Ten years under Dr Su: How AMD went from budget Intel alternative to x86 contender A decade ago, the landscape of the x86 processor market was nowhere near as competitive as it is now. AMD really wasn't the force in the processor market it is known as today. In early 2014, with Rory Read at the helm, it had been a while since AMD had tasted glory. By Read's departure, the last time the company posed a real …
"The biggest win for AMD of late is its market share in the server space"
Incorrect
The biggest win for AMD is surviving the Bulldozer/Piledriver years and coming out stronger, with better products, taking market share and being a direct competitor to Intel again.
Maybe in the next 10 years, they can do the same for the graphics business and make NV look over their shoulders nervously.
Unlikely.
They caught up to Intel because Intel had multiple major self inflicted disasters in both the fab and chip design sides of the houses. Had those not happened things would not be as rosy for AMD right now (though still way better than the Bulldozer days) Unlike Intel, Nvidia has been executing nearly perfectly on the design side, and since they rely on the same foundry as AMD any problems would affect both.
Actually if it came down to it Nvidia would probably come out better if TSMC had production issues because they are a much larger customer of TSMC's than AMD, and have a lot more cash so they can buy themselves a place in line ahead of AMD. Maybe not ahead of Apple, but at their current growth trajectory they may rival Apple's #1 customer slot at TSMC in a couple more years.
While it's true that most of Intel's problems were of its own making, we shouldn't ignore the deals it cut with manufacturers to make sure there was Intel Inside™. AMD remain cash-strapped because it was barely keeping its head above water in the fight with Intel.
Going forward, nVidia should be looking over its shoulder at anything that is "nearly" as good, but as uses less power as its main customers all have more than enough cash to build entire data centres using different architectures if total power consumption is siginifcantly lower.
Nvidia is way ahead in both total performance and power per performance in the AI race. It isn't even close. And they are rolling out their next gen Blackwell that's more than 2x the performance for only a moderate jump in power use so power per performance is taking another jump. They aren't sweating over AMD, they are way behind - basically taking the share that Nvidia can't fulfill because they are selling all they can make and have a line out back.
This. I just bought an over-priced Nvidia GPU precisely because of the software/ecosystem. It's not as bad or insurmountable as Apple or Microsoft's but Nvidia have played a shrewd game.
AMD has always been infuriatingly terrible at building GPU drivers and software in general. They crash constantly. They needed to rip up all the legacy Radeon crap and start again, and do it well so they're not launching a brand new compute ecosystem every few years. ROCm might be a big part of the answer to that (if they fix the core drivers too) but it's been so slow gaining traction that PyTorch doesn't support it properly on Windows, 8 entire years after it's launch.
The reason, I presume, is that they've been too cash-strapped to fund the software development. Hopefully that's changing now they're making bank on x86 processors but I can't help wondering if a tiny bit more focus on GPU compute over the years would have a better strategy for them. I was clear 15 years ago that CUDA was tapping an up-and-coming market, but AMD seemed to think they could hitch on the OpenCL bandwagon without putting any real effort in themselves. The ecosystem matters.
AMD's genius/fortunate moves over the past decades were: 1) Buying ATI. 2) Spinning off their foundries so that their future x86 chips could always utilise optimal semiconductor processes instead of being bound to whatever had worked out in-house. Intel could be wise to take note (or maybe they're better keeping control of foundries given the geopolitics of semiconductor manufacture, decisions, decisions).
Anyway, all the jostling is good for us consumers. Between AMD, Intel, Nvidia, ARM, and Apple it's difficult to even identify a proper duopoly any more. Each has their strengths and weaknesses. Intel could do with a few more quarters of pain to lean-ify them. Apple could use some decisive anti-trust rulings to bring them down to earth but I genuinely wish them luck with their silicon adventures. Nvidia will make hay while the sun shines, or they'll overextend and be the next one on the ropes when the AI hype-train runs off the rails. The world will carry on turning. All we really need to complete the picture of competition is a VIA resurgence.
AMD have been quite open that they don't support their cards for quite as long as Nvidia in general due to the cost of doing so.
In short, they are willing to target consoles (where they have been very successful) and datacentres, but consumers are an after thought.
It's been abundantly obvious for years that they don't want to, or can't, compete in the consumer GPU space. They're happy picking up some of the mid market sales, and have some decent if uninspiring cards at the low end.
The actual competition is (slowly) coming from Intel. Prices are lower, and driver support is gradually improving. If they stick at it they will overtake AMD as a viable choice.
VT-d FLR reset has been broken *for years* and AMD will not fix it permanently despite repeated requests. They had broken VR in their flagship GPU for around a year. I have a Vega 56 which admittedly at the time I bought it for 200 quid (just before GPU prices skyrocketed), was in theory a decent deal. In practice it took three years until the drivers matured, well into the following generation (which was, are you seeing a theme yet, buggy).
If you need open source driver support (basically Open/NetBSD) AMD are a decent choice. Windows/Linux/FreeBSD have proprietary Nvidia drivers that now work with Wayland.
Otherwise, go for Nvidia. Better drivers, RTX and DLSS, generally supported longer.
Where the heck do you live where that's true?
They've been the same price for 15-20 years, but the specs keep getting better. The "low end" models keep getting cheaper, I recall $200 being the low mark for a non-Chromebook so I wanted to see if that was still true and Best Buy has a Black Friday deal for a laptop for $109.99, which is $70 off its regular price meaning it is regularly well under $200.
Yeah the specs suck with dual core Celeron N4500, 4GB RAM and 64GB eMMC but that thing is probably as fast (or faster, due to not having a spinning hard drive) than 90% of what was on the market at any price in 2010.
they dont really run faster or more
Chrome was released about the same time as Wolfdale..
https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/AMD-Ryzen-7-9700X-vs-Intel-Core2-Duo-E8600/4169vsm124
E8600 was $266 on release, that's $391 in today's money. The 9700X debuted at $359. It has 4.8x single-core performance, and 4(+threads) times as many cores on top of that. (Roughly 22x the performance, if your computer is too busy to calculate that).
Best of all the market has widened, so there are both higher-powered consumer chips, and cheaper, and lower-powered consumer chips than there were back then.
It's true things stalled for a while. Clock frequencies plateaued. Memory latency has become a much more common bottleneck, advances in cache design and pipelining have only partially compensated. But the advances in core-count AMD brought have really broken the logjam in CPU performance. DRAM, solid-state storage speed, old-school platter storage capacity (but not so much speed), PCIE, USB, WiFi, GSM, numerous other interfaces and protocols, meanwhile have all seen incredible leaps too.
Software bloat is to blame for whatever performance problems you perceive. Probably some rose-tinted memories too.
It 2020 I needed to replace the Intel lap warmer / jet engine with an AMD and non Windows laptop.
I best I could do was a Lenovo with Windows and a soldered SSD. None of the niche suppliers could get the latest AMD chips.
Still running cool, but I am worried if the SSD gives up the ghost.
If your SSD gives up soon, the Clevo and TongFang Factories are Linux and maintenance friendly and are re-branded by companies like Bestware/Schenker and laptopwithlinux.com
I'm on my second AMD laptop from Bestware and am happy to recommend them. I even had to process the warranty replacement of a failed disk - there was no drama.
The great thing is that you can usually customise the components to get just what you want, even if it's a very high spec.
Try ASUS. I'm using a two year old Strix G15 gaming laptop for work - yes I thought that too, but it is much better than the high end Dell and Lenovo I had previously. The 16 thread Ryzen 9 is extremely quick, and while it isn't thin and light, instead of constant fighter taking off on afterburner fan noise, it has two large fans which spend most of the time off when running Linux, but when they are on have a nice low pitch tone which is far less annoying.
Most Modern Laptops have a "feature" that the user can be locked out and the only way to get back in is to pay technical support. The user gets a unique prompt, you tell technical support and pay them N x $100 dollars, and they tell you the password corresponding to that unique prompt.
I have LG gram and after removing Windows to single boot on Linux, I could not longer access BIOS, I contacted technical support and was told the price of 400+ dollars because warranty had ended. I didn't pay. Oh yeah, they didn't ask me for proof of ownership. The magically enabled BIOS password is not to prevent theft, it's to enable theft.
The laptop still works and runs Linux, but even having originally paid $1000 for it, I don't own the BIOS. Checking around the net I found reports from many frustrated users indicating this is a common feature on most modern laptops post 2020. There is an obsolete github account where a workaround existed, but the algorithms were updated since then so it no longer works. Various dodgy sites promise to give a password for cheaper if you pay up front. (Good luck with that!)
System76 Laptops are the only ones I could find that offer open source BIOS.
Most laptops, including ASUS, now have the CMOS battery soldered in. So it cannot be removed. That was the old way way, in 2010's, that you could reset BIOS memory. Look on your recent ASUS laptop - no battery visible, right?
This is a real problem. Apparently even for ASUS - [ https://www.reddit.com/r/ASUS/comments/12dt39q/how_to_get_rid_of_bios_password/?rdt=42751 ]
Some of the people there report they never set a password.
Some of the people there report their boards not having a removable CMOS battery - that because newer laptops have it soldered in.
Some of the people they were only able to recover by using this site [ https://www.biosbug.com/asus/ ], which is not an official ASUS site. Whoever operates that site has reverse engineered to the prompt to password mapping.
The emergency backdoor password (and it reverse engineering) has been around since at least 2009 [ https://dogber1.blogspot.com/2009/05/table-of-reverse-engineered-bios.html ]
Unfortunately, the motherboard companies periodically update their emergency backdoor password algorithm leaving locked out people stuck until the new algorithm is reverse engineered.
If you are brave you can set an admin password, then enter it wrong three times on purpose. Hopefully you will then be locked out.
Asus says : BIOS/Security password was set by user and was considered part of personal/private data. ASUS is committed to protecting and respecting your personal data and will not collect BIOS/Security password in our system. If you are unable to use your device due to a forgotten or lost BIOS password (Security password), please contact ASUS Product Support or ASUS authorized repair center for support, and service charge for repair may be provided to you according to ASUS Warranty Information.
It your warranty is expired - ouch. I bet you won't be asked for proof of purchase as long as you pay for service support.
Geez that's cheap as heck. Bad enough the cheap crap Lenovo laptops solder on the 4GB RAM (Source: own IdeaPad 330S from 2018 for $300 from WorstBuy that's still running on win 11). But soldering on the SSD? That should be a crime, and also a hard pass at purchase.
Intel are now run by accountants/MBAs, just like Boeing.
From 2008 to 2017 they released a very slightly better CPU every year, because they had no real competition.
AMD CPU's are great, but the Apple M series show what is possible.
With GPU's AMD's lack of software support and dropping development of the open source CUDA compatible compiler show that they are still quite clueless.
Mmm, and as the article correctly notes, the rot only really set in with Bulldozer - from the introduction of Athlon up to that point (i.e. about a decade *later* than the article implies) AMD had managed quite nicely to shake off their earlier image as being just a purveyor of cheap x86 clones and established themselves as a genuine alternative to Intel either outright at times, or at least if you were willing to sacrifice a small level of peak performance in exchange for an agreeably lower system cost. Which, given how utterly dominant Intel were at the time, was no mean feat...
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