So now we are going from AMD leaving desktop enthusiast market to AMD leaving all x86 markets?
They are going to give up a lot of things by abandoning these markets. Currently 30% of their sales are FX. Professional market, gone because no one wants a workstation chip that can't run Adobe and Autodesk products. Gaming market, gone unless you think AMD wants to sell $500 dGPUs for Android games.
AMD needs to shift focus to mobile, APUs, and HSA, there is no doubt about it. But they will still need big cores and they will still need big dGPU.
AMD is gonna dig themselves into a hole. If they push HSA too hard and ignore traditional workloads, they're going to force everyone else who has applications that aren't HSA ready or that don't scale to tons of cores very well onto other platforms.
AMD's biggest problem seems to me that their x86 big cores are designed for multi-threading and they're pushing for HSA, which will do multi-thread fantastically. Far better than a traditional CPU. Which means that their CPUs are going to be made obsolete by their own new products instead of complimenting them well by being strong at what HSA/GPGPU is bad at, which is single thread.
AMD big x86 cores should be single thread oriented to compliment HSA GPGPU instead of trying to compete with it.
However I still do not buy HSA replacing traditional computing entirely. ignoring traditional CPU workloads means that AMD is going to have a product line that only works for HSA enabled applications, and if you want to use it for traditional workloads, you're going to have an awful experience. The trade off will be huge, and I would imagine that the amount of traditional software will vastly out-number HSA software for a very long time, if forever.
Hardly anyone is going to choose "significantly slower in existing software but very fast in specific workloads" over "pretty good at everything and there's only a few applications where things are slow."
So overall, no, I'm not buying the HSA hype like everyone is. Yes, it'll be absolutely amazing for specific, niche roles that grow overtime. However, APU can't replace traditional CPUs or dGPUs and it never will be able to as long as it's a single socket solution with a die size that isn't ridiculous.
If you want my opinion on where HSA is going to sit in regards to marketshare and usage, it'll sit somewhere between CUDA/OpenCL and traditional CPU workloads. It will suppliment it, perhaps greatly in specific workloads, but it can't replace it because software will take forever to catch up and it will be nearly impossible to get software developers to jump on something with such small market share.
The only shining light is gaming. Where, if AMD goes APU only, their strongest CPU will be around FX 4300 level, FX 6300 if you're optimistic about Steamroller. That's the end of AMD's gaming platform. It means that the only reason to buy a high end AMD dGPU will be to pair it with an Intel CPU, because something along the lines of FX 4300 isn't going to push anything extreme. And then you won't have HSA. Meaning that a large portion of gamers won't care about HSA at all. So then you have consoles pushing for HSA and then Intel CPU PC gaming rigs without HSA being purchase while you can buy HSA PC gaming rigs.
And look how bad AMD wants to have a high end gaming CPU. They released FX 9590 with 220w TDP and $900 price tag just so they could try and have something competitive in the high end gaming segment.
Going HSA only is going to push a lot of people away from AMD products. Also, I don't recall ever reading that HSA is going to completely replace traditional computing. I have seen numbers saying it can do great things and that it is good (I do think HSA is awesome), but never anything regarding "traditional computing is dead, RIP in peace!!!!"
That seems to come from forum conjecture that people assume HSA is going to replace everything.
APU with HSA, if that's AMD's best performing product, will get mauled by Intel + Phi and Power8 + CUDA. There is absolutely no way a single AMD APU is going to come remotely close to the levels of performance both of those offer.
Now, 16 core Steamroller or Excavator Opteron with 7970 replacements, that'd be a scary thought.
I just wanna know, that if this market is useless and dying, why are Nvidia, IBM, Intel, and even AMD (with FirePro line) pushing towards it?
Like I said before, AMD needs HSA for desktop with CPU + dGPU. Not having that will create an awkward problem in their product line where CPU + dGPU is faster in most workloads, but loses horribly in HSA workloads while APU loses horribly in majority of workloads while it wins hard in the specific HSA ones.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_st?keywords=desktop+cpu&qid=1378573411&rh=n%3A172282%2Cn%3A541966%2Cn%3A193870011%2Cn%3A229189%2Ck%3Adesktop+cpu&sort=popularity-rank
Sorted by popularity. Notice where FX 8350 is? Now where is desktop APU?
Popularity of FX 8350 is really contradicting a lot of things that are getting thrown around in this thread. I find it very hard to believe that AMD is going to give up their top 3 selling products on Amazon and leave that market entirely to Intel.
FX 8350 is more popular than 3770k. Amazingly i3 is more popular than FX 6300. People like FX 8000 series a lot more than people in this thread are realizing, probably because they hang out in forums where people masturbate to a product being superior because it scores 120fps in a 720p gaming benchmark with settings on low as compared to one that scores 110fps.
AMD knows this, I'm assuming they thought that "moar coars and moar jigahurtz" was working so they released FX 9000 series, plus it would function as a halo product and it looks better for AMD if people who don't know better look at products on Amazon and see AMD HAS products that can be priced that high.
FX 9590 is on the same page as Intel 3960x. Serious under-estimation of what FX is to AMD going on in this thread, and serious over-estimation of what HSA is going to do in the short term (next 3 years or so).
EDIT: Just for fun, newegg results of desktop CPUs sorted by number of reviews:
http://www.newegg.com/Processors-Desktops/SubCategory/ID-343?Order=REVIEWS
I'm making a leap and assuming all CPUs have the same percentage of users review the product, but if that is true, AMD has sold a lot of FX chips. Much more FX than Intel has sold i5 to folks that shop for CPUs only at Newegg.