Discussion: AMD's last hope for survival lies in the Zen CPU architecture

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http://venturebeat.com/2015/09/09/amd-to-set-up-radeon-graphics-chips-as-a-separate-business/

Uh oh, why would the GPU unit need it's own division, announced the same exact day investors are purchasing a fifth of the company?

All the signs are there for a spinoff. This is happening faster then I thought.
 
As for Google buying / investing money into AMD...

Definitely not going to happen. They do not need AMD intellectual or physical properties in their products. Doing so does not help their brand or strategy to get more ads in front of people. Besides Google itself doesn't actually have a large product presence in the market with the exception of Chromebooks. In 2013, the Nexus 7 only had an 8% market share of all Android tablets sold. Sales of the Nexus 6 (smartphone) and Nexus 9 have been sluggish and actually dragged down Google's revenues.
 


Because if the ultimate goal is to spinoff the Radeon GPU into it's own company it is easier to do so when it is its own division. As a division it is compartmentalized which makes it much easier to spinoff at a later point in time. Not creating it as a division now means they would have to separate the CPU and GPU side of the business later which would prolong the process needed to spinoff the GPU side of AMD into a separate company.

If the spinoff does happen I am sure there will be licensing agreement where AMD can continue to use Radeon GPU architectures in AMD's APUs. Oh well... I guess this is the fruits of AMD's $5.4 billion purchase of ATI Technologies back in 2005.
 
^^ I know; you missed the implied sarcasm in my post. I'm well aware making Radeon a business unit makes it a lot easier to spin them.

I'm not surprised this is happening, just that its happening so fast. AMD should have had enough cash to reach Zen, unless either their losses spiked again, or Zen got delayed. But then again, remember those rumors months ago about AMD bringing in an outside firm to examine AMDs long term options? Maybe this has been brewing for a couple months now, which would make a bit more sense.

Gonna be an interesting 18 months for AMD, that's for sure.
 


Agreed Man. They already charge quite a lot for their CPU's.
 
Since price gets brought up a lot, something I find interesting. Things like the pentium overdrive p166 was around $499 in 1997. Amd's k6-233mhz was $469. The amd k6 2-350 was $317 in 1998. Their k6-3 380 was $349. The p3 era xeons at 733mhz were $826. The p3 733 was $776 while amd's 750mhz athlon was $799.
http://processortimeline.info/proc1998.htm

Misconception number one, that amd's have always been cheaper or better bang for the buck than intel, not true. Misconception number two, that intel charges 'quite a lot' for their cpu's again not true. Even after 17yrs of inflation, intel cpu's are much cheaper than they used to be at face value. Amd's cpus are priced right in line with intel's current chips comparing performance to performance.

Not sure where people think that suddenly cpu's cost 'so much'. If anything, consider gpu's. The 8800 gt/gts were considered fairly high end cards back in 2007 and they were around $200-250 when they came out. Now a relatively high end card like the gtx 980 was around $550-600 when it came out. So all in all, while both gpu's and cpu's have grown substantially more powerful over the years, cpu's are 25-50% of what they used to cost while gpu's are more than double what they used to cost. Yet it's cpu's people complain about the most when it comes to high prices.
 


While that is true, it does seem like AMD does have better prices compared to Intel, even though Intel does perform better. AMD does have good prices though.
 
They have a bit better prices if you think of it like 8350/i7, 6300/i5, 4xxx/i3 but that's not the case. There aren't just a handful of convenient 'tiers' anymore, and it's more like i7, 8350/i5, 6300/i3, 4xxx, pentium.

Considering those comparisons - which again depends on local pricing, some of the prices are way different in the uk or other regions so this is going by u.s. prices (where I'm located so where my comparison comes from).

8350 - $165
i5 4460/4590 - $177-$194

6300/6350 - $98-$120
i3 4170 - $112

fx 4300 - $84
pentium g3258 - $65

They pretty much trade blows (sometimes intel is cheaper, sometimes amd is cheaper) or break even. The difference is around $20-30 even when they swap blows and unless replacing a cpu is a monthly expenditure it's not going to have much affect on a total build. $20-30 might buy a nice fan or two. By the time you factor in motherboards and coolers, things can even out further.

A locked i5 is a bit more expensive than an 8350, though runs comfortably on its stock cooler and can be easily paired with a lesser expensive b85/h97 motherboard. If you try to get a price competitive motherboard for the 8350 you end up with vrm cooling problems and adding heatsinks and extra fans to try and make up for it or end up with a more expensive motherboard and many times people end up pairing it with at least a 212 evo and now the $20-30 price difference is lost. It all balances out in the end yet intel continues to dominate most of the performance charts whether office productivity, video editing, gaming etc. Technically that puts intel's products in better favor of price/performance.

I could understand the big gripe if we were talking a $200+ price difference in builds one brand vs the other but it just isn't that way. It's more like <$30 for a purchase that's more of a long term purchase. Even rapid upgrade type folks perpetually upgrading low end budget rigs probably aren't upgrading more than once a year. A worthwhile investment in the first place would prevent that. Even looking at intel, leaving amd out of it so as not to pick on amd - say someone buys a pentium. It's not quite good enough so now they up it to an i3. Nope, now they need an i5. Those might be annual purchases, but now they have an i5 that ended up costing them $357. They could have bought an i7 and saved over $30 and still ended up with a better cpu at the end of a couple years.

Factoring in that $30 or so price difference, even worst case scenario if it were annually that's nothing. That's 50 cents a week. Even a younger kid in school without a car can do a few chores for neighbors here and there over 12mo and manage $30. If they put some hustle into it and put in the hard work they could probably earn that in a day or two. For as badly as people want just gaming systems alone, there's plenty of incentive. That's not even factoring a working adult. How many of those people consistently complain about high cost of pc parts and how many of those will be blowing more than that price difference tomorrow night having dinner out that they probably won't even remember a week or two from now. The prices really aren't that big of a deal and this isn't coming from someone with triple monitors and sli'd 980ti's like money is nothing, this is coming from someone who upgrades in stages as budget allows.

Assuming my intel based system cost me even $40-50 out of pocket more than if I'd opted for an amd system, I'm getting better performance for the tasks at hand day in and day out for a build I'm guessing will last me a good 3-4yrs or more. Just the other day I needed a roof ladder for a project and instead of buying one for $100 I built one for literally less than $10. It's a moot point just that fast and easy.
 


Intel might be better for gaming, but the FX series AMD had are all unlocked and have more cores for money. The FX 8xxx series has 8 unlocked cores for as low as $130. I realize that they are weaker cores, but there is a nice advantage when rendering, Video editing and other things in that nature. I hope Zen gives AMD more success than FX seeing how Bulldozer was a complete flop. Vishera is better, but Intel's Skylake is supposed to be really good. What is an Intel equivalent to AMD's FX 8320? The Core i5's you mention aren't even unlocked.

 


The last Quarter of next year? Really AMD? What is simultaneous multi-threading?
 


SMT is the method of using two or more threads per core. Chances are we could be seeing four threads per core on the Zen architecture, but we need to let the performance benchmarks speak for themselves.
 
The potential delay is due to GlobalFoundries' low yields with the 14nm FinFET manufacturing process. It is something AMD has no control over.

SMT is basically the ability to execute multiple instructions at the same time (out of order) rather than a linear fashion (one at a time). An example would be Intel's hyper threading technology. Programs will need to be designed to use SMT in order to gain any performance. It will cause the CPU to consume more power if used.
 
I'll agree that fx has more cores for around the same amount of money but moar cores doesn't equate to more performance. Even when it comes to video editing. This is why core performance matters. Handbrake is a multithreaded application, yet the fx 8150 barely keeps up with lower end i5's and can't keep up with higher end i5's working with half the cores and half the threads.

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/cpu-charts-2015/-25-Handbrake,3716.html

Blender rendering is multithreaded. The fx 8350 is beaten by the i5 4430.
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/cpu-charts-2015/-23-Blender,3714.html

After effects, rendering 3 streams to 1. The fx 8350 falls behind locked i5's.
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/cpu-charts-2015/-30-Adobe-After-Effects-CC,3721.html

Video encoding in after effects, the 8350 falls in the middle of the i5's again, barely outperforming some and being outperformed by others.
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/cpu-charts-2015/-31-Adobe-Premiere-Pro-CC,3722.html

Here are a few more multithreaded application benchmarks, the fx 9590 (overclocked 8350) does pull ahead of the stock i5. However the i5 can also be overclocked and with stronger ipc can easily pull ahead. Again with half the hardware (core/thread count).
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/amd-fx-9590-9370_6.html

These are all non gaming scenarios where the massively multicore fx are supposed to trample everything and the fact is they don't. They struggle to keep up when pushed to the max so the overclocking ability of fx chips means little. Since they have lower ipc and are getting less done per cycle, speeding up those weak cycles is a lot like pedaling faster on a bike in a really low gear. Your legs are churning like crazy but you're not moving a whole lot faster. Any improvement by overclocking is better than none, absolutely. It's just taking the wind out of the overclocking potential if you consider overclocking as raising a factor by such a small multiplier. Cranking the speed from 4000mhz to 5000mhz sound incredible until you realize it's hampered by such a low ipc. 5000x1.1 is far less than 4400x2 where the smaller number is representative of the instructions per clock.
 
It will be interesting to see what happens in AMD goes under.

It is my understanding (from word of mouth) that AMD started the x86 business because of the US government's requirement that mission critical applications have two suppliers. (That way if one goes under, the US government has a backup supply) As Intel didn't have competition at the time, this locked them out of that market. So AMD got x86 marketing license agreements.

So the question becomes, what happens to all those lucrative government contracts that run on intel hardware that are no longer allowed because of lack of competition?
 

What really matters at the end of the day is overall performance and the FX8350 overclocked to 5GHz barely catches up with mid-range stock Intel chips. Unless you run one of few application types that really like AMD's CMT approach, Intel's chips pull so far ahead it isn't funny.

If you need to spend $100 extra on high-end overclocking components to make AMD's chip competitive with Intel's mid-range, the AMD system ends up more expensive for the same overall performance. On top of that, you also have to count the additional power and cooling costs over the system's useful life.
 
I'm thinking if there's truly an issue involving the government with contracts requiring amd stick around (if they even go under), assuming no one else bails them out like microsoft bailed out apple years ago, the government will likely bail out amd to keep things going. They did that for gm when it was going bankrupt and there were still multiple auto manufacturers around.

Even if amd goes down in flames, there are others working on chips as well like ibm/samsung along with suny and globalfounderies.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/07/ibm-unveils-industrys-first-7nm-chip-moving-beyond-silicon/

Amd remaining in the market is really neither here nor there, they could stay, they could go and the tech world (and competition) will continue forward.
 
I love AMD chips. I use them in video surveillance servers I setup all the time for small businesses, so think 20 or less cameras. I don't need a super duper processor to run Ubuntu 14.04 server edition. What gets hit the most is my hard drives. So I use the AMD AM1 platform with 16 GB of RAM and two WD Purple Drives in a software RAID configuration. This setup works great for me and the prices are fantastic! Also I love the embedded G Series AMD has for my custom Untangled or Pfsense Routers. My point here is does AMD have to go head to head with Intel on pure processor power? I think there are great use cases for the good chips that they have out now.
 


No chance of that happening. GM was a far more larger company than AMD is. The automotive industry have a lot more political clout than AMD especially since many states depend on the auto industry for jobs. That also took place during the global financial crisis, and the collapse of the automotive industry would have had a far reaching affect on the economy since those companies; especially GM; has a presence in the financial sector; GM Financial Co. Inc.

AMD has less than 10,000 employees (as of 2014) which is far less than in the automotive industry. It will be further reduced when the Radeon GPU division is spun off into a separate entity. The potential loss of jobs is nothing to scoff at since it will affect many lives, but in the grand scheme of things AMD's potential bankruptcy will not invoke any special governmental assistance to keep the company solvent.
 

One big challenge for AMD is that even Intel is getting hit by people and companies not replacing their PCs and laptops as often as they used to. For AMD to make a comeback, they have to overcome the overall diminishing interest in PCs on top of whatever performance disadvantage they might still have compared to Intel and Intel's mind-share across the board.

Even if Zen does deliver the rumored 40% better IPC, gaining mind-share back and whipping up sales will still be a steep uphill battle and take a while. Will AMD manage to even increase sales enough to offset the 6-10% year-on-year PC sales decline? Merely managing this much would mean carving that same 6-10% out of Intel's sales, effectively doubling the hit on Intel.

Whatever happens, next year should be interesting.
 


Right now it's one thread per core on the FX line. Four threads per core on the Zen line would make a significant difference!
 
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