Let’s remember AMD was absolute garbage for like 10 years until around 2016, when they finally bounced back. And they were getting closer and closer to bankruptcy, having to flog the silver - their fabs and even their campus. I’d say the Zen design and tsmc saved them (or Lisa Su and Keller).
Intel is in a better position financially than AMD was, and could catch up again. I tend to think it depends a lot on the organization and the people.
IC: A few people consider you 'The Father of Zen', do you think you’d scribe to that position? Or should that go to somebody else?
JK: Perhaps one of the uncles. There were a lot of really great people on Zen. There was a methodology team that was worldwide, the SoC team was partly in Austin and partly in India, the floating-point cache was done in Colorado, the core execution front end was in Austin, the Arm front end was in Sunnyvale, and we had good technical leaders. I was in daily communication for a while with Suzanne Plummer and Steve Hale, who kind of built the front end of the Zen core, and the Colorado team. It was really good people. Mike Clark's a great architect, so we had a lot of fun, and success. Success has a lot of authors - failure has one. So that was a success. Then some teams stepped up - we moved Excavator to the Boston team, where they took over finishing the design and the physical stuff, Harry Fair and his guys did a great job on that. So there were some fairly stressful organizational changes that we did, going through that. The team all came together, so I think there was a lot of camaraderie in it. So I won't claim to be the ‘father’ - I was brought in, you know, as the instigator and the chief nudge, but part architect part transformational leader. That was fun.
I don’t know the truth but that was spoken like a true humble leader. If I was forced to draw conclusions just based on that one exchange, I would agree that Jim Keller was an instrumental part of the successful design and implementation of the zen microarchitecture.
The whole interview was deeply inspiring. There is a very great deal to be learned from studying it. Listen carefully, and more than once! The audio is probably better than the text, at least first time through.
That and Microsoft has had an exclusivity agreement with Qualcomm for Windows on ARM. Once that agreement expires, I expect AMD to suddenly have some very interesting offerings.
After running benchmarks on Intel and AMD CPUs from that era with mitigations, it's clear Intel never really had a performance lead due to design. That alone rewrites the entire "state of AMD" narrative.
If Intel only had a competitive advantage during that era because they traded performance for security, was there ever really an advantage?
I personally don't think Gelsinger is going to be able to fix their culture issues. He's been more intent on pumping stock and asking for handouts than innovating, which is part of what got them where they are in the first place, for good or ill.
> they traded performance for security, was there ever really an advantage
Security is important, I would always prefer a secure product. But given design habits that elide security for performance, as well as a compromised supply chain, the only choice we have is to side with the devil(s) we know.
>Let’s remember AMD was absolute garbage for like 10 years until around 2016
After being ahead of Intel in the Pentium 4 era. The problem back then was marketing and giant amount of (probably illegal now) bundling that was rampant back then.
That last part is important. While Intel had good fab engineers, they also relied on cutthroat business deals requiring exclusivity to get discounts and promotional support and there were constant shenanigans with things like compiler support.
AMD had to make a much better product to get manufacturers to consider it, not just being price competitive. It took the P4 train wreck to get the market to shift but Intel had enough lock-in to make it to the Core generation without losing too much market share because so many of the vendors had those contracts.
And, to be clear, even though P4 was a disaster, Intel was STILL the market leader everywhere. They responded with the Core line only after years of AMD eating their lunch with the Athlon, Athlon 64, and Athlon XP line.
Thunderbird was released in 1999 and from there to the Core 2 Duo release in 2006, AMD was the performance leader (certainly at a huge discount compared to intel offerings).
> AMD was absolute garbage for like 10 years until around 2016
Their top performance was lower than Intel in many cases, but it was certainly not "absolute garbage". For low- to mid-range they offered similar performance with usually a (much) lower price point. For normal "average person" usage they were often the better choice in terms of "bang for your buck".
The main reason we were selling Intels is because we got a rebate from Intel for every CPU we sold. Financially it didn't really matter if we sold a €400 computer, €500, or €600 computer: the profit margin for us was roughly identical (a little bit more, but not much), but with Intel you got a rebate back-channelled, so then it did matter.
Well okay. But they had the same problem Intel is in now: they pushed an inefficient power hungry chip to the limit. So it was cheaper, and performance was only somewhat lower, but it was much hotter and used a lot of power —- so pretty useless for laptops.
On laptops AMD was indeed not very good; but their desktop CPUs – far more important in the 00s and early 10s than they are today – were pretty decent. That is not to say that Intel also didn't have good CPUs at the time, but (much) more expensive and for people just doing their browsing and occasional gaming on their desktop AMD was a solid (and cheaper!) choice IMO.
Intel is in an even better position now than last month, being handed $billions ($tens of billions?) of US tax dollars to fund building new fabs, which they would have had to build anyway. That will free up money to use in undercutting chip pricing, helping to bury AMD again.
Intel should realize at this point that their existential threat comes from TSMC, not AMD. AMD is one competitor, but TSMC is giving a huge boost to all of their competitors, particularly the ARM vendors who won’t just take some x86 market share but potentially destroy the entire x86 market at some point in the future.
Intel is in a better position financially than AMD was, and could catch up again. I tend to think it depends a lot on the organization and the people.