AMD - Dissapointed but not in trouble says meyer, but the future is looking better.

[Lightnix]

1: What most people seem to think of as 'RRP' is actually the price per 1000 units. There has to be some markup or nobody will make a profit making the whole excersize of selling the chips completely useless.
2: We have VAT. Fun fun fun.

There's much less hiking going on than you may think.

I think it was something like this:

Q6600 $266 per 1000 units
9500 $251 per 1000 units
9600 $283 per 1000 units

Source for Phenom CPUs

Doing 'the maths', based on their prices, the 9500 is hiked about £7 absolute tops, relative to the Q6600 on this site.

 

[something_totally_different]

1: What most people seem to think of as 'RRP' is actually the price per 1000 units. There has to be some markup or nobody will make a profit making the whole excersize of selling the chips completely useless.
2: We have VAT. Fun fun fun.

There's much less hiking going on than you may think.

I think it was something like this:

Q6600 $266 per 1000 units
9500 $251 per 1000 units
9600 $283 per 1000 units

Source for Phenom CPUs

Doing 'the maths', based on their prices, the 9500 is hiked about £7 absolute tops, relative to the Q6600 on this site.

actually, im afraid your wrong there my friend. there is hiking going on which was initially between 20 and 30% but has since dropped to about 18% above rrp. these chips are available now at many smaller suppliers for near the proper retail price inc VAT.

for example, right now i can buy the following at the following prices from smaller etailers (please note, these have stock right now, not "in a month")

Amd Phenom 9500 Quad-core Processor 2.2 Ghz 4mb L2 Cache Socket Am2 95w £144.88 Incl. VAT
AMD PHENOM 9600 2MB SKT-AM2+ £161.94 Incl. VAT
PHENOM QUAD 9700 2.4GHZ SKT AM2 4X1MB 125W£177.55 Incl. VAT

now go look at the prices of OCUK and the other larger online etailers and see for yourself.

p.s. this isnt a snipe at ocuk, every etailer has their reasons for selling items at the price they sell them and whilst one or two items may be over priced here the VAST majority of OCUK stock is good quality and very very competitively priced, sometimes to the point of absurdity!

 

[FrankJH]

Also dont forget that Intel has had similar design problems in the past, which where not detected until after release (was it the original Pentium? or something later)

Certainly Intel had to issue a huge recall due to "design" fault - was again in a very quirky area of the chip most users wouldnt detect, but it certainly happened.

 

[gareth170]

made a mistake? How can you launch a quad core which doesn't work properly. how the hell did i get past testing? How comes it took them twice as long as intel? How comes the 2900 totaly sucked at everything they said it would accell in. They have some serious issues with their testing team.

the 2900 doesn't suck. i agree AA performance isn't that good. but it isn't bad.. 3800 series is the same performance as the 2900 series even with AA but people are all over the 3800 series. seems like some people are 2 faced...

as for the quad core. if prices come down amd will get many sells. i would buy a 9500 if the price goes to about £130. i also think the next Phenoms will be better also it'll bring the 9500/9600 prices down..

 

[spookywillow]

wonder how long it will take us to see these price cuts http://translate.google.com/transla...de/cgi-bin/newspub/viewnews.cgi?id=1197724403

 

[Lightnix]

the 2900 doesn't suck. i agree AA performance isn't that good. but it isn't bad.. 3800 series is the same performance as the 2900 series even with AA but people are all over the 3800 series. seems like some people are 2 faced...

The 3800 series are good for a mid-range part, though. Especially now that they draw much less power and have a much more reasonable cooling system.

 

[Owenb]

the 2900 doesn't suck. i agree AA performance isn't that good. but it isn't bad.. 3800 series is the same performance as the 2900 series even with AA but people are all over the 3800 series. seems like some people are 2 faced...

as for the quad core. if prices come down amd will get many sells. i would buy a 9500 if the price goes to about £130. i also think the next Phenoms will be better also it'll bring the 9500/9600 prices down..

The 2900 was pretty poor, especially when it launched. The 3800 is a bit better due to better power usage, but they are forced to sell it so cheap that they probably wont make much out of it.

AMD quad cores- there isn't 1 single reason to go near them atm. Poor mobo and poor CPU.
Yes if AMD excute their roadmap perfectly they should do ok, but numbers on a sheet with pretty pictures don't mean much when you never deliver on them.

 

[MumboJumbo]

it got past testing because the error in question is a totally obscure one and as NO ONE has any experience with a 3 tier quad core architecture, not even intel, it was an unexpected side effect of an ambitious but overcomplicated project.

So what happened? They built a quad core, got to the point of manerfacturign them all. Then tryed overclocking them past 2.4ghz and found out it wouldn't work properly or what ever the problem is. Your telling me that because its new technology they couldn't possibly have thought to have tryed putting them past 2.4? Come on.

judging from your post count you have been here long enough to know the answer to that question so stop a moment and engage the grey matter. Intel has ten times the budget of AMD and was working on multiple architectures which they combined to form the conroe architecture. AMD can only work on one at a time.

as for you question what you should have been asking was how the bloody hell a company like AMD who is ten times smaller than Intel managed to build and market a better chip than intel for 3 years running. and more importantly, ask yourself why AMD`s market share barely grew.

What i was trying to say was that leaving it for so long was a mistake, intel got it right on the way they have approched it. Seemed like a bodge job to me at first from intel but they pulled it off well.

As for amd being ten times smaller and all that. As far as im consered thats no reason to bring out a 2900 which was an under performer and didn't live up to what they said. They claimed it would run AA very well and supported, what was it? 32xaa? Did they fail to test it and find out AA totaly killed the 2900? As above, the fact that they only relised there was a problem with the quads over 2.4ghz after mass producing them should never of happened.

Like i said, their testing team needs some work.

 

[MumboJumbo]

the 2900 doesn't suck. i agree AA performance isn't that good. but it isn't bad.. 3800 series is the same performance as the 2900 series even with AA but people are all over the 3800 series. seems like some people are 2 faced...

as for the quad core. if prices come down amd will get many sells. i would buy a 9500 if the price goes to about £130. i also think the next Phenoms will be better also it'll bring the 9500/9600 prices down..

THe 2900 isn;'t a bad card as its still moer powerful then the previous generations but that doesn't make it a good card lol. For the price the GTS beat it and for what they claimed it failed missribly, claiming to be a great card at handling AA. Its competition was superior, therefore it sucked in my eyes as there was no reason to buy one.

The 2900pro was a bargin thought, but still was onyl done out of desperation.

 

[manveruppd]

As for amd being ten times smaller and all that. As far as im consered thats no reason to bring out a 2900 which was an under performer and didn't live up to what they said. They claimed it would run AA very well and supported, what was it? 32xaa? Did they fail to test it and find out AA totaly killed the 2900? As above, the fact that they only relised there was a problem with the quads over 2.4ghz after mass producing them should never of happened.

The R600 was fixed in stone (or silicon) long before the Ati/AMD merger so your comments don't really apply to AMD. Nevertheless, it's pretty well-documented why the 2900XT has the AA performance problems that it does: when Microsoft first issued the DX10 spec sheet to Ati and Nvidia many moons ago, software-programmable anti-aliasing was a REQUIREMENT for DX10-compliant GPUs. Games developers have wanted this for years as it would provide much better image quality, so Microsoft included it in DX10.

So Ati and Nvidia got to work designing their next-gen GPUs, but somewhere along the route, Nvidia found out they couldn't do it. They started pleading with Microsoft to drop software anti-aliasing from the requirements, and eventually MS caved, as they could hardly afford to lock out the biggest GPU manufacturer from their entire platform. When the news got to Ati, their chip was so far advanced that to redesign it around hardware anti-aliasing would have made it massively late and cost them a lot of money, so they decided to release it and take the performance hit. In an almost mirror-image of what happened in the CPU race, the more forward-looking, innovative company takes a gamble moving to more advanced technology, and when they succumb to the inherent risks they get lambasted by every Tom Dick and Harry over issues they have no inkling of!

 

[MumboJumbo]

The R600 was fixed in stone (or silicon) long before the Ati/AMD merger so your comments don't really apply to AMD. Nevertheless, it's pretty well-documented why the 2900XT has the AA performance problems that it does: when Microsoft first issued the DX10 spec sheet to Ati and Nvidia many moons ago, software-programmable anti-aliasing was a REQUIREMENT for DX10-compliant GPUs. Games developers have wanted this for years as it would provide much better image quality, so Microsoft included it in DX10.

So Ati and Nvidia got to work designing their next-gen GPUs, but somewhere along the route, Nvidia found out they couldn't do it. They started pleading with Microsoft to drop software anti-aliasing from the requirements, and eventually MS caved, as they could hardly afford to lock out the biggest GPU manufacturer from their entire platform. When the news got to Ati, their chip was so far advanced that to redesign it around hardware anti-aliasing would have made it massively late and cost them a lot of money, so they decided to release it and take the performance hit. In an almost mirror-image of what happened in the CPU race, the more forward-looking, innovative company takes a gamble moving to more advanced technology, and when they succumb to the inherent risks they get lambasted by every Tom Dick and Harry over issues they have no inkling of!

Ive never heard that before, seems strange that nvida wouldn't be able to do it considering theirs is so much more powerful and they clearly had the better design. Seems like some twisted truth tbh and an excuse.

As for It not ebing Amds fault, its still the same ATI people making the cards, just under amd's name.

 

[manveruppd]

I read this on several news sites and people in the graphics forum here mostly think it's true. I also vaguely remember an interview with Mark Rein of Epic on a games site from a few years back who was waffling on about Unreal Engine 3 supporting sofrware AA (which it doesn't of course). It squares with the fact that, with AA turned off, the performance difference isn't actually that big. Haven't you wondered why the 2900XT takes such a framerate hit with AA on when for the last 3-4 generations of GPUs Ati have always been better at Nvidia at implementing AA?

 

[MumboJumbo]

MM i gues it does make sence, ive just never seen it before. Up untill my new rig i dont think id ever seen aa running a 6800 GT for 3 years. Was good in its day lol.