CPU/Mobo With dirty trade practises, how Intel sabotaged AMD

avi

Skilled
No, it's because the opposing side became dishonest. Rewind to 2005:

AMD had the Athlon 64 put ahead of everything Intel had available and they were making tons of money off its sales. But then, suddenly, sales went dry and benchmarks began to run better on Intel despite real world deltas being much smaller than synthetics reflected. Can you guess why? Because Intel paid PC manufacturers out of its own pocket for years to not buy AMD's chips. Although they were faster, manufacturers went with the bribe because the amount they made from that outweighed the amount they get from happy customers buying their powerful computers. And thus, the industry began to stagnate a bit with CPUs not really moving forward as quickly. They also attacked all existing AMD chips by sabotaging their compiler, making it intentionally run slower on all existing and future AMD chips. Not just temporarily, but permanently; all versions of software created with that version of the compiler will forever run worse on AMD chips, even in 2020.

tl;dr, from Anandtech's summary:

  • Intel rewarded OEMs to not use AMD’s processors through various means, such as volume discounts, withholding advertising & R&D money, and threatening OEMs with a low-priority during CPU shortages.
  • Intel reworked their compiler to put AMD CPUs at a disadvantage. For a time Intel’s compiler would not enable SSE/SSE2 codepaths on non-Intel CPUs, our assumption is that this is the specific complaint. To our knowledge this has been resolved for quite some time now (as of late 2010).
  • Intel paid/coerced software and hardware vendors to not support or to limit their support for AMD CPUs. This includes having vendors label their wares as Intel compatible, but not AMD compatible.
  • False advertising. This includes hiding the compiler changes from developers, misrepresenting benchmark results (such as BAPCo Sysmark) that changed due to those compiler changes, and general misrepresentation of benchmarks as being “real world” when they are not.
  • Intel eliminated the future threat of NVIDIA’s chipset business by refusing to license the latest version of the DMI bus (the bus that connects the Northbridge to the Southbridge) and the QPI bus (the bus that connects Nehalem processors to the X58 Northbridge) to NVIDIA, which prevents them from offering a chipset for Nehalem-generation CPUs.
  • Intel “created several interoperability problems” with discrete CPUs, specifically to attack GPGPU functionality. We’re actually not sure what this means, it may be a complaint based on the fact that Lynnfield only offers single PCIe x16 connection coming from the CPU, which wouldn’t be enough to fully feed two high-end GPUs.
  • Intel has attempted to harm GPGPU functionality by developing Larrabee. This includes lying about the state of Larrabee hardware and software, and making disparaging remarks about non-Intel development tools.
  • In bundling CPUs with IGP chipsets, Intel is selling them at below-cost to drive out competition. Given Intel’s margins, we find this one questionable. Below-cost would have to be extremely cheap.
  • Intel priced Atom CPUs higher if they were not used with an Intel IGP chipset.
  • All of this has enhanced Intel’s CPU monopoly.
The rest is history. AMD slowly lost money, stopped being able to make chips that live up to the Athlon 64, etc. The snowball kept rolling until bribery wasn't even necessary anymore, they pretty much just own the market now. Any fine would be a drop in the bucket compared to how much they can make by charging whatever they want.

edit: But guess what? AMD hired the original creator of the Athlon 64 and put him in charge of Zen[7] back in 2012. Zen might be the return of the Athlon 64 judging by recent news:

source
 
Nothing unknown..
Its like the rule of nature..

Next is Intel...
Mobile computing gonna kill Intel..
Companies like Qualcomm Mediatek will rise..

No matter Intel is big..
But even big stars in galaxies fade away..
 
Lol why are you posting this in 2015 ? This is ancient info. It's the same reason why I prefer team red thg, at least they don't pull off stunts like Intel and Nvidia.
Fingers crossed for Zen and Greenland.
 
^cos I think we should discuss zen and hope its good. If not, AMD will be doomed.
To be fair, if zen can reach Sandy bridge levels (Ivy might be optimistic? though the difference is small) in single threaded environments, keep power consumption low also lower platform cost, I think it could do well. This time, it seems they will go for a single socket for CPU as well as APU. Essentially, add more value to the platform rather than focus solely on CPU performance.
 
AMD has plenty of problems to overcome, money and foundry are two of them. I really wish they would make a comeback. Intel is the most pathetic company out there. I bought a 2600k, the mobo has died, it's not a very old CPU, but intel refreshes the socket every year as to make sure older processors are made obsolete. The 2600k I have is still one of the fastest processors out there but soon I won't be able to buy new motherboards to support it.
 
Yup, they are minting money. I too have a 2500k and wanted to get a new board, but could not find anything. Moving to a newer platform is pointless atm as its way too expensive and I will hardly gain anything.

Any news of the zen ? Last I heard there were delays.
 
I was always the AMD fan and the PC currently I am typing this post on, is a AMD PC and gives a run for money to Intel PC's purchased during same time.
However I agree that currently we don't have much choice when it comes to buy an AMD based PC/Laptop. Intel pretty much owns the market now and as stated earlier in thread, they don't need to bribe any more.
Core i3/i5/i7 is the biggest scam in CPU history.
 
This is mostly nonsensical excuses to make AMD's failures seem like they were not their own. I do not agree that Intel is responsible for AMD's failures.

For starters, they weren't even the ones to create the x86 architecture. They just copied from Intel like a hundred other companies in that era that started up and thrived on making Intel x86 clones till a time that they could no longer do it. (In case of AMD, it was an official licensing deal forced on Intel by IBM). AMD was big enough to survive when all the other clone makers failed that and they only had to take the existing architecture and improve and enhance it further and give it their own spin and they were simply not successful at doing that in the long run.

None of the things that Intel did like offering volume discounts on their own CPU's or lowering priority for OEM's who were dealing with both CPU's is ethically/morally wrong. These are very common business practices and if AMD would have been the ones trying to undercut Intel in volume deals etc, they would not have been considered to be at fault. Intel were however considered at fault from a legal angle because they are seen to be a dominant position and the anti-competition laws were evoked against them. These are all things that even your local businesses would be doing in a very casual manner.

Why are people flocking to the retailers that sell at the lowest prices. Isn't it wrong for Amazon/Flipkart/Snapdeal to offer lower prices while other stores do not. Should they be forced to sell at higher prices to match the prices offered by others?

Legal and ethical/moral wrongdoing are completely different things. Something that is deemed unethical/immoral is not necessarily illegal and vice versa something that is illegal is not necessarily unethical/immoral. For example, eating beef is just as ethical and moral as eating some other meat or plant food, but legally you cannot possess or eat beef in many places in India presently because it has been made illegal to do so.

AMD had a lot of time and decent amount of funds over the years to succeed. Its not like they were a small organization. They even had an advantage technologically with CPU's for a period of time (Athlon 64), but they could simply could not follow up on it and they could not catch up to Core architecture even once after it came out. Nothing stopped them from producing quite a number of successful GPU's (either in terms of value or performance) during the same duration, so why is it that they were not so successful technologically when it came to CPU's. They at offered VFM CPU's at some point of time, but now they have neither VFM nor performance edge.

OEM's are also driven by demand. If there were demand for AMD CPU's because they offered better VFM or performance, and people really wanted to buy them and not Intel's wares, no amount of bribing would coax an OEM to use only Intel CPU's and screw themselves in the process. At the end of the day, they have to sell their machines to make money and getting a massive discount on a CPUs is not going to help them if people are not going buy them.

It is a business management and technology failure from AMD and nothing else. One of the key reasons attributed for AMD's overall failure as a business is its lack of control over spending. It's not that somebody else prevented them from getting money, its that whatever money came to them was not utilized in the right manner. Loose spending was their bane.
 
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^^^ I'm planning to build a ps4 replacement PC for HDTV Gaming (Damn uncharted 4 makes the decision difficult).
now by this data, is going for a full AMD Rig a beneficial one or not..
 
Not sure what you mean @Lord Nemesis , I'll be a bit lazy and not cite sources, but I am sure they did make significant contributions to what the CPU is today. Its easy for us to ignore it as they are not doing well today, so let us not go there. As for Intel's practices, I don't know the exact nature, but if a $1B+ fine was given out to intel, something wrong was done.
No doubts about whether they ****ed up or not, of course they did, multiple times over different verticals. The point here is things are only going to get worse if they vanish(already it is hard to find alternatives).
 
http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/04/the-rise-and-fall-of-amd-how-an-underdog-stuck-it-to-intel/
http://arstechnica.com/business/201...e-top-of-the-mountain-to-the-deepest-valleys/

As The New York Times reported in 1989, AMD's corporate culture had also lost the thrifty habits it had at its founding. "Mr. Sanders's increasingly lavish style also became contagious," wrote the paper. "Salesmen who did not wear Rolex watches were likely to find their less-expensive time pieces thrown away by high-level executives who wanted the company to have a certain image. It was an atmosphere, former employees say, that encouraged loose spending throughout the company—a far cry from the early days at Advanced Micro, when Mr. Sanders once rejected a request for an electric pencil sharpener because it was too costly."

Raza also became concerned about the spending, which he came to see as extension of Sanders' personal lifestyle. Shortly after AMD bought NexGen, Raza visited Sanders at his expensive Los Angeles home.

"I said, 'It's a beautiful house,'" Raza said. "He said, 'I got in a competition with Madonna. We had a fight and I outbid Madonna.' I said, 'OK…' And he said, 'I understand what you're thinking. I spend more than I make. I always have spent more than I make.'" Raza said that the comment hit him like a punch in the gut. "And I said, 'I hope you don't do it at AMD,' but he did," he added. (Sanders did not respond to our request for comment.)


As Raza tells the story today, his boss insisted on building a fab in Dresden, Germany, over Raza's objections. (That fab, which still operates today as part of AMD spin-off GlobalFoundries, was completed in the spring of 2000.)

"The trouble in the entire economic model was that AMD did not have enough capital to be able to fund fabs the way they were funding fabs," Raza said. "The point at which I had my final conflict was that [Sanders] started the process of building a new fab with borrowed money prematurely. We didn't need a fab for at least another year. If we had done it a year later, we would have accumulated enough profits to afford the fab in Germany. He laid the foundation for a fundamentally inefficient capital structure that AMD never recovered from. I told him: don't do it. I put the [purchase orders] on hold. He didn't tell me and accelerated the entire process."

Both Raza and Barton recalled, independently of one another, one of Sanders' mantras: "Real men have fabs." Raza called this comment "simultaneously a sexist remark and the most stupid thing you can say," and he saw the fab decision as one of Sanders' "significant acts of irresponsibility." After he quit, Raza never spoke to Sanders again.

Ultimately, Ruiz found that the company wasn’t really a CPU maker anymore; rather, it was a Flash memory maker that happened to also sell microprocessors. AMD’s record profits in 2000 were due largely to its ability to sell memory to gadget makers, so Ruiz set about re-directing AMD.

This proved more difficult than expected; despite Sanders' swashbuckling ways, Ruiz found that "Sanders had unconsciously imbued AMD with a 'second-best' mentality." As Ruiz put it in his book, "Sanders was something of a paradox. On the one hand, he was full of energy and would never accept that AMD could fail. But on the other hand, he never seemed willing to put the long-term effort into developing a strategic plan. As a result we had a mediocre customer plan, a hit-or-miss reputation, and no global strategy at all... Simply put, no one inside AMD believed AMD could beat Intel in the marketplace or even mount a serious threat—not even the head of the company."


Despite technical successes, AMD's financial situation had become precarious. Processor unit sales were falling, and margins on most chips dropped quickly after 2000. AMD also had problems with producing too much inventory; in the second half of 2002, AMD actually had "to limit shipments and to accept receipt of product returns from certain customers," it announced, because the chips it made weren't selling fast enough. The company had a net loss of $61 million in 2001, $1.3 billion in 2002, and $274 million in 2003.

What was sucking away the company's money? It was those darned fabs, just as Raza had feared. In the company's 2001 10-K, AMD estimated, "construction and facilitation costs of Dresden Fab 30 will be approximately $2.3 billion when the facility is fully equipped by the end of 2003." There was also a $410 million to AMD Saxony, the joint venture and wholly owned subsidiary that managed the Dresden fab.
 
Not sure what you mean @Lord Nemesis , I'll be a bit lazy and not cite sources, but I am sure they did make significant contributions to what the CPU is today. Its easy for us to ignore it as they are not doing well today, so let us not go there. As for Intel's practices, I don't know the exact nature, but if a $1B+ fine was given out to intel, something wrong was done.
No doubts about whether they ****ed up or not, of course they did, multiple times over different verticals. The point here is things are only going to get worse if they vanish(already it is hard to find alternatives).


Intel was paying for money for exclusivity. Exclusivity is a pretty common strategy in business and money is exchanged regularly for exclusivity. Microsoft and Sony pay money to game developers for making games exclusives tied to their own products. e-coms, retailers and do it to get products exclusively and vice versa is also often done.

Intel too paid money to OEM's for exclusivity. In addition they also offered good volume discounts in their CPU's to their OEMs which is makes them cheaper for the consumers as well. Since Intel was in a dominant position, anti-competition laws were used to sue them. There is nothing wrong about these strategies since the under dog was free to do these things without any consequences, but Intel was prevented since they are the market leaders.

This is on similar lines to how Microsoft in EU was prevented from bundling IE with Windows because they were in market leader and also forced to put up a page on their website with links to Firefox and Chrome while on the other hand Apple gets way with bundling a browser on Mac OS.


And yes, AMD did make some good contributions like the x86-64 and 3D Now and some of their own earlier designs like the Athlon 64 which left the Intel competition in the dust. But, at the end of the day, they were not able to capitalize and not because of some silly "Intel tried to sabotage us" kind of reason, but primarily because of serious internal issues with how their business is run and that bad culture dates way back and continues to this day.

The below quotation in relation to an earlier dispute with Intel shows how AMD behaves.

The retired judge handling the arbitration called Intel's behavior "a classic example of the breach of the covenant of good faith and fair dealing: preaching good faith but practising duplicity." But he "characterized Advanced Micro's behaviour as 'unremitting vindictiveness accompanied by a large dollop of opportunism.' He also said Intel's behavior did not excuse Advanced Micro from having to come up with acceptable products to trade. 'The problem is that AMD assumes a somewhat romanticized factual situation which, like Camelot, never existed,' he said in the ruling."


AMD is not going to die off completely. Intel has a lot to lose if AMD dies and they will ensure that it will be kept in a half alive state even if they have to do it out of their pocket. In fact, I think Intel had an active role in ensuring that AMD CPU's get used in the current gen consoles when its pretty clear that Intel can do much better with their own CPU's.
 
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AMD is not going to die off completely. Intel has a lot to lose if AMD dies and they will ensure that it will be kept in a half alive state even if they have to do it out of their pocket. In fact, I think Intel had an active role in ensuring that AMD CPU's get used in the current gen consoles when its pretty clear that Intel can do much better with their own CPU's.

I find this hard to believe. Any sources to back this up? Using an AMD APU would have probably been the most economical option and that's why AMD won over the consoles.

Intel can't make GPUs for shit anyway. They've tried their hand at this and failed if I remember correctly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(microarchitecture)
 
^^ Its just a conspiracy theory, not hard fact. If Intel really wanted to take this opportunity away from AMD, they could have done that quite easily with the frail situation that AMD is in right now.

- Intel already has developed quite a number of x86 SOC's with third party graphics cores like PowerVR albeit for the low power segment.
- The first gen XBOX comprised an Intel x86 CPU and an nVidia GPU albeit not in an SOC package.
- The PS3 had an nVidia GPU.
- Both the players have presence in the console market already. AMD has its own via XBOX 360.
- It is not so unthinkable for the two to get together to take away this opportunity from AMD if they really wanted.
- They could easily undercut AMD's costs with the kind of resources they have.

Both of them want AMD to be alive and keep going in an half beaten half dead state. My point is that Intel would even spend of its pocket if that's necessary to keep AMD alive. If AMD is going to shut down if their CPU's don't sell, Intel would buy their whole stock anonymously and bury them somewhere.
 
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