AMD CPU speculation... and expert conjecture

[CooLWoLF]

This thread is absolutely worthless anymore. Seriously. Its become nothing but BLIND BRAND LOYALTY at this point, even in the face of simple logic.

Now I am reading posts saying games will not run anymore optimized on AMD cpus despite the fact that AMD cpus now lie in BOTH major consoles? How hard is it to concede that AMD might get a boost now because of this development? Are people so blind to their love of a tech company that they can't admit something when its staring at them right in the face? Are you for real?

I love technology and everything about it, but then again sometimes I can't really can't stand it because of stupid stuff like this.

consoles are a very small segment of the computing market. AMD is estimating 20% of AMD's revenue, so like 2% total x86 revenue lies in consoles. MS isn't going to change their stance any time soon.

I am not referring to AMD's revenue. I am talking about the coding aspect of upcoming games due to the new consoles using AMD's chips.

 

[juanrga]

Today the main game engines scale well. I already provided you a copy of a cpu profiling of a future PS4 game. The game uses six-cores for running six game threads. And the OS and the dev tools (including the profiler) run in the remaining two cores. A total of 8 cores working fine.

For the last bloddy time: Embedded systems != General Purpose PC.

The types of scheduling tricks you can use on a system with a single hardware spec are not feasible on a general purpose PC, as you can not guarantee at any point in time if your application is even running. You HAVE to go through the OS scheduler, you HAVE to share time with thousands of other threads, you HAVE to assume other applications can come in and kick you out, and you HAVE to synchronize your thread logic if two threads touch the same object. You can NOT make any assumptions like "X takes 1ms to occur, and Y will need the data from X after 1.2 ms, both X and Y start at the same time, so I don't have to synchronize my thread logic" that you can make on an embedded system.

I've worked on embedded systems for ages. You see a LOT of low level code optimizations. For example, you may know some command will throw a switch in the hardware that, by spec, takes a maximum of 2ns to flip, so you know you can do some other processing for 2ns before you send data across said switch. You see a LOT of really low level optimizations like this. On a PC, you can't, because you don't even know at what point your thread even runs the command that throws said switch. Abstraction is great for getting SW to work on thousands of different pieces of hardware, not so much good for performance.

Finally, the PS3 had 6 CPU cores (SPE's) for development, and the 360 had three CPU cores with 2-way SMT, giving both current gen consoles 6 CPU contexts to work with. And the same PC games that ran on 6 cores on the consoles use 2 on the PC. There's a reason for that. You will never see the low-level, fine grain control you see on consoles make their way over to the PC. I can guarantee ever CoD game this generation uses 6 cores on the consoles, likely at 100%. On the PC, 2. Same for every other title out there. I can not WAIT for Novemeber, because I will be doing nothing but posted "I TOLD YOU SO" when people find that graphical quality didn't jump, and we're still stuck on two main threads and maybe a worker thread or two.

To me, people are fooling themselves just like they did before the BD launch.

Yes, Embedded systems != General Purpose PC. We know that, but whereas you insist on the obvious you are avoiding the main part of what is being said to you.

When I said that current main game engines scale well, I was referring to engines that exist for PCs as well. And old engines that don't scale well are being rewritten to scale well. AMD move has been genial. By providing a large number of weak cores for the next consoles, devs will be obligated to do their work and go wide with the engine, using the available hardware, instead ignoring it.

The relevant part is that once devs go wide with their engines/games, those games will work better on the PC:

http://mygaming.co.za/news/news/57099-planetside-2-heading-to-ps4-devs-optimising-for-amd.html

Our engine sucks at that right now. We are multi-threaded, but the primary gameplay thread is very expensive. The biggest piece of engineering work that they’re doing right now, and it’s an enormous effort, is to go back through the engine and re-optimise it to be really, truly multi-threaded and break the gameplay thread up. But thankfully once they do it, AMD players who’ve been having sub-par performance on the PC will suddenly get a massive boost – just because of being able to take the engine and re-implement it as multi-threaded.

I’m very excited about that because I have a lot of friends, lots of people who are more budget minded, going for AMD processors because nine times out of ten they give a lot of bang for the buck. Where it really breaks down is on games with one really big thread. Planetside’s probably a prime example of that.

Or repeated once again:

they were now working more closely with AMD thanks to the hardware inside the Playstation 4, and the experiences and techniques used on the console will also filter into development for the PC.

The PS3 was a single core design (1 PPE, two hardware threads), which was assisted by six co-processors (6 SPE) specialised in multimedia and vector processing. In one sense the 6 SPEs of the PS3 played a similar role to the 18 CUs of the PS4. The CUs of the PS4 will work as coprocessors to the 8 general CPU cores: 1 PPE + 6 SPE --> 8 jaguar + 18 CU

The 360 had a triple core (six hardware threads), but developers coded for the minimum common denominator: the PS3. Things are different today as both PS4 and Xbox1 are 8-core designs.

The two hardware threads per core of the PS3/360 were achieved using SMT, which does not guarantee better performance than a single thread per core as in PS4/XboxOne. No strange that first-gen games for both PS3 and 360 were all single-threaded. I don't know of any game for PS4 or Xbox360 was not using more than four cores/threads. Therefore your appeal to history is not working here.

 

[esrever]

This thread is absolutely worthless anymore. Seriously. Its become nothing but BLIND BRAND LOYALTY at this point, even in the face of simple logic.

Now I am reading posts saying games will not run anymore optimized on AMD cpus despite the fact that AMD cpus now lie in BOTH major consoles? How hard is it to concede that AMD might get a boost now because of this development? Are people so blind to their love of a tech company that they can't admit something when its staring at them right in the face? Are you for real?

I love technology and everything about it, but then again sometimes I can't really can't stand it because of stupid stuff like this.

consoles are a very small segment of the computing market. AMD is estimating 20% of AMD's revenue, so like 2% total x86 revenue lies in consoles. MS isn't going to change their stance any time soon.

I am not referring to AMD's revenue. I am talking about the coding aspect of upcoming games due to the new consoles using AMD's chips.

except for console ports, not many people are going to care too much about the AMD cpu optimizations as long as their code works. Console ports should have some nice things but given how the jaguar cores aren't exactly like the piledriver modules, it could all be a wash.

 

[noob2222]

@juan.

3 years to obtain 5-10% isn't a very fast transition. The AMD article claims 20% or more by 2016, the same time ARM sais 5-10.

I never claimed intel market share would increase, but when any company has 95+% share, its a guaranteed bet that with any new competition it will drop.

as for intel just letting arm take over, the only one that has the money to push marketing to ARM is samsung. id venture to bet seeing intel back at their anti-competative strategies again.

as for your apple article ... sure ... one day ... what does that mean exactly? 2, 3, 5, 9 years from now?

as for your xeon rebuttle, I was using your claims of it equaling an e3, wich comes in a quad core. so 16:4 cores; arm:e3 = 32:8 e5 cores , 32+ : 10 e7 cores.

as for the nvidia article. nvidia is making a server cpu. even attempting to say that cuda isn't supported on ARM is saying cuda isn't supported by your own product. That's a pointless article, of course nvidia is going to support their own hardware.

 

[esrever]

Intel is going to lose if it does resort to under handed tactics because they will be fighting apple, samsung and qualcomm. All of which are bigger than intel. That process advantage is pretty serious business tho. The new atom reviews have it beating the tegra 4 in pretty much all CPU tasks and competing in gpu. Meaning that intel actually has the most powerful soc right now.

 

[de5_Roy]

intel's share will temporarily grow though. it's not mere speculation. when amd transitions again to arm socs, they'll leave a gap at different points where amd had shares, since intel's own size is stalled and is facing competition from arm, they'll take from amd. however, it doesn't necessarily makes a bad news for amd, after transition phase ends.
biggest competition will start after all foundries ready their 14nm nodes for mobile socs. can't wait...

 

[juanrga]

@juan.

3 years to obtain 5-10% isn't a very fast transition. The AMD article claims 20% or more by 2016, the same time ARM sais 5-10.

I never claimed intel market share would increase, but when any company has 95+% share, its a guaranteed bet that with any new competition it will drop.

as for intel just letting arm take over, the only one that has the money to push marketing to ARM is samsung. id venture to bet seeing intel back at their anti-competative strategies again.

as for your apple article ... sure ... one day ... what does that mean exactly? 2, 3, 5, 9 years from now?

as for your xeon rebuttle, I was using your claims of it equaling an e3, wich comes in a quad core. so 16:4 cores; arm:e3 = 32:8 e5 cores , 32+ : 10 e7 cores.

as for the nvidia article. nvidia is making a server cpu. even attempting to say that cuda isn't supported on ARM is saying cuda isn't supported by your own product. That's a pointless article, of course nvidia is going to support their own hardware.

2016 - 2104 = 2 years. ARM doesn't sell server chips. AMD does sell server chips. AMD knows well the market, has the data, and has the feedback from customers. Warsaw is AMD response to customers who will not switch to ARM the next year. AMD prediction of a 20% of the market share for 2016 is feasible. Other analysis predict 15--20%. Oppenheimer & Co. Inc. predict a 21% for microservers

The same analysts call this a "hyper-growth". Intel is estimating microservers will be a 10% for 2015.

New competition doesn't automatically mean that other's market share will drop. Look to new Warsaw chip. AMD doesn't plan to gain market share from Intel with it. AMD is releasing Warsaw only for legacy workloads.

Again, it is not Intel vs AMD neither Intel vs Samsung. It is Samsung plus Qualcomm plus Apple plus AMD plus Nvidia plus HP plus Dell plus...

Sorry but I cannot have access to Apple internal roadmaps. But I can say you that AMD assault to X86 servers begin the next year and Nvidia high-performance ARM for desktop, workstation, supercomputers is scheduled for 2015 or so.

I mentioned an E5-2650, which is one of fastest 8 core (16 threads) Xeons and one of the fastest x86 chips in the market. If that is not high-performance then I don't know what the term "high-performance" means for you.

Not only AMD is putting the new ARM chip in the same High-Performance tie than Steamroller

but AMD is claiming Seattle will be 4x as fast as fastest Jaguar, whereas claiming that Steamroller (Kaveri/Berlin) will be 2x as fast as fastest Jaguar. I think the equation is easy to solve.

Now take a look to the Nvidia blog article. The relevant part is where they say that their Denver project is aimed to power desktops, workstations, servers, and supercomputers with the future ARM chip. Supporting CUDA for ARM servers implies that (i) they predict that ARM server market will become important and want stay here from minute one and (ii) Nvidia want CUDA to be ready when they will release their Denver project.

 

[hcl123]

@juan.

3 years to obtain 5-10% isn't a very fast transition. The AMD article claims 20% or more by 2016, the same time ARM sais 5-10.

I never claimed intel market share would increase, but when any company has 95+% share, its a guaranteed bet that with any new competition it will drop.

as for intel just letting arm take over, the only one that has the money to push marketing to ARM is samsung. id venture to bet seeing intel back at their anti-competative strategies again.

as for your apple article ... sure ... one day ... what does that mean exactly? 2, 3, 5, 9 years from now?

as for your xeon rebuttle, I was using your claims of it equaling an e3, wich comes in a quad core. so 16:4 cores; arm:e3 = 32:8 e5 cores , 32+ : 10 e7 cores.

as for the nvidia article. nvidia is making a server cpu. even attempting to say that cuda isn't supported on ARM is saying cuda isn't supported by your own product. That's a pointless article, of course nvidia is going to support their own hardware.

ummm... no Intel doesn't have 95% of the market, not even at server, much less at desktop. If they did (have 95%), no competion will eat their lunch, because there will be none left lol... none serious competition could survive with only 5% of the market, thought that is exactly what intel intents, which should raise all kinds of alarms in end-users watch list, specially to those that prefer intel brand ( hello! how about $1k celerons ?... lol duuuh! lol )

ARM is gaining but its NOT taking over(neither it will ever like Intel today on PC world)(edt)... they have "quite more" competition on all the Ultramobile landscape (MIPS, x86, even Power) then there are in all the PC world... cause no fake benchmarks yet in ARM world, no intense anti propaganda, and very hard to arrange those since we are talking quite different ISAs, and without those 2 weapons very hard to see Intel becoming the dominant force in that space. And no... its not Samsung, its the all ecosystem, more free more equal more healthy, Samsung advantage is that they don't depend on any else to present complete products into the market, from design to fab to platforms to products... so they embark all profits from all that, share NOTHING, making full strategies more easy to...

As for Nvidia entering the server business... it could be... it would be healthy, it would be cause of the better ecosystem, CUDA on ARM will be only a side effect... and it would be an escape route for them, since they might get thrown out of the desktop by Intel (like with chipsets... lol what are friends for ? lol)

 

[noob2222]

@juan.

3 years to obtain 5-10% isn't a very fast transition. The AMD article claims 20% or more by 2016, the same time ARM sais 5-10.

I never claimed intel market share would increase, but when any company has 95+% share, its a guaranteed bet that with any new competition it will drop.

as for intel just letting arm take over, the only one that has the money to push marketing to ARM is samsung. id venture to bet seeing intel back at their anti-competative strategies again.

as for your apple article ... sure ... one day ... what does that mean exactly? 2, 3, 5, 9 years from now?

as for your xeon rebuttle, I was using your claims of it equaling an e3, wich comes in a quad core. so 16:4 cores; arm:e3 = 32:8 e5 cores , 32+ : 10 e7 cores.

as for the nvidia article. nvidia is making a server cpu. even attempting to say that cuda isn't supported on ARM is saying cuda isn't supported by your own product. That's a pointless article, of course nvidia is going to support their own hardware.

2016 - 2104 = 2 years. ARM doesn't sell server chips. AMD does sell server chips. AMD knows well the market, has the data, and has the feedback from customers. Warsaw is AMD response to some customers. AMD prediction of a 20% for 2016 is feasible. Other analysis predict 15--20%. Oppenheimer & Co. Inc. predict a 21% for microservers in a recent industry analysis

The same analysts call this a "hyper-growth". Intel is estimating microservers will be a 10% for 2015.

New competition doesn't automatically means that other's market share will drop. Look to new Warsaw chip. AMD doesn't plan to gain market share from Intel with the new chip. AMD is releasing Warsaw only for legacy workloads.

Again, It is not Intel vs AMD neither Intel vs Samsung. It is Samsung plus Qualcomm plus Apple plus AMD plus Nvidia plus HP plus Dell plus...

As you will know I cannot have access to Apple internal roadmaps. But I can say you that AMD attack to the server is made the next year and Nvidia plans to release its high-performance ARM by 2015 or so.

I mentioned an E5-2650, which is one of fastest 8 core (16 threads) Xeons and one of the fastests x86 chips. If that is not high-performance then I don't know what is high-performance for you.

Not only AMD is putting the new ARM chip in the same High-Performance tie than Steamroller

but AMD is claiming Seattle will be 4x as fast as fastest Jaguar, whereas claiming that Steamroller (Kaveri/Berlin) will be 2x as fast as fastest Jaguar. I think the equation is easy to solve.

Take a look to the Nvidia blog article. The relevant part is where they say that their Denver project is aimed to power desktops, workstations, servers, and supercomputers with their future ARM chip. Their support of CUDA now for ARM servers implies that they predict that ARM server market will become important and want stay here from minute one. Moreover, Nvidia want CUDA to be ready when they will release their Denver project.

Unlike you who can just believe marketing hype for being proven "facts", I need something a little more substantial than just speculation. You have offered nothing but marketing gimmicks, there is no hard evidence at all of your wild claims, so we are done here.

And HCL, that 95% came from juan's article, I was just running with it since it sounded so rediculous in the first place, didn't want to hurt his feelings more. Hes already on a warpath praising low-performance parts for being the new future of High end computing.

 

[juanrga]

The article quoting a 95% server market share for Intel agrees with others (IDC claims a 94.5%)

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/22/us-intel-servers-idUSBRE96L0P020130722

http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2013/01/04/a-review-of-why-intel-is-worth-33/

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-intel-cpu-processor,15041.html

But please guys continue negating facts, this makes this thread much more funny.

 

[gamerk316]

@juanrga

They are attempting to make the engine multithreaded, post release, without degrading performance. Even harder then trying to do it in the initial design phase. You aren't going to see an engine redesign for a game thats already been released for over a year, for no other reason then its not profitable to do so. Lip service, nothing more.

 

[hcl123]

The article quoting a 95% server market share for Intel agrees with others (IDC claims a 94.5%)

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/22/us-intel-servers-idUSBRE96L0P020130722

http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2013/01/04/a-review-of-why-intel-is-worth-33/

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-intel-cpu-processor,15041.html

But please guys continue negating facts, this makes this thread much more funny.

The problem is, that are facts or propaganda !?

Politically ppl seem to have wake up... that is why there isn't carpet bombing in Syria with possible escalation to WWIII

In IT in this aspect of "conscience" and seeing, we seem to still be back to horse riding... a lot of backwardness, biasing and distortions... a lot of sudo authorities pretending to be the truth... instead of the truth being the authority.

Polemic i know... but in the cases of this kind of "measurements", see like this... there are the small lies, then the big lies, and then there are statistics lol

 

[gamerk316]

So SR might just be competitive with Sandy's in single thread performance.

While being clocked higher by default. No one thing SR is going to make up the ~30% deficit in single core performance at the same clock, but if the chip is 15% faster, and also clocked 20% faster then Intel, then it could approach SB.

 

[de5_Roy]

^^ that's a spam post, copied a line from someone else's post.

 

[blackkstar]

So, AMD's server share is around 5% right now, probably more around 3%. And AMD is expecting ARM to quadruple it?

I don't think I understand how all of this is going to work. It seems like AMD's future plans involve excessive optimism as well as abandoning traditional customers.

AMD talks like it's some sort of simply "we're just moving to better markets" thing, but all I do is see abandoning existing customers in hopes that new markets make up for it. The scariest part of all of this is I recall someone at AMD saying that they were going to fund their new markets with existing ones that are making money. Well it seems to me like AMD is going to abandon the markets that ARE making money in order to get into new ones.

The thing I don't get is how AMD force developers into a wide, many weak core architecture for consoles and then seems to be abandoning the market outside of consoles for gaming CPUs.

I can't really tell if Rory Read is doing something really smart that I can't pick up on or if he's making fatal mistakes.

 

[de5_Roy]

^^ wth. amd isn't abandoning anyone or anything. do read other posts or only the ones with the most doomsaying?

reed's mistake was that he didn't know pc market would decline so fast. otherwise his plan was suitable for amd. despite gradual pc market decline, amd still sells plenty of stuff. their gfx cards and gpus are rising steadily, apus are selling and so on. the only loser segment is their 'performance cpus', otherwise they're doing okay.

arm is for a growing market which is still in small size.

edit 2: reed isn't alone, intel pretty much got caught with their pants down.
edit 3: mostly because intel was like,"sniffle! why is arm so nice and license IP for cheap! we can't have monopoly at all! samsung and qualcomm are haters!" then, "okay we can haz mobile socs, too."

 

[esrever]

Reed didn't have any focus, they were just trying to fight intel on many fronts and that was a battle they weren't going to win considering how slow glofo was on their process ramps. There was also the fact that AMD was losing money on all fronts due to intel's anti competition practices. It just ended up going nowhere. Sticking to high end CPU will continue to lose AMD money. Its not to say AMD will completely abandon it any time soon but they don't have the money to fight intel on every front and they are going to choose the ones which they have the best chances in to focus on. Going ARM servers is just a small step in opening new markets where they don't have to directly compete with a company 100x their size.

AMD's main focus now is APUs and GPUs and pushing gaming in the PC market. It doesn't matter if intel has better high end CPUs if AMD is able to sell the APUs into entry level laptops that can play games. They will move more volume this way and gain more revenue. AMD pretty much needs to money soon or else they will be bankrupt. Its likely this might be their first profitable quarter in years.

 

[GOM3RPLY3R]

Physx will not run on AMD GPUs. Any software implementations would be at cost of the efficiency of the hardware. AMD doesn't need a physics engine since its up to the devs to either implement one or license one. For a dev to choose to use physx is unimaginable in the current situation. If nvidia could have just done gpu physx in software, why wasn't it in the ps3 or 360?

Are you sure? What about those benchmarks where they used PhysX for AMD GPU's to test it vs OGL?

NVIDIA choose to implement PhysX via a CUDA, which AMD doesn't support. For AMD to support PhysX, they would have to support CUDA, which they will NEVER do. Likewise, because NVIDIA owns the license, AMD can't get access to the source to re-implement via DirectCompute.

Older drivers you could force a split AMD-NVIDIA configuration, with AMD as the main GPU, and NVIDIA doing CUDA, but NVIDIA now does a driver check to prevent that.

Then how do people do these PhysX testing on AMD and likewise...? There are still benchmarks for it today. If what you're saying is true, then wouldn't there be no benchmarks?

 

[GOM3RPLY3R]

I am a bit confused in all those intel fans said. I have a few question that I need some real good answers.

1. The software today we use are mainly developped and optimized for intel, is it not?
2. The AMD architecture is alot more different than an Intel and thus it is emulating Intel, as I know AMD has a RISC core inside, is it right?
3. As the software are not optimized for AMD, does they not use all the abilities an AMD chip has?
4. Next year PS4 and XBOX will be using AMD APU's, so all of the games that will be developed in the next years will be optimized for AMD, is it not?
5. As XBOX has an MS operating system inside, MS will also have full optimized OS for AMD next year and can easly port it to PC's.
6. So next year this time games and OS will be optimized for AMD.

As a result we can assume that fully optimized software will be running a lot more efficiently on AMD than today. Am I wrong?
Even now an AMD can match an i7 chip in multi tasking I really would like to see how optimized software would perform.

I also know that Intel chips has some special threads inside that can recognize benchmark programs and fake them, is this wrong? If this is true why does intel need to cheat when their chips are far more superior than AMD?

I also know that most of the tests out there favors Intel, again same question why?

Can someone enlighten me I really would be so glad. I am a bit confused here.

From what I understand, it would not make sense to suddenly change to a random (in many Microsoft buyers eyes) other company. Everyone that isn't into computers and just need one, is used to seeing Intel. Other than that, from what I understand, the Windows Phone came out before Windows 8. If what you're saying was true, then Windows 8 would be optimized for Qualcomm, which it's not.

That may be exaggerated, but lets just say this. The CONSOLE'S OS is completely different than a PC. Thus being said, maybe since the CONSOLE OS is very, very stripped compared to a PC OS and requires seriously less CPU power, they can go with AMD and optimize it for that.

Simply put, the lower should not, and has never, impulsed the hierarchy, in a PC case. These consoles are much less powerful than most computers today. As an example, it's like an old Pentium 4 PC running Windows XP will force the Company to make their new Windows 8, whilst there are i7-3770ks, 4770ks, 3930ks 3960xs and so on, to run optimized for a Pentium 4 CPU.

In other words, it doesn't make sense, and will not work. End of Story.

 

[GOM3RPLY3R]

Reed didn't have any focus, they were just trying to fight intel on many fronts and that was a battle they weren't going to win considering how slow glofo was on their process ramps. There was also the fact that AMD was losing money on all fronts due to intel's anti competition practices. It just ended up going nowhere. Sticking to high end CPU will continue to lose AMD money. Its not to say AMD will completely abandon it any time soon but they don't have the money to fight intel on every front and they are going to choose the ones which they have the best chances in to focus on. Going ARM servers is just a small step in opening new markets where they don't have to directly compete with a company 100x their size.

AMD's main focus now is APUs and GPUs and pushing gaming in the PC market. It doesn't matter if intel has better high end CPUs if AMD is able to sell the APUs into entry level laptops that can play games. They will move more volume this way and gain more revenue. AMD pretty much needs to money soon or else they will be bankrupt. Its likely this might be their first profitable quarter in years.

The fact that AMD makes both GPU's and Processor, and they are losing to two companies, is a little sad. Not saying they're bad, but it just seems strange that since many gamers are coming up to PCs, many of them (including me) are getting into video editing, which AMD does do better on, but for Gaming AND V.E, Intel has that in a great package. Also if the 4930k does sell enough, there may be a drop in the 3930k, which is amazing at both gaming and video rendering/editing.

Honestly, unless AMD can pull off a very powerful single GPU that can perform as good as the 780 for a similar/lower price, but doing great for both Direct X and GL and/or making the Laptop community much better to be competing with Desktops, then honestly they have no chance. It'll be sad, because Intel will probably jack the prices up high if there's no competition, and if that happens then AMD may come back. However, otherwise, that's what I see.

 

[8350rocks]

Reed didn't have any focus, they were just trying to fight intel on many fronts and that was a battle they weren't going to win considering how slow glofo was on their process ramps. There was also the fact that AMD was losing money on all fronts due to intel's anti competition practices. It just ended up going nowhere. Sticking to high end CPU will continue to lose AMD money. Its not to say AMD will completely abandon it any time soon but they don't have the money to fight intel on every front and they are going to choose the ones which they have the best chances in to focus on. Going ARM servers is just a small step in opening new markets where they don't have to directly compete with a company 100x their size.

AMD's main focus now is APUs and GPUs and pushing gaming in the PC market. It doesn't matter if intel has better high end CPUs if AMD is able to sell the APUs into entry level laptops that can play games. They will move more volume this way and gain more revenue. AMD pretty much needs to money soon or else they will be bankrupt. Its likely this might be their first profitable quarter in years.

The fact that AMD makes both GPU's and Processor, and they are losing to two companies, is a little sad. Not saying they're bad, but it just seems strange that since many gamers are coming up to PCs, many of them (including me) are getting into video editing, which AMD does do better on, but for Gaming AND V.E, Intel has that in a great package. Also if the 4930k does sell enough, there may be a drop in the 3930k, which is amazing at both gaming and video rendering/editing.

Honestly, unless AMD can pull off a very powerful single GPU that can perform as good as the 780 for a similar/lower price, but doing great for both Direct X and GL and/or making the Laptop community much better to be competing with Desktops, then honestly they have no chance. It'll be sad, because Intel will probably jack the prices up high if there's no competition, and if that happens then AMD may come back. However, otherwise, that's what I see.

Soon to launch HD 9970 > GTX 780. Mark my words...watch and see.

 

[juanrga]

These consoles are much less powerful than most computers today.

And still some game developer will be launching titles only for console, because most PCs are much less powerful.

 

[palladin9479]

The article quoting a 95% server market share for Intel agrees with others (IDC claims a 94.5%)

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/22/us-intel-servers-idUSBRE96L0P020130722

http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2013/01/04/a-review-of-why-intel-is-worth-33/

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-intel-cpu-processor,15041.html

But please guys continue negating facts, this makes this thread much more funny.

You gotta know how to read those numbers. Their talking commodity servers, basically cheap x86 box's used for apache, ESXi, AD / Exchange / Sharepoint and so forth. In that world Intel completely dominates as they tend to be the better of the two choices. You grab some cheap x86 box's and load ESXi onto them and you can easily populate your entire core client services into them. Things like ARM / SPARC / POWER aren't even factored into those numbers.

 

[palladin9479]

These consoles are much less powerful than most computers today.

And still some game developer will be launching titles only for console, because most PCs are much less powerful.

That would be true about five years ago but I'm beginning to think it's no longer the case. Most PC's today are fairly decent machines, that's why the slump in PC sales this year. The newer consoles will definitely perform better then most PC's, largely due to console hardware level optimizations that aren't present in the PC universe.

 

[8350rocks]

These consoles are much less powerful than most computers today.

And still some game developer will be launching titles only for console, because most PCs are much less powerful.

Realistically because of hardware uniformity and less headache.

There are some things the consoles can do that a PC cannot yet...primarily because of the architecture tweaks and modularity...though in terms of raw horsepower, the 8350 paired with a 9970 would be roughly double the TFLOPS, if not more.