Replies to post #33823 on Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[HailMary]

What exactly does AMD innovate?

AMD64. Doesn't that count for something?

AMD doesn't spend billions of dollars on research, so they take the best of what is out there and make good choices on how and when to use it. Laugh all you want. It makes good business sense for a company the size of AMD. Their innovation is putting all the pieces together into a product that can play across a broad market and be competitive with a giant.

[sgolds]

chipguy, What exactly does AMD innovate?

You can start with Long Mode in the AMD64 specification. It is not 64-bit that was innovated here but rather the design for x86 to abandon its segmented past and march into the future.

After that you may want to have a look at HyperTransport. Along with that, inexpensive glueless multiprocessing. Also affordable NUMA.

Oh, let's not forget the work AMD did as one of the pioneers of DDR, back when Intel was supporting some other little memory standard.

Innovations are generally not wholly new ideas but rather new ideas that bring new and unique improvements to what came before. Applying your yardstick to innovations then there have not been any since the transistor was invented (Bell Labs, 1958, as I recall).

But even that was just a solid-state implementation of a vacuum tube. I'm not sure what the predecessor of the vacuum tube was, but that probably wasn't an innovation, either.

Nope. No innovations under the sun!

[fastpathguru]

How about commoditizing technology that was previously only available in high-end, proprietary systems?

From your own list:

EV6
HTT
Dual core
Integrated MC

and don't forget:

DDR
AMD64

Intel on the other hand innovates large caches, frequent platform changes, proprietary lock-in, and, when forced by the market, following AMD's lead.

fpg