x86 CPUs: Why Intel and AMD have no competition

Have you ever wondered why AMD and Intel have little competition? I explain it here. If you have any more information on this, or I messed up somewhere, please do let me know in a comment!
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x86 CPUs: Why Intel and AMD have no competition

TechteamGB

[AdamSmith-gsdv]

The reason we don't have competition is simple: Bulldozer. AMD screwed up so badly with that CPU architecture that it almost killed the entire company! Thankfully it looks like Ryzen is fixing that!

[JohnGeorgeBauerBuis]

One cool feature of VIA Technologies CPUs is that the CPUID can be changed, so you can set it to CyrixInstead or CentaurHauls if you're feeling nostalgic, as well as having it masquerade as and AMD (AMDisBetter, AuthenticAMD) or Intel (GenuineIntel) CPU. This feature does serve a purpose besides entertainment, as the CPU dispatcher in the Intel Compiler checks the CPUID before checking the feature flags to determine which codepath to run, and will use a non-optimal code path if the CPUID is not GenuineIntel, and an even less optimal codepath if the CPUID is not AuthenticAMD instead, supposedly for compatibility reasons.

[lelouchvibritannia]

I'm trying to use this Intel CPU but AMD Ryzen keeps kicking my ass

[randallsmith]

Over the years there have been several companies that have manufacture x86 CPUs. Everyone except Intel, AMD, and VIA is out of the market now. Many due to financial issues or buyouts. I used to have a Cyrix 6x86 CPU.

[Koloth]

This is rather sad. Because competition gives the consumer more choice because the leaders get settled to not really trying to gaining customers. Because they will already get them no matter what they produce.

[popcornwonk]

Awesome. Thank you. I'd say definitely make more of these. Cheers.

[WXSTANG]

Competition is key to moving computers forward... and is why I am rooting for VIA to be become competitive again, and a fan of AMD.

[Kometgamer]

Nice video, really interested that CPUs cost ~50$ per piece, expected them to cost less

[Zestyclose-Big]

Transmeta Crusoe gets a mention!

(Man the Compaq TC1000 was really, really slow)

[sininetulnukas]

From theoretical point of view the CPU-s with registers are just "RAM Machines". The caches, out of order execution, etc. is just a speed optimization. This means that even if the electronic Boolean logic is used, there is absolutely no need to stick to a single, old-and-tried, computer architecture. For example, there are also "stack machines" and even microcontrollers that use "stack machine" architecture in stead of the traditional RAM-machine architecture. The stack-machine architecture based microcontrollers are manufactured by a small company that calls itself "Green Arrays", with an home page of greenarraychips dot ccoommm. However, even the old RAM-machine architecture offers still a lot. For example, You may find out about a CPU that has literally 1024 64bit CPU-cores by googling: "Parallella 1024". At one of the blog posts the founder of the Parallella told that he seriously considers to use the riscv dot ooo rr gg, an academic open source CPU-core, for one of his future projects.

From performance point of view the CPU architecture does not have to be the old x86. The RAM-machine just needs to execute a lot of instructions per second and those instructions do not have to match with those of the X86. There do exist some theoretical limits, which are described at "Theory of Computation" or "Recursion theory", and RAM-machines of type x86 also implement those instructions, but those can be patented only to the extent that a wheel can be patented, which tends to be the case in the U.S. but clearly is not the case in Europe, where a Swedish company, later acquired by Americans, has developed "LEON CPU" for the European space program. (Just google "LEON CPU"). The former Sun Microsystems also released its greatest and most powerful CPU, the T4, also as an open source project:


Open source hardware CPUs can be found from opencores dot ooo rrrr g. As a matter of fact You may want to get to know the Niklaus Wirth educational project, where he provides all 3: a CPU, which can be run on an FPGA, an operating system and a programming language.


Thank You for reading my comment.

[wb]

I'm excited about the future of computers and how AMD and Intel will use different materials other than silicon for manufacturing micro processors. It's very hard to compete with these two monarchs of CPUs :O

[syncmonism]

X86 isn't a market with clear boundaries, as Intel and AMD's X86 processors still face competition from other CPU architectures, particularly Intel, as AMD is already in the process of cutting into Intel's X86 market share, and Arm is likely going to want to avoid going after any segment of the market where AMD is making the most headway, especially given that AMD is, if they're smart, going to be most focused on areas where X86 is strongest against Arm, and Arm can still benefit indirectly from Intel losing market share (and profits) to AMD (technically, Arm is just a licensing company, and so actually there are a variety of different companies who make different Arm based chips, such as Qualcomm and Samsung). In fact, pretty much everyone benefits from both Arm chip makers and AMD cutting into Intel's dominance, at least up until the point that Intel is no longer any more dominant than AMD. AMD is still much, much smaller than Intel, with a lot less leverage, and isn't about to replace Intel as the biggest X86 chip maker, despite actually out-selling intel in some segments of the market for the past year and a half or so. However, it's possible that could change within a few years. Things can change very, very fast in this industry. Just ask IBM, or Motorolla.

A lot of server services are switching to using more and more Arm CPUs, and at least some of it is cutting market share away from X86, though there are some serious development and transition costs related to shifting from X86 environments to Arm environments in order to get operating systems and other software to work natively on Arm rather than X86, whereas a great deal of the development costs of X86 based software has already been paid for, and a lot of businesses and users are in no hurry to put up with the growing pains of switching over from one to the other. However, Microsoft and Apple are already heavily invested in getting Windows 10 and IOS, as well as their laptops, to run natively with Arm hardware, which is worth it for them, because simply doing this on the R and D and prototype side of things puts more pressure on X86 chip makers, especially Intel (who have way more to lose). Apple and Microsoft already have well working prototypes of IOS and Windows 10 working on Arm based hardware, and this really puts the pressure on Intel, who is also being pressured a lot from AMD on the other side. AMD on the other hand, sure they face competition from Arm, but they just aren't in the same kind of defensive position as Intel, as they have very little in the way of established supply contracts to server and system builders, and they're currently succeeding in cutting into Intel's X86 market share. AMD just needs to do its best to focus on cutting into Intel's market share in the areas which are best suited for X86 vs. Arm, so that they are less vulnerable to the areas where Arm makes progress. Even still, Intel is an extremely large and profitable company, and they can lose a ton of ground and still be able to recover and remain strong. There is presumably still plenty of room for them to continue to be profitable, they just need to accept the fact that their level of dominance over the past 10 years just isn't sustainable anymore, and avoid making a stand anywhere where they won't be able to hold their ground (they need to avoid investing in market segments which they're weaker in, and figure out what segments of the market their strengths are best suited to).

[MarkLikesCoffee]

Forgot to mention the IDT WinChip which was produced from 1997 to 1999. The mid 90s were great because Intel, AMD, Cyrix and IDT CPUs all used the same socket so they worked on the same motherboards. Great for consistency in benchmarking.

[slap_my_hand]

Intersil still manufacture 8086 CPUs. They technically are x86 CPUs, but they are only 16 bit, run at something like 10 Mhz and can only address up to 1 MB of memory (+ 64 KB IO address space).

[ewitte]

The only company I can think of with the resources, recent processors and foundries is Samsung.

[alvzcizzler]

VIA will release an 8 core CPU according to rumors.

[LaTSt]

Why would you upload a 1080p when you can upload the same 1080p footage as 4K but in original quality? Right, now there is a 4K-button which does nothing but create more network traffic, nice!

[seancondon]

Technically, Intel beat AMD to 64-bit with their Itanium CPUs in 2001... but there's a reason you don't hear about Itanium: it wasn't x86-compatible. A shift to it would have required a clean break, and legacy binaries would have been a no-go. So if you wanted to play... i dunno... Half-Life? Yeah, Valve would have had to recompile all the source code for Itanium. So Intel went about 64-bit the wrong way, AMD went about it the RIGHT way, and now 64-bit CPUs using AMD's 64-bit architecture are all over the place, and almost no one recognizes that AMD made that possible. It's just not something they think about. ...Or maybe kids these days just don't want to recognize accomplishments that took place a decade and a half ago. Who Knows.

[khayrou]

great video
u answered some questions I had for a very long time

[MallternativeAngst]

this is one of the reasons why i think the best decade for computing was the 90's, especially mid-90's. you had the x86, mips, alpha, pa-risc, sparc, and powerpc (which ibm still develops). majority of the risc systems outperformed intel systems but were very expensive. in the late 90's the performance gap between x86 and risc started getting smaller and the final nail in the coffin was the itanium. intel convinced sgi (mips), sun (sparc) and hp (pa-risc and alpha) to stop development of their cpu's in favor of the itanium and it worked. so in a nutshell, intel killed it's competition outside the x86 market with bs.