Depends on the cloud target - Google Zinc provides cloud rendering services for VFX/CG work, that is pretty high end stuff, I imagine there are other such high end cloud uses.
They were caught unawares by Core 2, despite its uArch predecessor Yonah being quite competitive already with K8.
They did get complacent.
That's not how cloud is often used. With typical cloud servers you essentially book virtual instances of CPU threads, and depending on service provider you pay CPU time actually used. But the availability is always there, even if idling. And in web serving (as a common use case example) idling is the rule, and performance capability is typically booked for the few exceptions where the site could be overloaded otherwise.
Ah, I think we are talking about different cloud services entirely - I meant things like cloud office apps when I said low demand.
Even in such cases you are essentially serving data stored in the cloud ("web app" as well as user files) which often is not a one-off on demand but a service idling most of the time.
Complacency is defined as sitting on your hands and doing little. A badly designed processor or overpaying for a graphics company aren't complacency. One is a design issue that didn't translate well to materials as it did on paper and the other is a financial mistake even though people railed against it. AMD would be in a tougher spot today if they sold their graphics division off years ago before their major troubles began.
It was not just a bad processor design, it was also too late by far to compete effectively with the Core2 onslaught which trashed AMD pricing back then - even when Agena landed, that TLB errata made it iffy for server use, making any aspiring server customers wait for Deneb in 2009 (which was great IMHO), by then a full 6 years after K8.
You're implying had it not been late, its poor design would have competed with Core2. In other words, if lateness is a condition in which you feel processors are make it or break it, then every proceeding architecture by either two in competition with the other is late as there is no 1:1 unified design and manufacturing cycle that are in step with one another.
From what I heard barring the TLB fault and process problems it wasn't particularly bad - again just somewhat late, I had the money to upgrade but decided to skip it for Deneb (excuse me Phenom II, so catchy).
Sorry I edited while you posted. I'm not chewing you out. The language is just iffy. I think AMD had some great ideas at the time, but being too revolutionary costs you.
Hahahahha me too.
I had two P4s. Prior that I had a P3 and before that a P1. My P3 was in the 500 Mhz range, IIRC. I was aware of PD at the time, but the Core2s had just come out months before. The OG Conroe 65 nm came out in the summer of 06 and I remember parts shopping in October or November of that year. I was cautious of it event though I'd read the writeups and examined the benchmarks. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me kind of thing, you know. Going from P4 to Conroe was a huge step up for me. I held and clocked that chip for a while before getting my hands on a higher E chip in 2011 out of an OEM build sold for scrap (busted PSU, silly owner).
Yeah it was such a step up because P4 was a step backwards from the P6 uArch, though I think not quite on the level BD was over K10.6 (Thuban/Phenom II X6)..
I hope that cadence keeps. Because it's impressive. If you remove their start time on Zen about 7 years ago, it took them 3 years to match and overcome Intel except in gaming. I suspect Intel's Odyssey, which some suspect has failed but I'll hold my tongue on that, was or still is a method for Intel's marketing to push chips via the gaming slant. To my knowledge, pure gamers make up a small portion of DIY sales of the already small DIY sector. No idea on OEMS but Dell's been selling Ryzens in their gaming computers. No idea how long,t hough.
Depends what you are into I guess, for me moar cores is always better - video encoders, path tracing renderers and compositors are my main compute workloads of choice.
I remember someone explaining it to me a year ago but it had to do with costs and worrying if AMD had something better. Intel knew 10nm was a red headed stepchild quite a bit into their development of the node but decided to keep going because they were already invested in it. You're thinking, Intel's got a ton of money, what's the big deal. Shareholders. Time is money, and money is time.
Mine is mostly VM work and faster compile times among other things. $500 for the 3900X is a lot of money, but it does that work lickity split, to quote an older coworker who scored one for home use. You could always wait in this era of AMD where each gen gets 8-15% IPC increase along the benefits of a refined or mature node, but you may get stuck waiting "indefinitely." After Core matured in the 2010s, particularly with Sandy Bridge, you didn't need to update for a long time. On the gaming front, they, AMD, have made decent progress. There's a guy on youtube called thespyhood who's done generational comparisons of the most popular AMD Ryzen processors and there's a 15-20 fps gain on minimums and averages for most games.
More than that, people and journo's are watching out for it now, like when nVidia got cautght with that iffy scheme a while ago - as an AMD buyer, I don't just feel like Intel cheated AMD with the bribery, I personally felt cheated (whih I know is more than a little strange, but hey tribalism), and I'm sure enough others felt similar that it makes a good story for a journo to break if Intel gets caught at it.
If anything, gaming is by far the biggest part of DIY. I can't emphasize that enough. And for good reason, pretty much everyone else is better off buying a prebuilt. Yes DIY is small in the scheme of things. You do have the e-penis crowd which can be quite profitable.
It's still early yet to say final perf on Zen2, given how many BIOS updates and OS scheduler tunings you tend to get for signficant uArch changes.
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