AMD's apparent velocity is likely due to multiple factors, first and foremost is Intel has essentially been stuck, trying to shrink die sizes (something AMD has essentially outsourced), suffering from shortcuts leading to Spectre/Meltdown and the performance regressions due to patching those, and inability to get their new architecture out the door.
All this coupled with really good execution from AMD, new architecture that has turned out to work really well and not really having to deal with Spectre/Meltdown regressions.
So yes AMD is doing very well, Intel's current problems makes them look even better.
How much of this is hiring and how much is just trucking along? Who knows.
> AMD's apparent velocity is likely due to multiple factors, first and foremost is Intel has essentially been stuck, trying to shrink die sizes
AMD's success has nothing to do with Intel's failure.
AMD engineered a beast of a processor architecture that runs circles around the competition at a price that renders competing options obsolete. Ryzen's performance track record would not be any different even if Intel did not sold processors with security problems or succeeded shrinking die sizes.
It boggles the mind how some people try to spin AMD's outstanding progress as something that Intel did instead of a collosal technical achievement by AMD.
Plus Intel has been such a dominate player for so long they've had no reason to innovate and largely haven't in some time. Their complacency caught up to them.
The anti-Intel circle jerk has to slow down a bit. Intel management is terrible but their engineers have been delivering amazing features. Did you know nowadays the main performance bottleneck is memory latency? For 8 years Intel has the best LLC around and with a very fancy adaptive replacement algorithm. Also the recent release of 10th gen came with 50% more L1 and 100% more L2, plus AVX-512 with finally a decent subset even on mobile i3 chips. And there are a lot of other important details most people miss.
The fact that Intel has an order of magnitude bigger R&D budget than AMD but still losing on many key metrics means that Intel is either doing a really bad job or AMD is full of geniuses. Nobody is saying that Intel does nothing, but they could have done so much more if they managed it better.
You have to take into account that Intel is having problems getting their next-gen architecture out the door.... who knows what it will bring good or bad... heck maybe even some of the delay is "oh crap Zen even beats our next-gen". Perahps Intels next-gen is just vaporware and they really have been sitting around raking in the $$$ b/c they could.
I'm really not trying to defend Intel (I understand that it may come across that way), just how we look at the situation. Indeed you could be spot on, just that the situation at Intel is likely multi-faceted.
ECC memory for desktops? PCI-E 4? more PCI-E lanes? There are lots of things Intel doesn't consider for their desktop CPU but AMD does. Security mitigations takes huge amount of CPU power.
Who cares about management vs engineers, we are customers and want fine reasonably priced products. Amd delivers on this front much more than Intel. Rest are details.
AMD chips suffer from Spectre too (which is the hard to fix issue). They didn't really take any fewer "shortcuts" than Intel. And they weren't "shortcuts".
I am a phd researcher studying linguistics and deception. You mentioned the op was being misleading and communicated an understanding of the op's subversive intentions. Could you help me understand how op was being deceptive and how you knew based on their choice of language?
If you don't want to comment publicly and are still interested in helping me you can reach me at:
gfair @ uncc.edu
I'm not OP but it comes from the fact that Spectre is a very specific bug, but is colloquially used to refer to all speculative execution bugs found after as well. So its true that AMD is susceptible to Spectre; However, the mitigations have a much lower effect on performance. Additionally AMD is not susceptible to the multitude of additional speculative execution bugs found in the time since Spectre was first announced.
Spectre was used to refer to all speculative execution timing leaks from the very beginning. That's why they called it "Spectre" - because it's going to be hanging over us for a long time.
I wasn't obfuscating anything. Spectre is a fundamental flaw that affects Intel and AMD processors.
Speculative execution is not really a "shortcut". Intel did make one shortcut but that resulted in Meltdown, which is easy to fix (conceptually anyway - I'm sure it was a lot of work!)
Any idea why I've been downvoted so much for saying something that surely everyone here remembers (wasn't that long ago) and is easily verified on Wikipedia:
> As of 2018, almost every computer system is affected by Spectre, including desktops, laptops, and mobile devices. Specifically, Spectre has been shown to work on Intel, AMD, ARM-based, and IBM processors.
Given that others also asked, I'll give a rundown of the discussion:
The context of the discussion was cpuguy83's suggestion that compared to AMD, Intel has been "suffering from shortcuts leading to Spectre/Meltdown and the performance regressions due to patching those".
cpuguy83's comment was very concise, so let me elaborate that the distinction between Spectre and Meltdown is essential here. Both are security flaws in CPUs that were published at the same time. Spectre is an industry-wide problem that also hit AMD, but "Meltdown" is the result of an Intel-specific implementation choice that I think one might fairly describe as a "shortcut". (Even IshKebab later agrees: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21342048) Meltdown was also more immediately dangerous, and the software workarounds that were necessary to mitigate it in existing CPUs cost a lot of performance.
Given this context, I'll quote the relevant item from cpuguy83 again and then IshKebab's reply:
> cpuguy83: Intel [... has been ...] suffering from shortcuts leading to Spectre/Meltdown and the performance regressions due to patching those.
> IshKebab: AMD chips suffer from Spectre too (which is the hard to fix issue). They didn't really take any fewer "shortcuts" than Intel. And they weren't "shortcuts".
Note how IshKebab carefully ignores the Meltdown part of cpuguy83's comment to be able to claim that Intel hasn't been doing any worse than AMD, and that there were no shortcuts. For Spectre in the stricter sense, that's technically true. It's not true in the context of the entire Spectre/Meltdown event, which was cpuguy83's argument.
Isn’t the big performance hit because Intel wasn’t checking permissions where they should have? How is that not a shortcut? They skip a step for speed.
Meltdown arguably does fit your description, but AFAIK the cost of checking permissions in the right place is almost zero, so it’s arguably better described as “we never realized it would be dangerous to not check permissions here” than “we skipped the check for performance’s sake”. (AMD processors were not vulnerable to Meltdown.)
Spectre, on the other hand, is sort of an inherent flaw of speculative execution (not related to permissions checks). Speculative execution itself is definitely a shortcut, but it’s a shortcut that’s crucial to the performance of all modern high-performance processors, with the result that nobody really knows how to deal with Spectre. Intel was apparently hit harder than AMD by side channel mitigations collectively, apparently because Intel was doing more aggressive speculation – but those mitigations are only partial. Both vendors’ processors are still vulnerable to Spectre attacks even with mitigations applied [1], and that will remain the case even on future processors, for the foreseeable future.
Contrary to popular sentiment, Meltdown is also not an Intel-unique bug, it also affected POWER and ARM processors.
AMD essentially got lucky on this one - their neural-network based branch predictor is difficult for an attacker to train to follow specific code paths, which is a necessary component of Meltdown/Spectre style attacks. Pretty much every other processor that does speculation is affected.
The potential for cache timing to serve as a side-channel leak was not widely appreciated in the industry, although it was theoretically described as far back as the early 90s.
All this coupled with really good execution from AMD, new architecture that has turned out to work really well and not really having to deal with Spectre/Meltdown regressions.
So yes AMD is doing very well, Intel's current problems makes them look even better. How much of this is hiring and how much is just trucking along? Who knows.