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What's next for AMD?
- Thread starter Mattuk69
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http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/03/amd_restructuring_job_cuts/
looks like thats what they are doing
At a time were i think should i go back to intel. Reading something like that helps my decision a lot easier.
Caporegime
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In what way exactly? AMD are firing people so, a chip you buy now will somehow be effected by that decision? If Intel tomorrow fired either 10 people, or 10k people, would Sandybridge suddenly become slower?
For the record AMD had roughly 1400 less employee's in late 2009, and the decision is mostly a suggestion that most of who were hired, were simply a wasteful drain that didn't improve things very much. When you consider the vast majority of the "talent" in terms of engineers or driver makers were already at the company in 2009, the 1500-1600 people they've hired since then at an absolute guess, would largely be in marketing and various non engineering roles.
We'll have to see, but the laughable thing on this forum is the amount of people calling Bulldozer a flop or slower than the old gen, when both are patently untrue.
Its only a flop amongst enthusiasts who quite retarded thought it would blow away the best designed chip from the richest R&D silicon company around, it was never going to beat it consistently.
Secondly, the x6 basically never, ever beats a 2600k and very rarely beats a 2500k. A 8150 both, beats a 2600k on several occasions and beats the 2500k FAR more often than a x6 does......... how anyone can call it slower I really don't know. 2 months ago AMD did not produce a chip that could beat a 2600k ever, now they do.... its called Bulldozer but somehow its slower than the previous chip.
When architectures change significantly, and its ground up completely different, you will get new strong points AND new weak points.
Bulldozer isn't a flop, is just not as good as completely unrealistic performance goals a very small group of people put on it. GPU's are very strong, very efficient and keep gaining more momentum, seemingly all 3 next gen consoles for one thing. More features, more performance and stomps all over competing APU's.
Where will AMD go, errm, increasing manufacturing capability with a new fab at Glofo coming on line this year, meaning more volume, better pricing and higher market share, Trinity will beat Llano, and Llano is already doing brilliantly for AMD.
DM- what are you smoking/drinking? BD is nearly twice as big as SB(ignoring GPU) and underload consumes twice the power yet is slower. If Nvidia released a 250w, 500mm2 GPU and it couldn't outperform a 160w 250mm2 AMD GPU I highly doubt you would be saying that it wasn't a flop!
Uhm Intel has shed thousands of jobs too over the last couple of years.
It's how it is.
Caporegime
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The B3 revision should fix the power draw, hopefully we'll see it soon, I'm going to assume the B3 revision launches with the FX8170 (Hope, whatever)
yeah, been doing some reading that B3 was the one they wanted to be the launch product but there had been too many delays along the road so launched before B3 was ready...? there has to be something wrong on the fabrication side of things because the power usage and frequency don't scale in a way that is remotely normal, power seems to go up exponentially as clock speed increases.
do find myself agreeing with Drunken a fair bit in regards to Bulldozer and how it shouldn't be considered a step backwards. considering it is the first consumer available silicon of a very immature architecture and process it isn't a bad attempt at all. has a fantastic frequency headroom, which at the moment is only being hindered by the fabrication, there are tons of positives for Bulldozer as a whole and some reasonably large negatives, but it is completely a step back in the right direction for Advanced Micro Devices as a whole.
what can improve? power consumption is a major one which should improve in upcoming revisions, cache latency is another one that should improve and bring performance improvements as the fabrication gets better, frequency is another big potential improvement, eight-core Bulldozer at 4GHZ out of the box with a 4.8GHZ turbo, all at 125W is potentially the way it could be heading, and for a base frequency that is fantastic, never mind the fact that they already do 5GHZ or so while suffering from quite apparent power consumption problems, what will they do when the process is fully matured, is 6GHZ beyond the reaches of decent water-cooling setup? what else can be improved without major modifications to the chip? thread scheduling can bring real, tangible improvements in performance, any potential small errors might get ironed out bringing some other small increases here and there, you see where this is going? all these 'variables' lead to increased performance, it never looses performance so to be honest they can only get faster.
do find myself agreeing with Drunken a fair bit in regards to Bulldozer and how it shouldn't be considered a step backwards. considering it is the first consumer available silicon of a very immature architecture and process it isn't a bad attempt at all. has a fantastic frequency headroom, which at the moment is only being hindered by the fabrication, there are tons of positives for Bulldozer as a whole and some reasonably large negatives, but it is completely a step back in the right direction for Advanced Micro Devices as a whole.
what can improve? power consumption is a major one which should improve in upcoming revisions, cache latency is another one that should improve and bring performance improvements as the fabrication gets better, frequency is another big potential improvement, eight-core Bulldozer at 4GHZ out of the box with a 4.8GHZ turbo, all at 125W is potentially the way it could be heading, and for a base frequency that is fantastic, never mind the fact that they already do 5GHZ or so while suffering from quite apparent power consumption problems, what will they do when the process is fully matured, is 6GHZ beyond the reaches of decent water-cooling setup? what else can be improved without major modifications to the chip? thread scheduling can bring real, tangible improvements in performance, any potential small errors might get ironed out bringing some other small increases here and there, you see where this is going? all these 'variables' lead to increased performance, it never looses performance so to be honest they can only get faster.
Yes but as a customer perspective. If you planned on buying something that turned out bad. And then hear the company has fired 10% of its staff.
Im not exactly going to have much faith in the next AMD proccessor am i?
Caporegime
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Intel shed 10000 employees in 2006 and another 6000 in 2009:
http://www.engadget.com/2006/09/05/intel-tightens-belt-lets-go-over-10-000-jobs/
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/012209-intel-to-shut-four-plants.html
Many people still bought Intel CPUs in that time period despite Intel firing around 16000 employees in three years. AMD also cuts around 5% of its workforce in 2008. Loads of companies are sadly doing this to improve profits.
The Pentium 4 is often quoted as being a failure for Intel at the beginning. However,remember that Larrabee was meant to have been available for desktop too and ended up being a failure despite costing billions of dollars. The 90NM Intel process was a failure and caused loads of issues with Prescott. The B2 chipset issue also cost Intel around a billion dolllars this year. On top of this socket 2011 has issues with Intel having to remove quite a few features it seems.
AMD Zacate and Llano have been a great success for AMD this year and they have increased their mobile shipments by 35% this quarter(AMD has been profitable this year). On top of this Interlagos has pushed up their server shipments by 27% too.
The job cuts while unfortunate are the same as what Intel did a few years ago - it is streamlining to increase profits. The new chap in charge,ie,Rory Reed, transformed Lenovo into one of the biggest PC makes in the world during his tenure with them.
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+1 for this, quote for truth!
don't forget when Bulldozer gets a bit more consistent and uses less power that will probably push their desktop share up for the first time in forever!