The “Break it Down” Blog

Well AMD can’t catch a break… first they tackle Intel and p0wn them and maintain the lead for something like 4 years… in that time, they never fundamentally redesign their chip, simply releasing refresh after refresh of the same K7 core and then the K8 core.

Intel responds with the Core Duo platform and shits all over AMD. AMD has been trying for what seems like 3 years now to respond to the Core Duo platform, and has never successfully done it. Always coming up about 10-20% behind in performance, but not at noticeably lower price points and at much higher power-usage and heat levels.

Laurence Hartje just sent in news that AMD’s newst attempt to respond to Intel, their Quad-Core Opteron and Phenom processors, are plagued by a problem in the “TLB Logic”. Sometimes issues in CPUs can be fixed with a microcode update, but it looks like this issue can only be fixed with a BIOS revision to the motherboard hosting the CPU… worse yet, the “fix” carries a 10-20% performance penalty… OUCH!

The death of AMD was the fact that it didn’t seem to have a new architecture in the wings waiting after K8 to revolutionize it’s platforms… it just continues to push that platform to it’s dual and quad core limits already falling well behind the higher end Intel chips.

I’m not sure what AMD has been doing in it’s R&D department for the last 8 years, but I think either they haven’t had a focused vision, or tried to execute something that was too ambitious, or there has been a general disjointedness with the entire company.  After they bought ATI, ATI almost fell off the map, getting totally dominated by NVIDIA and having no reply for the last year that makes it competitive again.  With a brand new graphic card family from NVIDIA coming in February and June, I don’t think the ATI-division of AMD has a chance…