

Former AMD Chief’s Book Describes Fight Against Intel - velodrome
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/02/14/former-amd-chiefs-book-describes-fight-against-intel/

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Osiris
On a plane flight about a year and a half ago, I sat next to a Professor of
Electrical Engineering who worked with various chip companies and startups on
chip design. The discussion was very interesting.

In particular, we talked about Intel and AMD. He claimed that if AMD's
architecture was produced using Intel's fabs, the chips would be better than
Intel's.

I'm not sure if he had inside knowledge or it was just his industry
experience, but I found it interesting that AMD's primary disadvantage is
fabrication technology and not chip design. They have to design their chips
better because they are competing often 2 processes behind Intel and still
compete.

~~~
ibrahima
> In particular, we talked about Intel and AMD. He claimed that if AMD's
> architecture was produced using Intel's fabs, the chips would be better than
> Intel's.

I would have believed this maybe 4 or 5 years ago, but these days I don't
think that's the case anymore. There was a time maybe 7 or 8 years ago when
AMD was hands down better, then Intel started doing good work with the
original Core 2 and then Nehalem, innovating on both the architecture and
process sides. Now AMD is kind of where Pentium 4 Prescott was in that their
latest architecture has to be pumped up to insanely high clock speeds to be
competitive with Intel's midrange parts. I don't think shrinking the process
node would help there, because they just don't have the IPC, and I don't think
going down to 22nm would help AMD push their clocks that much higher that they
would suddenly be competitive. And power consumption would probably go through
the roof if they tried that.

That said I'm probably going to build another AMD desktop just to support them
though an Intel would be way better for my needs, only because without them
competition would die on the CPU front. At the price points I'm looking at I
could get AMD's fastest CPU which competes with Intel's mid range and it'd at
least do everything I need it to do, but the Intel would probably use less
power. I'm kind of curious if AMD's Bulldozer architecture benefits parallel
compiling because my hand wavy intuition says that compiling should be mostly
integer code, and their processing modules do have two integer units so
vaguely speaking it might be able to perform close to how an 8 core standard
system would perform.

~~~
yvdriess
Intel is essentially still using the Pentium II architecture, where AMD has
refreshed theirs recently with the bulldozer. Intel's fab advantage (32->22nm
gives a massive thermal advantage) is getting wasted on putting more GPU on
die. Probably because they can't put more cores on there without blowing their
thermal threshold. The only way to add more cores then, is for cores to share
more component: share the sequencer (more vector instructions), share the FP
pipeline (aka bulldozer module), etc.

Running bulldozer modules on a 22nm fab would definitely beat the Intel Xeons
on the majority of the server applications. Increasing the cache sizes and
increasing the set associativity (amd is at 4, Intel at 8) will already give
it the edge.

With regard to the sharing of FP pipelines: this is not new, the Sun Sparks
have been doing that for ages. As we add more cores and parallelism, we will
go more towards finer-grained parallel architectures like the spark. The
bulldozer is only a shy step in that direction, not willing to commit too much
in loss of sequential performance.

