My favorite part of the story is later when AMD created the Opteron and created the AMD-64 instruction set. It was just nice to see Intel using AMD's new instructions for a change.
Its my favourite part too, that actually brings us to the end of the issue because Intel would sign more deals with AMD to be able to use that instruction set and by now its called x86-64, in a sense its a product of both Intel and AMD, however Intel introduced a trap, if AMD was bought out they would not be able to keep their license, a Major reason they were not bought out during the early 2010s. The engineers behind the AM64 was also the men behind Zen core(left AMD after the launch) and last I heard he was working for Intel.
Its a miracle that AMD is still standing and hadn't gone bankrupt after Bulldozer's massive failure, and in spite of all the anti-competitive practices that Intel done in the past few decades.
@@mozzinator bulldozer is really far from the history covered in the video. They were much closer to dying at that point than at any time during bulldozer
And now looking at 6000 GPU and 5000 CPU AMD is competing quite well with 90% performance at 70% power. AMD doesn't have the same edge their competitors have but they compete well with decent margins all the same. I am immediately drawn to the underdog story. Thanks goodness we have AMD to help other companies innovate.
The particularly poetic follow-up to this story involving the AMD64 extensions that Intel had to go to AMD for, hat in hand, after their own Itanium designs failed to achieve broad market success is also an interesting chapter, and I hope you cover it too! These two companies have a complicated and deeply intertwined history, and it's in large part because of this that we can still have meaningful multiple vendor options for x86-compatible processors these days.
Actually Microsoft forced that. Even besides , Itanium, Intel was ready to introduce an incompatible 64 bit upgrade to x86, and Microsoft didn't want to have to support two different instruction sets, so they forced the two to come to terms. Its a classic story that I assume will be covered here in part deux.
As we get on with the decade in which Intel struggles to recover its mojo -- and AMD basks in the sunlight it pined for, for the past generation... As always, well done, Jon.
Stick a fork in Intel. It's DONE. And rightly so. Sure, they'll reorganize, probably spin off their fabs to a new corp, and probably supply some x86 for a few years, but with RISC-V gaining momentum at just the right time, I am guessing this arch is going to be the new hotness in a few years. Who knows who it will be
@@kayakMike1000 I've heard that the biggest ball-and-chain around innovation in general purpose PC atm is the x86 arch - I'd love to see a new arch, be is RISC based or otherwise. Apple made the switch from PPC to x86 to ARM, so it's definitely doable. They have a unified software-hardware ecosystem that makes the transition a lot easier though. It's been tried with IA64 and that was a massive flop. I don't know the details of why it didn't get adopted though
The AMD 386 DX 40 was an awesome awesome awesome CPU. It ran Linux like crazy. The AMD AM486 line was legendary in the day. The AM5x86-133 was by far the best '486 ever made.
@@michaeldale837 Yeah, it was a AMD 386 DX 40 with a Weitek '387, 8 MB RAM 128k of cache. I ran Slakware on it. It was a slick workstation. I used it for years.
@@mr.ssergeev No, I was working in computers both hardware and software in the '80s. I read about things in the EE Times and saw the evolution of the chips over the decades that followed.
I had my first PC a 5 year old Pentium and it's then I discovered K6, Athlon, Duron. AMD was always a rebel, a skunk work, but it wouldn't be such w/o Intel. Very interesting and nostalgic video reminding old computer magazine articles from childhood
Back in the days, the central processors were relatively easy to r&d and manufacture, so the market was NOT an oligopoly of just Intel and AMD. In addition to the mentioned Zilog, Motorola and NEC there were also IBM, DEC, HP, MIPS, SGI, Sun, Hitachi and many more. I especially note Cyrix's x86 compatible processors that were not half as fast at the same frequency, but also required less power and emitted less heat, so they could afford working without a cooling fan when all the other x86s were already in need of it.
I think there would be less x86 computers and more ARM ones. Less competition in x86 but way more in variety. Maybe Amiga, RiscOS and PowerPC would be better known.
@@H0mework let's be real, ARM doesn't scale that well on higher power designs and a RISC-based arch has the downside of being very dependent on compiler optimizations, as they don't have the micro-ops translation layer of modern CISC-based one like x86. Also the vast x86 software library makes ARM quite uninteresting for developers outside embedded products running Android. You have to be the Raspberry Foundation or Apple to have the leverage to make it attractive to consumers. As for the name you dropped, Amiga hasn't developed something serious over the last 25 years. RiscOS has always been a niche compared to crossplatforn OSes like Linux or BSD. And PowerPC is now the excellent Openpower but IBM just made it for niche server applications and despite its openness the high costs and the fact no manufacturer dared to make its own Power CPUs just let the arch stale and now x86 is catching up on the perf level for a fraction of the price and wattage.
@@PainterVierax Psion and Sybian were around too, and windows XP 64 bit was rarely used even though it was"better". People gravitate towards software they need usually, not operating systems. You are assuming that MS would have had a hedgemony and few other OS developers, but there are many free Linux and BSD ports so I'm certain we have seen more diversity. I remember my n810 with fond memories until MS destroyed Nokia before buying it. Some people even still use the n900 to this day, a niche like that still attracted developers beyond it's normal lifespan. My n810 had no shortage of software either.
@@H0mework Psion, SyMbian (with an M, it's not a sextoy), Sailfish or Tizen were and are anecdotal in term of marketshare. They only evolved in embedded often with little to no updates or even internet connectivity. Sure people are more app driven than OS but you forget that one of the main challenge of exotic architectures and OSes is the software support. A ton of peripherals, SBCs or even microcontrollers are simply unusable nowadays because of the lack of software support so having less variety means improved support from manufacturers as well as larger communities to rely on. I believed in ARM as desktop ten years ago, then the reality of the myriad of device tree branches and the lack of GPU driver support from ARM itself (!!!) just made me go back to x86, even though nowadays uefi and retroingineering projects allow a slightly better user experience when traveling outside of the realm of Raspberry and Apple products. For embedded (as well as datacenters), the royalty-free Risc-V already ate a considerable amount of ARM marketshare in quite a short time but again long term support will be hard on such a vast ecosystem.
my 1st pc was AMD 486 DX4 100mhz... followed by K6 200, K6-2 500, athlon xp 2500, athlon64 3000 - 3200, A8 5600k, A10 7870K, ryzen 3100 & now ryzen 5500... yeah I'm a fanboy 😂
9:50 - The 386 is not just 32-address bus, but internally 32-data, from bus to registers, to addressing. The x86 pipelining may make that a bit opaque. A true 32-bit processor, that scared IBM, hence lost their PC lead. You want to know the real reason for the Pentium name. When they added 100 to 486, they did not get 586. The pentium's built in math coprocessor had an obscure math bug.
You're right. 32-bit addressing & data processing was the primary selling point, not the 32-bit bus, as shown by the 386SX chips, which had the same internals, but with cut-down 16-bit bus. Because I/O is expensive! And nice jab at the FDIV bug.
Thanks for reminding about the FDIV bug. 1993 was pretty exciting in the PC space, with Pentium shattering everything and AMD and Cyrix making a lot of noise about their upcoming K5 and M1 CPUs.
Thank you for this great history lesson on Intel & AMD. I always wondered why they stopped using the numbering system and changed to the Pentium brand name.
21:31 Mention to the Pentium FDIV bug, and how that put them in a vulnerable position for some time. F00F bug got almost no fame though. It's been forgotten now, sometime Intel was the laughing stock of IT cause of this. It would be interesting to know how that bug was able to reach production products. Best wishes.
@@aliabdallah102 Don't confuse Intel having a bad season, or a couple bad seasons with them having no resources to produce new good products and have a good come back. They still outsell Amd many times. Best wishes.
That was an interesting side note about Mostek. I was firmly in the Motorola camp from the time the Atari ST came out (and Amiga, I guess) powered by the MC68000, whose assembly language and processor architecture I found far more comprehensible than the Intel 386. I stayed in that camp until the NeXT computers were discontinued, by which time Intel/AMD had finally come around to a sane form of memory addressing.
While microcode can be updated/configured by firmware in some instances, it is still microcode and quite different from firmware in its function in a processor architecture. Microcode determines the multiple steps taken by the different hardware elements in a processor during the execution of each processor instruction. This is a fascinating period in computing history. My first PC (in 1989) used an 80286 made by Harris Semiconductor, another that was locked out of this market by the introduction of the 80386 design by Intel.
Competition is the only thing that keeps anyone honest and hungry. Self improvement is merely iterative and incremental because you don't know what you don't know until someone else does it.
Thanks for the history lesson 🤓 I only really came across AMD once Intel started their Pentium advertising - a mate had a 486 PC and another bragged about his P60 - a couple of years later when transitioning from an Amiga to PC the decision to go AMD vs Intel with a K6-233 for uni was a no-brainier based on price - since the other hardware was pin compatible I wrongly assumed that up until the divergence of sockets/slots that there was still some sharing of the underlying architecture - looking forward to the next instalment 👍👏
Cyrix were also producing x86 compatible CPUs at that timeframe. Did they have an agreement with Intel ? Or were they small enough to pass under the legal radar ?
Cyrix did not have a licensing agreement with Intel and as a result had an even more contentious legal battle with Intel than AMD had (and which Cyrix ultimately won). Cyrix did not produce 386 clones though, their first CPU clone was the 486 (although in a 386 pin socket package). The Cyrix-Intel fight would make for an interesting Asianometry episode as well.
I think Cyrix used legal workarounds in order to sell x86 CPUs. Back then companies like IBM and Texas Instruments had an x86 license. Cyrix had these two companies (along with STMicro which also had a license) to fab their chips for them. As part of the deal these companies could sell Cyrix's designs under their own names, such as the Texas Instruments Ti486, which was a Cyrix Cx486.
@@MaxPower-11Cyrix's first x86 product was, IIRC, the FasMath Math Co-Processor for Intel 386 systems. Then they had the Cx486DLC/SLC which were kinda like a cross between a 386 and a 486 and plugged into 386 motherboards. They later produced 'real' 486 CPUs, the Cx486DX, which was their own design, benched a little slower than competing Intel and AMD products but also ran cooler.
17:48 I remember working on similar looking mobo decades ago. Pentium 2 proccy's (slot 1) came in like mini catridge. ISA, PCI and AGP slots wow! miss those days.
Ever since Ryzen came out, I am a big fan of AMD. Just competition back in the marketplace got Intel to straighten up and actually come out with decent products, plus knowing that you can get 95% of the performance at 2/3 the cost of an Intel chip is just good business.
Good job. There was a bit of conflation there with microcode (its firmware?). It would have helped to underline that it is entirely internal to the chip and operates the internals of the CPU. In any case, microcode was discarded with the Pentium series, KINDA. It actually lives on today in so called "slow path" instructions like block moves in the later cpus, which use microcode because nobody cares if they run super fast or not, since they are generally only used for backwards compatibility and got deprecated in 64 bit mode. I await the second half of this! Things took off again with the AMD64 and the "multicore wars". Despite the mess, the entire outcome probably could have been predicted on sheer economic grounds, that is, the market settling into a #1 and #2 player with small also-rans. Today's desktop market, at least, remains in the hands of the x86 makers except for the odd story of Apple and the M series chips. Many have pronounced the end of the desktop, but it lives on. I have many or even most colleges who use Apple macs as their preferred development machines, but, as I write this, I am looking out at a sea of x86 desktop machines. Its rare to see a mac desktop, and in any case, at this moment even the ubiquitous Mac pro laptops the trendsetters love are still x86 based, although I assume that will change soon. Me? Sorry, x86 everything, desktop and laptop(s). At last count I have 5 machines running around my house and office and 4 laptops. I keep buying Mac laptops and desktops, cause, you know, gotta keep up with things, but they grow obsolete faster than a warm banana. Yes, I had power PC Macs, and yes they ended up in the trash. And yes, I will probably buy Mac M2s at some point.
The competition between AMD and Intel since 386 has changed the world. Not metaphorically. We are fortunate it isn't dominated by one player. Fast forward to this year and Intel is back in the High End Desktop space with chips cheaper than AMD's. Not many times that has happened in the past where AMD is more expensive. Now I know why AMD seems to always have good support from Motherboard makers. Great storytelling as usual.
It would be nice to give some technical datas to this early processors. Meaning Data- and Addressbus size, Register size and number. And clock rate. Also if floating point numbers are supported.-
What does '[other companies would not accept that novel chip] without A SECOND SOURCE' mean? That term occurs in a line of text starting at about 6:40 in the video.
The entirety of the Intel competitive strategy of the time period covered by this video was driven by Intel's success in their "Orange Crush / Crush Motorola" campaign. (Another future video, maybe?) Grove, Barrett and the Intel senior leadership teams (at least up to Gelisinger) realized that using bad faith legal arguments could squelch their competition, allowing Intel to milk the profits for a product over its lifecycle and preventing the entry of competitors until the product was no longer profitable. Once they had succeeded with driving Motorola out of their competitive space, they went after AMD, Cyrix (and later National), NEC, Intergraph, and so on. Why compete when you can lawyer your way into monopolistic practices, creaming off the profits and starving your competitors from access to capital through bad press? Oh, and forcing your competitors to spend hundreds of millions on legal fees instead of engineering research is a useful feature, too. Eventually, the string of legal losses started to really hurt, so Intel switched to leveraging their pile of cash into Marketing Development Funds as a rod for AMD's back, but I am sure that MDF will feature in future AMD-Intel videos from Jon.
It's just a question of retrocompatibility. That's also the reason why AM64 gets traction over Itanium. Software development has a lot of inertia, especially in the low level programming (OS and drivers) and with the closed-source model. Even a big cult like Apple had to provide some satisfying translation layers (Mac 68k emulator then Rosetta1 and 2) to assure the success of each of its 3 architecture transitions.
I had a compaq 386 dx computer. It was really sturdy. I also had a ncr 286 computer. It had a high qualit svga monitor. Nice for games. My dad bought it in canada in the early 90s. I loved that machine.
I'm not sure what your sources are, but the IBM PC used the 8088, which was a more economical version of the 8086. The 8086 was a true 16 bit CPU, whereas the 8088 was 16 bits internal with an 8 bit external data bus - much cheaper than to implement. Also, the 80286 was used for the IBM AT and was very successful.
So good memories. For PC, I started with 80286 (for computer it was a MSX, using a Z80A). Then 386 came in, AMD was pretty good and got a share because it was CHEAPER and worked perfectly fine. Who can't remember 486-DX2, DX4?
The 386's legacy isn't only about 32 bit address buss. iirc it introduced Virtual Memory with an MMU. This is a huge evolution that is indispensable for multiuser multiprocess machines
And really nice and general addressing modes. Before the 386, there were annoying limitations on which registers you could combine (and how) to form a memory address. The 386 instruction set was much more orthogonal than the 86/186/286 instruction sets… but the encoding was of course not nice and orthogonal.
@@holmybeer no, I’m talking about the ability to write [eax+ecx*4+1234], which works fine in real mode, btw. Before the 386, you could only use a few specific register in address calculations (bx, bp, si, di). If you wanted to access something on the stack, you almost had to use [bp+disp] (which conveniently defaulted to using the stack segment). You couldn’t write ss:[sp+disp] so you were basically forced to use bp as the frame pointer.
I thought I read that the 4004 microprocessor was developed for use in places like elevator controls and someone then realized after the release of engineering samples that it could be the core chip for a calculator.
Been rooting for AMD since around 1994. I hope you cover the events that transpired after this video, beginning with AMD deciding to create their own completely in-house CPU design, the K5, to Bulldozer, and now their rise with Ryzen, with their market cap going past Intel.
Micro computers were around before IBM PC. Vector Graphics was the first pre-built Pc years before IBM's pc. IBM didn't want to get into pc's until 1980's.
16:29 “Intel had developed the AM486 using what it called clean room … procedures” Interesting that Intel had to RE their own chip an rebranded it like an AMD product. ;)
Interesting that you referred to IBM's Boca Raton team as the 'toy' computer makers. Through the '80s, the IBM Fab in Burlington VT had really strong process tech, but mediocre products. IBM got second source rights to the 486D micro, and got good yield on initial builds. It would have been a great line filler to turn the focus from technical papers to manufacturing discipline, but the PC team used it for price leverage on Intel purchases.
The technology has evolved in a much quicker path since 80s. There's no way a product can hit a market 5 years later but still create 1 billion revenue.
6:57 what? Intel had a second source? Intel WAS a source. Do you mean that buyers had a second source? And Mostek "went with Motorola?" Huh? Do you mean that Mostek decided to start making Motorola compatible chips instead of Intel compatible chips? This is confusing/unintelligible unless you already know what it means, which I don't.
Me too, I have no clue what is meant with "customers required second sourcing". I've got an MBA and I've worked with B2B sales. As a salesman I've heard all kinds of stupid excuses for not buying our terrific products, but I've never heard of this kind of obstacle. Did ALL potential CPU buyers have this strange and stubborn policy? Did they all also rent each of their office buildings from two different landlords?
The outcome of all these legal battles was predictable... The attorneys on both sides were generously compensated. They won. As for the engineers, not so much.
The Wright brothers wasted their time fighting over patents instead of innovating. Similar issue with the original practical steam engine patent. Patents are a net negative for industry. Elon’s got the right idea with SpaceX, innovate quickly and don’t file for patents. All patents really do is hand the design to the Chinese.
@@gregorymalchuk272 I agree 100%. However, I worked on patents for six years as an engineer assisting a company’s half dozen full time attorneys. Based on that experience. I have a dim view of the patent system actually adhering to the principle you mentioned. The USPTO has taken steps to reduce the frivolous ones, but they still occur. What’s worse is the way it is abused. If you work for a small company, and market a superior product to that made by a large company, watch out. Even if you don’t infringe on their IP, they may pick several of their patents, add them to a letter they send stating you DO infringe and threaten legal action. Just going through the motions to counter their legal actions may include a ruling to prevent you from selling while it gets litigated, and can take years. Meanwhile, the ongoing legal expenses can bankrupt you, or force you to accept some onerous terms. I've been on both ends of this experience.
I used to hate Intel, now I hate them less. AMD has always been on their coattails except Athlon and Ryzen. Glad there's competition but if they didn't make it we might have seen more arm devices like ACORN's ARM computers.
I had forgotten about all those lawsuits. They really disgusted me, like Intel had so little faith in their capabilities that they had to resort to lawyers playing petty word games. But I didn't think much of their processors either. The 286 was a miserable stop-gap joke, the whole x86 instruction set felt like Rube Goldberg and Heath Robinson bandaids on top of each other. Kept rooting for Motorola's 68K series, nice and simple and clean in comparison.
The 68K had ridiculous addressing modes - and then the 68020 got even more of them! Both instruction sets were kinda hard to decode. But, hey, Amiga forever, right?
@@peterfireflylund Don't know nuttin' about the Amiga. The x86 instruction set smells of terrible design followed by terrible revisions. The 68K instruction is mostly symmetrical and logical. Those addressing modes were not all useful, and for all I know they made pipelining hard, and maybe that's one reason the 68K couldn't keep up in the MHz wars. But they were easy to understand because of the symmetry.
My favorite part of the story is later when AMD created the Opteron and created the AMD-64 instruction set. It was just nice to see Intel using AMD's new instructions for a change.
I was waiting for that, the Intel Itanium was a massive failure bit like the bull dozer.
Its my favourite part too, that actually brings us to the end of the issue because Intel would sign more deals with AMD to be able to use that instruction set and by now its called x86-64, in a sense its a product of both Intel and AMD, however Intel introduced a trap, if AMD was bought out they would not be able to keep their license, a Major reason they were not bought out during the early 2010s. The engineers behind the AM64 was also the men behind Zen core(left AMD after the launch) and last I heard he was working for Intel.
@@pedrorequio5515 Are you referring to Jim Keller? If I remember right, he is now working at a RISC-V startup after Intel.
@@xtaticsr2041 Jim Keller now works at Tenstorrent, so you would be correct.
AM64 was the old intel itanium 64 instruction set, the same
Its a miracle that AMD is still standing and hadn't gone bankrupt after Bulldozer's massive failure, and in spite of all the anti-competitive practices that Intel done in the past few decades.
if it weren't for Consoles Xbox and PS AMD would've gone Belly-up around 2010s
@@mozzinator And one of the reasons why both ms and sony went with amd was because both intel and nvidia had burned ms and sony previously
@@steffennilsen2132 Especially Nvidia, cuz it was also Dumped by Apple due to Nvidia's Ever-present Greediness.
@@mozzinator bulldozer is really far from the history covered in the video. They were much closer to dying at that point than at any time during bulldozer
And now looking at 6000 GPU and 5000 CPU AMD is competing quite well with 90% performance at 70% power. AMD doesn't have the same edge their competitors have but they compete well with decent margins all the same. I am immediately drawn to the underdog story. Thanks goodness we have AMD to help other companies innovate.
The particularly poetic follow-up to this story involving the AMD64 extensions that Intel had to go to AMD for, hat in hand, after their own Itanium designs failed to achieve broad market success is also an interesting chapter, and I hope you cover it too!
These two companies have a complicated and deeply intertwined history, and it's in large part because of this that we can still have meaningful multiple vendor options for x86-compatible processors these days.
Actually Microsoft forced that. Even besides , Itanium, Intel was ready to introduce an incompatible 64 bit upgrade to x86, and Microsoft didn't want to have to support two different instruction sets, so they forced the two to come to terms. Its a classic story that I assume will be covered here in part deux.
As we get on with the decade in which Intel struggles to recover its mojo -- and AMD basks in the sunlight it pined for, for the past generation...
As always, well done, Jon.
Stick a fork in Intel. It's DONE. And rightly so. Sure, they'll reorganize, probably spin off their fabs to a new corp, and probably supply some x86 for a few years, but with RISC-V gaining momentum at just the right time, I am guessing this arch is going to be the new hotness in a few years. Who knows who it will be
@@kayakMike1000 I've heard that the biggest ball-and-chain around innovation in general purpose PC atm is the x86 arch - I'd love to see a new arch, be is RISC based or otherwise. Apple made the switch from PPC to x86 to ARM, so it's definitely doable. They have a unified software-hardware ecosystem that makes the transition a lot easier though.
It's been tried with IA64 and that was a massive flop. I don't know the details of why it didn't get adopted though
I had a tour of the Intel 8008 line when I was in high school.
Awesome, I loved that processor as a kid... It was my first.
The AMD 386 DX 40 was an awesome awesome awesome CPU. It ran Linux like crazy. The AMD AM486 line was legendary in the day. The AM5x86-133 was by far the best '486 ever made.
Do not forget about Cyrix and its 5x86 line. It could outcompete its AMD counterpart in many-many applications.
Did you run linux on it back in the day? What OS did you use?
@@michaeldale837 Yeah, it was a AMD 386 DX 40 with a Weitek '387, 8 MB RAM 128k of cache. I ran Slakware on it. It was a slick workstation. I used it for years.
@@AndrewTubbiolo Amazing so cool. I assume for the Weitek you were using some specific CAD app? Did you dual boot?
@@Kedvespatikus I never tried the Cyrix brand, but I kept hearing bad things about their floating point performance. What was your experience?
I love hearing the back story and history of the events that I remember hearing about during my career. Thank you.
Are you a former AMD or Intel employee? 😮
@@mr.ssergeev No, I was working in computers both hardware and software in the '80s. I read about things in the EE Times and saw the evolution of the chips over the decades that followed.
Mike Hunt lol. They almost got you.
Would his boss be a Hugh Jass then, or a Richard Head?
I know, I wasn’t sure if Asianometry realised it was probably a joke comment
Never been this early. I feel I've Ascended to a new level of Asianometry. Great work!
I had my first PC a 5 year old Pentium and it's then I discovered K6, Athlon, Duron. AMD was always a rebel, a skunk work, but it wouldn't be such w/o Intel. Very interesting and nostalgic video reminding old computer magazine articles from childhood
I'd be curious to hear you cover the GPU price-fixing lawsuit that NVIDIA and ATI fought until like 2008.
Back in the days, the central processors were relatively easy to r&d and manufacture, so the market was NOT an oligopoly of just Intel and AMD. In addition to the mentioned Zilog, Motorola and NEC there were also IBM, DEC, HP, MIPS, SGI, Sun, Hitachi and many more. I especially note Cyrix's x86 compatible processors that were not half as fast at the same frequency, but also required less power and emitted less heat, so they could afford working without a cooling fan when all the other x86s were already in need of it.
Yup the venerable Cyrix 686
Definitely crazy to see just how fierce the competition is between these two, although us the consumers are definitely better for it.
Not really, monopolistic competition that is so capital intensive that it forces the industry into a pure oligopoly is not consumer friendly…
I think there would be less x86 computers and more ARM ones. Less competition in x86 but way more in variety. Maybe Amiga, RiscOS and PowerPC would be better known.
@@H0mework let's be real, ARM doesn't scale that well on higher power designs and a RISC-based arch has the downside of being very dependent on compiler optimizations, as they don't have the micro-ops translation layer of modern CISC-based one like x86. Also the vast x86 software library makes ARM quite uninteresting for developers outside embedded products running Android. You have to be the Raspberry Foundation or Apple to have the leverage to make it attractive to consumers.
As for the name you dropped, Amiga hasn't developed something serious over the last 25 years. RiscOS has always been a niche compared to crossplatforn OSes like Linux or BSD. And PowerPC is now the excellent Openpower but IBM just made it for niche server applications and despite its openness the high costs and the fact no manufacturer dared to make its own Power CPUs just let the arch stale and now x86 is catching up on the perf level for a fraction of the price and wattage.
@@PainterVierax Psion and Sybian were around too, and windows XP 64 bit was rarely used even though it was"better". People gravitate towards software they need usually, not operating systems. You are assuming that MS would have had a hedgemony and few other OS developers, but there are many free Linux and BSD ports so I'm certain we have seen more diversity. I remember my n810 with fond memories until MS destroyed Nokia before buying it. Some people even still use the n900 to this day, a niche like that still attracted developers beyond it's normal lifespan. My n810 had no shortage of software either.
@@H0mework Psion, SyMbian (with an M, it's not a sextoy), Sailfish or Tizen were and are anecdotal in term of marketshare. They only evolved in embedded often with little to no updates or even internet connectivity.
Sure people are more app driven than OS but you forget that one of the main challenge of exotic architectures and OSes is the software support. A ton of peripherals, SBCs or even microcontrollers are simply unusable nowadays because of the lack of software support so having less variety means improved support from manufacturers as well as larger communities to rely on.
I believed in ARM as desktop ten years ago, then the reality of the myriad of device tree branches and the lack of GPU driver support from ARM itself (!!!) just made me go back to x86, even though nowadays uefi and retroingineering projects allow a slightly better user experience when traveling outside of the realm of Raspberry and Apple products. For embedded (as well as datacenters), the royalty-free Risc-V already ate a considerable amount of ARM marketshare in quite a short time but again long term support will be hard on such a vast ecosystem.
Wanted to see something like this for a while, thank you 🙏
my 1st pc was AMD 486 DX4 100mhz... followed by K6 200, K6-2 500, athlon xp 2500, athlon64 3000 - 3200, A8 5600k, A10 7870K, ryzen 3100 & now ryzen 5500... yeah I'm a fanboy 😂
I love how they compete to a rival celeron and athlon , I now use athon 200GE from atlon x2 5050e
Nice video! Definitely an important part of history and it's good to see both companies alive and well with renewed competition.
9:50 - The 386 is not just 32-address bus, but internally 32-data, from bus to registers, to addressing. The x86 pipelining may make that a bit opaque. A true 32-bit processor, that scared IBM, hence lost their PC lead.
You want to know the real reason for the Pentium name. When they added 100 to 486, they did not get 586. The pentium's built in math coprocessor had an obscure math bug.
You're right. 32-bit addressing & data processing was the primary selling point, not the 32-bit bus, as shown by the 386SX chips, which had the same internals, but with cut-down 16-bit bus. Because I/O is expensive! And nice jab at the FDIV bug.
Thanks for reminding about the FDIV bug. 1993 was pretty exciting in the PC space, with Pentium shattering everything and AMD and Cyrix making a lot of noise about their upcoming K5 and M1 CPUs.
Nice work! This needs a part 2
Yep!
Seconded.
I hope you keep goin with this one... Part two is where the FUN begins!!!
Thank you for this great history lesson on Intel & AMD. I always wondered why they stopped using the numbering system and changed to the Pentium brand name.
amazing - You tell the story so perfectly
21:31 Mention to the Pentium FDIV bug, and how that put them in a vulnerable position for some time.
F00F bug got almost no fame though.
It's been forgotten now, sometime Intel was the laughing stock of IT cause of this.
It would be interesting to know how that bug was able to reach production products.
Best wishes.
If it wasn’t for bulldozer, Intel would’ve had remained a fuckin joke.
@@aliabdallah102 Don't confuse Intel having a bad season, or a couple bad seasons with them having no resources to produce new good products and have a good come back.
They still outsell Amd many times.
Best wishes.
That was an interesting side note about Mostek. I was firmly in the Motorola camp from the time the Atari ST came out (and Amiga, I guess) powered by the MC68000, whose assembly language and processor architecture I found far more comprehensible than the Intel 386. I stayed in that camp until the NeXT computers were discontinued, by which time Intel/AMD had finally come around to a sane form of memory addressing.
Compared tot he x86 the 68k series was really an elegant design.
While microcode can be updated/configured by firmware in some instances, it is still microcode and quite different from firmware in its function in a processor architecture. Microcode determines the multiple steps taken by the different hardware elements in a processor during the execution of each processor instruction.
This is a fascinating period in computing history. My first PC (in 1989) used an 80286 made by Harris Semiconductor, another that was locked out of this market by the introduction of the 80386 design by Intel.
This was awesome! Thanks for the history lesson :)
If AMD wasnt around we may have to spend a fortune to afford an Intel CPU. Well done AMD. The world needs u. 🎉💐
目前俄罗斯在二手市场收购Intel这颗DX结尾的I386CPU制作武器，陶瓷封装有不错抗干扰能力。
Thank you for bringing these stories to us again and again.
Mama Su is killin it at AMD right now...it's a much different company now than even in the early 2010s.
Eagerly awaiting for part 2 of this feud. 🍿🍿
Competition is the only thing that keeps anyone honest and hungry. Self improvement is merely iterative and incremental because you don't know what you don't know until someone else does it.
The next 30 years is where it gets REALLY interesting :D
After my various glorious student Atari machines, I had a Harris (?) no-wait-state AMD based 40Mhz 286 and it was fantastic. I still have it.
Thanks for the history lesson 🤓 I only really came across AMD once Intel started their Pentium advertising - a mate had a 486 PC and another bragged about his P60 - a couple of years later when transitioning from an Amiga to PC the decision to go AMD vs Intel with a K6-233 for uni was a no-brainier based on price - since the other hardware was pin compatible I wrongly assumed that up until the divergence of sockets/slots that there was still some sharing of the underlying architecture - looking forward to the next instalment 👍👏
Cyrix were also producing x86 compatible CPUs at that timeframe. Did they have an agreement with Intel ? Or were they small enough to pass under the legal radar ?
Cyrix did not have a licensing agreement with Intel and as a result had an even more contentious legal battle with Intel than AMD had (and which Cyrix ultimately won). Cyrix did not produce 386 clones though, their first CPU clone was the 486 (although in a 386 pin socket package). The Cyrix-Intel fight would make for an interesting Asianometry episode as well.
@@MaxPower-11 thanks! Definitely sounds like a video to wait for. TBH I know very little about Cyrix.
I think Cyrix used legal workarounds in order to sell x86 CPUs. Back then companies like IBM and Texas Instruments had an x86 license. Cyrix had these two companies (along with STMicro which also had a license) to fab their chips for them. As part of the deal these companies could sell Cyrix's designs under their own names, such as the Texas Instruments Ti486, which was a Cyrix Cx486.
@@MaxPower-11Cyrix's first x86 product was, IIRC, the FasMath Math Co-Processor for Intel 386 systems. Then they had the Cx486DLC/SLC which were kinda like a cross between a 386 and a 486 and plugged into 386 motherboards. They later produced 'real' 486 CPUs, the Cx486DX, which was their own design, benched a little slower than competing Intel and AMD products but also ran cooler.
17:48 I remember working on similar looking mobo decades ago. Pentium 2 proccy's (slot 1) came in like mini catridge. ISA, PCI and AGP slots wow! miss those days.
Happy Easter y'all
Ever since Ryzen came out, I am a big fan of AMD. Just competition back in the marketplace got Intel to straighten up and actually come out with decent products, plus knowing that you can get 95% of the performance at 2/3 the cost of an Intel chip is just good business.
"spent his first night after the settlement eating a pint of...ice cream"
thats a mood, damn
486sx 25 was my first computer:) I had to upgrade no sound to a sound blaster 16 and a Supra 28.8 modem.
Continue this timeline! :) I watched this just before I wanted to start reading "Chip War".
Good job. There was a bit of conflation there with microcode (its firmware?). It would have helped to underline that it is entirely internal to the chip and operates the internals of the CPU. In any case, microcode was discarded with the Pentium series, KINDA. It actually lives on today in so called "slow path" instructions like block moves in the later cpus, which use microcode because nobody cares if they run super fast or not, since they are generally only used for backwards compatibility and got deprecated in 64 bit mode.
I await the second half of this! Things took off again with the AMD64 and the "multicore wars". Despite the mess, the entire outcome probably could have been predicted on sheer economic grounds, that is, the market settling into a #1 and #2 player with small also-rans. Today's desktop market, at least, remains in the hands of the x86 makers except for the odd story of Apple and the M series chips. Many have pronounced the end of the desktop, but it lives on. I have many or even most colleges who use Apple macs as their preferred development machines, but, as I write this, I am looking out at a sea of x86 desktop machines. Its rare to see a mac desktop, and in any case, at this moment even the ubiquitous Mac pro laptops the trendsetters love are still x86 based, although I assume that will change soon.
Me? Sorry, x86 everything, desktop and laptop(s). At last count I have 5 machines running around my house and office and 4 laptops. I keep buying Mac laptops and desktops, cause, you know, gotta keep up with things, but they grow obsolete faster than a warm banana. Yes, I had power PC Macs, and yes they ended up in the trash. And yes, I will probably buy Mac M2s at some point.
If you post another CPU story, would be nice to include Cyrix processors in your next vid, along with Intel and AMD. And maybe MOS too.
Part 2 !!!! please!
Thanks!
This is great, needs another chapter…
Didn't you do an AMD vs. Intel story before? Are you revisiting and expanding on the story in greater detail now?
I remember the history of AMD video which covers some of the same topics cause that’s an important part of AMDs history
The competition between AMD and Intel since 386 has changed the world. Not metaphorically. We are fortunate it isn't dominated by one player. Fast forward to this year and Intel is back in the High End Desktop space with chips cheaper than AMD's. Not many times that has happened in the past where AMD is more expensive. Now I know why AMD seems to always have good support from Motherboard makers. Great storytelling as usual.
Would love to see a video on semiconductor testing including ATE companies like Teradyne and Advantest.
It would be nice to give some technical datas to this early processors. Meaning Data- and Addressbus size, Register size and number. And clock rate. Also if floating point numbers are supported.-
Did John just went to a library to get a photo of all those clips of newspapers that is shown throughout the video?
Was there a winner in the chip wars? Yes, the lawyers.
Please make a video about "Multitech Micro-Professor MPF-I."
where does DM&P and the vortex86 soc come into the picture
Great video! Can't wait for part two.
What does '[other companies would not accept that novel chip] without A SECOND SOURCE' mean? That term occurs in a line of text starting at about 6:40 in the video.
Subscribed and catching up.
can you do a section on memories and storage during these times....
"His name was not Mike Web it was Mike Hunt." ROFL!
You are a well researched good story teller. I like your video on the historical Japanese. Computer chips are not as fascinating to me.
The entirety of the Intel competitive strategy of the time period covered by this video was driven by Intel's success in their "Orange Crush / Crush Motorola" campaign. (Another future video, maybe?) Grove, Barrett and the Intel senior leadership teams (at least up to Gelisinger) realized that using bad faith legal arguments could squelch their competition, allowing Intel to milk the profits for a product over its lifecycle and preventing the entry of competitors until the product was no longer profitable.
Once they had succeeded with driving Motorola out of their competitive space, they went after AMD, Cyrix (and later National), NEC, Intergraph, and so on. Why compete when you can lawyer your way into monopolistic practices, creaming off the profits and starving your competitors from access to capital through bad press? Oh, and forcing your competitors to spend hundreds of millions on legal fees instead of engineering research is a useful feature, too.
Eventually, the string of legal losses started to really hurt, so Intel switched to leveraging their pile of cash into Marketing Development Funds as a rod for AMD's back, but I am sure that MDF will feature in future AMD-Intel videos from Jon.
I guess the 8086 is proof that there's nothing more permanent than a temporary solution.
It's just a question of retrocompatibility. That's also the reason why AM64 gets traction over Itanium.
Software development has a lot of inertia, especially in the low level programming (OS and drivers) and with the closed-source model.
Even a big cult like Apple had to provide some satisfying translation layers (Mac 68k emulator then Rosetta1 and 2) to assure the success of each of its 3 architecture transitions.
I had a compaq 386 dx computer. It was really sturdy. I also had a ncr 286 computer. It had a high qualit svga monitor. Nice for games. My dad bought it in canada in the early 90s. I loved that machine.
I'm not sure what your sources are, but the IBM PC used the 8088, which was a more economical version of the 8086. The 8086 was a true 16 bit CPU, whereas the 8088 was 16 bits internal with an 8 bit external data bus - much cheaper than to implement. Also, the 80286 was used for the IBM AT and was very successful.
Хороший обзор, спасибо
Dude took a Mike Hunt joke way too seriously.
So good memories. For PC, I started with 80286 (for computer it was a MSX, using a Z80A). Then 386 came in, AMD was pretty good and got a share because it was CHEAPER and worked perfectly fine. Who can't remember 486-DX2, DX4?
The 386's legacy isn't only about 32 bit address buss. iirc it introduced Virtual Memory with an MMU. This is a huge evolution that is indispensable for multiuser multiprocess machines
And really nice and general addressing modes. Before the 386, there were annoying limitations on which registers you could combine (and how) to form a memory address. The 386 instruction set was much more orthogonal than the 86/186/286 instruction sets… but the encoding was of course not nice and orthogonal.
@@peterfireflylund agreed, real mode is crazy! Throwing away that offset math and using a linear address space was a real improvement!
@@holmybeer no, I’m talking about the ability to write [eax+ecx*4+1234], which works fine in real mode, btw. Before the 386, you could only use a few specific register in address calculations (bx, bp, si, di). If you wanted to access something on the stack, you almost had to use [bp+disp] (which conveniently defaulted to using the stack segment). You couldn’t write ss:[sp+disp] so you were basically forced to use bp as the frame pointer.
This history was told plenty of times already, but I want to see your take on the next decade and half in your words.
My first PC had an AMD 486 100 mhz processor. Old good days.
13:25 Please don't tell me you fell for a 3 year old Mike Hunt joke.
I'm laughing so hard inside
very nice!
Literally never seen one of your videos this full of ads😂
It's a very nice and well done video, but at 16:30 I think you should have said AMD, not Intel.
lol mike hunt. an old classic prank phone call name.
I thought I read that the 4004 microprocessor was developed for use in places like elevator controls and someone then realized after the release of engineering samples that it could be the core chip for a calculator.
Wouldn't the 4004 have been way too expensive for elevator controls back in the day?
@@katrinabryce at $200 or even $300, it would be a miniscule amount if you consider the total cost of an elevator
Not true. The 4004 was commissioned from the start for use in calculators by Busicom. That it soon found a lot of other use cases is another history.
Good Video but it makes me ooold!! Hahahaha!! Yes, the slow old time of Chips! Greatings to all and stay safe and healthy!!!
Nobody else curious how Asianometry got inside Jerry Sanders’ apartment? Sounds like something you could only accomplish with a time machine.
The hotel story sounds like espionage.
Been rooting for AMD since around 1994. I hope you cover the events that transpired after this video, beginning with AMD deciding to create their own completely in-house CPU design, the K5, to Bulldozer, and now their rise with Ryzen, with their market cap going past Intel.
I think this is first unbiased video on this topic lol
An ad every 5 minutes?
Wait are you ai generating your own voice now?
Thanks for your research and historic insights.
Micro computers were around before IBM PC. Vector Graphics was the first pre-built Pc years before IBM's pc. IBM didn't want to get into pc's until 1980's.
16:29 “Intel had developed the AM486 using what it called clean room … procedures”
Interesting that Intel had to RE their own chip an rebranded it like an AMD product. ;)
It's fixed in the subtitles.
Interesting that you referred to IBM's Boca Raton team as the 'toy' computer makers. Through the '80s, the IBM Fab in Burlington VT had really strong process tech, but mediocre products. IBM got second source rights to the 486D micro, and got good yield on initial builds. It would have been a great line filler to turn the focus from technical papers to manufacturing discipline, but the PC team used it for price leverage on Intel purchases.
Check out a similar relationship between Honda scooters and Taiwan Sym scooters
The technology has evolved in a much quicker path since 80s. There's no way a product can hit a market 5 years later but still create 1 billion revenue.
I'm just happy that Ryzen brought back the competition.
And the lawyers grew rich.
I'm glad AMD fought with all they had until the end. And nowdays the tables turned, because AMD is the creator of the x64 we use on PCs.
Hate is such a strong word, we wouldn't be where we are in terms of performance to cost without AMD competing with Intel.
6:57 what? Intel had a second source? Intel WAS a source. Do you mean that buyers had a second source? And Mostek "went with Motorola?" Huh? Do you mean that Mostek decided to start making Motorola compatible chips instead of Intel compatible chips? This is confusing/unintelligible unless you already know what it means, which I don't.
Me too, I have no clue what is meant with "customers required second sourcing". I've got an MBA and I've worked with B2B sales. As a salesman I've heard all kinds of stupid excuses for not buying our terrific products, but I've never heard of this kind of obstacle. Did ALL potential CPU buyers have this strange and stubborn policy? Did they all also rent each of their office buildings from two different landlords?
The outcome of all these legal battles was predictable...
The attorneys on both sides were generously compensated. They won.
As for the engineers, not so much.
The Wright brothers wasted their time fighting over patents instead of innovating. Similar issue with the original practical steam engine patent. Patents are a net negative for industry.
Elon’s got the right idea with SpaceX, innovate quickly and don’t file for patents. All patents really do is hand the design to the Chinese.
Patent and copyright are only constitutional if they "advance science". To the extent that they no longer do this, they must be abolished.
@@gregorymalchuk272 I agree 100%. However, I worked on patents for six years as an engineer assisting a company’s half dozen full time attorneys. Based on that experience. I have a dim view of the patent system actually adhering to the principle you mentioned. The USPTO has taken steps to reduce the frivolous ones, but they still occur.
What’s worse is the way it is abused. If you work for a small company, and market a superior product to that made by a large company, watch out. Even if you don’t infringe on their IP, they may pick several of their patents, add them to a letter they send stating you DO infringe and threaten legal action.
Just going through the motions to counter their legal actions may include a ruling to prevent you from selling while it gets litigated, and can take years. Meanwhile, the ongoing legal expenses can bankrupt you, or force you to accept some onerous terms.
I've been on both ends of this experience.
I lost track after 3 lawsuits...
From friends to enemies to friendsagain,phew🤣
I used to hate Intel, now I hate them less. AMD has always been on their coattails except Athlon and Ryzen. Glad there's competition but if they didn't make it we might have seen more arm devices like ACORN's ARM computers.
Not without Windows on board. That's where the wintel moniker came from.
Umm, you know the Mike Hunt Reddit comment was a crude joke, right?
I had forgotten about all those lawsuits. They really disgusted me, like Intel had so little faith in their capabilities that they had to resort to lawyers playing petty word games. But I didn't think much of their processors either. The 286 was a miserable stop-gap joke, the whole x86 instruction set felt like Rube Goldberg and Heath Robinson bandaids on top of each other. Kept rooting for Motorola's 68K series, nice and simple and clean in comparison.
Amiga's taking over the world.
The 68K had ridiculous addressing modes - and then the 68020 got even more of them!
Both instruction sets were kinda hard to decode. But, hey, Amiga forever, right?
@@peterfireflylund Don't know nuttin' about the Amiga.
The x86 instruction set smells of terrible design followed by terrible revisions. The 68K instruction is mostly symmetrical and logical. Those addressing modes were not all useful, and for all I know they made pipelining hard, and maybe that's one reason the 68K couldn't keep up in the MHz wars. But they were easy to understand because of the symmetry.