Joel Hruska shares his view on the EPYC 2 launch and AMD's competitive position, reflecting on AMD's previous successful era with Opteron back in 2005:
"I don’t use phrases like “golden age” lightly. I’m using it now. While I make no projections on how long it will last, 7nm Epyc’s debut has made it official, as far as I’m concerned: Welcome to the second golden age of AMD."
extremetech.com
Interestingly, there is a fear in the article about history repeating itself — that AMD's success is like "hitting a rubber wall with a sledgehammer" — and that Intel will push AMD back into irrelevance. However, his look back at history also illuminates the differences between now and then.
Top of all, AMD is now not in dire need of making a $5B acquisition just to ensure a future. Getting graphics IP was vital back then. Nvidia was the courted partner, but that fell apart, and the forced marriage with ATI took place and hurt for years.
While ex-CEO Ruiz navigated the ATI acquisition and the factory spin-off, securing a deal with Abu Dhabi on the creation of GlobalFoundries, and deserves credit for that, his tenure was preoccupied with fighting Intel in the courts over their dirty business tactics. His successor, Dirk Meyer, quickly settled the dispute, although some argue he was too quick to do so and only got a paltry payment out of Intel.
Also, in 2005 the industry woke to the fact that "the free lunch was over", that single-core performance improvement was stagnating, and that parallel processing was the future. My understanding is that Dirk Meyer, who was in charge of the technical vision for AMD, struggled with integrating ATI while transitioning the engineers to fabless design methodology and SoC design — the use of PDKs, EDA and standard cell libraries, and moving away from manual circuit layout (something Intel may be facing now, under the direction of Jim Keller).
Dirk Meyer's vision for SoC design, "Fusion", HSA and the "APU" made longterm sense. Unfortunately, it took longer than expected (the first APU, Llano, was announced in 2011), and wasn't as profitable as hoped. As the new short-lived CEO he didn't manage to find a profitable way, the stepping stones above water, to get to the desired destination. And unfortunately, his bets on longterm CPU microarchitecture didn't pan out (while the chief architect on Bulldozer, Chuck Moore, got cancer and died).
This was all happening in a quickly changing market where the growth of mobile exploded, while the PC segment slowed down and stagnated. The AMD board reportedly wasn't pleased that, despite AMD's great IP, the company saw no share in this revolution. Many reports claim this is the reason Meyer got the boot (although I suspect it has more to do with lack of a profitable roadmap and execution).
Throughout this period, Intel was steaming ahead with a strong CPU architecture (in large parts built on AMD innovations and system design ideas, such as AMD64, integrated memory controller and coherent interconnect). Intel also had a huge lead in manufacture. They introduced the first "3D" transistor, the FinFET in 2011 to great fanfare, and leapt even further ahead.
Today the situation is quite different. After resetting the company under CEO Rory Read in 2011 with the hire of CTO Mark Papermaster, and subsequently Lisa Su and then Jim Keller in 2012, with Lisa Su executing the new vision as CEO since 2014, AMD again has a superior CPU architecture, but this time with a solid multi-year roadmap. They are also strong in GPU architecture, which is now a vital part of the mix in high-performance compute, and where Intel is the laggard. In manufacture, TSMC has overtaken Intel and has an unrelenting and competitive roadmap stretching far into the future. It is now uncertain, some say unlikely, Intel will ever get back in front.
And, AMD now has Lisa Su, Mark Papermaster and a strong management team. They have proven to have the technical insight — the ability to make the right bets — and a laser focus on roadmap execution and financial stability.