AMD no longer competing with Intel, goes Mobile
- Thread starter ATIorNvidia
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Associate
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And some think the idea of supply and demand is an ok one.
Exactly. If Intel price their best, fastest chip at a level that makes peoples eyes water they'll fill their warehouse with unsold and returned product, and the price will come down to shift them.
We may even see an unexpected player come in to buy AMDs processor making arm and bring new impetus/ideas to the table at some point. Stranger things have happened...
Soldato
Given the official AMD statement that was posted
it probably means more that AMD won't be attempting to try and match Intel performance wise, but will probably focus more on the price/performance range it has developed.
Whilst the performance isn't top of the range, you do get good value with AMD. That is probably what they are going to do. Rather than attempt to follow Intel down the high performance line anymore. Because that ship sailed when they stopped having their own dedicated fabs.
It would be suicide for AMD to ditch making desktop CPUs all together and go head to head with ARM.
it probably means more that AMD won't be attempting to try and match Intel performance wise, but will probably focus more on the price/performance range it has developed.
Whilst the performance isn't top of the range, you do get good value with AMD. That is probably what they are going to do. Rather than attempt to follow Intel down the high performance line anymore. Because that ship sailed when they stopped having their own dedicated fabs.
It would be suicide for AMD to ditch making desktop CPUs all together and go head to head with ARM.
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Soldato
My 4800+ was £500 before vat...
Raven generally tends to come out with some pretty stupid things.
And that's being unfair on all things that are pretty stupid in general.
Associate
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He, those prices take me back. Paid something similar, just went for the 4400 instead. My mate gave me his 4800 a couple of years ago as an upgrade and didn't notice any difference really.
That's a right bill for a computer though. If you spent the same amount of money now would you get the best components available right now (as you got back then?) or would it be cheaper/more expensive? Performance wise obviously no comparison, just wondered if the pound bought more or less bang per buck...
That's a right bill for a computer though. If you spent the same amount of money now would you get the best components available right now (as you got back then?) or would it be cheaper/more expensive? Performance wise obviously no comparison, just wondered if the pound bought more or less bang per buck...
Caporegime
I assume this is the post you are talking about:
http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1037999552&postcount=157
He even made the following statement too:
"BD doesn't have mainframe RAS features or the same scalability which is expected for the market Itanium primarily now targets as a competitor to IBM's POWER and Oracle's SPARC. And Intel doesn't need BD for the commodity server market since it already has Xeon, which is both a smaller chip and also has higher performance (plus it lacks GF's manufacturing fleas... brace for January when GF's pricing for AMD goes back to wafers instead of "good die" on a poor 32nm process)."
He talks about scalability and yet ORNL is using 38000+ Interlagos CPUs in Titan:
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/...400-processor-20-petaflop-successor-to-jaguar
It is going to be the most powerful supercomputer in the world. What's his idea of scaleability?? 50000 CPUs?? 100000 CPUs??
I have seen claims by that chap on forums. There are many people like him who make a million claims,of which a few will be true;however there are loads of claims they make which are nonsense and are not accurate. Will they EVER talk about these?? NO.
Loads of people knew that the fab business was loosing AMD loads of money. However,the X86 agreement with Intel meant they could not become fabless. With Intel releasing them from this requirement it was no wonder they went fabless.
That chap is making it sound he was the only chap on the internetz who said selling the fabs made sense financially.
I even said the same thing at around the same time on another forum!! +1 internetz to me too!!
The APUs use the same GPU architectures as their discrete cousins. If you sell off the GPU division then what happens to GPU architecture R and D for the CPUs?? A decent amount of these costs are met by consumer and professional GPU sales.
So basically what that chap is saying is one of the following:
1.)AMD only makes X86 server CPUs. However,according to that chap they won't scale so its a fail already!! On top of this they are going to become MEGA EXPENSIVE in January!!
2.)AMD ditches the lower end and midrange X86 market. They will have no hope trying to compete with Intel in this market with no IGPs. OEMs want lower costs. All of the ARM CPUs running Windows 8 will also have IGPs. Fail already!! Of course remember that all the FX CPUs from January are going to become MEGA EXPENSIVE on top of this!!
3.)They ditch X86 altogether for non-server CPUs and go ARM. They end up being a licensee. However with no GPU people left this would fail too. Fail already!!
4.)AMD just licenses a whole design including GPU and just rebrands the SOC. So AMD becomes a marketing and support company! Riiiight!
5.)They use their existing cores and license a GPU from another company. Nvidia maybe??
Of course it should be VERY easy and cheap for them too. A very reliable strategy! 6.)AMD sells the graphics division and licenses its former designs??Another company buys the graphics division and continues R and D. However,wouldn't that actually make things more complicated??
AMD needs a GPU division if it is to compete with any of the current CPU companies.
Its the GPU business which is keeping AMD competitive and if anything it will help them even more for mobile products. Also,don't you think that if AMD is going to focus more on their fusion CPUs they would be having more GPU people working on them?? If they have no GPU people any more than how are they going to make competitive products?? Intel is investing more in IGPs and so are the various companies designing new ARM based GPUs. These types of CPUs are going to make up the bulk of all CPUs sold to consumers. CPUs without GPUs might be only the preserve of the higher market for the time-being.
AMD is also working on GCN so it can have a better chance to break into the HPC market too. If anything AMD might end up putting less focus on the higher end consumer GPU market and moving towards the midrange and below. This is where the bulk of sales will be anyway.
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Associate
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I think it's easier to look at the bundle prices, because buying a processor on its own means nothing. You have to plug it into something, after all. As far as I can tell you can get a cheaper AMD system than Intel any day of the week. As for performance, I don't know how the following:
Compare in terms of speed. A lot faster than the next highest price, a bit faster or about the same? I expect Intel systems to be faster, clock for clock (or as near as you can compare) but the AMD systems are quite a bit cheaper.
This statement is as good as saying "don't expect us to be competitive with Intel in the future" and unless they keep the Phenom II range alive they aren't very attractive at the low-mid end either. Bulldozer will still be around but price/performance-wise it stinks compared to X4/X6.
Caporegime
No.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fx-8150-zambezi-bulldozer-990fx,3043-23.html
Wrong, Bulldozer will (and as the link I've posted shows, already does) perform better under Windows 8 than 7, and uses less power.
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Oh woops xD
I thought I heard somewhere it would only really benefit very threaded applications, but I see WoW on that list though, so im no longer sure.
I still don't think it should make anyone change their decision on buying BD though.
What amazes me is how AMD didn't get Microsoft to sort this out ages ago.
If anything its the other way around, theres not really much optimisation that the scheduler can do when all cores are utilised, whereas theres plenty when only a couple are.
And your right in that this shouldn't change anyones buying decisions, its an improvement but not enough to make Bulldozer (or rather Zambezi) worth buying.
It's too late in the game for MS to mess around with windows 7 scheduler. It's a big kernel change and it simply won't happen.
It looks like AMD will have some decent performance when Windows 8 hits though if they can improve on their designs.