYI, Haswell beats Skylake.

@magellen
The Itanium 2 is very old to me lol. It has been awhile since I studied that architecture. There was a flaw with one of the two Itaniums and I can't remember which one. Comparison wise, AMD was beating Intel at this time due to AMD's 64bit server chips. Itanium was still a 32bit chip, single core.

But according to wikipedia:
Itanium (/aɪˈteɪniəm/ eye-TAY-nee-əm) is a family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture (formerly called IA-64).

benbaked · Nov 2, 2015

magellan said:
But according to wikipedia:
Itanium (/aɪˈteɪniəm/ eye-TAY-nee-əm) is a family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture (formerly called IA-64).

That's correct. One of the Itanium's big failures was its poor x86 emulator. I recall reading that it emulated x86 instructions at about the speed of a 100 MHz Pentium. Intel later released a software x86 emulator for the Itanium that outperformed the chip's hardware solution. AMD instead went ahead and extended the x86 architecture to x86-64 with no performance hit in running legacy x86 code, it was so much more successful than IA-64 that Intel went ahead and licensed AMD64 starting with the Prescott P4s and Nocona Xeons.

magellan · Nov 2, 2015

benbaked said:
That's correct. One of the Itanium's big failures was its poor x86 emulator. I recall reading that it emulated x86 instructions at about the speed of a 100 MHz Pentium. Intel later released a software x86 emulator for the Itanium that outperformed the chip's hardware solution. AMD instead went ahead and extended the x86 architecture to x86-64 with no performance hit in running legacy x86 code, it was so much more successful than IA-64 that Intel went ahead and licensed AMD64 starting with the Prescott P4s and Nocona Xeons.

I remember now popular nickname for the Itanium was Itanic.

It's amazing to think that at one point AMD had the superior CPU for both the x86 server and desktop market. You would never think so now.

I even remember the last 32-bit Athlons (Thunderbird?) also out-performed Intel CPU's on an IPC basis.

Now it seems like there's no competition at all for Intel. I've even read that IBM's Power8 CPU's can't match Intel.

How did AMD lose the performance crown to Intel?

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