AMD CPU speculation... and expert conjecture

[dogman_1234]

What AMD needs is a sugar daddy who has a beef with Intel...or whoever.

 

[amdfangirl]

AMD should be bought out by Iron Man. :3

 

[noob2222]

For desktop use, ARM is "fast enough". Sure, gamers would get left out cold, but thats a small percentage of the market.

Also, WinRT has been out HOW LONG now? Really bad argument there...

How often do you see people recommending or even selling an ATOM DESKTOP? thats about how powerful cortex A15 is.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6422/samsung-chromebook-xe303-review-testing-arms-cortex-a15/6

Its only fast enough if your not actually doing any actual "work" with it. How well does ARM handle cad, photoshop, web design, programming, ect?

As far as the 7970 arguement, I could have said a 6650, point is you can't even have a discrete card, your stuck with the on-chip gpu, wich is good for web browsing.

 

[viridiancrystal]

if those figures in the article are correct, it just sucks for amd. this time they had time advantage, price advantage, better supply etc.
nvidia won't sit on their asses or mismanage themselves into oblivion. they'll certainly push for better products.
i partly blame all those people who bought gtx 550ti . i never figured out why that p.o.c. sold so well. imo that card was the worst card from fermi lineup.

I had a little debate with a friend of mine a while back about graphics cards. He knew quite a bit about computers, and would build them, and recommend parts for his friends. He was telling me he was going to use the 550ti in the build he was planning out for somebody. This wasn't long ago, so I recommended the 7770 instead. He outright agreed that it was a faster card, but refused to get it saying Nvidia has so many things AMD cards don't. (The one thing he came up with was PhysX, which he insisted was being put in at least 50% of all games.)

It kind of showed me how much people go with Nvidia or Intel just because it's Nvidia or Intel. The strangest part was that he matched it with a 8120.

 

[-Fran-]

I had a little debate with a friend of mine a while back about graphics cards. He knew quite a bit about computers, and would build them, and recommend parts for his friends. He was telling me he was going to use the 550ti in the build he was planning out for somebody. This wasn't long ago, so I recommended the 7770 instead. He outright agreed that it was a faster card, but refused to get it saying Nvidia has so many things AMD cards don't. (The one thing he came up with was PhysX, which he insisted was being put in at least 50% of all games.)

It kind of showed me how much people go with Nvidia or Intel just because it's Nvidia or Intel. The strangest part was that he matched it with a 8120.

Kind of the same thing happens with my GF... I was going to get her a GTX670 because it was the better buy at the moment, but she wanted an AMD card because of video and multi monitor set up (nVidia still sucks major ass in that department, have a GTX670 to confirm it XD), so I ended up getting her a 7970. She's a happy camper with it and plays everything fine. And yeah, it is WAY faster than the GTX670 with recent drivers.

Cheers!

 

[fazers_on_stun]

http://www.techspot.com/article/599-amd-rise-and-fall/

Yeah, read that yesterday and pretty decent analysis of what went wrong with AMD. In particular paying twice as much for ATI as they should have, then shortsightedly selling off the handheld graphics unit which now is a big part of ARM-based tablets & smartphones..

Unfortunately for AMD's management, nobody could ever fix stupid..

 

[fazers_on_stun]

What AMD needs is a sugar daddy who has a beef with Intel...or whoever.

You mean a beef daddy who has a sugar with AMD??

 

[mayankleoboy1]

It kind of showed me how much people go with Nvidia or Intel just because it's Nvidia or Intel.

In the case of AMD vs Intel , its OK to go with "its intel so i will buy it" because they do have faster CPU's. But NV vs AMD ? they are equal at almost all price points.

Kinda like Apple.

 

[viridiancrystal]

In the case of AMD vs Intel , its OK to go with "its intel so i will buy it" because they do have faster CPU's. But NV vs AMD ? they are equal at almost all price points.

Kinda like Apple.

Yeah, the Intel argument at this point makes a lot of sense. Intel is simply better in performance/watt at this point in time. The 7k series and 600 series are almost perfect competition, so when a 7870 and a 660 are selling at 240-260, it is hard to recommend one over the other. Personally, the only 600 I would be recommending at this point is the 670. The 680 isn't worth the price hike, and the memory limitations of the rest of the cards really worry me. However, Performance is close across the board, so it's hard to go wrong on either side. Nvidia is probably getting more sales at this time, because their name is Nvidia. I'm not putting down Nvidia because of that, they have just done a better job advertising, and getting into the market. AMD hasn't been doing that until recently.

 

[mayankleoboy1]

could be that AMD tried to do too many things with Tahiti : Graphics and compute. Due to this the power use increased, and so did heat and then cooler noise. This woud have succeeded, but thay dont actually have many applications using the GPU compute. If they would have collaborated with MS, maybe some basic functions of the OS would have used the GPU compute.

NV focused on graphics only, hence better power usage, heat and noise. And thus, better reviews.

Also, people think : "AMD, the same company who make crappy CPU's ? lets not buy anything from them"

 

[Novuake]

In the case of AMD vs Intel , its OK to go with "its intel so i will buy it" because they do have faster CPU's. But NV vs AMD ? they are equal at almost all price points.

Kinda like Apple.

The only problem is that AMD has a consistently larger manufacturing node for every chip, meaning they make a lot less profit than Nvidia per card sell, on top of that they sell a lot fewer cards in the OEM and Retail space... AMD is screwed and I hate it...

 

[amdfangirl]

AMD could litigate I guess.

 

[de5_Roy]

glofo seems to be doing well
http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/29582-globalfoundaries-sales-pick-up
and a little ot on the side...
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57553467-93/mozilla-quietly-ceases-firefox-64-bit-development/

 

[-Fran-]

AMD could litigate I guess.

Care(bear) to elaborate?

Cheers!

 

[fazers_on_stun]

glofo seems to be doing well
http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/29582-globalfoundaries-sales-pick-up

They don't expect to be profitable until 2015 though.

 

[amdfangirl]

Care(bear) to elaborate?

Cheers!

Anti-trust?

Monopoly?

Agitate the FCC into action?

Apply for Obamacare?

 

[-Fran-]

Anti-trust?

Monopoly?

Agitate the FCC into action?

Apply for Obamacare?

The anti-trust issue, I think, is old story. Don't think any judge would take such a claim seriously, to be honest. And also, Intel seems to have been on a somewhat clean track lately. Maybe because AMD doesn't have a better product, hahaha. Except for the "hey, watch this video of me playing a game" live "demo", I'd say they're pretty much BS free on what they have been doing. Does someone disagrees here?

And Monopoly... I don't know... The x86 market is huge and Intel CANNOT be alone in there, but ARMs designs are getting momentum, so it's a thing about timing. If a judge buys the "ARM is also a PC" argument (yeah, yeah, I know; not comparable, but bear with me) Intel could be free of such charges. I'd really say this could be a 50/50, but I don't really think Obama would like to bail out AMD, hahaha.

The FTC won't move a finger, because, like I said, Intel has been "clean" as of late. No need to play dirty with a better product, I guess

And yeah, AMD has to give better health plans for their employees. I'm sure they're under such stress that I would really would not like to be on their shoes 8(

Cheers!

 

[amdfangirl]

They might get Thunderman as the jury

AMD4LIFE?

 

[mayankleoboy1]

Monopoly could work. Force intel to pay money to AMD becaue they are better.....

 

[de5_Roy]

"AMD’s Steamroller High-Performance Core Slips to 2014, Excavator May Face Delays.
AMD May Be Reconsidering High-Performance x86 CPU Cores Roadmap"
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20121122235832_AMD_s_Steamroller_High_Performance_Core_Slips_to_2014_Excavator_May_Face_Delays.html

 

[gamerk316]

Monopoly could work. Force intel to pay money to AMD becaue they are better.....

No it can't. There are PLENTY of alternative OS's that are PPC or ARM based (or have variants), like that OS called Linux. Its not Intels fault 98% of the market runs either OSX or Windows. Plus, you even have an ARM Windows variant now, so theres competiton from ARM in X86's best market. Its not Intels fault if Win RT falls flat on its face (and it WILL).

"AMD’s Steamroller High-Performance Core Slips to 2014, Excavator May Face Delays.
AMD May Be Reconsidering High-Performance x86 CPU Cores Roadmap"
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20121122235832_AMD_s_Steamroller_High_Performance_Core_Slips_to_2014_Excavator_May_Face_Delays.html

More or less expected, especially since Steamroller has been missing from the roadmaps for a few months now...

All-in-all, it looks like Globalfoundries is unable to start volume manufacturing of products based on Steamroller micro-architecture using 28nm process technology, whereas after the recent round of layoffs, AMD cannot redesign its chips quickly to improve yields in order to release them next year. Partly, this explains why AMD will not be talking about Steamroller at International Solid-State Circuits Conference 2013, where the company traditionally revealed details about its high-end x86 cores. Instead, AMD will reveal some additional information about its low-power Jaguar x86 micro-architecture.

This is why, despite the overhead involved, AMD spinning GloFo was a massive mistake. GloFo just cost AMD a year, which may cause them to go belly up.

The ambidextrous strategy implies usage of similar building blocks inside completely different chips. While it clearly lowers development costs, it also means that AMD will be unable to leap forward one particular product line. Each building block needs to be developed for a particular process technology to be efficient in terms of performance. At the same time, each building block needs to be tailored for different product designs to ensure high-performance across the board. Hence, to boost the speed of one product by taking advantage of a new manufacturing, AMD needs to redevelop virtually all building blocks it has and tailor them for all possible designs to ensure maximum performance and power-efficiency across the product family.

Given the limited amount of engineers at the company, the firm will hardly be able to quickly respond to changing conditions and adopt the latest process technologies among the first ones, simply because its CPU/APU product lines will be too broad. AMD will have to be rather conservative with transitions to newer process technologies as they will require redevelopment of building blocks for numerous chips.

Translation: Too many markets. Every change in market conditions in any particular market slows development of ALL of AMD's chips, as they all share the same building blocks. Any change in one chip necessitates the rest be re-designed as well.

 

[mayankleoboy1]

No it can't. There are PLENTY of alternative OS's that are PPC or ARM based (or have variants), like that OS called Linux. Its not Intels fault 98% of the market runs either OSX or Windows.

isnt this how antittrust/ monopoly laws work ?
Was it MS fault that its OS is so popular in europe, and that customers demand a web browser if they pay for a OS ? But MS got hit by antitrust laws.

 

[de5_Roy]

xbitlabs said 'amd cancelled/delayed steamroller excavator as we know it'. so it's possible that amd might redesign them... may be for tsmc. as for hsa, since both arm and amd are members, amd might even (re)design future apus as arm cpus cores with hsa igpus....

slightly off topic but related to the topic:
something has been bugging me. i read the earlier articles on how nvidia ended up making much more money than amd (in dgpu sector) by designing their flagship asic smaller than amd's - this was attributed as a big factor. does this mean that implementing a smaller-but-similar-or-higher-perf design helped them offset yield issues and cost? then.. what about 32 nm llano, bd and pd cpus vs sandy bridge, did intel make more money partly because of smaller die? iirc sb dies were smaller than bd dies.

 

[mayankleoboy1]

^ One thing here is that AMD had pretty good yields of GPU in 28nm node. But you couldnt buy a gtx680 for months after release.
Also, Nvidia was the only company that said that they are facing 28nm supply issues. And berated "some partners" for low 28nm yields. They also changed the contract terms with TSMC to "number of working wafers" IIRC.

So in the beginning of the 28nm era, Nvidia, even though having smaller die, lost money in dies. And hence lost money in sales.

 

[mayankleoboy1]

since there is no GPU thread:

https://d24w6bsrhbeh9d.cloudfront.net/photo/5911191_700b.jpg