So since when did AMD start losing the IPC race?

[crystal6tak]

Hey all, I've been into tech only around two years ago. So I don't know much hardware before then. When I started researching and learning it was the deneb, thuban, and sandy bridge time. At the time bulldozer and ivy bridge were very close to launching. By then it was very clear Intel's core and single thread performance were years ahead of AMD's. Interestingly on forums I've see people mentioning how back in the old days AMD were the leading cpu manufacturer and dominated the cpu market. Saying how AMD were the one who came up with extreme edition processors and stuff.

 

So can someone enlighten me with a brief summary of the cpu war back then? And perhaps how did AMD fall so far behind?

[Guest]

Back when AMD brought 64bit computing 

[Raj8396]

I wasn't into tech until if found linus about 3 years ago but i had an AMD Athlon 64 dual core and it was awesome. I think amd was the first to hit the 1ghz mark and the dual core processor.

 

EDIT: i love the underdogs, i want amd to come back up looking forward to there apu's

[Morpheus]

Back when AMD brought 64bit computing 

what went wrong?

[Humbug]

When I built my first PC in the early to mid 2000s I used AMD's Athlon 64 architecture, it was a single core 3000+ CPU clocked at around 1.8GHZ if I remember correctly.  This was also the first consumer grade 64 bit product line. And at the time it stomped all over the Pentium 4. For example in gaming applications my CPU was faster than a 3Ghz Pentium 4, and I didn't even have a high end part. At the time Intel was desperately trying to up their clockspeeds to compete in the enthusiast sector; this made their chips power hungry and hot.

 

The top end Athlon64 chips were branded as FX chips, these were better binned and came with more cache and higher clockspeeds; I could never dream of affording these. Intel tried to respond with Pentium 4 extreme edition but again it didn't really work out.

 

 

This is the origin of the 'fx' brand and this is why many AMD fanboys from the old days felt insulted when bulldozer with it's mediocre performance started using the 'fx' name.

 

Even before this AMD used to be competitive with Intel but in this particular generation Intel convincingly lost the performance crown, and maybe it acted as a huge wake up call for Intel who realized that even if they slack off even a little bit AMD will come back to bite them. Intel started to turn it around with the core2duo architecture in 2006.

[Glenwing]

The first gen i7 and the six-core Phenom II's were neck and neck.  Then Intel brought out Sandy Bridge which was a massive improvement... The $200 mid-range i5-2500K was beating the previous generation $1000 extreme edition... AMD didn't have their own leap forward like that though, no response to Sandy Bridge.  They came out with Bulldozer which was more or less on par with the Phenom II's they were supposed to replace, Vishera was a moderate improvement but they're still far behind in IPC.  They make up for some of it with higher clocks, and the extra cores means they can catch up to the i7's in heavily threaded applications.  But yeah, they never caught up in IPC since Sandy Bridge.