Does AMD has some future?

[Sam_212]

Well, sad but true, AMD is not willing to keep up with Intel, nor does it have financial resources to compete with Intel, know that I was one of those AMD fans, who used to struggle with any Intel guy, but funny you should know, I have a 4670k installed in my rig.
Simply put AMD has not been profitable for the last 4 years, the situation has improved thanks to consoles but, that is not going to last forever
They are now involved in producing mobile chips, where they have shown some really promising ideas over rival Intel.
In the future? who knows? they might come on top in the future once more, but at the moment they need to avert bankruptcy, and if things go well, they will for sure think of competing with Intel again,
my vow is that if one day they can introduce anything that is even almost as good as intel's high end gaming CPUs, I will buy that product...
as far as their GPUs are concerned, I maintain they can easily compete with Nvidia price/performance wise, and sure buy introducing R3xx series, Nvidia will easily be challenged once more. And again I want you to know that I have a gtx 780 myself, that was because their R9-290 came out with a lame cooling solution, had it not been for that, I would have bought their GPU

 

[Sam_212]

Money is needed for research, without research they can't improve things simply put, so there we go, they have been incredibly wasteful in the past, and now here are the consequences... the day they beat Intel's ass, is the day millions of dreams will come true

 

[juanrga]

carrizo will allow amd to offer both a fan and fanless option to oems.

AMD says otherwise:

In terms of power draw, AMD expects to match Broadwell-U's "full dynamic range," with TDPs ranging up to 35W. AMD didn't share a lower limit, but it did note that Carrizo won't quite manage to slip into the 5-6W TDPs required for fanless tablets. We should "expect" Carrizo systems to be actively cooled, the company says.

 

[juanrga]

7W Dual core K1: 80 FLOP/s
35W Quad-core Carrizo FX: 67.2 GFLOP/s

.

and a 35w 7600 86.4GFlops

comparing the bottom up to the the top down will always make the former look better than the latter, this is why arm is so hyped, look we can scale up our arm cpu up to desktop speeds on less tdp. Great but can i run windows (NO) Bing windows is now free to oems under 8 inches, there will be a big shift this year towards under 100 dollar ,windows based tablets running x86 cpu's not arm.

Keep dreaming about x86 taking the market. Moreover, what you say about bottom vs top and ARM hype is wrong, but this wasn't a discussion ARM vs x86, but a discussion about microarchitectures.

The reason why you need four Steamroller/Excavator cores to match the FP throughput of two denver cores is because the former cores are 128bit wide whereas Denver core is 256bit wide:

4 x 128 bit = 2 x 256 bit

If Nvidia had a x86 license and the Denver core was x86 the gap would be exactly the same.

On the other side Broadwell is 512bit wide. Thus Carrizo is crushed by both sides: ARM and x86.

 

[juanrga]

Well, sad but true, AMD is not willing to keep up with Intel, nor does it have financial resources to compete with Intel, know that I was one of those AMD fans, who used to struggle with any Intel guy, but funny you should know, I have a 4670k installed in my rig.
Simply put AMD has not been profitable for the last 4 years, the situation has improved thanks to consoles but, that is not going to last forever

This graph shows the decline of the CPU/APU division and how consoles came to rescue!

They are now involved in producing mobile chips, where they have shown some really promising ideas over rival Intel.

The problem is that they are stuck to 28nm planar whereas Intel is on 14nm FF. This gives Intel a big advantage in die area and efficiency. Most OEMs will pick Intel Broadwell chips and only a pair of them will pick Carrizo/Carrizo-L. Moreover, it seems evident that AMD will compete with low prices which means we will see AMD designs on low quality models, probably similar to the 'beautiful' Carrizo-based prototype that AMD presented at CES

In the future? who knows? they might come on top in the future once more, but at the moment they need to avert bankruptcy, and if things go well, they will for sure think of competing with Intel again,
my vow is that if one day they can introduce anything that is even almost as good as intel's high end gaming CPUs, I will buy that product...
as far as their GPUs are concerned, I maintain they can easily compete with Nvidia price/performance wise, and sure buy introducing R3xx series, Nvidia will easily be challenged once more. And again I want you to know that I have a gtx 780 myself, that was because their R9-290 came out with a lame cooling solution, had it not been for that, I would have bought their GPU

AMD will not do a comeback. AMD was competitive when did spend on R&D about one half of what Intel did spend. Now AMD spends about one tenth. The gap is too big and with AMD competing with a cheap strategy and giving up markets they will have less and less money on R&D of future products increasing the gap more and more. This is why I don't see other future than AMD abandoning the PC market by semicustom.

I agree that the 300 series will be competitive on desktop market. It is possible that AMD wins some percentages on market share against Nvidia but both will lost GPU market share against Intel like has been the norm.

 

[juanrga]

i did not realize this was a discussion i thought it was your own, point out amd's flaws thread. and the official word was no fanless but oems might think different

I did start this thread because the AMD speculation thread was broken during weeks. I am posting here again because the thread has been broken during days.

At this late time, AMD knows that OEM designs Carrizo won and which didn't. Do you believe that if Carrizo was to be used on some fanless design, AMD would be claiming the contrary? It can happen, but I have a hard time believing it.

I think that Carrizo doesnt scale down enough to fit into a fanless design.

 

[jdwii]

This is sad but it seems to be the trend. People well still try and make different claims that's how it is. Some people believe in things without evidence.

 

[freeskier93]

2016 will be a telling year for AMD. I think the new core architecture will either flop or or be a huge success and make them competitive again. I certainly hope for the second. I really like my A8, I think the future is in integrated graphics and AMD is ahead in that department. They aren't dropping the desktop APUs, 2016 I predict we'll see the new APUs with the Zen architecture.

 

[Cazalan]

Do we really need another AMD doom and gloom thread?

Everyone knows AMD is in a rough spot. Do we really need to repeat it over and over again?

 

[etayorius]

I have my doubts about ZEN, some claim it will be superior to Skylake... which seriously sounds like Smelly BS, Intel has already stated that Skylake will be the biggest jump in terms of performance since the last 10 years, since AMD is around 60% behind in terms of IPC i seriously don`t see Zen beating Skylake, it may however be competitive (which could either be close or worst to performance from Haswell).

AMD did the idiotic mistake of sticking with Bulldozer/Piledriver for this long, they should had dumped it as soon as FX-8150 was released. AMD can improve their archs as much as they want, but as long as they don`t fix the horrible cache systems in their Chips they will always be screwed.

 

[-Fran-]

I really don't have details, etayorius, but I'm pretty sure changing a design that fails (Zambezi) is not an economically feasible option. Specially when money is not a resource your company has in abundance. They just had to make do with the bad calls from previous management and all that.

In particular to Zen, I haven't seen any documents around it's design, so I don't know what it will bring and change. Even more, wasn't Zen for an ARM design?

Cheers!

PS: Cazalan, the "official" thread is dead. Do you know if we can just get a new one and close the old one?

 

[etayorius]

I really don't have details, etayorius, but I'm pretty sure changing a design that fails (Zambezi) is not an economically feasible option. Specially when money is not a resource your company has in abundance. They just had to make do with the bad calls from previous management and all that.

In particular to Zen, I haven't seen any documents around it's design, so I don't know what it will bring and change. Even more, wasn't Zen for an ARM design?

Cheers!

PS: Cazalan, the "official" thread is dead. Do you know if we can just get a new one and close the old one?

ZEN is actually the High Performance x86 arch for 2016, SkyBridge is the cross x86 and ARM arch for 2015.

Yes, AMD has never had deep pockets like Intel but i been seeing people claiming ZEN will beat Skylake and to be honest there is no chance of that happening... but as long as is as close to Haswell that`s good enough since DX12 will make CPUs last twice as long in Gaming.

I am not going to bother with AMD CPUs anymore, ill just wait till Skylake arrive and build my next PC with Intel CPU and probably will grab an R9 300 GPU, most likely 370X or 380X, been saving like for 2 years waiting for AMD to release something good, but since i now got enough money to just grab the top i5 or maybe a lower i7.

 

[Cazalan]

PS: Cazalan, the "official" thread is dead. Do you know if we can just get a new one and close the old one?

I made that suggestion to Palladin. We'll see. :}

 

[jdwii]

Really Intel claims its the biggest jump in 10 years? Wow i might hold off until that comes out but man that 4790K is twice as fast as my 8350 in many things i use. AH i'll just buy both.

Also the downfall of Amd in terms of performance is nothing new its following the trend same as Amd building SOC base products. They seem to have a market for it.

Not sure how much longer they will be able to compete with Intel or yes even Nvidia in the high-end market once we get to 7-14nm. At that rate we need every single transistor to be used as efficiently as possible which cost money to hire engineers that can do this. With 1/10 the budget as Intel we know how that will turn out or have a very good idea. With Nvidia vs Amd well we already established how efficient maxwell is on the same 28nm.

 

[slyu9213]

I delayed an Intel Build for nearly an year when I went for FM2+ waiting for Carrizo instead of Haswell. As we all know that isn't going to end well. So now the aged AM3+ (8350+R9 290) I built for cheap will be used as long as possible until Skylake K-Series processor is released. If Skylake is indeed biggest jump in 10 years I think I can wait for it compared to going Haswell/Broadwell now. At least by then I'll have money saved for it compared to buying now and struggling. I'm still interested in AMD and their improvement but I am not going to be buying AMD again unless they actually perform better than Intel then. Not buying on 'ifs' for the future.

 

[-Fran-]

Anyone with the exact quote from Intel?

If it is one of the "the biggest *efficiency* jump in the last 10 years" is totally not the same as "the biggest *performance* jump in the last 10 years".

Cheers!

 

[etayorius]

Here is the exact Quote:

" Intel says the chips will have the biggest PC innovations for the last 10 years. Rather than being a simple performance bump, Skylake will bring support for DDR4 memory and usher in so-called 'wire-free' computing. "

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/new-product/pc-upgrades/3590751/skylake-release-date-specifications/


Should wrap up any misconceptions.

 

[Cazalan]

My toothbrush has been wirelessly charged for 14 years. It's about time laptops get it.

 

[gamerk316]

When it became apparent that their AM3 line was retired, okay I get that.. the world is going integrated and they need to consolidate their socketed platforms. But now AMD are retiring their last desktop/socketed APUs? What are they thinking?

They're moving toward mobile designs, but they're about 5 years too late to the party. Laptops are not a big thing anymore, not with Tablets and 2-in-1's being around. They're moving toward being a niche supplier.

i did not realize this was a discussion i thought it was your own, point out amd's flaws thread. and the official word was no fanless but oems might think different

windows will unify desktop and mobile , creating a seamless transition from mobile to desktop for consumers. Anyone not able to produce x86 will be left out, that is a simple fact. as much as i like and use android, i would drop it in a ny minute to run full windows.

To be fair, ARM is gaining a LOT of strength. What it comes down to: Can ARM get "big enough" to be able to run Windows apps in some way, be it through either an emulator, Virtual OS, or streaming?

And that again assumes people want to do Office/Photoshop on a 7-inch screen. Which I doubt. I really don't see Windows as big a thing in mobile.

 

[jdwii]

Here is the exact Quote:

" Intel says the chips will have the biggest PC innovations for the last 10 years. Rather than being a simple performance bump, Skylake will bring support for DDR4 memory and usher in so-called 'wire-free' computing. "

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/new-product/pc-upgrades/3590751/skylake-release-date-specifications/


Should wrap up any misconceptions.

Yeah and that surly does, i was reading something similar today. I was even wondering if it was a simple igpu increase. Only makes me feel better about upgrading in the next 6 months though. Since i'll probably end up buying both.

 

[RCFProd]

Intel is running the show at the moment. i3 4xxx should be preferred over the FX's. i5 is the standard in the medium to high end cpu market. Xeon also a worthy mention aswell now let alone the even better i7.

It doesn't mean they die, they just need to come up with a new model really. It's all it takes sometimes. Imagine a new Phenom that costs as much as an i3. BAM!

 

[etayorius]

Here is the exact Quote:

" Intel says the chips will have the biggest PC innovations for the last 10 years. Rather than being a simple performance bump, Skylake will bring support for DDR4 memory and usher in so-called 'wire-free' computing. "

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/new-product/pc-upgrades/3590751/skylake-release-date-specifications/


Should wrap up any misconceptions.

Yeah and that surly does, i was reading something similar today. I was even wondering if it was a simple igpu increase. Only makes me feel better about upgrading in the next 6 months though. Since i'll probably end up buying both.

There were some "Leaked" benchmarks of a Skylake Mobile CPU somewhere in the web... if i find the link ill share it.

Supposedly Skylake will have double digit IPC improvements up to 10% and possibly 40% or higher iGPU performance, the CPU was clocked at 2.2GHZ or something. It could be fake but Intel claims that it will not be just a mere small performance increase like in the last 10 years, it could at least innovate the Desktop and should be released somewhere from August - Nov, heck i been waiting 2 years for AMD to respond to Intel, can´t hurt to wait little more than half a year, Broadwell will most likely not be much of a upgrade from Haswell.

 

[gamerk316]

Honestly, I'm figuring an IB type bump; it's only a die shrink, so 5-10% is about what we'll see. The GPU is the interesting one, given AMDs lead in that area. If Intel can get an i3 with a iGPU even close to AMD's APUs, AMD is going to find itself outcompeted in even mobile.

Say what you will, Intel is REALLY trying to fix their GPU.

 

[Sam_212]

Well, I sort of feel 2016 is the year things will change for AMD, legendary Jim Keller returned to AMD in 2012, usually working on a new architecture takes 4 to 5 years, and usually companies do not reveal anything about their new architectures until last phases, There are also some rumors about their new architecture, like their working off CMT and a new propensity towards SMT... well we think AMD is dead, but we have all been proven wrong in the past, so maybe again?

 

[con635]

They need hbm on their igp and the arm core to be a killer.