Why has AMD fallen apart?

[helloguy]

Ever since Core 2 Duo (from Intel), AMD has fallen behind in making good performance CPU's, do you guys think AMD will ever make a comeback?

 

[ss202sl]

It has said it isn't competing directly with Intel.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-intel-cpu-apu-processors,15741.html

 

[maurelie]

AMD has shifted towards APUs and that is where Intel is falling behind. They might come back with better gaming CPUs in 2015, as for now only gaming CPUs are the FX line.
AMD did punch back in 2010 with the Deneb and Thuban, but in 2011 Sandy Bridge was released and they were falling behind again.
For the price at the moment the AMD FX line is pretty good.

 

[aatje92]

AMD is making a comeback right now on the APU line.

 

[logainofhades]

Too much focus trying to sue Intel, instead of making better products. Hector was a horrible CEO.

 

[Supernova1138]

Bulldozer was a fundamentally flawed architecture that performed worse than Deneb and Thuban under most circumstances. AMD made the same mistake that Intel made back in the early 2000s with the Pentium 4s, and made huge sacrifices to IPC in order to get higher clock speeds and decided to compensate for the weak IPC by cramming more cores onto the chip and hoping developers would write their software to use that many cores. Outside of a few productivity applications and a couple of games that really hasn't happened yet, so AMD's chips aren't all that competitive from a performance standpoint for many users. Piledriver did improve things a bit, and at least isn't getting outperformed by Deneb and Thuban, but still suffers from needing software to be heavily multithreaded in order for it to be competitive performance wise.

After Piledriver, it looks like AMD just gave up on trying to compete with Intel for performance, I guess there was no way to fix the IPC problems that Bulldozer/Piledriver had, and AMD doesn't have the resources to throw out the design and start again from scratch. As such, they're focusing more on the lower end market where performance doesn't matter that much, and where AMD's superior integrated graphics actually count for something.