IBM, AMD and Others Plan Assault on Intel’s Chip Dominance

wsj.com/ ^ | Aug. 23, 2016 4:01 p.m. ET | By Don Clark

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

IBM to unveil new details of its Power9 chip; AMD to talk about inner workings of Zen technology

ENLARGE

AMD Chief Executive Lisa Su at an event in San Francisco last week discussing a chip dubbed ‘Summit Ridge’ that uses the company’s new Zen technology. Photo: Advanced Micro Devices

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Few companies enjoy the kind of dominance Intel Corp. INTC 0.42 % does in chips for the computers found in data centers. But competitors keep trying to pry open its server stronghold, with International Business Machines Corp. IBM -0.20 % the latest to brandish a new tool.

IBM, at a Silicon Valley technical conference on Tuesday, plans to reveal new details of Power9, the next addition to the line of microprocessors the technology giant uses in its own servers and—in a recent strategy shift—offers to other hardware companies.

Advanced Micro Devices Inc.,

[stylin19a]

again ?

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Have they a chabce!?????

[Red in Blue PA]

Good luck.

[Dr. Sivana]

We have some servers running old PowerPC chips. Reliable boxes, but NO support. No easy way to migrate stuff off of them. Intel just keeps on throwing more cores and smaller dies at twhat they’ve got. It’s ugly, but it works.

And of course, ARM based processors dominate the small stuff these days.

[Nifster]

Every decade or so they try this silliness. Who knows maybe this time

[Extremely Extreme Extremist]

AMD chips are much better than Intel's. Intel has a huge market share simply because of advertising.

I have a new ASUS desktop computer that has the AMD 10 chip in it, and it could power up NASA.

[Justa]

I have a new A10 system and a 5 y.o. I7 950 system. Both are overclocked to max stable. The I7 runs rings around the A10 for multi threaded processing such as running several VMs and multiple desktop apps in each. The A10 chokes on 2 VMs whereas the I7 950 runs four with ease.

[Paradox]

AMD chips are much better than Intel's.

I use and still use both. I'd give the slight edge overall to Intel, but they are both good, both capable CPU families.

[Zathras]

Since I have worked on designs for both IBM and Intel I can tell you Intel is at least 6 years ahead of IBM.

[Jack Hammer]

Oh, gee - I’ve got the hots for Lisa Su....

[minnesota_bound]

AMD stock has gone from $1.65 to $8.00 this past year. Current price is $7.41
It is one of the stocks I am looking at. Potential for big profit (or loss).
I currently own NVIDIA. (graphics chips).

Chart
http://tinyurl.com/z2pye3c

[hawg-farmer - FR..October 1998]

I work refurbishing Mirra Trak tools for the Semi-Conductor Industry. Chemical-mechanical planarization. We buy and sell with Intel. There is a huge demand for 150mm and 200mm tools even though they are twenty years old. We deal in Ångströms.

[Zathras]

I’ve been doing microprocessor design for 20 years.
I was only familiar with Intel design rules until fairly recently.
As soon as I saw GF/IBM/AMD design rules, I saw why they are so far behind.

Intel’s 14nm is so advanced that they had to create 14nm+ process to tweak the fin spacing to finally get the yield where it needed to be.

Most other semi companies including Qualcomm, TSMC and Samsung are just now running into finFet problems that Intel bumped into 5 years ago.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Interesting...thanks !