AMD's "tocks" (Inq)

[manveruppd]

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2007/12/08/amd-barcelona-right-royal-mess
The man has a point when you think about it: I remember the whining on here about the faulty memory controller on the initial batch of Athlon 64s (Winchester cores iirc?) which wasn't fixed until the respin, and I also remember how nearly everyone who was on Socket A went straight from their T-breds to Bartons and gave the Pallies a miss (except me, I was a noob and bought a Pally for my first build - decent clocker as Pallies went though, got it to 1.73GHz from a 1.45 start).

With a stock price at a 52-week low and history suggesting that they'll manage to fix Barcelona's flaws with the B3 respin (although of course nothing is certain, and the fiasco surrounding this launch is certainly greater than their previous ****ups), I'm saying AMD would be a decent investment for someone looking to make some quick and dirty profit

 

[mrthingyx]

Considering the scandalous rumours about Samsung buying them up...? Probably.

It's a difficult one, though, because an approach may slightly buoy the share prices, but the offer from another company (which, at this point is pretty much the only way the prices are going up in a hurry) will probably be below the market value of shares purely because of how much debt the company is in, so there is no telling in the end.

It's tough, because I could convince my self that AMD are trying to push down their share price to make themselves more attractive to a takeover bid... either that or the directors really should be taken out at dawn...

 

[edgedemon]

No one can deny that they have big problems, but if they can make it through the next year I think they will come good. Buying ATI has put them back a bit, and the two halves of the company are not working well together yet, but the long term 'vision' could be their saving grace.
At last they can produce a platform, CPU, gfx and mobo, and I think they might just surprise a few people with the performance gains that this could in theory bring.
Having said that, Spider is a disaster, (so far) and I hope that it is a learning curve that they will learn from for their next platform release, when hopefully the two halves will be working together better..
Time will teel hopefully as Intel really needs a strong competitor to keep prices down.

 

[something_totally_different]

ah the inquirer, that bastion of truth and justice of course... now where did i put my sun news paper, id like to read some more facts about the world.

 

[manveruppd]

I used to mock the Inquirer a lot too, but the amount of wild stories they published that subsequently turned out to be true is surprising. Remember when, one month after the release of R600, they came out with "R670 is coming in Q3, and it'll be a die-shrink of R600"? Every forum and every news site in the industry said "Haha, that's just a false rumour put out by Ati to find out which of their employees was leaking stuff to the Inquirer, and the idiots bought it!" Well, guess what champs, it was true. I can't think of any more examples offhand, but it's happened a lot in the last year or so.

 

[mrthingyx]

Well, people don't have to believe the Inquirer - a quick look at the NYSE will tell even the casual user everything they need to know... nothing like a 50% drop in three weeks to keep the directors on their toes.

I think the most amusing thing about this is that while everybody is so busy beating AMD up for obviously being so rubbish, Intel pulled a British Government and quietly admitted (or rather released a non-admission) that they were having problems with Yorkfield and its full release was getting pushed back. And nobody cared.

 

[Corasik]

Better to push back the release of Yorkfield than release a buggy slow, powerhungry chip.. Oh opps thats what AMD just did . Gotta remember intel currently hold the performance crown, and they have no need to rush out Penryn, and the last thing intel need right now is to release a chip with a serious errata which cant be fixed in microcode.

Ok some people are disappointed by the delays in Yorkfield, but at the moment Core 2 Quad is the fastest desktop processor available, and honestly a delay in Yorkfield is just a minor annoyance, mostly to the overclocking/enthusiast sector. Most 'business' customers dont really care if they get a Kentsfield or a Yorkfield.

AMD on the other hand are under huge pressure to get a processor out which can compete with Intel. Athlon 64's actually a great little chip, and amd are chucking them out very cheaply.. unfortunatly not making much profit on each one. But people are told 'Intel is fastest' and benchmarks will prove this.. And then go out and buy a bottom of the range Intel system to run 'Office Suite' on .

Its just like Race cars... People see 'BMW' do well in racing and think 'Cool' I drive a bmw, and thats a race car! (Although they may only own a 316D hehe)

 

[manveruppd]

But people are told 'Intel is fastest' and benchmarks will prove this.. And then go out and buy a bottom of the range Intel system to run 'Office Suite' on .

What ****** me off about Intel is that even when they were NOT the fastest by a good long nautical mile, their anticompetitive practices and massive marketting dollars and PR muscle had rammed down the "Intel is fastest" message down the throats of the average user, and people were buying their underperforming, overheating chips by the bucketload, sometimes even against the advice of well-meaning salespeople.

We forget that they've already been sued by the Korean government for monopolistic practices and there's still an antitrust lawsuit against them by AMD in the States as well.

 

[HighlandeR]

I reckon they just bit off more then they can chew, trying to incorporate so many technologies all at once. They need to go back to doing what they did so great.... powerful graphic cards that compete well with Nvidia and powerful cpus that can outpace Intels best.

Once they get to that point then they can get adventurous and daring, not now.

 

[Duke]

What ****** me off about Intel is that even when they were NOT the fastest by a good long nautical mile, their anticompetitive practices and massive marketting dollars and PR muscle had rammed down the "Intel is fastest" message down the throats of the average user, and people were buying their underperforming, overheating chips by the bucketload, sometimes even against the advice of well-meaning salespeople.

We forget that they've already been sued by the Korean government for monopolistic practices and there's still an antitrust lawsuit against them by AMD in the States as well.

Thats all very well but you don't become as big as Intel by being nice

 

[Corasik]

I reckon they just bit off more then they can chew, trying to incorporate so many technologies all at once. They need to go back to doing what they did so great.... powerful graphic cards that compete well with Nvidia and powerful cpus that can outpace Intels best.

Once they get to that point then they can get adventurous and daring, not now.

Thats all well and good, but thats not where AMD have historically been. They have been performance underdog to intel for the largest part of their existance. They only build X86 processors because IBM demanded that intel allowed another fab to produce chips as IBM didnt want all it's eggs in one basket.

Intel got 'stuck' with clock speeds near the end of life on Pentium 3, and AMD overtook them in performance. Intel's answer P4 was a disaster, it never performed as it should. At 1.4Ghz the P4 was actually slower than the 1Ghz P3 it replaced. Unfortunatly for intel it cost a lot of research dollars, so they tried for 4+ years to 'try and make it work'.

Intel were losing the performance battles, and covered up their lacklustre processor with marketting spin. Not exactly intel's finest hour no matter how you look at it. And no doubt the lawyers will be making money from it for years to come.. But lawyers do very little for the 'customer' its just about how much money they can put in their pockets imho.

Anyway intel cleaned up their house, threw away the P4, and brought out a microprocessor worthy of the name "Intel".

AMD have been providing processors at the 'bargain basement' for a long time, and if they cant ramp up the performance of Phenom does it really matter. It's a damn good price, and should bring quad core processors to markets where intel is still too expensive.

There is enough room in the industry for both AMD and Intel... Infact from a customers point of view, both companies are required for healthy development of new products.

 

[Corasik]

What ****** me off about Intel is that even when they were NOT the fastest by a good long nautical mile, their anticompetitive practices and massive marketting dollars and PR muscle had rammed down the "Intel is fastest" message down the throats of the average user, and people were buying their underperforming, overheating chips by the bucketload, sometimes even against the advice of well-meaning salespeople.

We forget that they've already been sued by the Korean government for monopolistic practices and there's still an antitrust lawsuit against them by AMD in the States as well.

The european community are constantly putting up antitrust lawsuits against Microsoft. When a large company uses marketting pressure to sell its products small companies often cry 'unfair'. I would be willing to bet that if AMD had been the market leader, and the entire world understood 'AMD Inside' and Intel had been the underdog, that AMD would have been spending its marketting dollars to ensure its product was being bought.

I can think of plenty of products which are 'lemons' but if something is so expensive to design and produce that the company has to sell it or die... Most companies will use spin and marketting and hope to regain their 'good name' with a better product later.

Some fail, look at Voodoo, Pioneers in graphic cards, fantastic products, but then a string of 'bad products' and they were destroyed. Im sure if Voodoo had more cash, it would have struggled through, sold their rubbish cards based on their good name, and then returned again.

Infact Nvidia did that. When they started using Voodoo technology in their 5800 series GPU's. Poor performance, but their marketting department had no problem selling them to the 'masses'. Only the enthusiasts really knew that ATI's were faster. But now look at Nvidia, 8800 series is excellent, and unless I am much mistaken it still still a distant cousin of Voodoo Technology.

 

[MrP77]

if intel are planing to change there socket type for nehelem which i've heard rumours of and amd keep next to total backwards compatibility then it's possible that amd will slowly claw a market share, even if they can't win the speed battle...

think about it before all this stuff with the errors lots of reviews were saying yes it is slower but not too much, is cheaper (tho this has yet to materilise in the real world) and so would be a good upgrade for someone with an am2 motherboard cos they are compatible...
if am3 is backwards compatible all the way back to am2 then they could be quids in if there succesor to phenom is good....
because they will win buyer of intel and retain there curent customer base... that will cause intel a major headache after nehalem... it could be a failure....

then come 2009 amd will be kings....

will get complacent

screw up

come 2011 intel will be kings

get complacent

scre.......

just my thoughts

 

[manveruppd]

Spin and marketting are not cause for anti-trust lawsuits: the reason Intel is under investigation in the EU and already in court in the US and Korea is their anti-competitive practices, such as strong-arming OEMs into only offering PCs with Intel CPUs, locking AMD out of millions of customers.

 

[mrthingyx]

if intel are planing to change there socket type for nehelem which i've heard rumours of and amd keep next to total backwards compatibility then it's possible that amd will slowly claw a market share, even if they can't win the speed battle...

Yup - Intel are planning on changing their socket and alienating even more of their users. It's going to be a choice between the body-part donation club of Skt 1366 and the pretty expensive 715. There is actually a good reason for this evolution (not to the two sockets, but in general) and that's because Nehalem has an integrated memory controller. Just like Athlons... funny, that.

 

[Talrinys]

The integrated memory controller will be another step towards moving to an integrated platform in a single chip, absolutely a benefit
AMD have been doing the same thing for years now and it's very well designed, getting some great results in memory benchmarks, one of the points i'm really glad that AMD has mastered

 

[GhostlyPea]

their anticompetitive practices and massive marketting dollars and PR muscle had rammed down the "Intel is fastest" message down the throats of the average user, and people were buying their underperforming, overheating chips by the bucketload, sometimes even against the advice of well-meaning salespeople.

They are a company, what do you realistically expect any company to do? say "nah our stuff is lame go buy somebody elses"

Come on people..they are a business like anyother, stop whining about it, its what ALL companies do.

- Pea0n

 

[Hobgoblin]

They are a company, what do you realistically expect any company to do? say "nah our stuff is lame go buy somebody elses"

Come on people..they are a business like anyother, stop whining about it, its what ALL companies do.

- Pea0n

theres a difference between trying to advertise and sell your product and paying off huge company's to only stock your product, which is not only detrimental to the need for competition this market needs but also royally buggered millions of customers for not getting the best deal with their hard earned money.

 

[GhostlyPea]

theres a difference between trying to advertise and sell your product and paying off huge company's to only stock your product, which is not only detrimental to the need for competition this market needs but also royally buggered millions of customers for not getting the best deal with their hard earned money.

Didnt say anything along those lines at all. All i said was disagreeing with the post I quoted. Advertising and promoting your products in ANYWAY is perfectly fine providing it is legal and it annoys me when people have a go at companies for having business sense.

For doing the illegal stuff like bribing, in all effect, other companies I do not agree with it at all and that too makes me angry.

- Pea0n