AMD's 3GHz K10 to break 30,000 3DMark06

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Intel does have a lot of expectations to meet, but so does every other publicly-held company in a competitive market. They set their goals of putting out a new arch in even years and a die shrink in every odd year- we didn't set those goals for them. If they try and succeed, then props to them for hitting their goals. But if they told us they'll hit them and they miss, then we should be free to say everything from "It didn't matter, they're still more profitable than AMD" to "they bungled their releases, they are poorly managed." The latter is what's being said about AMD about 10h even though in the aggregate they sold more desktop and laptop CPUs than Intel did while being roughly 6-7% of the size of Intel.

I'm not unhappy with either Intel or AMD at the moment. Intel is firing on all 12 cylinders and putting out a multitude of new and very good parts at a very rapid clip and for a good price because the *finally* got away from beating the old dead NetBurst horse and recognize that they have competition. AMD might be in some peoples' dog houses at the moment because the 10h hasn't already shipped, but they are competitive with Intel despite being about 1/20th the size. They shipped more desktop CPUs than Intel did last quarter and almost as many laptop CPUs. That's impressive enough, as well as finally getting back in the black after a bad price war and purchasing ATi.
 


They are in the black? Where and who mentioned this revelation? Losing 500+, 600+, and 600+ million a quarter doesn't show any sign of being in the black - especially in light of a report for 1 month, by a research company that isn't primarily in CPU consumer marketing. Gaining the 2.2 or 1.8B to pay back the MS loan doesn't make them in the black. It just releases them from the terms of that loan. A link or something to where this is mentioned would be nice.

Also, I would love to see how you figured they sold more desktop/laptop CPUs, and shipped more than Intel. I just want to see where you got your information.
 
Sorry, at this point all I can say is SCREW INTEL. I have my reasons, none of which can be discussed without myself getting sued.
 
They are in the black? Where and who mentioned this revelation? Losing 500+, 600+, and 600+ million a quarter doesn't show any sign of being in the black - especially in light of a report for 1 month, by a research company that isn't primarily in CPU consumer marketing. Gaining the 2.2 or 1.8B to pay back the MS loan doesn't make them in the black. It just releases them from the terms of that loan. A link or something to where this is mentioned would be nice.
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Apparently the financial page I read the Q2 earnings on didn't count the liabilities correctly. They lost $600m for Q2 when it was correctly calculated. Sorry about that.

Also, I would love to see how you figured they sold more desktop/laptop CPUs, and shipped more than Intel. I just want to see where you got your information.
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It was on TG Daily: http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/33571/118/

According to the market research firm, AMD-based desktop and notebook PCs achieved a unit share of 51.0% in July in U.S retail: Compared to June 2007, the company was able to steal 13.4 points from Intel; AMD's share was also up 4.3 points year over year from 46.7% in July of 2006.
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Historically, AMD has always been stronger in the desktop segment in U.S. retail and July 2007 was no exception. Current Analysis estimates that 66.6% of all desktop PCs sold during the month carried an AMD processor (Intel: 33.4%).
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AMD was outsold in notebook chips alone, just as I said:

Surprisingly, AMD-based notebooks also showed an unusually strong presence during the month of July. 44.8% of all U.S. retail notebooks integrated an AMD processor – a record high for the company. Unit share was up 11.8 points from 33.0% in June and up 20.5 points from 24.3% in January of this year. Intel Centrino notebooks, on the other hand, were estimated at a retail unit share of 55.2% in July - down from 67.0% in June and more than 75% in January.
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Unless Current Analysis's numbers are off, then what I said before was correct. I know, it's only one month. But it surprised me a lot also as I'd expected the high 20s to low 30s figures that are often quoted as AMD's overall market share. I guess the back-to-school crowd bought a lot of inexpensive AMD-powered machines. If my classmates are a good example, most of the notebooks with a 15.4" screen are AMD-powered, most of the 14.1" units are Intel-powered, and all machines 13.3" and under are Intel-powered. It's about a 50/50 split as to 15.4" and under 15.4" inch screen size and it's also roughly a 50/50 split for Intel vs. AMD for new purchases. I'd also say that almost everybody who ordered a computer got one with an Intel chip and most people who bought one off the shelf at Office Depot or Best Buy got an AMD-powered unit and spent probably 2/3 as much as the people who ordered a machine.
 


Thanks. I was wondering if you saw some other article other than the one that Current Analysis put out. The reason being is that, with such good news, no financial outfit (Barron's, Bloomberg, or even WSJ - not to mention the tech analysis - Mercury or Gartner) said anything to corroborate this achievement.

I don't doubt that AMD (and Intel) sold a lot of CPUs in low end/mid range system, the problem is the article (based on Current Analysis' report) didn't really go into what sort of profit margin either company made. Just cause a system was sold for $500, doesn't mean Intel or AMD made $500 off the purchase. Also, the report didn't really go into detail what type of CPUs were sold in most systems.

Thanks for the link.
 


The article said that the best-selling desktop was an HP unit with an AMD Athlon 64 4400+ and the best-selling desktop with an Intel CPU was also an HP unit, with an E4400. No mention about the notebooks, though.
 


Well, those are the low/mid range CPUs where profits are pretty hard to come by. Unless AMD is making those CPUs for less than $75 a CPU, they aren't making much money - retail price in Newegg is $84.99. The Intel offerring is in the same boat, but with a retail cost of $125.99 a CPU, Intel would have to be making those CPUs for under $115 to be profitable. Again, these are just guesses, since I am not privy to how much each company's costs are per CPU.

(Just to clarify - I made up those numbers for price per CPU vs. retail costs. I figured that if a CPU costs $10 less to make than what it sold, that would be a good profit per CPU. I know that OEMs get a price per tray, but without knowing how much each OEM prices each unit, it's hard to really get a real profit margin per CPU sold, in a pre-built system. So, please, don't jump me for my numbers, I made them up.)

Also, after re-reading the article, it seems more to be about retail market share, and not so much CPU market share. So, the 51.0% increase was in retail, which may or may not affect overall CPU market share. Again, this is the same place AMD fell into with the "30% market share at all cost" battle cry. If they do gain CPU market share in Q3 (as they did in Q2), how will the lowered pricing (no matter what the 1 month retail market share percentage equates to) affect their bottom line?
 
Which is why, although AMD regained 66% of the market share they lost in Q1, they only gained 1/2% of market revenue. Not good at all, and obviously reflects the effects of their lower margins resulting from the reduced ASP.

But they are doing (at least in part) what they have to do. While Current Analysis's numbers are nice (if they are truthful) they dont reflect the revenue. Even with increased sales AMD is still well below previous revenue levels. If they could freeze margins @ current levels, they still have to take well over 50% of the total market (at current market division percentages)just to regain their Q4 revenue level. Selling cheaper has bought them back some market share, but not the income. IMO though, thats what they needed to do. I dont beleive we would be seeing them regain market share if they had not lowered prices, which (again IMO) would have resulted in even greater hemoraging of both market share and revenue. And right now, revenue is the number I am really curious about. More sales wont mean much if their current margins are so low that they havent been able at least partially stem their $600+million per quarter losses. even if they have taken a bite out of the losses, even 50% for the sake of argument, that still leaves them bleeding $300+ million a quarter - which only gives them about 5 quarters until they hit net sum zero.
 


True.
Unless AMD stops the bleeding, they aren't looking to healthy going into 2008. The most recent blow is the downgrade from "High Risk" to "Speculative Risk" by Citigroup's Glen Young. Link.
This could be very bad for stockholders, except those with the guaranteed notes.
1 month out of 12 does not make a great year. Considering the revenue that is barely generated from that month's sales, I wouldn't be to optimistic about a glowing 1 month report.
Overall, I agree with your assessment that they cannot withstand more 500-600 million losses a quarter. Add to the fact that Intel has not stopped with new product launches, and their current "Tick-Tock" strategy, it could be a grim end of year for AMD, if Barcelona (which they are placing almost all their hopes on) does not live up to the hype.
 


Okay, back on topic.

Since the upcoming Phemon supposedly scored 30k in 3DMARK06, and since the Inq reporter (Theo) seemingly can remember every thing about the benchmark, even after losing his laptop which had the purported pictures of said 30k score, I would love to hear what the SM and CPU scores were.

Also, if it was so record breaking, how come there is nothing posted at Futuremark of this? Hell, wouldn't it be great to flaunt this score over all the Quad and Core 2 Duos that are in the top spots right now?

I still call BS on this one. Heck, if they put the 23k score up in Futuremark, I would start to believe this.
 
Well, Ed Stroligo over at overclockers had this to say....


Beware 3DMark 2006 . . .
by Ed Stroligo - 8/29/07
There's an article floating around that I'm afraid you're going to have to take with a big block of salt.

It purports to provide 3DMark 2006 scores for a K10 quad-core processor running at 2.5 and 3.0GHz.

The purported scores, K10 vs. K10, were:

2.5GHz: 23,768
3.0GHz: 30,031


Since these are higher scores than the current world record of about 27,000 achieved with a grossly overclocked Intel quad-core, this looks impressive.

There's a few problems, though:

First, the 3DMark score went up 26% just by increasing the processor speed 20%. That's a scaling of 130%. That's pretty good, matter of fact, it's too good to be true based solely on changing the speed of the same type CPU.

Second, this is especially true for 3DMark 2006, which is primarily a video card, not a CPU benchmark. As you can see here, the percentage increase in 3DMark scores based on increases in CPU frequency isn't 130%, it's less than 30%. For instance, for the quad-cores listed, a frequency increase of 25% yields just a 6% increase in the score. That's a scaling percentage of 24%.

Therefore, an 20% increase in CPU speed alone ought to get you a 3DMark score about 5% better, not over 25%.

So where's the rest? The article mentions that the video cards were overclocked. It doesn't say if they were overclocked at 2.5GHz, but somehow I think not, so overclocking the video card would account for another chunk of that 26%, probably somewhat more than that of the CPU speed.

That still leaves somewhere around half the improvement unaccounted for. Where might that be?

It's possible that "optimized" drivers were used to improve the score, but there's a much simpler and probably more likely explanation:

3DMark 2006 can be run a number of ways, different resolutions and different video processing modes. Reduce the resolution and video processing and, as this article illustrates, the scores go up. The differences aren't night and day, but the score can be manipulated enough to account for the rest of the reported increase.

I don't people don't like gnatty details, but unless you know the exact specifications under which 3DMark 2006 (and many other benchmarks) were run, and compare those numbers to those run under the same conditions, apples to apples, comparisons are likely to be useless.

Ed
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Its Ed, so you can take this with as big a truckload of salt as the 3dmark
 
Here's a few thoughts:

1. The Phenom needs a lot of RAM bandwidth and their OCing from 2.50 to 3.00 GHz was a straight-up, no-divider LDT overclock, which increased the RAM bandwidth by 20% and led to a more-than-linear increase in CPU performance. This doesn't sound really likely to me, but who knows.

2. The 2900XTs were bus-choked and in OCing, they didn't lock the PCIe bus frequency and overclocked the PCIe bus as well, increasing data transfer to it and increasing the performance of the GPUs along with the CPUs. The GPUs would probably crash as 20% is a lot to OC the PCIe bus by and have it work well. That's why the locks were invented in the first place..

3. The 2900XTs were data-starved by the CPU and increasing the CPU's crunching power caused not only the CPU's contribution to increase but the GPUs' as well. This is a more likely story

4. They probably overclocked the GPUs or OCed them more when they did the CPU at 3.0 GHz to do a hell-bent-for-leather overclock and you're seeing both increases reflected in the scores.

5. They used a moderate resolution like 1024x768 or 1152x864 where the CPU and GPU don't really have a clear decision as to who's in charge of determining the numbers like the CPU is at low res and the GPU is at high-res. So increasing the CPU clock gives more to both the CPU and GPU part of the scores.

I'd bet #4 is the most likely, but #5 was alluded to in the article and is possible, but kind of odd. Now two guys have said the same things, so either Charlie must have more drinking buddies or something is actually out there. It should not be too long until we start to see somebody bench some of the 10h Opterons that will show up before the first Phenoms do. They're due to ship in about a month, so we should see them soon, but you know how AMD likes to hold their cards close...
 
Well, in any case, if this article was c**p we can slaughter the chap who wrote it, hopefully he loses his job, and AMD will more than likely be down for its final count and they'll deserve it.
The only thing keeping AMD alive right now is fanboy "hope"...the HOPE that they will release something worth buying - hence endless paper statements and paper releases and un-backable rumors.
If enough of us just keep on "hoping" for that killer AMD processor, maybe, MAYBE one day they will actually release it and AMD can make some money.
But I'm sorry, the upcoming X38 set and 45nm intel procs look great, should OC great, and we pretty much know EXACTLY how well they will perform and we also can COUNT on them being released. The fact of the matter is, come Christmas AMD will still likely be telling us to hold out for the good procs. But I'll be happily playing Crysis and what not on an intel proc by then.
I mean, it would be great if AMD procs were so much better than intels, but it doesn't make sense for them to not let us all know about it, because for whatever reason they are holding back info, they ARE LOSING consumers to intel.
As part of AMD's "fanboy hope" strategy of staying alive, I wouldn't be surprised if that Inq nitwit was paid off by them for the article. FFWD 6 months, hopefully we'll all know by then.
 


Without Intel's Core 2 Duo's release do you think that the prices would be as low as they are now? I hope to god AMD comes back with something amazing!
 
1. The Phenom needs a lot of RAM bandwidth and their OCing from 2.50 to 3.00 GHz was a straight-up, no-divider LDT overclock, which increased the RAM bandwidth by 20% and led to a more-than-linear increase in CPU performance. This doesn't sound really likely to me, but who knows.
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You got it the other way around.

Scenario 1:
CPU: +20% OC
Memory: 0% OC
Max Performance Gain: +20% (tops)

Scenario 2:
CPU: +20% OC
Memory: +20% OC
Max Performance Gain: +20% (tops)

Scenario 2 has a much higher probability of getting closer to +20% performance boost, but, without further architectural change, no higher-than-linear scaling would be possible.

Suppose I told you that I OCed a E4300 (1.8Ghz, 800Mhz FSB) that used DDR2-800 by 33% and got 2.4Ghz @ 1066Mhz FSB and worked with DDR2-1066. Would you really believe it if I told you that I got +50% performance on a 33% system-wide overclock?... Nothing else has changed...
 
Hey turpit ... like your saying Ed at Overclockers is more reliable than Mike, Charlie and Theo at the Inq ??

All Ed does is bash AMD .... period. The guy is obsessive ... read some of his trash.

The Inq on the other hand writes short funny and enlightening stuff ... sure there is some rumour there ... but these guys have the inside track on AMD second to none ... period.

Just thought I'd throw my 50 p in there.

I think the 3D scores are a bit too good for comfort too though ... they might have had a fewpints before posting and the glasses tend to fog the eyes a bit ... heh heh.

Then again ... the hits on their website must have been going through the roof.

 
This reads alot like Intel "fanboy hope". Lighten up...

 


The statement about AMD staying in business because of Fan boy hope is nonsense. I'm sorry, but your post just seems like Intel bias fanboy rubbish.
 
Well I can see there are a lot of AMD fanboys in these forums.
Just calling it as I see it, at this point in time.

I'll gladly buy an AMD 3GHz quad Phenom if they ACTUALLY come out and ACTUALLY outperform intel, but I'm not watiitng past Christmas. I'll have too many games to play by then.

I'll still buy ATI gfx though 😉
 
Calling BS on AMD 3DMark Score Rumors

http://www.hardocp.com/news.html?news=Mjc3ODIsLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdCwsLDE=

clap_1.gif
 


CPU choice aside, can you explain why you'd go ATI at this point? Especially if you're playing games...
 

Why will you have too many games to play then? Are your parents buying them for you for Christmas along with that new Intel system? :lol: :sarcastic:
I think that you are completely off base on your comments. The AMD backers here are hoping for something TANGIBLE from AMD, not the silver-bullet Intel killer that everyone else out there in the media like to hype their stuff up to be before it comes out. Fanboys just bash and don't care about the overall health of the industry. Hell, they don't care if AMD puts out a Wolfdale/Kentsfield/Conroe/whatever the flavor of the month is killer because AMD isn't good enough to put in their machines. Count me as one of these AMD "hopers" because I really do want AMD to keep Intel on their toes so that they are forced to keep up the pace. If you honestly say that Intel would be as forward-thinking and innovative without AMD around, just remember back when they said that NO ONE would EVER need 64bit processors. Page forward a few years, and 4GB is the new 512MB and now we all are going to HAVE to have 64bit machines.
Here's a conspiracy theory for you: What if Intel was paying these sites to put out all this FUD on AMD's new products just to build the hype so much that even if AMD could compete clock-for-clock with their new chips that it wouldn't matter because they can't reach 30,000 in 3dmark or whatver bullshit you want to throw out there?
Another one: What if Intel was trying to kill AMD's sales this quarter by putting all this FUD out there just to stifle their short-term sales by making people wait for the Giant-Killer?
There might be something to this, so don't just discount it. Intel and other businesses in other industries (The Federal Government comes to mind) do this type of spinning all the time. Truely un-biased information is IMPOSSIBLE to find. Reporters are merely idealists who wear rose-colored glasses and think that only they can report unbiased information when in reality, no one can report unbiased information because of their own perceptions not being in tune with reality. Remember: your perceptions make up your reality. Reality shapes your perceptions, but it's only half the equation.. the other half is your own ignorance and prejudice.
Sorry to get off-topic this bad, but someone had to say it.
On topic: Remember: AMD has NOT claimed much of anything as to their performance for these processors. It's all the outlying bullshit artists who expect people like us to just read what they write and believe it. It's fun to read and philosophise about "what-if" their made-up statements are true. But, in reality without definitive proof, if you believe what these reports say, you're as stupid as they think you are.
 
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