AMD Wowed Linux Users In 2020 With Their Fantastic Zen 3 CPUs, Timely New Open-Source GPU Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Wowed Linux Users In 2020 With Their Fantastic Zen 3 CPUs, Timely New Open-Source GPU Support

AMD this year not only delivered the very powerful Ryzen 5000 "Zen 3" desktop processors and initial Radeon RX 6000 "Big Navi" graphics cards but for exciting Linux users was the timely open-source support for the new GPUs well in advance (and also already preparing for some 2021 graphics products) as well as more timely support around Zen 3 thermal support and other additions. AMD's open-source timing is still improving although not yet optimal but all in it was a hell of a year for AMD Linux users...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-2020-Highlights

[OneTimeShot]

Not going to stop the usual suspects complaining, though...

[Awesomeness]

Wow us more by finally adopting USB4 and making your own WiFi and Bluetooth chips. As it stands, you either need to buy pricey AMD notebooks that have Intel wireless or you get Realtek crap.

[shmerl]

Well, if you could only buy them anywhere.

[Jumbotron]

Long ago, Charlie Demerjian over at Semiaccurate.com spilled the beans over the fact unknown to the wider press at the time that Intel was going to start missing it "Tick Tock" arch upgrade cycle because they didn't know how to manufacture chips at 10nm or smaller at economies of scale. That was 5 years ago.

Now with a resurgent AMD under the leadership of ex-IBM CPU engineer, Lisa Su and the dawning of the Age of ARM first in mobile now in desktops with Apple and soon Microsoft and Google, not to mention the hyperscalers such as Facebook, Amazon, Google and Microsoft, the inevitable has now happened to Intel.

Intel...is now being forced to break up in order to survive.


** BREAKING NEWS **


Third Point, the hedge fund led by Dan Loeb, is urging Intel’s board of directors to hire an investment adviser to explore “strategic alternatives” after the chipmaker lost market share to TSMC, Samsung and AMD.
Among the considerations should be divesting of “failed acquisitions,” Loeb wrote in a letter to Intel’s board on Tuesday. CNBC viewed a copy of the letter. Third Point, known for its activism, recently took a significant stake in Intel.


Intel shares rose 5% to $49.39 after reports of the letter surfaced. Even with Tuesday’s rally, Intel is down 18% in 2020, while AMD, Intel’s top U.S. rival, has almost doubled in value and the S&P 500 has climbed 15%.
“The loss of manufacturing leadership and other missteps have allowed several semiconductor competitors to leverage TSMC’s and Samsung’s process technology prowess and gain significant market share at Intel’s expense,” Loeb wrote. Meanwhile, AMD has eaten away at Intel’s share of its “core PC and data center CPU markets,” he wrote.
Intel’s financial results have been hurt in recent quarter by delays in is 7-nanometer chips, enabling AMD to get a dramatic head start with its competitive chips. The processors are key to providing improved computing performance and meeting demands for faster speeds.
AMD contracts with Taiwan-based TSMC, the largest contract foundry in the world and a company that also makes chips for Apple and Nvidia. Intel CEO Bob Swan Intel said in July that the company was open to outsourcing its manufacturing in order to keep pace with the current generation of chips.

Loeb indicated that Intel’s loss of manufacturing prowess raises national security concerns.





“Without immediate change at Intel, we fear that America’s access to leading-edge semiconductor supply will erode, forcing the U.S. to rely more heavily on geopolitically unstable East Asia to power everything from PCs to data centers to critical infrastructure and more,” he wrote.

Loeb added that Intel has to be able to make products that serve massive companies like Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, which are developing their own chip designs and having them manufactured abroad.

He said the firm has more recommendations that it would like to make to Intel in private. Third Point has also filed with the Federal Trade Commission to acquire incremental shares and preserve the option to recommend board members in 2021 “should we sense a reluctance to work together to address the concerns we have raised in this letter.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/29/third-point-urges-intel-to-explore-strategic-alternatives-.html

Here is the full letter from Dan Loeb who runs the Hedge Fund which owns 18% of Intel....




Dan Loeb's Letter To Intel Corporation


Dr. Omar Ishrak

Chairman of the Board

Intel Corp

2200 Mission College Blvd

Santa Clara, CA 95052

Dear Dr. Ishrak:

As you know, Third Point LLC recently took a significant stake in Intel Corp (the “Company”). Despite its theoretical competitive advantage as the world’s leading semiconductor business, Intel’s shares have dramatically underperformed those of its peers on a one, three, and five-year basis. It has lost over $60 billion of market capitalization over the past year alone.1 Third Point has engaged with companies facing other versions of “rough patches” for over two decades, and we would like to suggest concrete steps the Company should take to address its pressing challenges. Considering that you have been Board Chairman for less than a year, we appreciate that many of these issues have come under your purview only recently. Still, we hope that you share our view that Intel’s substantial problems must be handled with the utmost urgency.

Once the gold standard for innovative microprocessor manufacturing, Intel has lost its pole position to TSMC in Taiwan and Samsung in South Korea. Previously reliably able to progress its process technology every 2-3 years, Intel has been stuck at its 14-nanometer node since 2013, while TSMC and Samsung both transitioned to 5-nanometer this year and are developing more advanced process geometries. Intel’s plan to roll out its 7-nanometer node late 2022 or early 2023 will place the Company several years behind its Asian peers for at least the first half of this decade. This lag in advanced semiconductor manufacturing is a vulnerability that must be corrected.

The loss of manufacturing leadership and other missteps have allowed several semiconductor competitors to leverage TSMC’s and Samsung’s process technology prowess and gain significant market share at Intel’s expense. Under the visionary leadership of Dr. Lisa Su, AMD put its liquidity concerns behind it and has been taking meaningful market share in Intel’s core PC and data center CPU markets with its Ryzen and EPYC product lines. NVIDIA’s GPUs have dominated the nascent market for training complex computational models used in AI applications, a market in which Intel has largely been absent. While these companies are U.S.-based and display the breadth of America’s semiconductor design expertise, they operate no fabs themselves and leverage manufacturing in Asia to produce their products.

This raises a critical concern – the vital role of Intel’s products and services to America’s national security. In this respect, you lead one of America’s most essential boards. Without immediate change at Intel, we fear that America’s access to leading-edge semiconductor supply will erode, forcing the U.S. to rely more heavily on a geopolitically unstable East Asia to power everything from PCs to data centers to critical infrastructure and more.

From a governance point of view, we cannot fathom how the boards who presided over Intel’s decline could have permitted management to fritter away the Company’s leading market position while simultaneously rewarding them handsomely with extravagant compensation packages; stakeholders will no longer tolerate such apparent abdications of duty. Of special concern is Intel’s human capital management problem and the absence of an articulated plan to address it. The Company has lost many of its most inspiring and talented chip designers and leaders, and our sources indicate that those who remain (several of whom are highly regarded in the industry) are becoming increasingly demoralized by the status quo. Intel was built on the vision of engineering genius and, without the best talent, the current trajectory will not be reversed. Solving Intel’s human capital management issue should be the Board’s most urgent task.

Considering these and other challenges, we suggest the Board retain a reputable investment advisor to evaluate strategic alternatives, including whether Intel should remain an integrated device manufacturer and the potential divestment of certain failed acquisitions. As to the former issue, recent industry developments suggest many customers (such as Apple, Microsoft and Amazon) are now developing their own in-house silicon solutions and sending those designs to be manufactured in East Asia. You must be able to offer new independent solutions to retain those customers rather than have them send their manufacturing away. Just as Netflix uses Amazon’s AWS for cloud services, Intel must figure out how to serve its competitors as customers.

While we believe it is in the best interest of the Company to release this letter publicly and share our views with fellow shareholders and other stakeholders, there are other specific issues we would like to discuss privately and look forward to a constructive dialogue to help Intel chart a new course. Although we expect these conversations to be productive, we are filing for Hart-Scott-Rodino approval with the Federal Trade Commission to acquire incremental common shares and engage more actively with the Company, as well as to preserve the option to submit nominees for election to the Board at the 2021 Annual Meeting should we sense a reluctance to work together to address the concerns we have raised in this letter. While we have no agreements in place, we have specific recommendations regarding certain changes that we are confident will resonate with the Board and fellow shareholders.

We look forward to discussing this with you soon.


Sincerely,

Daniel S. Loeb

Founder and CEO

Third Point LLC

https://www.valuewalk.com/loeb-third-point-letter-intel/?amp=1

[stormcrow]

Wow us more by finally adopting USB4 and making your own WiFi and Bluetooth chips. As it stands, you either need to buy pricey AMD notebooks that have Intel wireless or you get Realtek crap.

Generally speaking, Intel NICs aren't bad. Realtek is hit or miss - the one in my desktop is fine for what it is.... the really bad NICs are the "Killer" stuff in higher end Dell laptops. Dell lost a customer (literally) when they put Killer crap NICs in their XPS line. I just bought a new laptop in the ultrabook form factor, and it wasn't Dell because my past experience with Dell's Killer NICs being utter junk.

I guess the PC world is going to have to watch out for Killer NICs in Intel garb now since Intel bought them out earlier this year.

[Peter Fodrek]

Not going to stop the usual suspects complaining, though...

It will not stop anytime soon, Now it is to solve

AMD Developers Looking At GNU C Library Platform Optimizations For Zen
Written by Michael Larabel in AMD on 25 March 2020


It's long overdue but AMD engineers are now looking at refactoring the GNU C Library (Glibc) platform support to enhance the performance for AMD Zen processors.

Stemming from Glibc semantics that effectively "cripple AMD" in just checking for Intel CPUs while AMD CPUs with Glibc are not even taking advantage of Haswell era CPU features,

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNU-libc-Platform-Optimize-Zen

Glibc-HWCAPS To Help With AMD Zen Optimizations, Other Per-CPU Performance Bits
Written by Michael Larabel in GNU on 7 July 2020


Experimental patches under discussion for the GNU C Library (glibc) would make it easier to dynamically load optimized libraries (shared objects) on systems depending upon the CPU in use and its hardware capabilities. This glibc-hwcaps work stems from the desired work on being able to better leverage Linux performance optimizations on AMD Zen-based systems but the hardware capabilities patches themselves can help any CPU microarchitecture family in more easily shipping optimized support.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=glibc-hwcaps-RFC

GNU C Library 2.32 Released
Written by Michael Larabel in GNU on 6 August 2020


GNU C Library 2.32 (glibc 2.32) is now available as this important library for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.

Sadly not making it for this release is the restartable sequences support. Additionally, the hardware capabilities discussion is also still ongoing.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Glibc-2.32-Released

Performance gains are anticipated at Matalb Performance boost levels

MATLAB MKL Codepath Tweak Boosts AMD Ryzen MKL Performance Significantly

by btarunr Nov 18th, 2019 10:53
Nedflanders1976 devised a way to restore anywhere between 20 to 300 percent performance on Ryzen and Ryzen Threadripper processors, by forcing MATLAB to use advanced instruction-sets such as AVX2.

https://www.techpowerup.com/261241/matlab-mkl-codepath-tweak-boosts-amd-ryzen-mkl-performance-significantly?cp=3

And It is anticipaed in about a month..

The GNU C Library releases every 6 months. See the NEWS file in the glibc sources for more information

• The current development version of glibc 2.33, releasing on or around February 1st, 2021.

https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/

Maybe som development or rc for glibc test may appear soon

[onlyLinuxLuvUBack]

I am wowed by the paper launches.

I would like amd nics and would like amd to figure out how to catch up to intel sata controllers.

[stormcrow]

I am wowed by the paper launches.

I would like amd nics and would like amd to figure out how to catch up to intel sata controllers.

What's to catch up to? SATA is on the way out as a legacy bus interface. AMD is ahead of Intel on PCI-E implementations which NVME drives directly interface with. Both of them have some catching up to do with the bombshell Apple dropped in November. But between the two, Intel is the one that's going to be suffering more as they've been behind the curve on core system components for years.

I don't even have an SATA drive outside of the optical drive in my desktop - for legacy purposes. It's all NVME. The legacy SATA drives I have I put in USB drive docks as needed.

[fenixex]

I assume they will throw more cache on next gen chips which will also be on TSMC's 5nm and have ddr5. Based on Hynix'es slides, they should be able to double the memory speed of Apple's chips. Then what?