I was at AMD in the mid-late 2000s helping design CPU/APU/GPUs

Since the introduction of Opteron at the beginning of 2003 until the introduction of Core 2 at the middle of 2006, the AMD CPUs were vastly superior to any kind of Pentium 4, not only to Pentium D.

This was much more obvious in servers or workstations than in consumer devices, because the kinds of applications run by non-professionals at that time were much more sensitive to the high burst speeds offered by Pentium 4 with very high clock frequencies, than to the higher sustained performance of the AMD CPUs.

In 2005, I had both a 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 (Northwood, 130 nm) and a 3.0 GHz Pentium D (Prescott, 90 nm). With any of them, the compilation from sources of a complete Linux distribution took almost 3 days of continuous work of 24 hours per day.

After I bought an Athlon X2 of only 2.2 GHz, the time for performing the same task has been reduced to much less than a day. Even for some single-threaded tasks, but which contained many operations that were inefficient on Pentium 4, like integer multiplications or certain kinds of floating-point operations, the 2.2 GHz AMD CPU was several times faster than the 3.2 GHz Pentium 4.

At work, the domination of the AMD CPUs was even greater. Each server with Opteron CPUs that we bought was faster than several big racks with Sun or Fujitsu servers that were used before. Intel did not have anything remotely competitive. At the beginning of 2006, on my laptop with an AMD Turion I could run professional EDA/CAD programs much faster than on the big Sun servers normally used for such tasks. Intel had nothing like that (i.e. the 32-bit Intel CPUs could not use enough memory to even run such programs, so the question whether they could have run such programs fast enough was irrelevant).

Of course, half of year later the competition between Intel and AMD looked completely different.

hard depreciating assets (factories) + selling chips are way worse than actually selling an ecosystem. NVDA is just getting started :-)

Since we're talking about nvidia... :)

is there anybody here who has access to a B200 NVL72 with working external nvlink switches and wants to share non-marketing impressions?

> We did launch a “true” dual core, but nobody cared. By then Intel’s “fake” dual core already had AR/PR love. We then started working on a “true” quad core, but AGAIN, Intel just slapped 2 dual cores together & called it a quad-core. How did we miss that playbook?!

it is wild the way AMD engineers can't stop themselves from throwing stones, even with 20 years of distance and even when their entire product strategy in 2024 now rides on gluing together these cores.

people forget that Intel saying that AMD was gluing together a bunch of cores comes after years of AMD fans whining that Intel was gluing together a bunch of cores - that was always an insult to Intel users that pentium D wasn't a real chip, that core2quad wasn't a real chip (not like quadfather, that's a real quad-core platform!). And you see that play out here, this guy is still salty that Intel was the first to glue together some chips in 2002 or whatever!

and the first time AMD did it, they rightfully took some heat for doing it... especially since Naples was a dreadful product. Rome was a completely different league, Naples really was glued-together garbage in comparison to Rome or to a monolithic chip. You can argue that (like DLSS 1.0) maybe there was a vision or approach there that people were missing, but people were correct that Naples was a dogshit product that suffered from its glued-together nature. Even consumer ryzen was a real mixed bag, vendors basically took one look at naples and decided to give AMD 2 more years to cook. People wedge still so wound into it they sent death threats to GamersNexus for the “i7 in production, i5 in gaming” which frankly was already quite generous given the performance.

frankly I find it very instructive to go back and read through some of the article titles and excerpts on semiaccurate because it just is unthinkable how blindly tribal things were even 10 years ago, but this shit is how people thought 10 years ago. Pentium D is bad, because it's glued-together! Core2Quad is bad because it's glued-together! And that from the actual engineers who have the perspective and the understanding to know what they're looking at and the merits, with 20 years of retrospect and distance! If you instead look at what the discourse of this time was like...

https://www.semiaccurate.com/tag/nvidia/page/6/

"NVIDIA plays games with GM204"

"how much will a GM204 card cost you!?"

"Why mantle API will outlive DX12 [as a private playground for API development outside the need for standardization with MS or Khronos]"

"GP100 shows that NVIDIA is over four years behind AMD in advanced packaging"

"NVIDIA profits are up in a fragile way".

like why are amd people like this? inside the company and out. It’s childish. None of the other brands engineers are out clowning on twitter (frank azor? chris hook? etc), none of the other fans are sending death threats when their brand’s product isn’t good. Like you wanna make a $10 bet over it???

the reason NVIDIA has a lead right now is largely because they didn't slack off during the Maxwell era and kept iterating even after the 22nm/20nm node fell though. AMD decided that hey, we can't really afford this right now, and NVIDIA can't shrink either, right? But NVIDIA slipped in a major architectural iteration that was basically a full node worth of efficiency gains, and that really has put them in the position they are today.

Being able to take a trailing-node strategy during the Turing/Ampere years, being able to run a full node behind RDNA1/2 and use dirt-cheap Samsung crap and last-gen TSMC 16FF/14FFN while still fighting AMD to a standstill on efficiency is entirely the result of AMD slacking off.

AMD themselves have said they slacked off. Lost focus, is the quote.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=1956&v=590h3XIUfHg