AMD Confirms Departure of CIO Mike Wolfe

[blazorthon]

It is not so much they can't compete at the top tier, which is a niche market anyway. It's that they can't compete in the low to mid tier which is killing them. They can't compete in price, performance or even performance/watt....so what is there to compete???

AMD is competing in price, AMD is competing in performance (in the low and mid-ranged and to an extent, even in the higher end), and in some cases, AMD is at least doing fine in performance per watt (such as with Trinity gaming systems), albeit I'll admit that they do overall have a loss there.

It's not even a matter of can and can't because AMD most certainly can do a helluva lot better if they wanted to. Take FX and cut down on cache capacity (the FX-4300 did this with the L3 cache from 8MiB to 4MiB and it had little to no adverse impact on performance while cutting down on power consumption considerably) in both L2 and L3. There's no good reason to have more than 1MiB of L2 per module and there's no good reason to have more than 4MiB of L3 cache on the lower end FX CPUs and there's no good reason to have more than 6MiB (if even that much) on all but the highest end models. We can see from the i7s that huge amounts of cache simply don't make a huge difference.

Getting the cache latency down and bandwidth up should be AMD's top priority. This is easily one of their most crippling problems (it may even be their worst problem) and one of the reasons for why Piledriver bested Bulldozer by a lot less than it should have based on looking at Trinity. Trinity showed us incredibly efficient CPUs that could compete with even Ivy in many ways in power efficiency. Think about it. The A10s are quad-core CPUs that perform right behind the i3s in average gaming performance, but best the i3s in fully threaded performance similarly to how much they lose in average gaming performance and these A10s, with their IGPs disabled to equalize the playing field, use less power than Ivy! At idle, even with the IGP, they use less power than Ivy and without the IGP, they can drop around or below Ivy even at load. They can stomp on Sandy in efficiency. Say what you will, but Piledriver is one very efficient micro-architecture despite it's poorly performing cache.

So, getting some properly performing cache with proper capacities should be a number one priority for AMD. They've even licensed technologies such as Z-RAM and TRAM, so they have no good excuse for having problems with this.

Then AMD has stupid mistakes such as their front-end bottle-neck beyond the cache. Giving a module the x86 decoder throughput of a single core (technically, compared to AM3 CPUs instead of modern Intel CPUs, it's a little more than that of a single CPU core, but still) when it's supposed to feed two x86 cores was an obvious mistake from the start with Bulldozer. That it wasn't fixed immediately in Piledriver instead of waiting for Steamroller is ridiculous because of Piledriver not even getting the fixed cache that it sorely needed. People can say all that they want, but with proper cache and x86 decoders alone, Piledriver could have literally competed with Intel.

I don't know why they don't get into gear, but they are capable of it. Maybe like what one of the above posters said, they'd do better if a *better* company bought them and got them into gear, just remember that anyone doing so may have to jump through hoops if the x86 license from Intel is still non-transferable (meaning that AMD would probably still need to exist as AMD, even if owned by another company).

 

[anxiousinfusion]

[citation][nom]hydac7[/nom]Can we stop with the AMD bad news , i don't feel so good ..[/citation]

Next month: "AMD lose global headquarters to gaping, fiery hole in the Earth. All employees believed to have been exalted to Hell."

 

[Guest]

i just powered up my trusty sempron 2200+ on 462 (my first amd). still running great. now it's your turn, amd. power up amd, power up.

 

[teiva]

I'll be purchasing a new Piledriver cpu and 990FX motherboard. It plenty fast enough for me. Lets hope AMD restructures and pulls through OK. Intel needs the competition otherwise its back to the bad old days of overpriced Intel parts.

 

[nebun]

[citation][nom]ekho[/nom]I'm getting nausea; too much bad news from AMD....[/citation]
like i said before....AMD is a dying brand

 

[cscott_it]

AMD has hired some of their old talent and are stepping up their game. However, it will take at least a year to see the real benefits. Hopefully the people hired back and new talent acquired can help fix some of their CPU problems. In addition, AMD is also going to be pumping out 64-bit ARM stuff too - so if they can get that off the ground, they can leverage some real power in the web-server and low power server market. I'm thinking about picking them up (stock) as a long term investment - eventually they'll finish paying for Global Foundries. I think at $2.07 a share they are a steal - but I'm going to do more research before I jump the gun.

 

[GreaseMonkey_62]

I've said this before - on any given day I seen at least half a dozen commercials for Intel on TV and on the internet. The only AMD advertisement I ever see is a banner ad that is occasionally here on Tom's. That needs to be addressed. quotemsg]
Marketing is half the battle in the tech arena. I'm sure people have seen several Intel commercials before making a PC purchase and it's really the only Processor on their mind when purchasing. Another chunk of the battle is getting OEM's to put more chips in their computers.

 

[Guest]

my guess is he' leaving to concentrate his history Channel's show American Pickers

 

[teiva]

Advertising is one of the keys to success. Most of the computer illiterate people I know have heard of Intel but not AMD. Although, they mainly buy by brand (HP, ACER, etc..) and price. Most of the time they don't really care what the powerplant is. I've been to many a store where the PC salesman are just as ignorant and it gets quite frustrating especially when they tell you that the Intel graphics on notepads runs games fine (and im not talking about minesweeper).

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]teiva[/nom]Advertising is one of the keys to success. Most of the computer illiterate people I know have heard of Intel but not AMD. Although, they mainly buy by brand (HP, ACER, etc..) and price. Most of the time they don't really care what the powerplant is. I've been to many a store where the PC salesman are just as ignorant and it gets quite frustrating especially when they tell you that the Intel graphics on notepads runs games fine (and im not talking about minesweeper).[/citation]

powerplant?

 

[Guest]

I wonder what AMD's employee satisfaction rate is. I've heard that morale among the engineers is at an all-time low.

If your company can't keep execs, it's usually a sign that the company does not have a future. There's a big difference between a house cleanup and people leaving a sinking ship, yet both look the same from an outside perspective.

 

[teiva]

powerplant = cpu

 

[Guest]

Mike was not the right manager anyway. I have met him, and my experience is that he promoted a culture of "good old boys network" over "technical agility". In hard times, he forced people from other organizations to join his group just so that he can get rid of them when layoffs are needed, making sure his good old friends are still around.