Hardware Discussion Thread

[drhycodan]

AMD was on the right track with the AMD Athlon 64 series, whatever happened to their focus?

[AnyOldName3]

Dodgy dealings between Intel and OEMs, better marketing from Intel. Intel having better brand recognition from the majority of non-enthusiasts (and hence the majority of people overall). AMD insisting on buying their own fabs as a higher priority than designing good chips to make in these fabs for a few years. All these meant Intel was getting more money for R&D and marketing than AMD, and as successive processor generations became more expensive to develop (as they were more complex), AMD got stuck in a downwards spiral.

Then Bulldozer happened.

[NaturalViolence]

Off the top of my head?

1. After AMD earned billions in profits from A64 and AX2 AMD spent all their money and then some on purchasing ATI. Massively overspending in the process (they paid at least 3x what the company was actually worth according to analysts).
2. AMD took 5 years to properly integrate said company with theirs.
3. AMD either promoted their best engineers to management positions that they were ill equipped for or fired them in order to replace them with more, cheaper (and less experienced) engineers. They divided their already too small teams even further to work on more projects.
4. AMD spend enormous amounts of time and money developing a microarchitecture from scratch based on a concept that worked on paper but not in practice (CMT). Then spent even more time/money backtracking. Meanwhile Intel continued to make incremental improvements to an already solid foundation.
5. Pressured by shareholders AMD ignored the advice of their senior engineers to wait until further lithography improvements were made to release bulldozer.
6. AMD made massive cuts to Bulldozers design to get it rushed out.
7. AMD likely completely redesigned bulldozer at least twice due to design ideas that didn't pan out. Supposedly it was at one time going to be an 8/16 core chip with very small/simple cores similar to bobcat/jaguar. But because multithreaded scaling didn't take off the way they expected it was redesigned to take more of a middle ground road between core count and core IPC so that it would perform well with a greater variety of PC applications. This is likely the reason why it had to be rushed in the first place.
8. AMD separated into two companies (the other being global foundries) and sold their fabs to pay for the ATI acquisition. GF fabs then began rapidly falling behind Intel due to budget cuts. This probably contributed to bulldozers prolonged release.
9. AMD promoted rather than firing the clowns who made most of these decisions. Only after a few years did they get a new CEO that did the right thing.
10. AMD had problems integrating ATI GPUs with their own CPUs due to the different transistor designs required.
11. AMD laid off massive numbers of employees after bulldozer. While this is bad thing they had to do it at that point to prevent further debt from accumulating.
12. AMDs marketing was taken over by clowns.
13. AMD basicelly abandoned the desktop and server market. Seriously we haven't had a new desktop flagship since piledriver, 5 years ago! Their desktop APUs are always 1-2 generations behind their laptop APUs. And don't get me started on servers.
14. And so on.....

Basically they shot themselves in the foot instead of capitalizing on their success. Then decided to begin damaging their vital organs.

[admin89]

Maybe Intel got scared of Ryzen, Pentium Kabylake are all dual core with Hyperthreading now
Comparing to Core i3 7100 @ 3.9GHz ($120), Pentium G4560 @ 3.5GHz (2 cores 4 threads) is only $64 . The new Pentium is truly a i3 / A10 /Athlon X4 killer
If only they made a 4.0GHz HT Pentium ... I would gladly upgrade my G3258 rig

[MayImilae]

It looks like the G4560 is the budget chip to get right now! Fascinating. All that they talk about with multithreaded era of games doesn't really apply to Dolphin, but it's very informative.

https://youtu.be/H-aP0JqJkJ0

[NaturalViolence]

Now if only US retailers actually sold it....

[admin89]

My SFX PSU is outdated now
They trim it down to the size of a small power brick
Meet the HDPLEX 300W power supply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahD4uGyWUDI

Specs Wrote:Support 300W and 400W Peak with modular ATX output,>94% DC-DC Efficiency
• Texas Instrument TI-LM2642 chip,WIMA Audio Grade Capacitor, INFINEON MOSFET, and 4 layer 2oz Gold PCB. 150mm(L)x51.5mm(W) Small Footprint.
• Germany Würth Elektronik High Current Inductance, Smooth Response and Low Ripple Noise, Long life Solid Sanyo Capacitors
• Dual Aluminum Heatsink,PCIE 6+6+2PIN AUX Power, Support High Power Video card
• Support 7.4x5.0mm w/PIN DC Input Jack, wide range AC-DC Adapter compatibility

[Helios]

It makes me wonder wtf is the difference between the new pentium CPUs and the core i3s, besides the better iGPU.


That may just be it. Core i3 has a better iGPU

[KHg8m3r]

Also the i3 has AVX support, which from what I understand Dolphin can utilize to help speed up some part of the codepath

[MayImilae]

Better iGPU, higher clockspeed, and higher price. Honestly they are quite similar, though the G4560 definitely beats it in bang for buck!