AMD Spreads Propaganda, Ex-Employee Speaks Out

AMD Spreads Propaganda, Ex-Employee Speaks OutLaunches a man with a shovel.

Back in old days, AMD has issued fake Barcelona CPU benchmark results to lure in some buyers. As we know, it did not turn out well for them.

Well, few years later and the history repeats itself, just check this AMD FX promotional video below:

Now, we did some digging and found out quite few interesting things. Here is a quote from the AMD ex employee himself, who posted few comments about the whole situation some time ago:

On paper bulldozer is a lovely chip. Bulldozer was on the drawing board (people were even working on it) even back when I was there. All I can say is that by the time you see silicon for sale, it will be a lot less impressive, both in its own terms and when compared to what Intel will be offering. (Because I have no faith AMD knows how to actually design chips anymore). I don’t really want to reveal what I know about Bulldozer from my time at AMD.

What did happen is that management decided there SHOULD BE such cross-engineering ,which meant we had to stop hand-crafting our CPU designs and switch to an SoC design style. This results in giving up a lot of performance, chip area, and efficiency. The reason DEC Alphas were always much faster than anything else is they designed each transistor by hand. Intel and AMD had always done so at least for the critical parts of the chip. That changed before I left – they started to rely on synthesis tools, automatic place and route tools, etc. I had been in charge of our design flow in the years before I left, and I had tested these tools by asking the companies who sold them to design blocks (adders, multipliers, etc.) using their tools. I let them take as long as they wanted. They always came back to me with designs that were 20% bigger, and 20% slower than our hand-crafted designs, and which suffered from electromigration and other problems.

That is now how AMD designs chips. I’m sure it will turn out well for them [/sarcasm]

BTW, you ask how AMD could have competed? Well, for one thing, the could have leveraged K8 and the K8 team’s success and design techniques instead of wasting years of time on a project that eventually got cancelled using people that had never achieved any success. It took Intel years to come out with Nehalem, and AMD could have been so far ahead by that point that they’d have enough money in the bank that they wouldn’t have to accept a low-ball settlement offer in the antitrust suit and they wouldn’t have to sell off their fabs.

Gives a totally different perspective on why Bulldozer failed, doesn’t?

Stay tuned.

  • bob

    Faildozer to the max! A Pentium II at 350mhz could smoke this thing

    • Pete and Repete

      RUBBISH!

  • Mr>Bates

    Im masturbating out of glee! People now realize how AMD sucke! Yet they still invested their time on it LOL (ejaculated)

  • Pete and Repete

    This doesn’t ring true to me, the wording is terrible, the grammar is rubbish and it just doesn’t sound like an “AMD insider” to me.

    ANYONE that has knowledge on this subject could have wrote that.

    Not convinced.

    • Hell

      Wording is normal, grammar 8 – 9 / 10 , that just happens when you write something NOT for exam. He’s not english teacher. It’s possible that the guy faked, but your statements doesn’t confirm that in any way.

      • Insider?

        I like reading this intel propaganda put out just cause there running like scared ants trying to figure out how to compare to an 8 core processor that is physically superior to they’re more expensive rip-off i7.

        My AMD processor blows that crap out of the water. I know people who wish they had bought AMD instead of a cheap rip-off like intel.

        • Diceman

          time to stop the weed.

  • Amd sucks

    Not suprised AMD tards will buy into this propaganda. It’s first better value for the money and now this, fake propaganda and benchmarks disgusting.

    • Intel suc*s

      It’s just a piece of silicon, retard, stop being so passionate about it.

  • Rude

    3 years ago experienced AMD engineers in Germany and the US told management it would take over a year to get a worthy new CPU into production.

    Management fired the engineers and sold the fabs.

    Management hired cut & paste ‘engineers’ on H1-B visas to do design and outsourced production to China.

    3 years later we can see that the new flagship design is not just slower than Intel’s mainstream CPUs from last year but slower than AMD’s own overclocked chips from 3 years ago.

    And it uses more power.

    And it costs more to make.

    This is exactly the route and result that bankrupted Sun.

  • dvorak

    So how about hand tuning the final design to give us something like the performance we expect. After all its possible to tweak production car engines!!

  • Ya know…I was thinking that from the start.

    The Bulldozer doesn’t even look right…

    32nm process, 8 cores, gimped L1 cache sizes, mediocre L2 and L3…

    8 cores needs more balls, and this ‘Insider’ may be fake, but the words don’t matter…

    The end result is still a crap chip after years of work…Really now AMD?

  • AMDFORLIFE

    MAn..totally disappointed with amds new chips..infact i was gonna get the new fx as soon as t released..if you guys back out.i cant take intels monopoly.. come on heads at amd… grow up.. if you guys read this,, i can gaurantee that i can shut the trap of such people posting bullshit and get a new processor that redefines the company.. hell i aint even working there so.. all i wish you is good luck.. i still remember when my dad got my first amd FX system.. that sysytem literally kicked ass everything out there.. if you can do it once y not again???

    • Gngl

       Because from now on, the good engineers will stay away from AMD.

  • Kilobit

    It’s actually true my wife amd I have a friend thats employed by AMD in Sunnyvale, AMD went this route to cut costs on designing and cut back on their engineers hints probably why the guy no longer works for AMD,he told me everybody is still against it and they have been bringing it up in Kaisen meetings but they don’t care they just want to save money he also said that they will be having temporary lay offs this summer.