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Intel's "cripple AMD" function

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Re: Intel's "cripple AMD" function

#51

Post by joe_the_user »

jimbokun wrote: post #36
drewcrawford wrote: post #20

I was an intern for AMD a few years ago (these are my views and not AMD's). I was pretty skeptical about AMD's antitrust claims against Intel until I went to work there. I'm as free market as they day is long, but there's a whole untold story of the evil things that go on in the back meeting rooms, even outside of sales, where most of the public lawsuit claims are/were. The thing to remember is that AMD is a small fr…

"Even while I was there, we had what I suspect (but have no proof) were incidents of people leaking product plans, roadmaps, etc. (but no IP) to Intel." I can't imagine Steve Jobs allowing this to happen at Apple. They have definitely caught people leaking things, and the consequences were swift and unpleasant for the leaker. Why can't AMD catch these people? Is there something preventing them from implementing the s…

Well AMD is a small fraction of the size of Apple as well. Even more, Apple's business isn't oriented towards cutting into the market share of a large competitor. And there have been significant leaks at Apple.

Re: Intel's "cripple AMD" function

#52

Post by rbanffy »

jey wrote: post #32
liuliu wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and gcc is not that bad after all. I uses openmp to parallel my program on core i7 860 cpu which should support 8-threads. But using icc as compiler, it will only utilize 7 cores, and it does affect performance (about 10% slower (wall time) than gcc which uses 8 cores). I suspect that it has something to do with the dynamic linked openmp library for icc.

Really? I find Intel's compiler to outperform GCC on pretty much all of the numerical work I do. I build with "-O3 -xHost" and make use of OpenMP. Dynamic linking of the OpenMP library is almost certainly not the cause of the slowness you're observing. If you really want to force the Intel OpenMP runtime to use all 8 cores: export OMP_DYNAMIC=false export OMP_NUM_THREADS=8 export KMP_LIBRARY=throughput # "KMP_BLOCKTI…

"I find Intel's compiler to outperform GCC on pretty much all of the numerical work I do."

It's only a question of time. I suspect that if more companies decided to pool resources around GCC (or any other free C compiler, like pcc or clang), they will pretty much bury Intel.

Intel is a chip company. The only conceivable reason for them to want to maintain a C compiler is to make a C compiler that's better than the competition on Intel processors and that sucks as much as possible on competing architectures.

Icc is not a compiler. It's a sales tool.

Re: Intel's "cripple AMD" function

#53

Post by wmf »

sfg wrote: post #48

I do not know much about processor benchmarking, but is it not a little weird that the bench markers use software that is not independent of the hardware they are testing? It seems like they are asking to be manipulated: why do they do this?

They think the software is processor-independent but it's really Intel-biased; that's the problem.

Re: Intel's "cripple AMD" function

#54

Post by rbanffy »

jimbokun wrote: post #36
drewcrawford wrote: post #20

I was an intern for AMD a few years ago (these are my views and not AMD's). I was pretty skeptical about AMD's antitrust claims against Intel until I went to work there. I'm as free market as they day is long, but there's a whole untold story of the evil things that go on in the back meeting rooms, even outside of sales, where most of the public lawsuit claims are/were. The thing to remember is that AMD is a small fr…

"Even while I was there, we had what I suspect (but have no proof) were incidents of people leaking product plans, roadmaps, etc. (but no IP) to Intel." I can't imagine Steve Jobs allowing this to happen at Apple. They have definitely caught people leaking things, and the consequences were swift and unpleasant for the leaker. Why can't AMD catch these people? Is there something preventing them from implementing the s…

The problem here is that you can easily detect leaks to the press. Tainted information gets published and you know who leaked by how the leak deviates from reality.

It's less so with leaks between companies. A company that deals this way will never allow the information it gathers to show up like that. Even analysts who will examine the leaked materials will have little (not so little in the case of Intel - they have like two competitors) information about the origins of what they are looking at.

Re: Intel's "cripple AMD" function

#55

Post by netcan »

brk wrote: post #50
netcan wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" Competing on price alone rarely makes for a successful company" You sure?

Yes. It's fairly established that chasing down the lowest-price path usually doesn't make for a very stable business model in the manufacturing businesses. This is even more significant when the competitive options are significantly limited (eg: processors). In larger markets (eg: automobiles) there is more room for low-cost competitors to make some money, but they are not often powerhouses of the industry. If you ha…

Well, first you said companies not just manufacturing companies so I would have pointed to Wal Mart. But since you have limited the range it's more difficult because manufacturing companies are not as high profile as retailers. I will point to China as a whole as a contemporary example. Chinese companies have consistently beaten the previous generation's manufacturers by achieving lower costs.

Anyway, since you say "it is fairly established" the burden should be on you to tell me where & by who. What I know is established is that internet marketing gurus speaking to small & micro businesses recommend finding non price differentiators. This arguably makes sense for small businesses where market size is not an issue. Most large companies however, need to go after large markets & that means lower prices.

My old marketing textbooks say that there are two broad positioning strategies & corresponding pricing strategies niche(differentiated) & penetration(low cost). The larger share of the pie usually belongs to the latter with high margins often going to the former.

I would argue that low cost strategies are probably more "stable" since they do not rely on innovation & other constant miracles. Even Apple may flop two or three major products in a row & die again.

Re: Intel's "cripple AMD" function

#56

Post by jey »

rbanffy wrote: post #52
jey wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? I find Intel's compiler to outperform GCC on pretty much all of the numerical work I do. I build with "-O3 -xHost" and make use of OpenMP. Dynamic linking of the OpenMP library is almost certainly not the cause of the slowness you're observing. If you really want to force the Intel OpenMP runtime to use all 8 cores: export OMP_DYNAMIC=false export OMP_NUM_THREADS=8 export KMP_LIBRARY=throughput # "KMP_BLOCKTI…

"I find Intel's compiler to outperform GCC on pretty much all of the numerical work I do." It's only a question of time. I suspect that if more companies decided to pool resources around GCC (or any other free C compiler, like pcc or clang), they will pretty much bury Intel. Intel is a chip company. The only conceivable reason for them to want to maintain a C compiler is to make a C compiler that's better than the co…

I fully agree. I'm looking forward to LLVM becoming fully mature; it's a great platform already, and just needs to be fleshed out with some more optimizations/analyses/etc. And with the clang front-end, we can get rid of the unmaintainable pile of crap that is GCC.

Re: Intel's "cripple AMD" function

#57

Post by chancho »

jey wrote: post #32
liuliu wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and gcc is not that bad after all. I uses openmp to parallel my program on core i7 860 cpu which should support 8-threads. But using icc as compiler, it will only utilize 7 cores, and it does affect performance (about 10% slower (wall time) than gcc which uses 8 cores). I suspect that it has something to do with the dynamic linked openmp library for icc.

Really? I find Intel's compiler to outperform GCC on pretty much all of the numerical work I do. I build with "-O3 -xHost" and make use of OpenMP. Dynamic linking of the OpenMP library is almost certainly not the cause of the slowness you're observing. If you really want to force the Intel OpenMP runtime to use all 8 cores: export OMP_DYNAMIC=false export OMP_NUM_THREADS=8 export KMP_LIBRARY=throughput # "KMP_BLOCKTI…

What are some kinds (examples?) of code that you find ICC to compile better than GCC? Like, what's a typical loop that ICC can vectorize but GCC can't? I always have the damnedest time pinpointing when and where these optimizations fire and I've pretty much given up on the compiler when it comes to them. Rather I just develop code as normal and then when it's done find the top 3 or 4 functions in gprof (or Shark or whatever) and vectorize those by hand. Either that or try every compiler you have available and pick the one that yields the best time, but in my experience it's not always Intel.

Re: Intel's "cripple AMD" function

#58

Post by rbanffy »

wmf wrote: post #17
rbanffy wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better yet: make it writable. That way the OS could change it per process/thread/context and the code would be happy.

VIA has a writable vendor string which they have used to reveal this type of shenanigans in the past.

I always liked those guys. The über-486 Centaur built was briiliant design and out-of-the-box thinking from top to bottom.

Weren't the VIAs able to trounce Xeons in some crypto stuff?

Re: Intel's "cripple AMD" function

#59

Post by rbanffy »

brk wrote: post #44
netcan wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point does not stand alone, you are right. drewcrawford said "If they try to specialize (say, servers, or notebooks), Intel will just sell that segment at a loss" That's the point & that is arguably anticompetitive. IE, they are small and they have to spread wide to avoid being open to predatory pricing.

Yes, but they voluntarily entered in to their business. What is AMD's competitive advantage? The best I've ever seen is that they are cheaper than Intel for a given processor class/speed. However that doesn't seem to have gotten them much traction. Competing on price alone rarely makes for a successful company.

AMD voluntarily entered the desktop processor business, IIRC, at a time the US government required a second source before they could buy x86 chips. How does that make anti-competitive behaviour from a company many times their size nice?

Re: Intel's "cripple AMD" function

#60

Post by wmf »

rbanffy wrote: post #58
wmf wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VIA has a writable vendor string which they have used to reveal this type of shenanigans in the past.

I always liked those guys. The über-486 Centaur built was briiliant design and out-of-the-box thinking from top to bottom. Weren't the VIAs able to trounce Xeons in some crypto stuff?

Weren't the VIAs able to trounce Xeons in some crypto stuff?

Yes, since they had crypto instructions and nobody else did. Now I would expect Westmere to be faster.

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