AMD CPU speculation... and expert conjecture

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Since we're bringing up popularity on amazon, take a look here:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_nr_n_0?rh=n%3A172282%2Cn%3A541966%2Cn%3A229189%2Ck%3Acpu&sort=popularity-rank&keywords=cpu&ie=UTF8&qid=1383430245&rnid=493964

FX 8350 most popular AMD CPU (these results include APUs, mind you).

Do you see? AMD losing in laptops to Intel.

The more things are emerging with GloFo the more it's becoming apparent (to me at least) that AMD is focusing on APUs now because they don't have a place to build an APU with a CPU comparable to FX 8350.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_st?keywords=laptop&qid=1383430628&rh=k%3Alaptop%2Cn%3A172282%2Cn%3A541966%2Cn%3A565108&sort=popularity-rank

Laptops, spot the AMD products!

The only way AMD can get a solid mobile win is if they can get into a Mac product. AMD already has wins to get into HEDT and Gaming PC markets.

I have a lot of respect for Juaranga and I've known him for a while under different names in different forums, but I think he is wrong on this one. AMD needs to blow a lot of smoke to investors about going mobile and all that jazz. Analysts are screaming "OMG DESKTOPS ARE DEAD BUY 3 IPADS TO MULTITASK!!!" and AMD is in a position where they're doing very well in a subset of a dying market, when that subset is actually growing. It's like the Titanic is going down and AMD owns all the life boats.

But given the air around what analysts are saying, it'd be impossible to find investors if you go around saying that you're going to focus on PC Gaming. No one would want to invest in that. Not when desktop market share is shrinking overall (gaming PCs are doing better mind you but analysts seem to think that EVERYONE who owns a desktop can do everything they do on a desktop on a tablet) and new consoles are coming out.

There will be a dedicated, high end gaming platform for AMD that supports HSA over dGPU with a large CPU. AMD has been very careful in wording how they are scaling Mantle. They keep saying it scales to a large number of cores. If AMD were never going to release anything with more than 8 cores, they'd be calling it "scales up to 8 cores."

 


Amen, hello 10 cores!

 



This is the best post for some time, completely agree. I have an investment in AMD and have followed this forum topic and all financially related AMD news for a long time. All it comes down to with all the arguing and talking is a fast steamroller cpu. The actual single core performance has to be good. They can obviously make the gpu end of the apu fast with there vast catalogue of gpu tech. They have the unifying tech for the apu. The cpu end of the equation has to be fast in all its forms from low end to high. If they do a good job with the steamroller core then they will be in a very good situation, if they screw this up they will be so far behind they will never catch up. Yes it is true that the x86 computer market is in trouble but AMD can grow in this environment if they take market share from Intel. To take market share from Intel you need a fast steamroller core, simple.
 


what about it? very few motherboards have it.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131987

add another $100, better have a specific purpose for needing it. Extranal HDD? e-sata is compatible across platforms as well as USB 3.0. TB, better make sure the other device has the capability.

Thunderbolt is just a gimmick at this point and hasn't gained much ground. Intel was slow to adopt usb 3.0 hoping that Thunderbolt would take over. Due to compatibility, it never left the ground.
 
I have a lot of respect for Juaranga and I've known him for a while under different names in different forums, but I think he is wrong on this one. AMD needs to blow a lot of smoke to investors about going mobile and all that jazz. Analysts are screaming "OMG DESKTOPS ARE DEAD BUY 3 IPADS TO MULTITASK!!!" and AMD is in a position where they're doing very well in a subset of a dying market, when that subset is actually growing. It's like the Titanic is going down and AMD owns all the life boats.

But given the air around what analysts are saying, it'd be impossible to find investors if you go around saying that you're going to focus on PC Gaming. No one would want to invest in that. Not when desktop market share is shrinking overall (gaming PCs are doing better mind you but analysts seem to think that EVERYONE who owns a desktop can do everything they do on a desktop on a tablet) and new consoles are coming out.

There will be a dedicated, high end gaming platform for AMD that supports HSA over dGPU with a large CPU. AMD has been very careful in wording how they are scaling Mantle. They keep saying it scales to a large number of cores. If AMD were never going to release anything with more than 8 cores, they'd be calling it "scales up to 8 cores.
Click to expand...

This is pretty much how the market is now. We aren't replacing any of our client systems with tablets, especially not ARM tablets. One of our LoB applications has monstrous system requirements. We actually use large expensive notebooks for these specialized systems for mobility purposes but cheap desktops for typical office work due to costing reasons.

You are not doing office automation on a tablet and office automation drives the entire world right now. Desktop is not declining, desktop sales are declining. There are plenty of desktops in the world, everyone needs one and every business needs one for nearly every worker. Thing is office automation has very low requirements and thus business's just buy really cheap systems and lifecycle them every 3~5 years. So now that the market has saturated and there isn't any new customers, just old customers replacing products, the total sales volume is on the decline. It's going to continue going down until it hits an equilibrium were systems are being sold at a rate that corresponds with replacement.
 
^^ +1

said it before. With intel improving by 10% over 3 years, whats the rush to upgrade?

When you have no reason to upgrade, what happens to sales?

Go to any home that bought a HEDT 3-4 years ago and ask them if they need a new system. Go back 5&10 years and ask the same question, a 4 year old system back then was junk.

Same thing will happen to tablets when they peak in performance. People will quit "buying new" and just keep what they have.
 
AMD is in a prime position to take the whole market right now. They blind sided Nvida with the Rx series and now have a tiatan killer for half the price. If Steamroller is good, they could have a i7 killer for the price of i5s, AMD would have both the CPU and GPU markets. With amd's ram, is they make it better and cheeper then, say corsair's they could snag that market also. Amd SSD, better then samgsung's, but for less. You could have a whole AMD system, that would outperform a system with Intel/Nvidia/Corsair/Samgsung, but for less $$$. AMD would not only win the desktop market, but with thier arm intrests, they could capture some of the tablet market as well. The desktop is like a ship sinking, but still sticking out of the water once it is sunk, it will never really go all way under. The thing is is that people bail from the sinking desktop in to lifeboats (tablets) wich amd also owns.
 




I think AMD is aware that the only way to move a lot of DT CPUs is to offer a large amount of performance increase.

They have been watching Intel release chips after chip of <10% improvement and Intel's HEDT sales are not improving. No one wants to upgrade from SB to IB or Haswell unless they are the type to think that going from 170 to 190fps in Skyrim is the cat's pajamas.

The thing is, if you want to move a lot of HEDT systems, you NEED to have something revolutionary. The HEDT platform has been horrifically stagnant since Nehalem came out, from both Intel and AMD.

Intel gave up on that market. They can't squeeze anything significant out of their cores performance-wise, so they're pushing them to mobile. I don't think Intel could come out with a serious product that had 30%+ IPC increase no matter how much money they threw at things.

It's the same thing Nvidia does. When you can't see the gains you want or the competition is putting you in a tough spot, you focus on things unrelated to the main selling point of the product. Like 290x can often beat Titan yet Nvidia is pushing G-Sync and their new features and you can see people defending buying Nvidia for $700 when it's slower than 290x for $550. Intel does the same with power consumption and it's what tech companies do when they have a product that doesn't do the primary goals of what consumers want.

AMD is waiting. I find it extremely curious that there hasn't been ANY sort of talk about HSA features of GCN 1.1 or GCN 2.0 yet. Before Tahiti came out AMD was talking up HSA features and when the card shipped, they were all disabled.

And now suddenly AMD is hush about it? Either AMD gave up completely on dGPU HSA (and there are plenty of slides which contradict this entirely) or AMD is sitting on something waiting for the right time.

I also don't think AMD is replacing AM series with FM2+. Look at a high end Gigabyte board and compare it to a high end FM2+ board

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128508

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128653

Other than the chipset, the UD7 is still in a league of its own. More PCIe, more ports, it's just a better board in general.

Also, the most expensive AM3+ board is twice as expensive as the most expensive FM2+ board.

FM2+ and AM are not targeted at the same markets.
 


are the next amd processors that powerful? i thought there wasn't much info of the specs.
 
I think AMD is aware that the only way to move a lot of DT CPUs is to offer a large amount of performance increase.
Click to expand...

Are we talking OEM sales or enthusiast / boutique builds? Those are two vastly different markets.

OEM box's are all about price, you need to provide "good enough" performance cheaply with a guaranteed delivery of product. This is where business's purchase their systems from, in the hundreds if not thousands per customer. To get here you need design wins and you need to convince system engineers (me) that you can provide a good product that has a really low return rate.

Enthusiast builders are all about performance, this is where you need high performance gaming to get your chip into customers systems.
 


The DIY order parts from newegg/amazon/ncix/etc route.

It's gotten massively popular and the barriers to entry have been completely reduced.

No more jumpers, nothing overly confusing anymore. You can't insert anything wrong.

I think that also has a lot to do with DT sales declining. Dell/HP/etc report that their sales are down because people are just flat out building them.

I hate using anecdotal evidence but the same happened to me. I told my parents to buy a Dell work computer for DT stuff like quickbooks and that I couldn't match the price. It showed up and it was complete rubbish.

I built them an FX 6300 system with a low end dGPU, SSD, and cheap case + 1080p monitor and it was about $500.

I don't understand why a larger fuss isn't made over this. Ask anyone who has been around since the early 00s how many people were building computers back then and then look at it now. The further back you go the less people you had building their own rigs.

And of course this makes sense, Gigabyte, Asus, MSI, etc all do much, much better by making it as easy as possible for users to build their own systems.

I mean, look at how many companies just sell components simply for DIY system builders.
 

it is indeed much cheaper, but it can't go where titan can go - small form factor gaming builds that boutique builders have been pushing now. r9 290x's biggest and only advantage is price. imo big enough to overlook the heat and power use issue from a high perf. enthusiast standpoint.

that's a big if. it's quite possible for amd to outperform current intel offerings (except the lga2011 ones) but they're process-bound. the issue is with software.

amd's ssd and ram are made by other oems, patriot iirc. amd just supplies the brand name and may be customer support.

that has been possible since bulldozer. but since 2011-2012, you can build intel and amd systems under similar price limit and have similar performance (desktop).

tablets are huge risk for amd. at high end, they'd have to contend with apple and qualcomm, who are uarch license holders and depend on tsmc (and samsung). both could easily fab-block amd. at midrange and low end, mediatek. in ultra-mobile gpus, imagination, qualcomm, arm have vast majority of marketshare, even nvidia looks irrelevant despite having their own custom ulp gpu and uarch license (surface rt and surface 2 :lol:).
to get into tablets, they have to have a powerful and power efficient arm core and gpu that scale down to that level while outperforming others. they'd have to have the latest modem as well.

edit: arm tablets, not x86. i think amd has a lot to gain from selling x86 tablets. temash is their x86 tablet soc. i was expecting amd to win a few 7" tablet designs... lately i haven't read anything new on that front.

it remains to be seen. take all rumors and speculations with a big pile of NaCl. keep expectations low and realistic. DO NOT buy into fanboy hype, marketing and shilling.
 


NaCl lol. i just wish there was some way to know if the new cpu's/apu's are worth the wait.
 
Amd's buldozer based CPUs need some kind of better driver for windows, to maximize their performance. I have found that different drivers can do wonders for a product.
 


Yes, they are not, for now. With a simple chipset change, fm2+ could become a enthusiast platform. We know that normal CPUs can run on FM2+, the new athlons. So they could have a 8 core, normal CPU on a fm2+ platform with a chipset comparable to 990fx.
A88FX or A98X maybe?
 
the athlon line are APU with a defective gpu. your still running a cpu without l3 cache and thats one thing games generally want.

Most business apps aren't really affected by the lack of l3 cache. This is the target market for the APU line. People using them for office applications and the like.

sandra-cache-latency.png


http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/memory-scaling-gaming-haswell-richland,3593-10.html

This is one of the things AMD needs to fix. Their l3 cache and main memory have been getting worse since the athlons came out.
 


Being "the top-selling laptop" and being "in the top-selling list for more than one year" are entirely compatible claims :sarcastic:
 


We were talking about bestselling. The bestselling CPU on AMAZON is the FX-6300, followed by the FX-8350 both rank #87 and #88. There are Intel chips that rank higher. The higher I would find is the i5-4670K ranking #14

http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Electronics-Computer-Components/zgbs/electronics/193870011/ref=zg_bs_193870011_pg_5?_encoding=UTF8&pg=5

http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Electronics-Computer-Components/zgbs/electronics/193870011/ref=zg_bs_nav_e_2_541966

Filtering to only CPUs can give impression that the 8350 is selling well

http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Electronics-Computer-CPU-Processors/zgbs/electronics/229189/ref=zg_bs_nav_e_3_193870011

but overall it is 74 positions behing top-selling Intel.

Those are about components alone. If we count pre-build computers then total sales of APUS outperform CPUs by about 4:1. Last data I have FX-8000 series accounted for 2% of total desktop units shipped.



I already gave a link to how AMD lost laptop share to Intel. I add this

http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Electronics-Laptop-Computers/zgbs/electronics/565108/ref=zg_bs_nav_e_2_541966



Sure, there are rumors Apple is disappointed with Intel Haswell. Apple migrating to ARM is not possible now, therefore some people is speculating that AMD could get some Kaveri or Carrizo APU on future Apple laptop. Carrizo? Maybe. Kaveri? I doubt very much.



Well, I have a lot of respect for you and others in this thread. There are only two posters whom I lost the respect due to their posting style, but their names are easy to guess.

I don't think that any serious investor is saying that the desktop is dead, but are saying that desktops are a falling market. Those claims are based in sales data from multiple years plus predictions.

Apple is moving from desktops being their main revenue to laptops/tablets/phone being it now.

Intel and Nvidia are also moving to the tablet/phone market.

AMD was late to react to market changes, 'thanks' to myopic previous head.

Nobody says that desktops will disappear, but that desktops will remain as a niche market.

Parts of that niche market can grow. In fact the most optimistic predictions offer a 6.5% increase in PC gaming (!= whole desktop) for next year.

A 6.5% increase are peanuts for AMD. Why do you believe that AMD shares dropped by about a 15% one day after the Q3 results were made public? Because AMD still has an entire foot in the desktop (about a 50% of its finances still depend on the falling market) and the numbers don't match well still.

Sure you read AMD head claiming that they are moving from a past where most of its revenue did come from PCs to a future where most of its revenues don't come from PCs. AMD is now in a transition period with a 50%-50%.

Also nobody is saying that all desktops are being replaced by ipads. Desktops are being replaced by a mixture of laptops, tablets, TVboxes, hybrids and... desktops.

Finally, I note how some people here spend [strike]fantasizing[/strike] speculating about AM4, 10-core CPUs, triple dGPU configs... but avoids the talk given by AMD to OEMs a pair of days ago, specially the slide #13.
 

..... and ye shall receive...
a88x motherboards galore:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157457
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813132054
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128653
they're already on sale, since socket fm2+ supports trinity and richland.
edit: ... i assume ....er... the e.s. together with the mobo may violate some nda.. may be it's okay as long as the pins and holes don't touch... :ange:
 

Here is the chart showing only CPUs: AMD has 4 of the top ten slots, ahead of most i3 and i5 CPUs:

http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Electronics-Computer-CPU-Processors/zgbs/electronics/229189/ref=zg_bs_nav_e_3_193870011

With i3s and i5s selling so poorly (worse even than FX!!!), I guess Intel will discontinue them 🙂

 


Marketing = public façade.

You are more naïve than I had ever thought if you continue to buy into that.

Also, in response to your earlier claim:

Quote and link the post where I said what you say I said. Otherwise discussion is over and do not say "But you said X..." again without quoting me directly.

EDIT (because you evidently cannot google the differences between substrates):

SOI vs. Bulk characteristics:

http://www.pcper.com/news/Editorial/ST-Ericsson-Shows-First-FD-SOI-Product

Tagged: ST Ericsson, planar, PD-SOI, L8580, FinFET, FD-SOI, Cortex A9, cortex a15, arm


SOI has been around for some time now, but in partially depleted form (PD-SOI). Quite a few manufacturers have utilized PD-SOI for their products, such as AMD and IBM (probably the two largest producers of SOI based parts). Oddly enough, Intel has shunned SOI wafers altogether. One would expect Intel to spare no expense to have the fastest semiconductor based chips on the market, but SOI did not provide enough advantages for the chip behemoth to outweigh the nearly 10% increase in wafer and production costs. There were certainly quite a few interesting properties to PD-SOI, but Intel was able to find ways around bulk silicon’s limitations. These non-SOI improvements include stress and strain, low-K dialectrics, high-K metal gates, and now 3D FinFET Technology. Intel simply did not need SOI to achieve the performance they were looking for while still using bulk silicon wafers.


View Full Size


Things started looking a bit grim for SOI as a technology a few years back. AMD was starting to back out of utilizing SOI for sub-32 nm products, and IBM was slowly shifting away from producing chips based on their Power technology. PD-SOI’s days seemed numbered. And they are. That is ok though, as the technology will see a massive uptake with the introduction of Fully Depleted SOI wafers. I will not go into the technology in full right now, but expect another article further into the future. I mentioned in a tweet some days ago that in manufacturing, materials are still king. This looks to hold true with FD-SOI.

Intel had to utilize 3D FinFETs on 22 nm because they simply could not get the performance out of bulk silicon and planar structures. There are advantages and disadvantages to these structures. The advantage is that better power characteristics can be attained without using exotic materials all the while keeping bins high, but the disadvantage is the increased complexity of wafer production with such structures. It is arguable that the increase in complexity completely offsets the price premium of a SOI based solution. We have also seen with the Intel process that while power consumption is decreased as compared to the previous 32 nm process, the switching performance vs. power consumption is certainly not optimal. Hence the reason why we have not seen Intel release Ivy Bridge parts that are clocked significantly faster than last generation Sandy Bridge chips.

FD-SOI and planar structures at 22 nm and 20 nm promise the improve power characteristics as compared to bulk/FinFET. It also looks to improve overall power vs. clockspeed as compared to bulk/FinFET. In a nutshell this means better power consumption as well as a jump in clockspeed as compared to previous generations. Gate first designs using FD-SOI could be very good, but industry analysts say that gate last designs could be “spectacular”.
Click to expand...

http://www.st.com/web/en/press/t3405

That's also test confirmations from STMicro, who designed the 28nm FD-SOI process GF is using.
 
look at slide 13 more closely, the title is MORE performance with MORE cores. AMD is still advertising that more performance = more cores. A 8 or 10 core steamroller is still very possible.
 
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