A Rough Week: AMD Gets Six F Grades From Investors

[captaincharisma]

at this rate AMD might go under before RIM does

 

[uglynerdman]

ive been a long time amd fan but regardless, amd's engineers, gaming community leaders and mostly the guts of the company has left. Their CEO is out of touch with the customer base. Im pretty shure the 7970m was not Read's full idea/descision. he thinks that something on par with a gtx 650m forgetting about the fx series for a second, everything else in all other areas arent worth effort. AMD's marketing is horrible. their working on driver support with other companies is horrible. ENDURO makes ppl have a performance hit! and they have massively failed in the mid to higherend mobile market. I care about the mobile world because well ppl are shifting away from the big box more and more. saying stuff like intel is tooo fast doesnt cut it anymore, if i can buy a cheap mobile intel processor and play games on ultra with performance that rivals a amd desktop... something is wrong with amd then. ill probably get alot of hate but. i really do see amd suffering for their mistakes for along time until some new ppl come in who care about the company and its customers wants and needs.

 

[southernshark]

[citation][nom]teh_chem[/nom]What strikes me as odd is that at the moment, even AMD's "poor" bulldozer CPU performance is more CPU performance than the average user would ever need. Unless we're talking multi-GPU purposes, it really doesn't matter. Same thing with AMDs APUs vs. Intel's most recent mobile Ivy Bridge processors. It's a bunch of CPU performance that whomever buys laptops/devices will never need all of that power.[/citation]


LOL Man you should work for AMD. Rory would love you. Or you could work for RIM. You could explain how no one needs those features the Iphone have. Or you could work for a large number of failed companies who believed that increased performance was meaningless.

The reality is that has become a false dichotomy. On the top level everything seems to be fine, with just about any processor able to meet current demand. But underneath is the truth. The truth is that 1080p is holding us back. Don't believe me? Well take it up with Apple as well, because it has finally recognized that consumers want a better display, hence the retina display. The fact is that processor only seem to be "fast enough" because PC buyers are willing to put up with crummy displays and we let the hardware manufacturers get away with making crummy displays because we keep buying them.

Of course performance does always matter, even beyond the display issues. A faster processor will still let the computer operate slightly faster which helps productivity and it will open up new possible uses for the computer which it may not currently be being used for such as AI.

Then there is the issue of DARPA which also wants faster CPUs and those boys are going to get what they want.....

And finally there is the issue of the consumer. Give someone a choice between two otherwise equal devices but one is better, the consumer will 95 percent of the time, pick the better device. Even if you don't use all the power Intel offers you will still pick it because it is better.

 

[verbalizer]

where's 'triny'.?

 

[freggo]

AMD has a marketing problem.
Their CPU naming schemes are a disaster.
Ask even a fairly knowledgable IT guy to name the current top 3 AMD CPUs in falling order.
With Intel it is easy... i7, i5, i3

BMW... 7 series, 5 series, 3 series
Mercedes S-Class, E-class, C-class

AMD.... sorry, do not have a clou. So I just bought a new machine with an i5 inside with an ATI graphics card.

 

[silverblue]

What, A4/A6/A8 isn't clear enough? :|

 

[zloginet]

[citation][nom]silverblue[/nom]What, A4/A6/A8 isn't clear enough? :|[/citation]


He did say falling order....

 

[fazers_on_stun]

AMD is not being mismanaged. It is generally not the direction I would like to see it going, but I would argue that the management is doing the best with what AMD has. Keep in mind that Intel has a massive R&D department that has functioning silicon with features that a production CPU won't get for at least 2 years. AMD doesn't have nearly the R&D (in the CPU department), so it's going to play the roll of the company that will design a custom APU/CPU/SoC that will meet certain needs using either an x86 or ARM core. It will take advantage of the Radeon IP it has and integrate a Radeon core in the APU/SoC. Intel will be ahead in the CPU performance game, but AMD has decided to play the SoC designer game in the long run and it seems to be profitable for companies like Qualcomm

IIRC AMD was working on the Bulldozer design for over 5 years, and look what we got - a sidegrade if anything. Seems like they made some fundamental uarch mistakes with the shared front-end, cache latency, etc etc. If Piledriver is only 15% faster than BD, AMD will still be behind performance-wise, and if Haswell has a huge (5x according to S/A) improvement in the GPU, it's pretty much over for AMD at least in the CPU space. In which case the current $4 a share stock price might seem really high..

 

[maxinexus]

[citation][nom]silverblue[/nom]What, A4/A6/A8 isn't clear enough? :|[/citation]

I think he means FX and Phenom II...
Anyway I believe that if AMD would priced its CPU lower there would be not much of a trash talk.

FX8150 should have debuted at $199.99 etc...

Another thing they scrd up was 7970 prices. Instead of starting at 499 they jacked it up to 549 and then when GTX680 was out they still kept it up there...

I just got MSI 7950 for 309 after rebate...that is an awesome deal...only thing that would keep people buying new things is great price/performance ratio.

Back to piledriver 10-15% performance increase from FX would be great but if they price it wrong ... well F is what they deserve.

 

[freggo]

[citation][nom]silverblue[/nom]What, A4/A6/A8 isn't clear enough? :|[/citation]

Opteron, FX, Phenom II, Piledriver... plus a load of meaningless numbers (unless you do a lot of THG reading of course) behind each.

Don't get me wrong, I am very much PRO AMD, would hate to see them go away !!
But they simply do not have the marketing punch like Intel; they do not have the name recognition.
Intel Inside ... YEAH.... AMD inside...? What is an AMD ?

For consumer success you need the KISS approach. A catchy name, a few numbers and that's it.
The thing is that ever since AMD walked away from the MHz naming scheme some years ago (because clock speed is not everything) they started loosing out to Intel.
While AMD had a valid point, they totally overestimate the average user.
Even today, when I am with a client and computers come up I get asked how many MHz/GHz my computer has. Multiple cores or Graphics cards do not go into the average user's mindset.

 

[gm0n3y]

If you actually believe in AMDs long term prospects then this is a great time to buy. Or maybe wait another month or 2 for it to drop some more first.

 

[GreaseMonkey_62]

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Piledriver pulls out a win for AMD, but it's not looking the best.

 

[GreaseMonkey_62]

(because clock speed is not everything) they started loosing out to Intel.
While AMD had a valid point, they totally overestimate the average user.
Even today, when I am with a client and computers come up I get asked how many MHz/GHz my computer has. Multiple cores or Graphics cards do not go into the average user's mindset.

I'm not sure that's the whole picture. AMD's processors have similar clock speeds to Intel and the FX line can be easily overclocked to 4.0ghz.

 

[teh_chem]

LOL Man you should work for AMD. Rory would love you. Or you could work for RIM. You could explain how no one needs those features the Iphone have. Or you could work for a large number of failed companies who believed that increased performance was meaningless.

The reality is that has become a false dichotomy. On the top level everything seems to be fine, with just about any processor able to meet current demand. But underneath is the truth. The truth is that 1080p is holding us back. Don't believe me? Well take it up with Apple as well, because it has finally recognized that consumers want a better display, hence the retina display. The fact is that processor only seem to be "fast enough" because PC buyers are willing to put up with crummy displays and we let the hardware manufacturers get away with making crummy displays because we keep buying them.

Of course performance does always matter, even beyond the display issues. A faster processor will still let the computer operate slightly faster which helps productivity and it will open up new possible uses for the computer which it may not currently be being used for such as AI.

Then there is the issue of DARPA which also wants faster CPUs and those boys are going to get what they want.....

And finally there is the issue of the consumer. Give someone a choice between two otherwise equal devices but one is better, the consumer will 95 percent of the time, pick the better device. Even if you don't use all the power Intel offers you will still pick it because it is better.

Hey, if they want to throw a few bones my way...

But seriously, it's not taking into account the shift of the entire market/industry. It's shifting away from powerful stand-alone units, so providing the powerful CPU to go into these units is a dwindling market.

I'd be willing to bet that's one of the things AMD is keeping in mind with their acquisition of SeaMicro. With the shift to "server-end" "cloud" computing, the major requirements will be there, not in the hands of consumers.

 

[Guest]

They still have affordable/powerful processors that are good enough for most people. So, the financial gurus downgraded the stock. So, if the world listens to stocks and not the processors of AMD, they could only be worth 1 cent per share. This doesn't really reflect anything in my opinion. Not a short time ago, AMD was good and profitable for several quarters/years in a row, but the stock didn't go up and the price again still declined. It's a game.

The best way to keep AMD afloat is to buy it's products. Let's do it so that we can keep competition alive.