U slučaju da je netko propustil seriju (1, 2, 3) članka o usponu i padu AMD-a, koji već dobrih sedam godina muku-muči s plasiranjem uistinu konkurentnog (klasičnog) procesora. IMHO zadnji spomena, kupnje i preporuke vrijedni bili su Phenom II X4 i X6 procesori, da bi se nakon toga Bulldozer i Piledriver pokazali žešćim pucnjem u prazno. Stvar donekle spašavaju APU modeli, ali bez odličnog iGPU-a, teško da bi ih kupci i tržište uzimali u obzir. Članak koji pokriva povijest modernih grafičkih procesora se logično nadovezuje na cijelu štoriju i definitivno predstavlja štivo vrijedno čitanja. Kak god da se okrene, žalosno je da postoje samo dva relevantna x86 proizvođača, dok je jedan praktički na aparatima i da nema grafičke divizije, pitanje je da li bi AMD uopće opstal do dana današnjeg.
Mada, bilo bi zanimljivo vidjeti razvoj situacije da su umjesto ATi-a kupili nVidiju.
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AMD began life as a second-source supplier for companies using Intel processors. Companies like IBM didn't want to rely solely on Intel for one of the primary components in their computers, so they licensed AMD to produce versions of processors like the 8088 and 80286. While these CPUs were manufactured by AMD (and, in some cases, AMD was actually able to clock the CPUs higher than their Intel counterparts), almost everything about their designs came from Intel. Beginning with Intel’s 80386 in 1985, Intel stopped giving AMD access to its designs. AMD had to forge its own way, soon producing 386 and later 486 CPUs that were essentially reverse-engineered versions of Intel’s parts.
Intel’s 386 was released in 1985, for instance, but AMD’s didn't appear until 1991; Intel’s 486 was out in 1989, while AMD’s wasn't on the market until 1993. The increased complexity of Intel's CPUs made the reverse-engineering process more difficult: Intel's 486 had 1.18 million transistors, and the original Intel Pentium chip had 3.1 million in 1993. The Pentium line quickly grew more complex, leading to the 5.5 million transistor Pentium Pro in 1995 and the 7.5 million transistor Pentium II in 1997. Compared to the 134,000 transistors in the 286, these were enormously difficult chips to replicate, and though AMD sold millions of its versions through aggressive pricing, the strategy wasn't viable in the long term.
When the K6 hit shelves in 1997, it represented a viable alternative to the Pentium MMX, and while Intel continued to stumble along with its underwhelming Netburst architecture, the K6 went from strength to strength -- from a 233Mhz speed in the initial stepping, to 300MHz for the "Little Foot" revision in January 1998, 350MHz in the "Chomper" K6-2 of May 1998 and 550MHz in September 1998 with the "Chomper Extended" revision. K6-2 introduced AMD's 3DNow! SIMD Instruction set (similar to Intel's SSE), though this came with the downside that programmers needed to incorporate the new instruction in addition to patches and compilers needing to be rewritten to utilize the feature.
The K8’s biggest benefit for servers, though, was its 64-bit extensions. The extensions enabled AMD’s chips to run 64-bit operating systems that could address more than 4GB of memory at a time, but they didn’t sacrifice compatibility or speed when running then-standard 32-bit operating systems and applications. These extensions would go on to become the industry standard, beating out Intel’s alternate 64-bit Itanium architecture—Intel even licensed the AMD64 extensions for its own compatible x86-64 implementation. (Intel's initial approach could only run x86 code with an immense performance penalty.) The K8 architecture was successful on the desktop in the form of the Athlon 64 lineup, but it was the Opteron server variants that brought AMD real success in the high-margin market. By the time Intel introduced dual-core Xeons based on the company's Core architecture in September of 2006, AMD had snapped up an estimated 25 percent of the server market. AMD continued to iterate successfully on K8 for a few years, performing several architecture tweaks and manufacturing process upgrades and even helping to usher in the multicore era of computing with the Athlon 64 X2.
By 2003, it was becoming clear that the NetBurst architecture that powered the Pentium 4 wasn't performing as well as the company had hoped—Intel had hoped to push the chips' clock speeds all the way up to 10GHz, but even at 4GHz, the Pentium 4's heat and power consumption were causing reliability problems. Rather than modify the Pentium 4's architecture to work better in laptops, the company went back to the drawing board and assigned a small team in Israel to work on a project known as Banias. The CPU was such a success for Intel in laptops that, when the NetBurst architecture's time was up, the company set about to adapting the Pentium M's architecture for desktops and servers as well. It ramped up Pentium M's clock speed, added 64-bit extensions (licensed, of course, from AMD), and added a second CPU core, which provided the basic ingredients for the Core 2 Duo (the original Core Duo and Core Solo were sold only in laptops and lacked 64-bit extensions—Core 2 Duo was this architecture's first foray into non-mobile form factors.
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AMD began life as a second-source supplier for companies using Intel processors. Companies like IBM didn't want to rely solely on Intel for one of the primary components in their computers, so they licensed AMD to produce versions of processors like the 8088 and 80286. While these CPUs were manufactured by AMD (and, in some cases, AMD was actually able to clock the CPUs higher than their Intel counterparts), almost everything about their designs came from Intel. Beginning with Intel’s 80386 in 1985, Intel stopped giving AMD access to its designs. AMD had to forge its own way, soon producing 386 and later 486 CPUs that were essentially reverse-engineered versions of Intel’s parts.
Intel’s 386 was released in 1985, for instance, but AMD’s didn't appear until 1991; Intel’s 486 was out in 1989, while AMD’s wasn't on the market until 1993. The increased complexity of Intel's CPUs made the reverse-engineering process more difficult: Intel's 486 had 1.18 million transistors, and the original Intel Pentium chip had 3.1 million in 1993. The Pentium line quickly grew more complex, leading to the 5.5 million transistor Pentium Pro in 1995 and the 7.5 million transistor Pentium II in 1997. Compared to the 134,000 transistors in the 286, these were enormously difficult chips to replicate, and though AMD sold millions of its versions through aggressive pricing, the strategy wasn't viable in the long term.
When the K6 hit shelves in 1997, it represented a viable alternative to the Pentium MMX, and while Intel continued to stumble along with its underwhelming Netburst architecture, the K6 went from strength to strength -- from a 233Mhz speed in the initial stepping, to 300MHz for the "Little Foot" revision in January 1998, 350MHz in the "Chomper" K6-2 of May 1998 and 550MHz in September 1998 with the "Chomper Extended" revision. K6-2 introduced AMD's 3DNow! SIMD Instruction set (similar to Intel's SSE), though this came with the downside that programmers needed to incorporate the new instruction in addition to patches and compilers needing to be rewritten to utilize the feature.
The K8’s biggest benefit for servers, though, was its 64-bit extensions. The extensions enabled AMD’s chips to run 64-bit operating systems that could address more than 4GB of memory at a time, but they didn’t sacrifice compatibility or speed when running then-standard 32-bit operating systems and applications. These extensions would go on to become the industry standard, beating out Intel’s alternate 64-bit Itanium architecture—Intel even licensed the AMD64 extensions for its own compatible x86-64 implementation. (Intel's initial approach could only run x86 code with an immense performance penalty.) The K8 architecture was successful on the desktop in the form of the Athlon 64 lineup, but it was the Opteron server variants that brought AMD real success in the high-margin market. By the time Intel introduced dual-core Xeons based on the company's Core architecture in September of 2006, AMD had snapped up an estimated 25 percent of the server market. AMD continued to iterate successfully on K8 for a few years, performing several architecture tweaks and manufacturing process upgrades and even helping to usher in the multicore era of computing with the Athlon 64 X2.
By 2003, it was becoming clear that the NetBurst architecture that powered the Pentium 4 wasn't performing as well as the company had hoped—Intel had hoped to push the chips' clock speeds all the way up to 10GHz, but even at 4GHz, the Pentium 4's heat and power consumption were causing reliability problems. Rather than modify the Pentium 4's architecture to work better in laptops, the company went back to the drawing board and assigned a small team in Israel to work on a project known as Banias. The CPU was such a success for Intel in laptops that, when the NetBurst architecture's time was up, the company set about to adapting the Pentium M's architecture for desktops and servers as well. It ramped up Pentium M's clock speed, added 64-bit extensions (licensed, of course, from AMD), and added a second CPU core, which provided the basic ingredients for the Core 2 Duo (the original Core Duo and Core Solo were sold only in laptops and lacked 64-bit extensions—Core 2 Duo was this architecture's first foray into non-mobile form factors.
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