Where would CPUs be today without AMD in the late 90s to mid 2006

[Wolverine607]

Imagine if AMD was of no competition to Intel in the late 90s through mid 2006? Where would we be today?

I mean AMD was very competitive with AMD in the late 90s and very early 2000s with the Athlon and then Athlon XPs competing and holding their own and even exceeding the Pentium 3 and Pentium 4 in some cases. Then Athlon 64 comes about and it bests even the Pentium 4 Northwoods clock for clock.

Then the dual core Athlon 64s come out and are superior to the rushed Pentium Ds

Intel has far more resources and is forced to innovate. They start the Core architecture which evolves into Core 2 which is released in mid 2006 and they smoke AMD's Athlon dual cores and Intel has had the performance crown at the top ever since and have not looked back.

Imagine had their been no AMD. Where would we stand today. Would Intel have just as good of CPUs' but far more expensive? Or would we be stuck on still Pentium 4 CPU level performance? Or maybe at Core Duo or Core 2 Duo with Quads costing thousands instead of the Core i7s we have today.

Now with AMD not pushing much competition (even after 2006, AMD still had some competition in the mid range and value market, but now they do not have much for any new modern CPU), Intel seems to leave us stuck at 4 cores for mainstream.

 

[ShintaiDK]

We would be using IA64 and be better off in all metrics.

You got 4 cores because this is what the 99% crowd wants and OEMs. Its all about performance/watt and integration. Not because evil Intel is holding back.

Having more than 4 cores isn't innovation in any way. And as long as software isn't better than it is, then its useless for the masses. They would be better off with more cache, better IGP, DSP modules or PCH integration.

Prices would be the same as today. AMD have zero effect on these. And there is a lot more other MPU companies in this world than just AMD. Specially back then.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

You're forgetting that AMD was competitive with Intel looooong before that (see 386 DX40, etc.)
Cyrix doesn't count because it was a POS that couldn't do a damned thing right (and personally knowing some of the engineers who used to work there, I'm not surprised).

 

[jhu]

We would be using IA64 and be better off in all metrics.

You got 4 cores because this is what the 99% crowd wants and OEMs. Its all about performance/watt and integration. Not because evil Intel is holding back.

Having more than 4 cores isn't innovation in any way. And as long as software isn't better than it is, then its useless for the masses. They would be better off with more cache, better IGP, DSP modules or PCH integration.

Prices would be the same as today. AMD have zero effect on these. And there is a lot more other MPU companies in this world than just AMD. Specially back then.

I'm going to disagree with this. There was already so much legacy x86 code to be run. And IA64 couldn't emulate x86 any faster than even a Pentium 4. So that's strike one. Strike 2 is the fact that being able to write fast general purpose code for EPIC/VLIW is very hard. Even ICC generated code, while faster than gcc, still isn't that fast. Strike 3 is that it was way too expensive, which is why none of the other high performances architecures have seen any significant traction in the consumer market (POWER, SPARC, MIPS, etc.). Without AMD, I think Intel would have still come out with some version of x86-64 because no one (other than HP) was buying Itanium to any significant degree.

 

[VirtualLarry]

We would be using IA64 and be better off in all metrics.

Yes, because IA64 did so well in the server and HPC space, clearly showing off its advantages, so much so that it got... cancelled?

 

[Wolverine607]

You're forgetting that AMD was competitive with Intel looooong before that (see 386 DX40, etc.)
Cyrix doesn't count because it was a POS that couldn't do a damned thing right (and personally knowing some of the engineers who used to work there, I'm not surprised).

True, although I was too young to and did not build PCs back then to remember. I started building my own PCs in 2002.

 

[Schmide]

Yes, because IA64 did so well in the server and HPC space, clearly showing off its advantages, so much so that it got... cancelled?

Imagine if ShintaiDK applied his brush equally to the Opteron A1100 thread based on the profits generated by IA64?

 

[ShintaiDK]

Yes, because IA64 did so well in the server and HPC space, clearly showing off its advantages, so much so that it got... cancelled?

x86 won due to investment level and legacy. This is also why x64 won the day it was created.

 

[EXCellR8]

My first CPU was an Athlon XP 3200+ single core. That was 2003 or 2004. Without that chip I personally would probably not have ventured further into custom PC land. That little chip & platform was so basic and easy that it set the foundation for future builds.

...and I still have it, along with my NF7-S board

 

[frozentundra123456]

Does it matter? And can we really say? Just seems like pointless speculation TBH.

We are where we are, and no amount of nostalgia will make AMD competitive or justify their existence until Zen comes out. Then, who knows. Maybe they will be competitive and push intel, or maybe it will be another flop and intel will remain firmly in control of the market. I also predict this thread will turn ugly really fast.

 

[Phynaz]

^ EOT.

 

[Gikaseixas]

We would be rocking single core P4's running @ 10ghz
AMD was the biggest incentive Intel had (to come out with Conroe). Some won't admit but that's a fact. Competition promotes innovation period. A look at BMW vs Mercedes and you can see how much these two automakers have progressed.

 

[ShintaiDK]

We would be rocking single core P4's running @ 10ghz
AMD was the biggest incentive Intel had (to come out with Conroe). Some won't admit but that's a fact. Competition promotes innovation period. A look at BMW vs Mercedes and you can see how much these two automakers have progressed.

You have to ignore the entire Pentium-M line to begin with.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

True, although I was too young to and did not build PCs back then to remember. I started building my own PCs in 2002.

Fair enough
Now that I think about it, I could have sworn that I used to own an IBM-produced 486 SLC2-66, which as it turns out completely blew compared to a real Intel 486 DX2-66.
IIRC, the SLC2 lacked a math-co, and the integer perf wasn't much to write home about either.

 

[superstition]

You got 4 cores because this is what the 99% crowd wants and OEMs.

Extra cores is the consequence of the problems inherent in shrinking silicon transistors.

 

[BigDaveX]

We would be rocking single core P4's running @ 10ghz
AMD was the biggest incentive Intel had (to come out with Conroe). Some won't admit but that's a fact. Competition promotes innovation period. A look at BMW vs Mercedes and you can see how much these two automakers have progressed.

Intel wouldn't have come out with dual cores as quickly, but it would have happened sooner or later. The main reason (aside from competition from AMD) why they went down that route was because their prototype Tejas chips needed something ungodly like 200-250W to clock at speeds even comparable to Prescott, and were apparently even blowing out the VRM circuitry on test motherboards. Out of the options on the table, switching to Merom/Conroe would have been the least expensive option for Intel regardless.

In any case, without competition from AMD, chances are that the Core 2 Quad would have never existed. The main reason why Intel produced that so quickly was pretty obviously to get revenge on AMD for the three year ass-kicking it had sustained, so without the (theoretical) competition from Phenom, odds are they'd have waited for Nehalem to show up before going quad-core.

 

[Fjodor2001]

It's very obvious that AMD is the company that has contributed the most to CPU and GPU progress given its size. It's actually quite astonishing how many projects they have headed.

Multi-core x86 revolution, 64-bit x86 CPU revolution, HBM based GPUs (and soon APUs), ARM based server CPUs, lower-level GFX API:s (Mantle, indirectly driving DX12 too), APUs, console APUs, the list goes on.

Now compare that to e.g. Intel and nVidia, relative to the size of those companies.

 

[Arachnotronic]

It's very obvious that AMD is the company that has contributed the most to CPU and GPU progress given its size. It's actually quite astonishing how many projects they have headed.

Multi-core x86 revolution, 64-bit x86 CPU revolution, HBM based GPUs (and soon APUs), ARM based server CPUs, lower-level GFX API:s (Mantle, indirectly driving DX12 too), APUs, console APUs, the list goes on.

Now compare that to e.g. Intel and nVidia, relative to the size of those companies.

We get it, you are an AMD fan.

 

[Gikaseixas]

I wouldnt say they innovated more than the competion. Many times throughout history they also copied Intel and Nvidia and just named it differently

 

[Phynaz]

We would be rocking single core P4's running @ 10ghz
AMD was the biggest incentive Intel had (to come out with Conroe). Some won't admit but that's a fact. Competition promotes innovation period. A look at BMW vs Mercedes and you can see how much these two automakers have progressed.

Actually thermals were the incentive. But believe whatever you would like.

 

[Phynaz]

We get it, you are an AMD fan.

Who somehow manages to forget Intel came out with the first multi core x86 CPU.

 

[pantsaregood]

Not sure where we'd be exactly, but I can confidently say that we would have neither Skylake nor the 10 GHz NetBurst that Intel imagined.

AMD pushed Intel pretty hard from 1999-2006. K7 was being pushed further than P6. Intel released NetBurst (which did eventually outperform Athlon XP by a bit with the release of Northwood) and began attempting to ramp up clock speeds.

AMD then released K8 ("dropped the hammer," if you will) which outperformed NetBurst at every price point - often K8 CPUs were outperforming NetBurst processors at higher price points.

However, even if you assume K7 and K8 never happened, Intel could not have maintained "MOAR MHZ" forever. NetBurst quickly ran into thermal issues and mediocre performance scaling while the P6-based Pentium M was showing extremely promising scalability.

Ultimately, NetBurst had to be abandoned in order to continue to push performance. It may be unlikely that Intel would've abandoned NetBurst as quickly without the pressure from AMD, but it was going to happen at some point.

To some degree, we're at a point where that kind of pressure would be good: Intel's lineup has been evolutionary at best since Nehalem. I considered upgrading my i5-2500K with a Skylake unit, but ultimately concluded the performance improvement wasn't worth it in most workloads yet. We're back to relatively slow progress.

 

[Fjodor2001]

We get it, you are an AMD fan.

No, I'm a fan of companies that make sure technology progresses.

 

[superstition]

We get it, you are an AMD fan.

Ad hominem is a fallacy.

Next time try a rebuttal.

 

[mrmt]

Multi-core x86 revolution, 64-bit x86 CPU revolution, HBM based GPUs (and soon APUs), ARM based server CPUs, lower-level GFX API:s (Mantle, indirectly driving DX12 too), APUs, console APUs, the list goes on.

I'm pretty sure that from this list only x64 and HBM might be credited to AMD, the others AMD didn't pioneer. But what is impressive is that AMD managed to not make money in most products sporting these technologies.