Newsgroup: it.comp.hardware.video-3d
Titolo: Riflessioni the inquirer su AMD<->ATI [Lungo]

THE AMD ATI MERGER is a done deal finally, or at least it will be in an hour 
or three. The deal is flat out necessary for the survival of AMD, and it is 
a strategic rather than a tactical move for the company.
Anyone who looks at this with a time horizon of only a quarter or four is 
doing themselves and the companies involved a major disservice. Also, this 
deal has nothing to do with GPUs or chipsets, it is about the technology 
behind them.
The deal has many aspects but sadly the only one likely to be noticed in the 
short term is the money laid out, and that is unquestionably the wrong way 
to analyse this. There are both short and long term implications, the short 
term ones will batter the stock tomorrow because of myopic analysts, and the 
long will be of great benefit to those with foresight.
The short term effects include Nvidia, Intel, the loss of business, and the 
potential damage to partners. These are all short term reasons, and have 
nothing to do with the reasons behind the buy. Of them all, Nvidia is the 
most problematic for AMD, closely followed by Intel for ATI. In either case, 
it won't have any effect in the extremely short term, say until the end of 
the year, and after that, new business will outweigh the losses, AMD hopes.
Let's take Intel and ATI first. Intel buys a lot of ATI chips and graphics 
cards, and has a license for Crossfire. This is all likely to end soon - no 
surprises there. The official word is that the love-in is already over. From 
what we gather, that's unrelated to the AMD buy. ATI chipsets were a stop 
gap to cover Intel's demand forecasting woes, and since that rough spot has 
been covered, well, ATI was on the way to being discarded anyway. No market 
loss there.
On the flip side, Crossfire + Conroe is set to become the gaming platform of 
choice for 2007. R600 is going to flip the power balance to favour ATI 
again, and Nvidia has been playing power games over SLI licences. Intel was 
preparing to kick Nvidia in the teeth, and if it decides right now to pull 
back the boot, it will still be a long time before it can get the fine print 
sorted out and products on the street.
So, expect the Crossfire + Conroe fliers to hastily have Crossfire magic 
markered out, and SLI written in, but the affair between Intel and Nvidia 
will be a stormy one at best. You can bet that Intel is going to accelerate 
its internal GPUs as much as possible. It doesn't want to be in bed with 
Nvidia a second longer than it has to be.
So, what about Intel flat out buying Nvidia? We severely doubt that, mainly 
because there is next to nothing that Nvidia brings to the table that Intel 
cannot, do internally. For the short term, it would be expensive and 
disruptive to a company that is just stumbling its way out of several 
grievous self-inflicted wounds. It would turn into an ugly mess. Long term, 
well, Intel will be there with internal projects, so why spend the money now 
to placate Wall Street?
This brings us to ATI. The loss of any additional Intel business, mainly 
having Crossfire being de-sanctified, will be minimal. I think that deal was 
struck without much, if any money, changing hands, so any loss would have 
minor monetary effects.
Short term, this means Intel will have to grin and bear it, or have 
absolutely no gaming platform with dual GPUs. For 2007, it means it sticka 
with the deals they have, or are stuck with the slower GPU on their 
platform. We're putting our money on it staying put, and taking classes on 
how to not visibly wince when asked about AMD Crossfire on an Intel box.
That brings us to the AMD and Nvidia relationship. Everyone thinks for some 
reason that this is a stab in the eye at its close partner Nvidia, and it 
will mean doom for both sides if they are forced to break things off. Two 
problems, they won't have to break things off and it could be good for 
Nvidia.
If AMD plays its cards right, and it has shown that it is quite savvy in 
corporate dealings of late, it can turn this into a win/win long term. The 
reason for that is this deal has nothing to do with GPUs or chipsets at all, 
it is about technology and engineers. Think long term.
That brings us to the long term side of things, and here all is good for 
AMD. In fact, if this deal does not happen, AMD will be out of business in 
five years, or at least out of the CPU business. In that time frame, this is 
good for AMD, good for Nvidia, and good for all the AMD partners. It kind of 
stinks for Intel though, but that is a lot of what AMD was aiming for.
Let's look at this long term, say five or so years, the design cycle of a 
modern CPU. As we've noted earlier, the X86 CPU is about to take a radical 
turn, and the designs you will see at the turn of the decade won't resemble 
anything you see now. What do we mean by that? Mini-cores and Larrabee.
Until Sun came out with Niagara, modern CPUs were big, fast, hot out of 
order execution (OoO) beasts that ran a thread as fast as possible. 
Programmers were stupid creatures that had to have their work done for them 
in hardware, and elegance was the domain of game developers of yore. Fat 
cores were in.
Then came Sun with a hard left turn, lots of little, stupid cores that can 
do more in aggregate that a single big core. It had been tried in the past, 
but not with a modern ISA for mainstream use. If your application fit the 
bill, in Sun's case, this meant no FP code more than anything else, it 
simply flew. If it did not fit, well, you had problems. Can we offer you one 
of our other more conventional products?
The first salvo in the modern mini-core wars was fired, and the world 
changed. Now, Sun is on the verge of releasing Niagara II, and Niagara III 
is sure to follow. Intel was not about to let this winning strategy go 
unchallenged, and now has enough mini-core projects going to fill a phone 
book.
Kevet and Keifer were a mini-core and a CPU made of 32 of those cores 
respectively aimed at server workloads. It was four times what Niagara was 
reaching for, but also five years later. Intel is going for the swarm of 
CPUs on a slab approach to high performance CPUs, and more importantly, is 
going to upgrade the chips on a much swifter cycle than we've been used to.
With 32 small and simple cores, you can design each core much more quickly 
than a normal CPU, much more quickly. Design complexity, verification and 
other headaches make things almost a geometrically increasing design 
problem. A small core cut and pasted 32 times can mean smaller teams doing 
more real work instead of busy work, and more teams tweaking things for 
niches.
We think Intel is aiming at a much more rapid design upgrade cycle, most 
likely yearly, and much more niche-aimed CPUs. If you can make a new core 
with 1/10th the effort, and put it in an already existing and verified 
infrastructure/interconnect, then you can revamp your line up with a 
rapidity that would be flat out impossible to do today.
Now, if you add in GPU functionality to the cores, not a GPU on the die, but 
integrated into the x86 pipeline, you have something that can, on a command, 
eat a GPU for lunch. A very smart game developer told me that with one 
quarter of the raw power, a CPU can do the same real work as a GPU due to a 
variety of effects, memory scatter-gather being near the top of that list. 
The take home message is that a GPU is the king of graphics in todays world, 
but with the hard left turn Sun and Intel are taking, it will be the third 
nipple of the chip industry in no time.
Basically, GPUs are a dead end, and Intel is going to ram that home very 
soon. AMD knows this, ATI knows this, and most likely Nvidia knows this. AMD 
has to compete, if it doesn't, Intel will leave it in the dust, and the 
company will die. AMD can develop the talent internally to make that GPU 
functionality, hunt down all the patents, licensing, and all the minutia, 
and still start out a year behind Intel. That is if all goes perfectly, and 
the projects are started tomorrow.
The other option is to buy a team of engineers that produce world-class 
products, are battle tested, and have a track record of producing product on 
the same yearly beat Intel is aiming for. There are two of these in 
existence, ATI and Nvidia. Nvidia is too expensive, and has a culture that 
would mix with AMD like sand and Vaseline. That leaves ATI, undervalued and 
just as good.
So build versus buy for long term strategic competitiveness, the choice is 
obvious, you have to buy. This will put AMD about 12-18 months behind the 
first of the mini-cores from Intel, about the range AMD is behind for 
everything else. Intel bites the bullet and proves the market, then AMD 
steps in. Here, AMD is going to let Intel do the heavy lifting, and then 
waltz in at the right time.
Long term, buying ATI is the only thing AMD can do to survive. It will bring 
some short term pain, and Wall Street will simply not have a clue once 
again, but there is no doubt that it is a necessary thing.
The more interesting time is mid-term, in the year to three year range. ATI 
has two sets of deep engineering knowledge that AMD can suck in and benefit 
from, memory controllers and PCIe. AMD is integrating both into the CPU, so 
ATI engineering can help greatly there. On the flip side, AMD has 
world-class manufacturing facilities that ATI can make GPUs and chipsets on 
without paying an arm and a leg to use. This is a win/win.
That brings us back to Nvidia, and why I think it is not a death-blow for 
Jen Hsen's company. If AMD is smart, it can placate Nvidia by ceding markets 
to it, and keeping the platform open. We think it will. AMD has never been 
one to shut out partners as a blatant money grab like Intel. It sees things 
long term, and if you look at what it is doing with the Torrenza platform, 
you can see it has no intention to close the market.
Nvidia can have a big piece of the new pie in the future, things are not 
bleak at all. Short term heart attacks aside, the technology it brings to 
the table is still in great demand. Remember, this deal is not about AMD 
making GPUs or chipsets, it is about it making a completely different set of 
cores. GPUs and chipsets will still be in great demand, it is just that ATI 
won't be making them.
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=33219

inizia la guerra :)
w la concorrenza, ora, dopo la mossa da 90 di amd-ati, dovranno davvero 
farsi tutti battaglia serrata, speriamo che la competizione porti a nuovi 
prodotti innovativi e che i giganti si facciano una guerra di prezzi che li 
porti in ginocchio, a tutto vantaggio nostro
la prima pietra è stata lanciata
ora vedremo i reali sviluppi della più grande fusione in ambito cpu/gpu 
della storia
 There is a lot of news surrounding ATI at the moment, especially with the 
AMD buy out confirmed earlier today.
Intel has pulled ATI's chipset license, meaning that there will be no more 
ATI (or rather, AMD) chipsets for Intel processors after the end of the 
year.
There will still be time for one more though, namely the upcoming RD600 
chipset, which doesn't look like it will be cancelled, despite the earlier 
news. However, it is unclear whether the RD600 project will see the light of 
day though.
Intel has pushed the fact that its 975X chipset supports CrossFire quite 
heavily, especially with the Core 2 Duo launch. I think it is a fairly safe 
bet to say that Intel will contine to support CrossFire on its high end 
chipsets for the foreseeable future.
After all, Intel is keen to sell its own products, especially now it has the 
fastest chip on the market. Also, I don't believe that AMD would choose to 
lock CrossFire out on Intel's chipsets either, because it just wouldn't make 
financial sense - AMD/ATI will still profit from the video cards sold for 
use with Intel products.
Intel has already dropped support for CrossFire on its 965-series chipsets 
and it is unclear whether Intel will continue to design chipsets that 
support multi-GPU technologies. The company has been hinting at moving GPU 
tasks back onto the CPU for a few months now.
We'll bring you more as soon as we get it...
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2006/07/24/intel_pulls_ati_chipset_license/
 

 year.
Old e già smentita. ;)
p.bes

Toh, il Paolone :-)
Lavori ancora per TGM?
P.S. ma dopo il take over di qualche anno fa il canale ircnet #tgm s'è
più ripreso?
Byez.

 piů ripreso?
Boh, non ne ho idea.
p.bes

 p.bes
Ciao, pensare che di recente ho ritrovato dei vecchi arricoli tuoi 
sull'Amiga ... bei tempi...
Ne possiedi ancora di macchine Commodore?
ciao

 ciao
sniff ;-( sniff ;-( non mi fate tornare indietro nel tempo dai ;-( mi
sembra ieri che all'edicola di mio padre mi mangiavo TGM appena
usciva...

 Ne possiedi ancora di macchine Commodore?
Un Commodore 16, un 128 e un Amiga 1200. Naturalmente in disuso 
pressoché totale, ma non me ne disferei mai.
p.bes

 p.bes
Hehe...
io ho ancora un a2000 ... non del tutto in disuso, avevo una mezza idea 
di rimetterlo completamente in moto...
ciao

andrea ha scritto:

Da qualche parte dovrei avere un VIC20 con monitor e un C64 che
diventava un 128 premendo un tasto con monitor e unità nastro. Un
giorno vorrei rimetterli in moto anche io...chissà che effetto mi
faranno.... :-)