Do or Die: AMD Moves Away From PCs Amid Steep Losses

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IBM or Samsung should buy AMD, that would enable them to implement x86 instructions (or a hardware translator ?) on it's processors plus add some very good GPU and APU knowhow.
 
AMD is on it's way out. Their ill-advised acquistion of ATI killed their ability to compete with Intel on x86, and they've failed to execute on a number of good, but risky, ideas. The APU holds tremendous promise, but AMD simply doesn't have the resources to hang with it. And now they face a diminishing x86 market, which has Intel worried as well.

The only question is this: at what price does AMD become a tempting takeover target, and for whom? Anti-trust may not be a concern, as an acquiring company could spin-off the division which is the problem and keep what it wants. So you could possibly see Intel acquiring ATI if it wants a strong graphics arm, or Nvidia getting the AMD x86 portfolio and licenses.
 
intels pricing is not rediculous. the power saved from the upfront cost is astronomical. i mean amd is only competing with the i3 they cant even touch i5s and i7s.

if ur not paying the powerbill amd is probably not as problem to you. as someone who has become energy conscious i have been kinda left with intel as my only option for a good cpu with low power draw and very high performance.

Also i cant realize my small form factor dreams with amd. i wish they woulda stepped up and made smaller cards or something. im tired of space shuttle cards. I finally ditched amd completely, tho i still type on my amd desktop my new rig is a i7 laptop with a 680m. broke my bank but worth every penny, same hardware as a 670 but underclocked, and a cpu which does just as well as the highest end amd cpu. over the course of its lifetime the powersavings alone will pay for itself.
 
With AMD's awesome APU, they can make their own HTPC's and totally kill that area and have it all to themselves. I would buy one for $200-$300.

Then eventually down the line in a few years they can work with TV manufacturers and have that integrated into the TV sets. The trend is TV's are getting smarter and smarter and a few years down the line a lot of people will be using them for many of the tasks that PC's are used today. Email, Facebook, youtube, netflix, dvr, gaming...etc. All the parts (technology) are there for AMD to make this happen, they just need to execute it. What have they got to lose anyway?
 
The DOJ and the courts will not allow any part of AMD to go to Intel, Intel already has a GPU of its own, and the part of AMD that was once ATI would have to go to a company without any competiting GPU to maintain market competition! The best thing for AMD would be for a private equity firm to purchase AMD and take it private, as opposed to a publicly traded company! Private companys do not have any short term profit pressures that publicly traded companies have, this will allow the AMD managemant the time to focus on the long term market and AMD's survival! Any company that is allready in the GPU or x86 market will never be able to aquire AMD, so any talk of Intel or Nvidia getting the ATI parts is out of the question, and the x86 license may be non-transferable. AMD is best kept as a whole and taken private until it can once again be public!
 
You say tomato, I say tomaaato. You say hyperthread, I say module with 'two cores'.

Run Cinebench 11.5 on your FX Bulldozer and tell me how many cores and threads you see.

Wake up world ! If there was any real competition we would see stark differences between the AMD, Intel and Nvidia offerings by now.

LMAO .. the computer/ tech industry is just as rigged as a US election.
 
[citation][nom]snemarch[/nom]How? So far, it seems we're dealing with an architectural problem on the AMD side - we've got worse performance per GHz, worse power consumption per performance unit, worse hyperthreading (call it what you want) performance, and price point that simply isn't compelling enough....[/citation]
Almost anything is possible with enough time and money. 😉

The power consumption per performance unit can almost solve itself once AMD moves to a 22nm process. AMD's 4-core FX chips are using roughly the same amount of power as Intel's old 4-core Sandy Bridge chips... which were also 32nm. Performance per GHz is the part that will require the most work.

At any rate, AMD is two, to two and a half processor cycles behind Intel at this point, so they have a lot of catching up to do. But I don't think the Bulldozer architecture is fundamentally flawed. I just think it is still in its juvenile stages, while Sandy Bridge is obviously hitting its prime.

There is still time for AMD to catch up. I think their biggest issue now is getting down to the 22nm process, especially considering they don't any fabs while Intel owns most of their own fabs. But then again, if Haswell ends up being as big of a success as Sandy Bridge was, then AMD just simply won't have the money to catch up in the foreseeable future.
 
AMD was complacent with their Athlon 64 Socket 939 chips. When Core 2 Duo (Conroe) was released in 2006, AMD had no answer to it. They've been playing catch-up since...
 
[citation][nom]killerb255[/nom]AMD was complacent with their Athlon 64 Socket 939 chips. When Core 2 Duo (Conroe) was released in 2006, AMD had no answer to it. They've been playing catch-up since...[/citation]
But they were ahead for a good few years, and did nothing for their brand building, hence they lost the lead on a whimper, and nobody noticed...

At least with BlackBerry, non-techies still know who they are.

At to be fair, Core was already present with Pentium M... Intel just wasn't nimble enough to switch over when they realized it was a better architecture philosophy...
 
[citation][nom]gto127[/nom]I don't know about you guys but I don't like the sound of this. "AMD moving away from PCS" I can't imagine a market of intel only CPUS. We can do something about this folks. I'm ordering a AMD APU & motherboard. I would reccomend everyone that reads this do the same & pass the word on & tell your friends to do the same. Money talks & if we order enough then mabye they will continue to sell CPUS for PCS. If the only choice is Intel then the price will go UP UP UP & will become a very niche market. Let's keep the PC market alive. Who's with me?[/citation]

Why would I order an inferior product to save a company making an inferior product?
 
Honestly I think the APU iGPU chips put AMD in a far better place then Intel in the mobile market.

We are rapidly reaching the point when even the most modest consumers are expecting smooth video and graphic out their mobile devices.

And as an owner of a cell phone with a 1.5-GHz Snapdragon dual-core processor its impressive....for a phone but I don't see the mobile chip makers competing head to head with Intel or AMD.

The line is blurring.

The surface tablets are a good sign of the direction the tablet market is going.

Intel has the highest end CPU's but comically bad iGPU's.

AMD has for the tablet market are too power hungry, but is the only one decent iGPU.

As we move into more and more powerful tablets the mobile chip makers are going to struggle to keep up with Intel and AMD.


The Surface tablets are quite cool but image the next gen AMD APU's in one of them.

1080p mobile gaming at a decent frame rate. Yes please.

The APU thing is clutch for AMD's future.

 
[citation][nom]jacobdrj[/nom]But they were ahead for a good few years, and did nothing for their brand building, hence they lost the lead on a whimper, and nobody noticed...[/citation]

It's not as if AMD were having lots of unsold CPUs on their hands. They were producing them as fast as they could. In the end, advertising might not have been a big help then, but with the large number of unsold Llanos, it sure would've been over the past year.
 
Apple had a sim. problem when they got rid of Steve Jobs who Apple thought was too ambitious.
After Apple got rid of him they tanked and asked him to come back, which he did and now it's one of the biggest business.

Funny I've posted this line time after time for a looooonnngggg time. About why it's important to support a product. If you don't your cutting off your own heads.
I got very bad vibes with this Reed as a slick talker but short on know-how. AMD lost almost all it's engineering talent, heck, it was a tidal wave of desertions because just maybe they could see through to what kind of jerk they really put in there at the CEO and then he got rid of the rest pretty much and hired people would are there just to kiss up to him and say yes at every stupid idea and they really don't know what to do with this CEO ruining AMD.
And now the panic sets in, they hire back the designer of the CPU that got them on top, like that will do them much good now. Can only hope but I think it's too little too late.
Any business that tanked as bad as AMD would fire the CEO and really try to get one in there that can apply AMD's talents. Or try to get it's talents back.
Why is he still there? He is good at just giving a line of bull but is not good for anything else.
When I think if that guy I think of the Carny Barkiers, that bring in suckers to take their money.

I think ATI should try to get out of the merger or take as many of it's good talent and form another gpu business because I don't want AMD to kill off ATI at the same time. We would all be royally screwed if that happens. We are already seeing the screws from Intel's price hikes and it is nothing if or when AMD goes out of the cpu business for good.

Get ready for the $2,000 computer again. What is really funny how people got fixated on numbers. While one cpu was better then the other in the numbers game they had both reached a level of being able to run any of todays software just fine. But people are so simple minded and easy to sway to tunes of got to have the best even when they will never use much more than 50% of it's power on the majority of the programs you run though it. But we got to have those numbers...
Hell, I can still play any game out there on this computer and it just has the good old Phen. 6 core. The intel system I also got is a royal pain in the ass as far ease of use and stability. It's faster but so what? If I was going to mars and I needed a load of numbers crunched I might prefer the Intel system but I rarely see a need at home for one over the other. But it's all about the numbers game, the I got a faster cpu than the jones's down the block mentality we have been in ever sense we could climb out of the tree's and we thought that way even when we were up in them. We can never learn anything FAST enough and so we keep getting screwed by our own doing.



The way everyone bailed on AMD even when the difference was hardly a issue is going to see the fruits of their labor when the prices spike and new innovation slows to a crawl. Without AMD Intel will not need to spend nearly as much on R&D and will cut the new models down because they will be able to.
Maybe AMD tanking will be a good thing if they can start fresh and go back to their roots of just putting out good cheap cpu's and not worry about Intel. In a way it was the worst thing AMD did when they came out with the one Intel killer because everyone expected them to keep it up but it was just a one time deal.
I wish they could get their orig. CEO back. AMD would be in a lot better shape than they are now.. Well, there is still the stupid numbers game but before the FX the numbers game wasn't really a issue.
But kill off AMD and forget about numbers or anything because Intel won't be forced to do much of anything. They go hand and hand and they are not a car so they won't need any real design changes like we've been sooooooo used to but there will not be any incentives for it.

And get ready to welcome back the castrated Celron or Celeryon or what ever it was called because that will be back so everyday people can afford a crappy cpu that AMD would still be a better choice at lower price but whoops, where did AMD go? Most of the end users are going to get what they deserve.
Just try not to bend over for the soap..

The only really great thing is sites that feed off of numbers will not have much interesting items to show off and they will start to die out. That I can live with.
 
If they would not of delayed their new FX chips back a quarter, they would not be so bad off. The product were ready by all rumors.

Any bets the buyer of AMD is Apple? :)
 
I dont think we will have the return of $2000 pc if AMD folded. For starters, even if it went to bankrupcy, some company will buy them, provided the price is right, so AMD will go on.

What will happen, however, is that Intel will no longer need to have so many different cpus like they have now, like pentium G, celeron, i3, i5, i7 etc. These wont be needed, since all of them are basically positioned agains a competing AMD product. What I see happening is the pentium g and celeron will become the new $100-250 cpu line, I3 will be discontinued, I5 will be in the 300-450 range and I7 up from there.

So cheap pc will still be around, you just wont get the same performance per dollar as now.
 
[citation][nom]iam2thecrowe[/nom]I think AMD needs to be sold to another company who can do something with them, before they dig themselves a hole they cant get out of. No one can deny it is the continued pursuit of this inefficient bulldozer architecture that has led to their downfall. They should have just dropped it and gone back to the old faithful Phenom II core and tweaked it.[/citation]

The fact that Trinity proved that AMD's work in Bulldozer was the right course of action let's me deny what you say because you're wrong. AMD has made many mistakes, but the modular micro-architecture was not one of them.
 


Intel can't make pricing non-attractive and expect it to work. Even if they're not hammered by anti-trust lawsuits (an unlikely scenario), they'd need to give people a reason to buy new CPUs and/or computers with new CPUs. Bad prices would mean that far fewer people will be able to afford upgrades in CPU performance, so developers would likely have to react by making more and more efficient programs instead of relying on new CPUs to get better performance, further decreasing the need to buy new CPUs. Intel would hurt from many places if they stop competing because even without AMD, they need to compete with themselves.
 




Are you people forgetting what happened back then? Intel made sure that most major OEMs didn't use AMD CPUs by paying them to not use AMD CPUs. It wasn't AMD's fault that they didn't get anywhere with Athlon 64, Intel literally cheated. Even now, we still occasionally see news about lawsuits against Intel over this that haven't been finished. Intel was fined in the billions of dollars by various companies as well as AMD's lawsuit that got AMD a big chunk of money out of it too (although probably nothing compared to what AMD would have made had Intel not been using their anti-competitive tactics).

Sure, AMD doesn't do marketing like Intel does and that probably has a great impact on their issues (assuming that they can even afford to advertise), but that was not the only issue for AMD.
 


AMD made far more Llano APUs than chipsets for them. That was one of the biggest issues with underselling Llano APUs.
 


The A10-5800K performs on-par with the FX-4170 in gaming CPU performance, but it does so while more than half of its chip is an IGP. AMD most certainly can make very efficient CPUs. Saying they can't is like saying that Intel can't just because of Netburst. A little fine-tuning and Piledriver is already much more energy efficient than Bulldozer despite being the same basic micro-architecture, AMD has plenty of room to grow with it so long as they can stay afloat (they're failure is unlikely because Intel probably isn't going to let their only major competitor in the x86 markets, they're shield from anti-trust/monopoly lawsuits, die).

Furthermore, ARM's micro-architectures are optimized for extremely low power consumption, not huge power efficiency. They're not as efficient as you might think.
 
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