The New Z170 Motherboards

cthulhu said:

Intel having the entire x86 processor market to themselves is a nightmare scenario.

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Why exactly? Intel has had the $200+ market to themselves for many years now. AMD offers some bargain-basement options, but it's not like they have any significance for the future of x86 technology at this point.
So I guess we are already in your 'nightmare scenario'... which makes me wonder what the 'nightmare' is exactly.
The fact that I don't have a choice, but have to buy Intel CPUs is not something I have experienced as a 'problem'.

Scali said:

The fact that I don't have a choice, but have to buy Intel CPUs is not something I have experienced as a 'problem'.

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So, one choice is okay with you? Seems that certain experiment launched back in 1917 sort of withered on vine. Competition breeds perfection in my way of thinking. BTW, AMD was up 1.65% and trading at @ 2.10 on the NYSE today.

The "nightmare" would be a single corporation having a monopoly over mainstream PCs. That would most certainly not be good, and even being an Intel fan myself, I could easily see development being reduced and costs kept up - doing only just enough to keep x86 the platform of choice. Having the best or most popular products in a particular range does not qualify as having a market to themselves - they most certainly do have a competitor who would gladly jump them if they could.

I too hope that Zen kicks ass, I'm not holding my breath, but if it did - that would be a very good thing no matter which brand you prefer.

SpidersWeb said:

The "nightmare" would be a single corporation having a monopoly over mainstream PCs. That would most certainly not be good, and even being an Intel fan myself, I could easily see development being reduced and costs kept up - doing only just enough to keep x86 the platform of choice. Having the best or most popular products in a particular range does not qualify as having a market to themselves - they most certainly do have a competitor who would gladly jump them if they could.

I too hope that Zen kicks ass, I'm not holding my breath, but if it did - that would be a very good thing no matter which brand you prefer.

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Intel is essentially a monopoly over mainstream PCs.

They haven't totally killed AMD because then the government would declare them "officially a monopoly" instead of just "essentially a monopoly."

They literally paid PC vendors to keep Intel CPUs around during the P4 and Pentium D days when AMD had a better product. That bought them the time (literally...by bribing vendors) to get Core 2 Duo out the door. If it was a real free market, Intel would have lost a ton of market share during those years and AMD would be a lot better off than they are now.

Intel can't push its monopoly too hard without slowing the pace of replacement system sales and reducing profits.

ARM is closing in on the per core performance of AMD which means AMD can't rely on selling big chips with lots of slow cores at low prices (because of power consumption) too much longer. Either Zen gives AMD a good jump in per core performance with reduced power consumption or AMD switches to being yet another ARM based microserver company eking out an existence on tiny margins.

Edit: AMD couldn't increase market share back when Intel was doing Pentium 4 rebates because AMD wasn't adding production capacity. All of AMD's cash reserves were gambled on over paying for ATI while AMD delayed development of new processes.

Agent Orange said:

So, one choice is okay with you?

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One choice of CPU brand, yea. Just like you had one Commodore 64. Sure, you could get a different computer, but there was only one Commodore 64. I don't see the problem.
I don't need a choice of brand per se. In theory I wouldn't even need choice. As long as I can get a product that suits my needs. Choice for the sake of choice is ridiculous.
So far, Intel offers a wide range of products, so there's something for everyone's needs. I don't see that changing anytime soon.

Agent Orange said:

Seems that certain experiment launched back in 1917 sort of withered on vine. Competition breeds perfection in my way of thinking. BTW, AMD was up 1.65% and trading at @ 2.10 on the NYSE today.

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Intel is always competing with itself. CPUs don't need replacement nearly as often as what Intel needs to sell to sustain its current operation.
Intel needs to give us a reason to upgrade every 3-4 years.
Heck, we're on a vintage computer forum here. We're using computers that are 30+ years old, and their CPUs still work fine. If it wasn't for performance, why would we ever upgrade? Intel would go out of business in no time if they can no longer supply an upgrade path to the existing market, which is pretty much saturated.

Just be honest... Intel hasn't been competing for performance with AMD since 2006. What reason would they still have to keep churning out faster Core i7 chips?
The scenario you're talking about is the one we're already living in.
In fact, I am willing to go as far as to argue that the competition with AMD at its peak didn't work very well. 'Perfection' wasn't what we got at all. Instead we got the GHz race, resulting in unstable, immature products.
The current situation is much nicer. The focus isn't entirely on raw speed anymore, Intel is also working on better efficiency. Gone are the 100+W CPUs of yesteryear.

krebizfan said:

Edit: AMD couldn't increase market share back when Intel was doing Pentium 4 rebates because AMD wasn't adding production capacity. All of AMD's cash reserves were gambled on over paying for ATI while AMD delayed development of new processes.

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Exactly. Even at its peak, AMD could only cater to about 20-25% of the market, so the majority chose Intel 'by default'. AMD's supply issues were also a big factor in why large OEMs such as Dell or Apple didn't consider AMD over Intel.
So Intel's marketshare was reasonably secure.
It's pretty much impossible to compete with Intel, because it takes years to add enough production capacity to be able to serve as large a market as Intel does. You have to be firing on all cylinders consistently for many years.

I wouldn't want to only have to choose from Intel. Their products are just way to expensive and I shouldn't have to fork over $200 to get what should be a standard amount of cores.

I prefer Intel CPUs at the moment, but competition is never bad. Remember IA64 vs AMD64?

Plasma said:

I prefer Intel CPUs at the moment, but competition is never bad. Remember IA64 vs AMD64?

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Competition is good but buying a lackluster product just to have a second source makes no sense. AMD has fallen to where Cyrix was in 2000.

I don't believe AMD "lacks luster". They seem to run everything out there on the market, and you don't hear too many complaints. True, they don't match up as far as the top end Intel benchmarks go, but they're still pretty decent for the the price.

Plasma said:

I prefer Intel CPUs at the moment, but competition is never bad. Remember IA64 vs AMD64?

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Actually:
1) IA64 did not compete with AMD64 directly. IA64 was meant for high-end servers and workstations, as a replacement for HP's aging PA-RISC architecture. It mainly competed with the likes of IBM POWER, Sun SPARC, and DEC Alpha.

2) It's the perfect example of something that was BAD for progress, not good. AMD64 locked us into the age-old inefficient x86 architecture for at least two more decades. A move to IA64 would have broken the chains of x86 legacy, and would have promoted more portable code, so future shifts to new architectures would be much easier to do, allowing much higher rate of CPU architecture development, similar to the GPU-world.

AMD64 is the worst thing that could have happened to the industry.

Agent Orange said:

I don't believe AMD "lacks luster". They seem to run everything out there on the market, and you don't hear too many complaints. True, they don't match up as far as the top end Intel benchmarks go, but they're still pretty decent for the the price.

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Isn't 'luster' exactly that though?
AMD are pretty 'bland' CPUs. Intels have the extra 'luster' of having much higher performance and much lower power consumption.

Also, did you look at where AMD stands in the marketplace?
This is AMD sorted from high to low price: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...94814 600005853 600005863 600372025 600484725
Their 'top' CPU is $239.

'Top end' doesn't cover this at all. AMD is barely in the mainstream market anymore.
The usual market distribution is something like this:
sub-$200: budget
$200-$500: mainstream
$500-$1000: high-end
$1000+: enthusiast/professional

'Decent for the price' is also rather meaningless in my technical opinion.
AMD is practically giving away their CPUs for free (judging by their business results consistently in the red figures). Make anything cheap enough and it is always a 'good deal'... But it doesn't say much about the technical merit of the product, nor how future-proof the technology and its company are.

Scali said:

Actually:
1) IA64 did not compete with AMD64 directly. IA64 was meant for high-end servers and workstations, as a replacement for HP's aging PA-RISC architecture. It mainly competed with the likes of IBM POWER, Sun SPARC, and DEC Alpha.

2) It's the perfect example of something that was BAD for progress, not good. AMD64 locked us into the age-old inefficient x86 architecture for at least two more decades. A move to IA64 would have broken the chains of x86 legacy, and would have promoted more portable code, so future shifts to new architectures would be much easier to do, allowing much higher rate of CPU architecture development, similar to the GPU-world.

AMD64 is the worst thing that could have happened to the industry.

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My thoughts exactly. I happen to think it's generally good that AMD competes, to some extent, with Intel, but they basically killed IA64 with their AMD64 hack. When we had an IA64 server at work it was the fastest machine around, a great system in every way. The high-end x86 Intel boxes could not compete. With AMD64, Intel's IA64 got marginalized and we're still stuck with x86.

Scali said:

Actually:
1) IA64 did not compete with AMD64 directly. IA64 was meant for high-end servers and workstations, as a replacement for HP's aging PA-RISC architecture. It mainly competed with the likes of IBM POWER, Sun SPARC, and DEC Alpha.

2) It's the perfect example of something that was BAD for progress, not good. AMD64 locked us into the age-old inefficient x86 architecture for at least two more decades. A move to IA64 would have broken the chains of x86 legacy, and would have promoted more portable code, so future shifts to new architectures would be much easier to do, allowing much higher rate of CPU architecture development, similar to the GPU-world.

AMD64 is the worst thing that could have happened to the industry.

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Lol, simply untrue. We were (and still are) locked in x86 architecture by applications. Business and consumers demand backwards compatibility. Without AMD64, we simply would have been stuck in 32-bit land longer until Intel came up with something similar.

IA64 was not superior, unless you think expensive, slow, and difficult to optimize for is somehow better.

Plasma said:

Lol, simply untrue. We were (and still are) locked in x86 architecture by applications. Business and consumers demand backwards compatibility. Without AMD64, we simply would have been stuck in 32-bit land longer until Intel came up with something similar.

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No we wouldn't. Because if Intel is the only supplier of x86, Intel decides not to come up with 'something similar', meaning that people will HAVE to upgrade to IA64. The same happened with Apple multiple times. The Mac went from 68000 to PowerPC, and from PowerPC to x86, simply because 68000 and PPC ceased to exist.
When x86 ceases to be a moving target, IA64 would exceed it with x86-emulation performance eventually. But people would also be fully aware of the fact that native applications would be faster than x86-emulation, so a demand for native IA64 applications would arrive. Moreso than AMD64 has done so far.

Plasma said:

IA64 was not superior, unless you think expensive, slow, and difficult to optimize for is somehow better.

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Firstly, whether IA64 itself was superior or not wasn't the point.
The point was, IA64 would cut the binary ties to x86, opening the doors for future superior architectures.

Secondly, difficult to optimize for applies to x86 more than IA64. Compilers take care of that for mortal developers.
At least for IA64 the performance of the assembly code was very explicit, much like with RISC CPUs. With x86 there are tons of pitfalls 'under the hood', that you can't tell by just looking at the x86 code, because of all sorts of decoding rules, register renaming, aliasing, synchronization issues etc at the execution backend level, which you cannot program directly. Most people who *think* they know how to write x86 asm, can't hold a candle to a modern compiler because they have no clue about this.

Lastly, IA64 wasn't slow at all. It scored extremely well in various industry benchmarks. Especially its floating point performance was 'best-in-class', well out of reach of x86. This made IA64 quite popular in HPC situations.
IA64 cores are also smaller than x86 ones, so it would have scaled better in the multicore-era. More cores in the same die-space (the IA64 dies were mainly large because of their extreme amounts of cache, given their target market).

Plasma said:

Lol, simply untrue. We were (and still are) locked in x86 architecture by applications. Business and consumers demand backwards compatibility. Without AMD64, we simply would have been stuck in 32-bit land longer until Intel came up with something similar.

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But how do you know that? You can't, because the chance to try that was blocked by AMD.

IA64 was not superior, unless you think expensive, slow, and difficult to optimize for is somehow better.

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Slow? Not in my experience. Difficult to optimize for? If so, it must be *very* fast, because for a long time I did parallel builds of all our in-house software on IA64 as well as the then-top-of-the-line Xeon boxes, and IA64 was flat out fastest by a good margin. And felt snappy to work with too - and the builds were fast. I can only conclude that for the same generation of hardware IA64 was better than x86.

Tor said:

But how do you know that? You can't, because the chance to try that was blocked by AMD.

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Democracy doesn't work because the majority of the people don't know what's good for them. You always get the shallow, short-term solution.

People don't "have" to do anything. Apple could afford to switch architectures because of their limited market share and the types of people who use Macs. (Not big business, and not people who are concerned with cost.) That would never work with PCs. Intel can only sell what people buy, and in the business world, evolution beats revolution every time.

IA64/EPIC is much more difficult to optimize for than x86; this is a well-established fact. A big problem being that memory latency is non-deterministic. Intel themselves struggled to write an optimizing compiler.

IA64 was only faster for native floating point. In the server market, Itanium 2 competed directly with Opteron. If you wanted a 64-bit server, those were your two choices. Opteron was the same performance for much less money. And of course when running 32-bit legacy code, Opteron wiped the floor with the Itanium. The choice for businesses was a no-brainer, and it's why Intel implemented AMD64 so they didn't get left in the dust.

I also don't buy the multicore argument. Itaniums ran hot as hell, and heat is a bigger problem than die size.

Tor said:

But how do you know that? You can't, because the chance to try that was blocked by AMD.

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How about the history of PC computing since the IBM 5150? Backwards compatibility has always been king, and progress has always been through evolution.

AMD didn't "block" anything. Intel was free to do whatever they wanted. Not being complete idiots, they realized what the market wanted and delivered.

Tor said:

Slow? Not in my experience. Difficult to optimize for? If so, it must be *very* fast, because for a long time I did parallel builds of all our in-house software on IA64 as well as the then-top-of-the-line Xeon boxes, and IA64 was flat out fastest by a good margin. And felt snappy to work with too - and the builds were fast. I can only conclude that for the same generation of hardware IA64 was better than x86.

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An apples to oranges comparison. Two cores vs one in the absolute best case scenario for parallelism. And regardless, my comparison was AMD64 to IA64.