AMD quits the high-end CPU market

[MR.B]

Well i'm sure this will annoy many because it's pretty much the end of era from what i can make out... 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.

 

[MR.B]

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.

 

[MR.B]

To be honest, and correct me if I'm wrong, AMD has technically never really been in the high-end CPU market

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.

 

[MR.B]

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