[Zdnet]AMD "We are not for sale" - Page 7

Implying buying AMD will make them competetive against Intel "like the old 64bit glory days"
Implying AMD can no longer "game"

I guess their achievements in graphics processing, accelerated processing units, push for heterogeneous system architecture and updated fixes for their Bulldozer CPUs in Piledriver doesn't mean jack to you.

Of course they will be, but that doesn't mean the integrated intel chips aren't good, they are, just the AMD ones are outstanding for what they are.

I would not hold my breath over the HSA. For that approach to take off they would be needing to release a compiler that capable of taking advantage of these hardware resources and when running on other hardware capable of offering a performance similar to Intel compiler. Now granted, they have some pretty nice names in that consortium so its not total science fiction that they might be able to pull that off but its not obvious sucess story either as soon as they are able to put the hardware on the table.

That's because, until recently, it was about equal in performance as buying AMD's new chips (BD), and also happened to be cheaper.

And because the Phenom II chips STILL offer great performance for the price. Phenom II 965's still sell for up to $90 used easily. Oh and lets not forget AMD making most of their sockets compatible - allowing AM3 processors to run on AM2+, AM3 AND AM3+ sockets had something to do w/ Phenom II's being so successful.

I was able to purchase a Phenom II X3 + AM3+ motherboard for $60 total. Then I threw $20 worth of DDR3, a $20 case and $30 HDD w/ it and I had a $180 HTPC. Gave it to my grandma and it's the fastest computer she's ever used.
Edited by M3T4LM4N222 - 11/15/12 at 5:35am

I don't understand the big deal about it. It sounds like the same story all over again. When you hear AMD praise it, they talk about how much parallel processing power you will have with it. Well, they tried that with Bulldozer. Most consumer market products don't scale to 8 cores and aren't highly parallel.

Even in the niche where you do need highly parallel processing, a discrete GPU will do it better because the sheer number of cores in comparison to the small number of on die cores of APU's.

I am not sure what their marketing strategy is. They are so far behind in the desktop processor market that Intel doesn't even consider them competition. They are making APU's for the Ultrabook and low power devices, but their fabrication process is so far behind they will never have the performance per watt as other chip manufacturers. In the server market the Opterons are all for niche customers. Somewhere between the Mom and Pop shops that run a regular desktop and consumer grade processors to power their servers and the major data processing corporations that only buy the fastest processors no matter the cost.

When you target niche markets it is hard to stay afloat, especially in an industry where you have to spend a lot of money in research to stay relevant.

Few things. 1.) They are for sale. 2.) They will be bought in the next 2 years. 3.) 90% sure they will be bought by Intel, 9% sure they will be bought by Apple. Unfortunately, no one else can afford to unwind the mess that is AMD is right now.

To address the "fcc" comments that are going to come.

1.) AMD and Intel are not the only cpu makers on the face of the planet right now. ARM manufacturers ships more chips then AMD and Intel combined.
2.) There is no harm to the market, because AMD is irreverent.
3.) If Intel does not buy them, they will be gone in 3 or 4 years.

So the only question I would have is that, I thought anyway, the x86 market is different than the ARM market. I can't come up with an analogy to illustrate, but ARM doesn't power servers or desktops or laptops, so Intel would have a monopoly on the x86 market, which I think would be a really bad thing. Maybe I'm off here, but I can't come up with another x86 company, let alone one big enough to effectively compete with Intel...
Edited by b3machi7ke - 11/15/12 at 6:15am

AMD landed a deal to make the GPUs for all 3, and rumored to also have gotten an APU deal for the PS4.

4k is crap, and twice that is still crap.

Rumors for the PS4 are an A10 (aka PD quad + 7660D) and a 7850, and you think a HD 4000 will cut it?

They aren't good.

They still get beat down by Llano, let alone Trinity and eventually Steamroller's APU, which makes use of the incredibly power efficient GCN (as seen in the 7850), not including the further "merging" of the CPU and GPU.

2x 4000 will finally be enough to actually do things while AMD will be moving on to "Hey! We can play in eyefinity with reasonable settings now!"

Imagine offloading your FPU work to the GPU, leaving the CPU to do only Integer work.

AMD already has a compiler, although for Linux only, and also has a "beta" compiler for HSA of sorts.

Plus, if the PS4 does get an A10, games will be optimized for the Module design. No better IPC then a program being written for your hardware, right Intel compiler? Of course, that's wishful thinking, but it isn't completely unrealistic.

Not really sure what that even means. How about I give some of my theories.

First off, no AMD would be terrible. Most of you are too young probably to remember back in the day when Intel was the only chip in town that mattered with their Pentiums (1st generation)

Anyway, you want to know what happens when there is no competition? It is much like cable TV. You pay what they ask for, for a clunky interface, with hundreds of channels that you don't want, with all these commercials you don't want to see. This is rhetorical, please bear with me.

I love AMD, I ain't gonna lie. I have been powering my rigs with them since forever. Owned Intel too. Can I honestly say there is a big difference? Not really. The funny thing is that I replaced an old socket 939 Athlon 4800+ last year. I had striped 10k hdd to eliminate i/o bottleneck to storage, and a couple other tweaks. My computer at home was always snappier that my brand new Intel Xeons I got at work, but my work also puts all that crap lockdownware with services out the ying yang running. Any way, my main point is this.

Build a bunch of Intel and AMD machines. Do a blind study and have people use them, play games, whatever, and then see if they can tell the difference between AMD and Intel. Now, of course, everyone will be able to probably guess the $5000 machine with the thousand dollar processor. Maybe. Of course, no one would be allowed to use any bench marking software, or FRAPs or anything. Just common work day tasks. That would be interesting to see the results. Anyway.

One of my main theories about AMD bashing, which I know sounds conspiracy-ish, is to realize the fact that AMD is and has always been one of the most shorted stocks out there. Right now there are close to 150 million shares short. That means, people have "borrowed" 150 million shares of AMD and sold them on the open market and put the cash in their pocket. Yes, without every owning the stock, they sold shares of AMD and simply used a margin account to back such an action. Now, they are paying interest on those shorted stocks, and will have to pay those shares back, in the form of shares. However, if AMD goes bankrupt, they get to keep all the money in their pocket! Let's just say they borrowed 100,000,000 million shares of AMD at the $8.00 price point and sold them. Effectively, if AMD goes bankrupt, they just pocketed $800 million dollars. If AMD does not go bankrupt, they still buy the stock back, but at today's discount rate of $2.00 a share and pocket the difference. Sorry for the rant about short sellers, but back to my main point.

There is a lot of money at play here. I have some theory that these AMD capitalist pig short sellers spam the forums and comments sections everywhere to try and push public opinion of young 20 somethings into actually believing AMD is a garbage CPU,APU,GPU, company, etc. Yes, it is very true they cannot keep up with Intel on the benchmark edge of society. They might be a year behind, or two, who knows. They are doing pretty damn good if you ask me, when compared to the resources Intel has.

Anyway, I buy AMD for the same reason I go to a mom and pop hardware store instead of Walmart. I can walk into the mom and pop, have a good conversation, wish them good will, and be on my way. Does Walmart need my money? No. Does the mom and pop? Yeah.

So, Intel is a fine processor, and at any given moment, is on the technological edge. Is AMD honestly that far behind? No, they are not. What is more important to system performance, incrementally higher IPC or an SSD? A $200 CPU or a $700 GPU solution?

Bottom line, AMD is not this irrelevant garbage hipsters want to believe.