(32 votes, average: 4.22 out of 5)
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If imitation is indeed the sincerest form of flattery, we at AMD are feeling very flattered this week.
According to Intel’s Patrick Gelsinger as quoted in The Wall Street Journal, “The Intel Xeon processor 5500 series is the foundation for the next decade of innovation.” Well, I almost agree with that. After nearly six years of telling customers that the AMD Opteron™ processor architecture was the wrong answer, this week our competitor has finally delivered “Nehalem” ― which some might call a copy, at least as far as the architecture is concerned.
So I suppose it’s all about when you think that decade started.
Nehalem, or the “Opti-clone” as I call it, has been met with “breathless” enthusiasm by many. AMD’s John Taylor will cover this in our communications team’s blog, but I am getting a bunch of questions ― so I thought it may be time for some humor (or what I think passes for it).
With that in mind, I present the interview I just concluded with myself:
Interviewer:
Wow, you people must be really scared.
Me:
Nope.
Interviewer:
Nope? Ok, how about really, really scared?
Me:
Nope. Nope. No, really we’re not.
Interviewer:
Why not?
Me:
Over the last ten or so years, we have traded performance leadership with Intel something like six times.
Remember 2006? We heard some of these same statements from Intel then, about an eighty percent performance advantage and never losing another benchmark to AMD again with “Woodcrest”. That gap closed quickly.
Interviewer:
But they are the fastest – won’t that mean they will win all the business?
Me:
According to this website the world’s fastest car is a SSC Ultimate Aero. It does 257 mph and goes from 0-60 in 2.7 seconds. Have you ever seen one?
Interviewer:
No.
Me:
I think that might be because it’s Twin-Turbo V8 Engine with 1183 horsepower has a $654,400 base price. But more to the point: the 0-60 mph speed of a car does not define how long it takes to get across town. And most customers buy servers to, well, get across town.
More than ninety percent of what we sell is not our fastest part. The market for the fastest part is always small and in this economy it’s likely even smaller. And while Intel may leapfrog AMD in raw performance (for the moment, at least) with the ― oh so flattering ― overhaul of their server architecture, they are also introducing a new learning-curve and resource-drain for an already cost-sensitive and disruption-averse IT environment.
Interviewer:
But Intel tells me this is what the market has been waiting for.
Me:
Value, consolidation and saving money is what’s hot at the moment ― and that’s not likely to change for the foreseeable future. With all of our competitor’s talk about memory bandwidth, they have ignored the market that cares the most about having a large memory footprint ― the 4P market.
Interviewer:
But surely this is it, you can have no response?
Me:
We have demonstrated that our upcoming 6-core “Istanbul” processor, which is on track for launch in the second half of this year, is compatible with existing OEM platforms for a faster time to benefit. In early 2010, AMD plans to introduce our next-generation “Maranello” platform that will feature the 12-core “Magny-Cours” processor as well as serve as the platform for our “Bulldozer” architecture in 2011. The debate will continue.
Interviewer:
But they win over 30 benchmarks. Surely that matters for something?
Me:
Only if you run your business on benchmarks.
Joking aside, nice job Intel, but value for money is what’s key in this market. </breathless>
Nigel Dessau is senior vice president and chief marketing officer at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.
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#1 by JD - March 31st, 2009 at 16:37
Very well put. It’s nice to see you calling a spade a spade. Pretty entertaining “interview” you had there as well.
I love reading these blog posts, keep them coming!
#2 by DennisR - March 31st, 2009 at 16:49
I must say Nigel you are an amazing interviewer…:)
a very nice little read, I look forward to more
#3 by Theo - March 31st, 2009 at 17:28
Hi Nigel,
nice article. However, there are several things missing – AMD Opteron came out in 2003 and changed the world. That’s true – AMD was nowhere in enterprise space and it became a leader overnight. But what exactly AMD did after that architecture?
Secondly, neither AMD nor Intel invented IMC, if we are really going to call spade a spade. Just like MSFT and AAPL took family jewlery from Xerox PARC, AMD/INTC took the best from Alpha CPU architecture, that featured lovely 8-channel IMC using 16-bit Rambus memory (anybody remembers these guys? they used to innovate instead of inventing lawsuits). Still have that CPU somewhere…. board went the way of dodo birds, unfortunately.
Best of luck with Istanbul and Magny Cours… even though, interesting naming convention. Istanbul is a great racetrack, but your d-die 12-core baby is called upon one boring track in the middle of nowhere. Pardon, France. Why not Suzuka, since its double eight figure mostly fit the dual die convention. Ah well…
#4 by ALYS - March 31st, 2009 at 20:41
You are very creative and a great interviewer…I love reading these blog posts Keep posting more…
#5 by Audiguyy - March 31st, 2009 at 22:32
Nigel,
Great blog. I appreciate that you AMD guys are being open and putting yourselves out there in the community! AMD has obviously decided to “Change the Game” in terms of its communication as well as its technology!
Congrats!
Theo – Shanghai was a pretty good piece of engineering according to the reviews! Not bad after clearly leading the semi market for close to 6 years in servers!
#6 by Danieö - April 1st, 2009 at 06:05
This was interesting reading for sure. Bulldozer = Orochi, right?
#7 by shari - April 1st, 2009 at 11:03
AMD dominates the Java server performance hill
This Shanghai Quad Core Opteron server from HP scores 1,181,782. The best Intel Nahelem based Xeon X5570 scores about 542,793, less than 50% of AMD.
Core i7 has shown some good IPC numbers, but it is no big iron like Opteron, which scales to 8P 32 core. Intel engineers in Israel are stilling banging their heads to reverse cache coherent HT… This again shows that Intel is a desktop company which only knows how to do 2P, while AMD’s Opteron is a server chip designed by server people.
It’s rumored that AMD will yank Intel’s AMD64 and Direct Connect licenses. As you know, Intel’s Quickpath is a copy of AMD’s HyperTransport, and EM64T is a copy of AMD64…
#8 by Cliff Forster - April 1st, 2009 at 11:58
I especialy like the “oh so flattering ― overhaul of their server architecture”
Intel finaly gets around to killing the front side bus and they act like it was thier stroke of brilliance all along…
#9 by Krish - April 1st, 2009 at 13:31
I like the optimism sounded in your voice, But you need a leap frog performance in bulldozer to beat Intel.
Now AMD need to push the OEM’s(DELL, HP) to sell phenom II based systems in their product lineup so that you can grab CLIENT/system market share from Intel. This will help to improve the balance sheet till bulldozer rolls out.
Phenom II (X3/X4) benchmarks are good compared to Intel i7/core2duo series. So I think if your marketing team make a right move, then you can gain market share from Intel but that will not happen unless DELL/HP push your phenom II base systems.
If you want push DELL, I may suggest few marketing gimmicks .
some third part vendor/sytem builder (CyberPC .. etc) should come to the media and say that , they are gaining market share due to Phenom II processor, because OEMs dont have Phenom II x3 based sytems in their lineup, similarly some big corporate customer (buying from DELL) should go this 3rd party vendors to buy those Phenom II systems and this should be in top sites.
CNBC team or Investors should raise a question in dell conference call in such way they will lose market share , if they dont adopt Phenom II base systems on upcoming Windows 7 platform, that is optimised for Phenom II /ATI platforms.
Get the DELL marketing manager browsing patten and publish all this information in those sites. for example if he read tomshardware or money.cnn everyday , put these topics in those sites.
Like you guys, I also want your team to win the battle. I see, you are winning and you will win.
These are my humble opinions
Regards,
Krish – bkrishnamoorthy@gmail.com
#10 by Lozil - April 1st, 2009 at 23:58
Nice Self Interview. Would just like to see AMD come out with better products for Everyone.
#11 by Nigel Dessau - April 3rd, 2009 at 17:56
Lozil – thanks but what does ‘better products’ mean. Better on what metric? Benchmarks? Experience for user? Using my HP dv2 – that’s a great product – happens to have AMD stuff into it but it really is so much more. well done to HP.
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#14 by DP - July 21st, 2009 at 09:02
I like interview style!