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AMD quits the high-end CPU market

MR.B

MR.B

MR.B

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Well i'm sure this will annoy many because it's pretty much the end of era from what i can make out... :eek: Not exactly sure if AMD are leaving the high-end market completely, but at the very least AMD will focus a lot less on high-end desktop CPU's.

Theres lots of news on Anandtech about AMD's new direction.

AMD hasn't been able to compete in the high-end for a while now, and we've been stuck with Intel purposely holding back clock speeds and not lowering prices because of this.
Bulldozer is underwhelming to say the least, plus Intel are always ahead on the smaller process nodes which greatly helps, but more importantly full size desktops are slowly dying out. Laptops have been outselling desktops now for some time, even tablets are catching up.

With Windows 8 tablets these will also replace many desktops and laptops for the average person, as they are after all still a PC with almost all the same capabilities, and obviously have the ability to connect keyboards / mice / gamepads / monitors and millions of other things that work with a PC (they're not a limited oversized phone like the iPad). So like it not this is where things are heading and where AMD will be focusing more.


Some quotes from AT to sum things up:
AMD used to focus on PC clients and servers in mature markets. It used OEMs as the primary delivery vehicle for its products. Going forward AMD wants to focus more on client mobility, not smartphones but ultra thin notebooks, tablets and other similar devices.

Rory didn't come out and say it here but no where in AMD's future direction is a focus on the high-end x86 CPU space.

Also note that AMD isn't going to be as focused on delivering high performance products on the absolute latest process node. It views Brazos as one of its biggest successes to date and that architecture was built on a 40nm process with an easily synthesizable architecture. It's likely that the future of AMD is built around more of these easy to manufacture SoCs rather than highly custom, bleeding edge CPUs.

The company wants to be a solutions provider, one that's ambidextrous and not married to any one architecture. AMD is likely talking about ARM here and seems willing to offer both ARM and x86 based SoCs depending on the market segment/customer requirements.

AMD isn't going to have the fastest general purpose x86 CPUs on the market and it is no longer interested in pursuing that goal. It does promise to have much better on-die GPU performance than Intel.

The days of AMD chasing Intel for the high-end desktop market are done though. That war is officially over.
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Shame they ballsed it up so much, an 8 core Phenom would have been massively popular even though it still wouldn't beat Intel, they were doing good job of playing the 'value' role up until Bulldozer.
 
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Even if Bulldozer turned out to be great and better than anything Intel had, i'm sure AMD would still of headed down this mobile route as well. Everything is heading this way with tablets, ultra thin laptops and similar small devices, and Win 8 will give it a further big kick.
 
To be honest, and please correct me if I'm wrong, AMD has technically never really been in the high-end CPU market, in comparison to high-end cpu's such as the 980X, 2700K and 3960X..

The Phenom II X6 compares really to the upper i5's and lower i7's of the x58 socket and from what I've seen, even the bulldozer FX 8-core can't even outperform the 2500K, barely..

Mind you, good value for money though (Phenom II).

My next upgrade will be intel. That's if they don't raise their prices too much :S

EDIT: I have only really taken interest into computers over the past year, so earlier CPU's which I've been told such as the Athlon vs Pentium 4, I won't know about. >.>
 
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MrElve said:
To be honest, and correct me if I'm wrong, AMD has technically never really been in the high-end CPU market, in comparison to high-end cpu's such as the 980X, 2700K and 3960X..

The Phenom II X6 compares really to the upper i5's and lower i7's of the x58 socket and from what I've seen, even the bulldozer FX 8-core can't even outperform the 2500K, barely..

Mind you, good value for money though.

My next upgrade will be intel. That's if they don't raise their prices too much :S
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You have a short memory... :p

Those are only from the last couple of years... Athlon vs Pentium 4

After the core chips came in, they've been struggling to keep up.
 
MrElve said:
To be honest, and correct me if I'm wrong, AMD has technically never really been in the high-end CPU market
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You must be really young to not remember... but the Athlon 64 was faster than anything Intel had at the time. Core 2 Duo knocked it off the top spot, and since then AMD hasn't been doing too well. But since the 90's AMD and Intel have traded blows for the top spot in CPU performance.
 
crinkleshoes said:
You have a short memory... :p

Those are only from the last couple of years... Athlon vs Pentium 4

After the core chips came in, they've been struggling to keep up.
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MR.B said:
You must be really young to not remember... but the Athlon 64 was faster than anything Intel had at the time. Core 2 Duo knocked it off the top spot, and since then AMD hasn't been doing too well. But since the 90's AMD and Intel have traded blows for the top spot in CPU performance.
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My bad :P. I literally only came taking an interest into computers just a little over a year ago so most of this I won't know. Only most of the things happening over the last year. But you never stop learning! :)

EDIT: I put an edit into my OP too.
 
this is all smalch, AMD is commited through to Q4 2013 minimum with piledriver and excavator, and running with excavator through 2014 with a refresh at least Q3 2014.

by that time a lot could have changed, in this market
 
that would be really sad but as other said it doesn't say anywere amd will stop alltogether to make desktop cpus. If anything i enjoyed being able to cook some eggs on the heatsink of my amd cpus for a while :D
 
Just edited my post to make it more clear that AMD are not leaving the desktop market! But focusing less on the high-end desktop CPU's. It's more about servers, SoC's (System on a Chip) and APU's from here on.

I probably shouldn't have used that title actually... didn't finished reading all the articles first :rolleyes:
 
Basically what they're saying is ''We're not as good as Intel so don't raise your expectations up high, we'll be concentrating on the lower-end market which we'll also fail at to Intel''.
 
What I don't completely understand is why they can't reverse engineer one of Intel's faster chips, see how it works, adjust it to get away from breaking any patents and make it their own.

I guess Intel's very good at obtaining the right patents to prevent this?

Could be my lack of comprehension of chip design...
 
AMD fanboys reaching new lows? Because AMD can not compete it does not mean that desktops are dying lol. Intel posted record breaking sales on desktop cpus so what kind of non sense is this? Anyway, bye AMD you will not be missed.
 
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