AMD vs Intel Cold War

As soon as the word CPU or Processor is heard, anyone who uses a computer remembers Intel. But AMD, which has seen a rapid rise in recent years, last year created a processor that surpassed Intel in all respects. As a result, AMD is set to record its highest share value since 2007 in 2021. This is how AMD, which was on the list of companies that could go bankrupt in 2010, was revived.

Birth of AMD

The world’s first integrated circuit (IC) (Integrated Circuit) was invented in 1961 by Fairchild Semiconductor. In 1968, two young engineers joined NM Electronics. A few weeks later it changed its name to Integrated Electronics or Intel, and a year later eight more left Fairchild Semiconductor. The company they started together is Advanced Micro Devices or AMD.

Intel builds its first processor, the 8080 processor, in 1974. AMD, which studies its photography more closely, develops a processor similar to the 8080 as the Am-9080. Today it can be described as intellectual property theft, but instead, the two companies entered into an agreement. Accordingly, AMD was allowed to reproduce the processor manufactured by Intel. Intel hoped to promote its products and maintain productivity even in the event of an emergency. In 1982, Intel began the production of x86 architecture processors. The model of a processor determines which software processor can run and which hardware processor is supported.

AM-9080 processor

AMD also became a major processor supplier for IBM computers, with IBM deciding to use x86 processors for their first “personal computers (PC)”. But Intel is no longer prepared to continue its deal. IBM will increase its market share in the computer market from 55% to 84%, while Intel will cancel access to AMD for its latest processor. The complexity of the later Intel 386 and 486 processors made it difficult for AMD to disassemble and redesign them. That’s how they started producing their own processors in 1996.

In a battle with AMD vs Intel

The K5 processor was the first processor to be developed by AMD on its own. Being a 133 MHz processor, it was a threat to Intel’s first Pentium processors. It is safe to say that the K6 processor, developed by AMD in 1997, was one of the world’s most powerful processors. In particular, the 1998 K6-II model competed with the Pentium II and the K6-III model with the Pentium III. According to statistics, the K6-II processor made up nearly 70% of the computers under the $ 1,000 market at the time

AMD K5 processor and Intel Pentium processor

Not to be outdone, AMD is developing the Athlon processor, or K7, their most popular processor. For the first time in the world, the processor clock speed exceeds one billion (1GHz). Designed as an extension of the K7 Snow, the Athlon Thunderbird processor was the first processor with overclocking capability. Support for DDR RAM and the expansion of the processor model to Level 2 cache memory began with this processor. The K7, which battled the Pentium IV for the first 5 years of the 21st century, sold well because it was available for less

Released in 2003, the K8 processor is the first x86-64 model to be introduced to the world. AMD64 is still used today to refer to the “Instruction Sets” of processors created by both companies. AMD is also the first to introduce multi-core technology to the world. The Athlon 64 X2 processor, introduced by AMD in 2005, had dual-core cache memory.

AMD Paradise is falling apart

This is the beginning of the decline of AMD, the world’s leading processor maker. While not a groundbreaking contribution to the genre, AMD continues to make its way to the Down of the list in 2016, when some of the company’s top executives made decisions and shortcomings in the new processor models introduced.

During 2006, Intel’s products also had significant problems. Realizing that their latest processor model could no longer be upgraded, they turned to upgrading their old Pentium model again and began launching their products under the Core name. Three days before Intel’s introduction of the Core 2 Duo processor in 2006, AMD announced that it had acquired ATI Technologies, a graphics card maker, for $ 5.4 billion. ATI’s only assets were the intellectual property they owned. They did not even have a factory to make graphics cards. As a result, AMD will soon have to sell ATI to Qualcomm for as little as $ 65 million.

In 2007, AMD introduced the 4-core K10 processor. It will not be able to surpass Intel’s Core 2 Quad Q6600 processor, which was already very popular in the world. All the cores in the K10 were housed in a single CPU die. While this is said to provide a theoretically higher “counting speed”, showing a speed of 100MHz lower than the Q6600 used by the two die was a setback for AMD. The so-called name also contributed to the low purchases of the K10 processor. AMD decided to name the processor Phenom instead of the popular Athlon, as Intel introduced the processor as Core instead of Pentium.

Intel has also become a major supplier of processors for Dell computers. By 2007, 76% of their revenue came from designing processors for Dell. AMD, meanwhile, failed to produce as many processors as its customers could expect. Intel was able to generate more than $ 40 billion in revenue in the first decade of the 21st century, while AMD was collapsing in the face of losses from the purchase of ATI and the failure of K10. The situation worsened after that. AMD’s Earnings Report for 2011 to 2016: Here the negative values show their credit rating

Failed CPU format

The CPU industry was further developed by the creation of two separate threads for a single core. Intel’s model featured several cores and their separate Floating Point Unit (FPU), Level-1 cache, and Level-2 cache, so that a thread would run very similar to a separate processor. Intel called this Hyper-Threading. AMD’s replacement for this was the latest model, the Bulldozer. Instead of upgrading to the K10 processor, they chose a completely different model. But instead of splitting a core into two threads, they inserted two cores into one module. They called this technology Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT).

Bulldozer model with 4 modules

This gave the two cores a common FPU, a Level-1 cache and a Level-2 cache. By doing this they hoped to reduce the power consumption of the processor. Accordingly, the AMD FX-8510 released in 2011 had 4 modules. Since each module had two cores, they introduced it as an 8-core and 8-thread processor. The Core i7-2600K processor introduced by Intel that year had only 4 cores. They used Hyper-Threading technology so it consisted of 8 threads. Desperate for AMD, the Intel processor, which required 30W less power than their processor, outperformed the AMD processor.

Since then, Intel has released better processors year after year. The improvements made to the FX processors did not outweigh the Intel. As a result, AMD suffered millions of dollars in losses from 2012 to 2016. Although the Jaguar model processor was a success for the Xbox and PlayStation, the revenue from it was not enough to fuel the crash of the processor product for PC. In 2014, Rory Read resigned as head of AMD, handing over the reins to Professor Lisa Su.

AMD is back with a new CPU model

Lisa, an American immigrant born in Taiwan, holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in electrical engineering from M.I.T. Prior to joining AMD, she was a member of the technical staff at Texas Instruments, where she was General Manager of Free-scale Semiconductor and Head of Semiconductor at IBM. Under her, Jim Keller, who led the design of the K8 processor, became the head of research and development at AMD.

Under the new leadership, AMD will take steps in 2017 to launch a new processor model called the Zen. The main purpose of this model was to produce high-capacity processors at an affordable price and to increase the core value from 4 to 64, but also to make processors easily accessible. The first Zen processor series was released on March 2, 2017 and was called Ryzen.

High hopes for the Ryzen 1000 series of processors

During the period 2014-2017, no processor manufacturer was able to challenge Intel. As a result, their processors did not show much improvement in each other, which led consumers to have high hopes for the Ryzen 1000 processor.

Both the Ryzen 5 1600 and Ryzen 7 1700 processors were faulty from the day they were released. The first-generation Ryzen processor failed to gain user trust because of the large number of complaints about processor memory and software support, which required several updates to fix them. What’s more interesting is that the Ryzen processor has become the most affordable processor. Cheaper than Intel, this processor also had a higher core capacity. The Ryzen 1700 processor had 8 cores and 16 threads, and Intel first added 8 cores to its consumer processors a year later.

The latest Ryzen processor shows the highest capability of a single core

Correcting memory errors, Ryzen released the second-generation processor with the Zen plus model, which showed some sales. Intel introduced the Coffee Lake model in 2017, replacing the Skylake model introduced in 2015 with the i9 processor model in 2018. Intel introduced the 9900K with 8 cores and 16 threads with the i9 processor model.

In response, AMD introduced the Zen-2 model in 2019, and its Ryzen 9 3900X processor easily surpassed Intel’s i9-9900K in the multi-core segment. Intel processor was far ahead in terms of single-core capability. As a result, Intel claims to be the world’s best processor maker.

In addition to releasing the Zen-2 model Ryzen 4000 processor line for the year 2020, AMD also introduced the Zen-3 model Ryzen 5000 processor line at the end of the year. This time they surpassed Intel’s processors in both multi-core and single-core. The Ryzen 9-5900X processor is about 10% more efficient on both the Multi-Core and Single Core sections than the Core i9-10900K processor.

Ownership of the World Processor Market

In April 2020, AMD had a 21.7% share of the world processor market, while Intel had a 78.3% share. By January 2021, AMD had increased its ownership to 29% and Intel’s value had dropped to 70%.

If the Cold War between the two companies continues like this, consumers will no doubt be able to buy the most capable processors at affordable prices.