AMD's chief technical officer interviewed

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We quiz Mark Papermaster on a variety of topics.

2017 is shaping up to be a really solid year for AMD. Ryzen on the CPU side and Vega for GPU appear to offer competitive performance.

We chatted with Mark on both of these topics, Infinity Fabric, machine learning, VR, design philosophy and more in a wide-ranging interview.

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HEXUS Forums :: 4 Comments

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Dude, historically AMD was the master of single threaded performance if you go back to single core CPUs.
Always been an AMD fan.
Interesting interview, cautiously to moderately optimistic for AMD this year. I have slight concerns about Vega performance on launch versus the high end competition but hopefully AMD will stick with it and work on drivers etc.
acrilo
Dude, historically AMD was the master of single threaded performance if you go back to single core CPUs.

They had their noses in front twice in the history of x86 CPUs….and the first time was when they were making Intel clones (80386) and just rated them higher than Intel would…..this was quite a brief period. The second time was when Intel went through the worst time in their history that I can remember…..the Pentium 4/netburst era.

While AMD have done a good job of keeping Intel honest (at least to some degree), they are far from the masters of single threaded performance and historically have languished far behind once they had to design their own CPUs…..it wasn't until 2000 (and AMD had been making x86 CPUs since 1982) that they actually had a design win and it still took a couple of years before the performance gap between netburst and Athlon XP became really noticeable. They then had a whole 4 years as “masters” (at least from a performance POV - Intel still outdid them on marketing sadly) before Core2Duo released and AMD was once again relegated to second best.

So, since they started making x86 CPUs in 1982, they have been the masters of single threaded performance for around 6 years max….out of 34 years….