AMD Piledriver rumours ... and expert conjecture

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Reynod

Reynod

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Mar 26, 2007
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We have had several requests for a sticky on AMD's yet to be released Piledriver architecture ... so here it is.

I want to make a few things clear though.

Post a question relevant to the topic, or information about the topic, or it will be deleted.

Post any negative personal comments about another user ... and they will be deleted.

Post flame baiting comments about the blue, red and green team and they will be deleted.

Enjoy ...
 
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Long time people, nature of the job though but things starting to hit anticipation stakes. I know I was set back a bit organising samples at a later stage but still it seems like forever to come yet.


So in the interim I turn to another question, does anyone know what the new Sapphire HD Radeon 7970 6GB Toxic card will retail for, it is believed to be a buffed Tahiti core but overall the fastest single GPU out, the eyefinity performance from the rumblings is insane at 25x14 res.
 
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Common misconception is that the enthusiast market actually means something. It's such a small fraction of the sales pie that even if AMD made the greatest CPU evar!! it wouldn't mean much. OEM sales are where all the money is (consumer wise) and most of that money is in the low / mid sector not the high end. When people buy computers, they go to a big box store, or order online and usually get the cheap $999 or less model. They don't sit there and pick out motherboards / ram / CPU's, at most they'll be presented with three to four CPU options and they'll pick the one they think they can afford.

Most of us build our own rigs, so absolute performance is a critical issue. We like to know that we've made something and own it. Most consumers couldn't care less what's inside the PC, as long as it does what they want it to do.
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there is something in the form of mindshares, if AMD's brand itself isn't recognized it would sell less cpus to the general public. People may not know what cpu they buy but the intel inside sticker is something a lot of common people will see and notice on their computers. Intel is good about its marketing. If AMD completely loses the enthusiast market, they would lose a lot of mindshares from semi-knowledgeable people. Many people who know a little about computers would not select AMD due to intel being better and also affect the people around them. many everyday people shopping for a HP or Toshiba would pick the intel models because they recognize the brand. In the end losing mindshares is even more detrimental than losing any benchmarks to a business like AMD.
 
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So in the interim I turn to another question, does anyone know what the new Sapphire HD Radeon 7970 6GB Toxic card will retail for, it is believed to be a buffed Tahiti core but overall the fastest single GPU out, the eyefinity performance from the rumblings is insane at 25x14 res.
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Im just putting a guess at $599, double vram cards are generally very overpriced from what I can recall.
 
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AMD is being squeezed from all sides. Intel from the high end on CPU and ARM from the low end. And Nvidia from the high end on GPU and Intel on the low end. The one area that AMD is the clear leader is heterogeneous computing. If AMD can make it work this is their one saving grace.
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From http://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-q22012-ultrabook-ivy-bridge,16336.html

If Intel was able to slide through the quarter with a few dings here and there, why was AMD apparently bruised so badly?

AMD recently said that it expects its revenue to decrease about 11 percent sequentially. The reason may be that AMD is much more exposed to the consumer business than Intel is and economic troubles in Western Europe and North America may reveal themselves much more than they do at Intel, which still has a blossoming enterprise business. Intel and AMD executives usually do not comment on each other's businesses, but they do place needle pokes whenever they can. When Otellini was asked why AMD declines and Intel does not, the executive said that Intel may have "taken share" from its rival especially in the low-end consumer business, which would be rather remarkable and troublesome for AMD.

The low-end consumer business is AMD's strength and should have been resistant against an Intel attack, given the fact that AMD secured the supply of more 32 nm APUs in Q2. AMD's recent strategic changes were especially targeted at this market segment and if Otellini is right, AMD may have to make some adjustments.
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From http://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-q22012-ultrabook-ivy-bridge,16336.html

If Intel was able to slide through the quarter with a few dings here and there, why was AMD apparently bruised so badly?

AMD recently said that it expects its revenue to decrease about 11 percent sequentially. The reason may be that AMD is much more exposed to the consumer business than Intel is and economic troubles in Western Europe and North America may reveal themselves much more than they do at Intel, which still has a blossoming enterprise business. Intel and AMD executives usually do not comment on each other's businesses, but they do place needle pokes whenever they can. When Otellini was asked why AMD declines and Intel does not, the executive said that Intel may have "taken share" from its rival especially in the low-end consumer business, which would be rather remarkable and troublesome for AMD.

The low-end consumer business is AMD's strength and should have been resistant against an Intel attack, given the fact that AMD secured the supply of more 32 nm APUs in Q2. AMD's recent strategic changes were especially targeted at this market segment and if Otellini is right, AMD may have to make some adjustments.
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I'd be weary of that "may have" but that's bad news if it's true. I think it's more likely a result of low volume in BD and Radeon due to bad pricing. Hence why prices of BD and Radeon have plummeted recently.

On the other hand, the initial shipments of Trinity mobile should be on the books for Q2, so I find this surprisingly plausible.
 
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GF's investors have deep deep pockets. They're backed by Abu Dhabi oil.

A continuation of a bad trend that has only hurt the US economy. More manufacturing being lost.

More reason to buy Intel who is building new fabs in the US.
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you forget that it was Intel's immoral and illegal business practice that forced AMD to sell off in the first place.

Then again, maybe youd rather see the fabs closed down versus keeping all the people working there employed by an overseas company buyout.
 
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I'd be weary of that "may have" but that's bad news if it's true. I think it's more likely a result of low volume in BD and Radeon due to bad pricing. Hence why prices of BD and Radeon have plummeted recently.

On the other hand, the initial shipments of Trinity mobile should be on the books for Q2, so I find this surprisingly plausible.
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Personally I'd wait for a neutral third party like iSuppli to give some unbiased info 😛, but then I also think AMD should have kept selling the Phenom 2's after they knew BD would be underwhelming, and only stop when PD was released.

What I think actually happened is that AMD lowered their prices in order to move Llano's and unload P2's from their stock, and unfortunately the BRIC countries and Europe didn't buy enough to offset the lower ASPs and margins. But we should get the juicy details tomorrow evening after AMD reports their Q2 earnings.
 
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do not let 'triny' hear you say that... 😗
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IIRC he was predicting that Intel would get sandwiched between AMD at the high end and ARM at the low end. While I don't recall his pulling a Sharikou and saying Intel would "BK" (bankrupt, not Burger King 😀) by tomorrow morning, or maybe the end of 2013 😛, he did seem pretty confident that Piledriver or Elevator or whatever comes after would reclaim the top end and start Intel on a downward spiral.
 
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^^ Also why AMD's revenue has plummeted recently.

I'd be very interested to see what AMD's profit on each chip sold is. It CAN'T be good with FX right now...
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If I remember correctly, AMD's gross margin last quarter was 48% until they added in the Glofo expense, dropping it to a whopping 2%.
IIRC he was predicting that Intel would get sandwiched between AMD at the high end and ARM at the low end. While I don't recall his pulling a Sharikou and saying Intel would "BK" (bankrupt, not Burger King 😀) by tomorrow morning, or maybe the end of 2013 😛, he did seem pretty confident that Piledriver or Elevator or whatever comes after would reclaim the top end and start Intel on a downward spiral.
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McIntel
or
BAMDK

One of the most popular fast electronics manufacturers
or
The second best sandwiched between bankruptcy.

Ironic that I just had BK today when I rarely eat fast food, and I forgot they "improved" their fries awhile ago. They're just as improved as Bulldozer was over PhII.

It's sad. There was a lot of potential in AMD, but they're bleeding out their experienced employees.
http://semiaccurate.com/2012/07/18/trinitys-system-architect-turns-up-at-apple/
 
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Well, i believe that AMD will stick with 32nm for a while since the speculations is that there are going to be a total of 4 generations.

I know that BD wasn't a great CPU but you have to look at AMD's past experience. They are a company that only got it right the first time ONCE. If you look through everything, they usually catch up at the end of the architectures life which i believe is the most important moment.

My personal theory is that AMD has been worrying too much on the APU's and because of breaking in to a different chip market they also screwed themselves. You have to look at this in a bigger aspect. I've seen the performance benchmarks of the APU's when pinned with the Intel equivalent and personally i thought for low end PC's and Notebooks, they did very excellent, but that costed them on the bigger chips.

People forget that Intel screwed up too when Windows Vista came out and AMD had a decent comeback on the Phenom II because it was optimized for Vista. Also people forget that the relationship with Microsoft and Intel isn't too great. It's VERY possible that Microsoft and AMD are working together for when it comes to it's final stages. A great majority of problems get solved at the very end of production. I'm not saying that Windows 7 is to blame for BD or anything of such, but the fact is that when you try to create a new architecture, there WILL be speed bumps. When you look at the Phenom vs the BD, the architecture is as different from Intel's Pentium 4 to the Core 2 Duo.

I can say that i love AMD and Intel equally. I'm always a fan of the underdog simply because I don't want to see any CPU company control an entire monopoly. If that happens, then you'll see Intel pull the same bullshit that happened when the 1st generation i7 chips with $1000 overpriced chips. Sorry but i think $1000 for a stupid chip is pointless when the performance increase in the real world is minimal.
 
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If that happens, then you'll see Intel pull the same bullshit that happened when the 1st generation i7 chips with $1000 overpriced chips. Sorry but i think $1000 for a stupid chip is pointless when the performance increase in the real world is minimal.
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Sorry, but this isn't a recent Intel-exclusive trend. It's standard for the best desktop CPU to be priced at about $1000.

AMDPricing.jpg
 
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amd financials
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-financials-q2-2012-brazos-bulldozer,16364.html
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Looks like BD Opterons haven't done too well, despite being designed as server CPUs. Wonder if their marketshare is lower than the what - 5% last quarter?

Read also mentioned something about not chasing the low end anymore - if that is true, then AMD is at long last abandoning their 'marketshare at all costs' strategy..
 
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