How can AMD compete with Intel when Intel has vastly more resources?

>>59141516
Jim Keller

>>59141522
This. Keller is the magician.

>>59141516
>Intel is a bunch of lazy fucks, >semiconductor R&D funding seems to hit diminishing returns
>AMD owns licenses to a bunch of Intel tech

>>59141516
Thanks to a series of spectacular R&D and market-entry failures intel is pretty vulnerable to coughing up some market share. They aren't going anywhere anytime soon but they've squandered a pretty insurmountable lead, partly due to dumb decision making at the top and partly just due to bad luck.

>>59141516
They don't have a leg up, they CAUGHT up. If they're ahead of Intel anywhere it's in multithreaded performance, and that's from spending so much time trying to make Bulldozer work.

>>59141548
>>59141522
I'm reading about him on Wikipedia right now. It says he coauthored the x86 instruction set, so already I can tell this guy is qualified. It also says he returned to AMD to work on the Zen architecture. Says he's working @ Tesla now, so whatever Zen proves to be, I'm guessing AMD won't advance beyond it for a while.

I figured an answer to my question could be that AMD simply had a superior scientist/researcher, looks like that IS the answer. Cool. Very cool.

I had another thought though. There's this effect where if you're running in a race and you see someone's back in front of you, it gives you the extra energy to try and close the gap. So maybe the whole time that Intel was dominating, AMD's R&D department was affected by this phenomenon.

2nd place phenomenon + super duper Jim Keller = AMD being relevant again

>This is the first time in a very long time that we engineers have been given the total freedom to build a processor from scratch and do the best we can do. It is a multi-year project with a really large team. It's like a marathon effort with some sprints in the middle. The team is working very hard, but they can see the finish line. I guarantee that it will deliver a huge improvement in performance and power consumption over the previous generation.

—Suzanne Plummer, Zen team leader, on September 19th, 2015.

>>59141601
jim left with with zen and zen+
let's also not forget how good amd engineers actually are, look at the improvements the continually made when they were left with fucking bulldozer,

How did they fuck up so bad with bulldozer?

>>59143503
Mismanagement, a lot of automated tooling and mistaken product placement, CMT isn't useful for desktop yet.