AMD Talks About APU Commitment at Computex 2013

[Marcus Yam]

AMD is confident in its technology.

AMD Talks About APU Commitment at Computex 2013 : Read more

 

[sarinaide]

Fantastic period for AMD, execution and product line is important and the line up is quite aggressive allowing end users to be spoiled for choices, very exciting time and a bit of a rebirth.

 

[Benthon]

I see the current situation in the market to be something like this.. Intel basically won the "biggest, bestest, most efficient CPU" race. Except AMD walked out of the race halfway through and decided to participate in the "APU" race. By the time Intel finished the CPU race, nobody was there at the finish line to congratulate them because the market shift to APU's is already starting to happen.
I'm a huge fan of Intel in my desktop (with Haswell being meh), but honestly the integrated graphics in Richland with 2133MHZ RAM and the upcoming Kaveri are sick and Intel really isn't even close. Now they're playing catch up and I bet they don't like it.

 

[silverblue]

Well... they are, but they charge through the nose for Iris Pro. I'm sure AMD could devise an APU with L4 cache if they really wanted to show Intel up but I'd rather they just get Kaveri here as soon as possible.

 

[somebodyspecial]

Kaveri would be impressive if 20nm this year, not 28nm.
It's difficult to add embedded ram without blowing up cost (they already lose money on every cpu sale, that's how you rack up 1.18B in losses when the gpu side barely breaks even - you're being killed on cpu sales), where Intel offsets some with 22nm saving die cost. AMD will have a tough time with Broadwell which again will concentrate on gpu perf and leave us CPU people at 10-15% if lucky. I'd expect broadwell to double that cache to 256mb or something else that will dramatically up perf. They can afford it unlike AMD. At 14nm they will have plenty of room to play with gpu. If they released iris to the desktop A10-6800 wouldn't make a cent. They will do this move next time though, as Arm will be in their cpu space on all fronts by then (notebook, server, desktop) so they will be able to legally kill AMD with FCC coming to get them.
You could argue they could pull this now, but I think they'll just wait until they KNOW the FCC won't come for them at 14nm. By then Arm will be selling desktops, notebooks etc with chrome, firefoxos, etc and of course servers with all the Arm chips coming there too (Project Boulder etc, cavium etc, everyone planning arm server chips). If there are 6-7 cpu competitors, Intel can kill AMD and get it over with.

 

[neilquan]

@Somebodyspecial Lets hope that doesnt happen. Afterall, its competition that pushes these companies to bring out better products. Without it wed be enslaved to whatever timetable they felt like releasing something new with only mild upgrades.

 

[danwat1234]

45w mobile APUs? 45w CPUs for those you will have a dedicated GPU, so we can have decent single core performance?

 

[sarinaide]

The big issue and why AMD had losses was because traditional markets were all AMD catered for, cue 2013 and AMD have products in every market sector with Tamash and Kabini being fantastic for what they are intended to do, Richland is by far the best iGPU solution on a cost to performance basis and is considerably smoother than HD4600 and is another evolutionary step of the APU. Rory Reed took a ton of criticism but despite the difficult 18 months AMD had upfront things are looking a lot better and most is down to having a product line.