AMD vs Intel a Long History

AMD and Intel between them make up almost all of the x86 processor market, there has been a long running rivalry between the two organisations driving each other on through the decades. Its not always been that way however.

Lets look at the longer history of rivalry and innovation these two companies have brought us.

00:00 - Intro
00:24 - A word from our sponsors
01:01 - What this video is (and is not)
02:13 - In the beginning
03:02 - 2nd sourcing and CPUs
07:00 - Here come the clones
08:11 - NEC V20
09:31 - iAPX (why oh why)
09:46 - 286
10:33 - 386
13:05 - 486
19:00 - The Pentium (every thing changes)
24:35 - Cyrix
25:27 - AMD K5
27:39 - Quake, and the rise of the FPU
30:07 - AMD K6, and Intel MMX
32:20 - Pentium Pro
32:59 - The MMX court battle
33:38 - Slot 1
34:10 - Pentium 2
34:47 - AMD K6-2 (3D Now)
35:45 - The Celeron
36:19 - Slot 2, and the Xeon
37:08 - Pentium 3 (and SSE)
37:55 - AMD K6-3 (and the Duron)
38:28 - AMD Athlon
39:13 - Itainium (Intel screws up)
42:13 - x86_64
44:20 - Pentium 4, Athlon XP
45:05 - AMD Athlon64
45:24 - Pentium D, Athlon64 x2
47:25 - Pentium 4 redesign
47:56 - Intel rips of Transmeta, and get sued
49:00 - Intel Core
49:20 - AMD buys ATI, and Intel release the Core2
50:51 - AMD Phenom
51:20 - AMD Phenom-2, Intel i7
52:25 - Sandy Bridge
52:43 - Bulldozer (AMD's turn to screw up)
53:24 - AMD nearly goes bust
54:30 - Intel takes the lead, but reduces R&D spend
55:00 - AMD better dead than smeg
55:58 - Zen
56:43 - Ryzen
57:20 - Intel on the back foot
58:36 - Zen2
1:00:15 - APU
1:01:10 - Zen3
1:02:25 - Alder Lake
1:03:26 - Zen4
1:04:17 - Raptor Lake (the ultimate waffle iron)
1:05:20 - The state of the war
1:06:30 - Will ARM kill them all ?
1:08:06 - Thanks for watching

[dennissdigitaldump]

When I worked at Intel, most of the phones speed dial was #1, that department's boss, #2 AMD's equivalent department. We talked constantly and the joke when ending the call was "we hate you", "we hate you too." Instead of goodbye, often said in a silly voice.

[interrobangings]

Ah, yes, 1969. A "relative newcomer" compared to Intel's 1968. 😂

[justfabulous]

Itanium was an Extremely Parallel Instructionset Computer processor? An EPIC processor?

Only now do I realize what a gigantic shot at Intel it was to name the Ryzen server line EPYC. That is just pure unadulterated Schadenfreude

Edit: You did bring it up at the end. I was having quite the laugh tho when the coin dropped in my mind

[js-]

Clean room reverse engineering doesn't mean they didn't look at it. It only means the team writing the code never looked at it. One team reverse engineers it and then documents it, the other implements it.

[wktodd]

"Basically required the compiler to be sentient " LOL

[hypercomms]

"intel had made themselves effectively 'a waffle iron that could do maths '' "... Classic! I enjoy this channel for the sense of humour, but as an engineer the depth of technical information. Excellent job!

[daemonspudguy]

Glad to see that I'm not the only one to joke about iAPX 432 being so complex that VAX is like a RISC chip by comparison.

[eroot]

ERRATA:
- Duron was not budget version of K6-III but Athlon
- AVX512 was introduced in Rocket Lake. Alder Lake could use these instructions if E-cores were disabled but Intel blocked that feature with uCode updates

[geekstrm]

38:00
The AMD Duron was the budget version of the Athlon, not the K6-III

[schrenk-d]

Man, this brings us down memory lane.

I was there for all but the earliest of releases. My first x86 PC was a 486 (family PC) … My first PC I ever purchased for myself was a Celeron.

I've had, K6's, Athlons, (I had the first Gen one that went into a slot as well ... The slot A)...

The craziest thing we had was a dual Celeron with the Abit BP6(?)... Running Linux.

Those were the days...

Sh!t I'm old ...

[RachaelSA]

There used to be an mp3 encoder written in ASM called gogo / petite, that was 10 times faster than every other encoder, and it used 3D now, so it was twice as fast on an AMD K6.

[jerry]

58:36 Am I dumb or Ryzen 9000 is Zen5 not Zen2 as mentioned in video?

[TheRidders]

Excellent trip down memory lane - thank you - that was Epyc!

[natashakerensky]

Thanks RetroBytes on this deep shallow dive into the rivalry. I remember working on “old IBM” PCs at Uni in 88. All these company names brings back memories. I too had a set of the Intel Bunny Suit plushies that I’m sure someone’s child at work got. The old days. Now everything is virtualized and only hardware is laptops, consoles and gaming PCs.

[mellusk]

One of the big issues that hobbled early Pentium IV adoption was that it required RAMBUS memory, which was incredibly, outrageously expensive at the time.

[EgonOlsen]

The problem with quake wasn't so much that the non-Pentium-CPUs were so much worse on floating point but that they couldn't run them in parallel to the integer pipeline as the Pentium could.

[kerryhoath]

That was honestly a really good overview of how these companies competed with each other. I was aware of most of it but it was cool to see it all in the one place, and the dry humour? much fun.

[Choralone]

Excellent video! A wonderful trip down memory lane!
One minor quibble that I noticed. At 38:04 you mention the AMD Duron as a budget version of the K6-3. The Duron was the budget version of the Athlon and was released June 2000. The original Athlon CPUs used Slot A from June 1999 to June 2000. The Duron was released when the Athlon was moved to the Socket A format starting in June of 2000 as there was no Slot A Duron.

[Meoknet]

Very nice video. Only major thing I would have added is the inclusion of X3D as a technology, like how you did MMX and SSE. You could have mentioned when AMD finally got SMT to compete with Hyper Threading years later. But as I said, great video. The truth is, this battle has been raging for so long that you'd have to do a series of videos if you ever intended to fully chronicle everything, so for a single video effort, I'm very happy with this.

[michaelfieser]

A new RetroBytes video? What a wonderful way to start my Saturday!