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I would urge those that wonder WTF AMD is doing copying all the old mistakes Intel did with netburst to read this post by a former employee who lays out exactly why this is happening, the former CEO did the usual Wall street move of slash and burn, get a stock bounce, and cash out.

They are stuck with the Netburst that is Bulldozer/Piledriver/Suckavator or whatever other names they want to give it because the former CEO FIRED everybody that knew how to make a chip over there and replaced them with computer layouts which as you can see blow through power like shit through a goose while giving worse performance on a per watt basis than the previous Stars arch.

This isn't coming from some Intel fanboy, I own and sell nothing but AMD at the shop, but when I can no longer get Stars and Liano chips I'm gonna have to seriously look at Intel because these new designs just suuuuck. There is a good reason why you don't see Thuban chips in most benchmarks against the new chips, its because if you matched clock for clock the Thubans and Denebs will win. That is pretty damned sad, when your old chips are actually better while using less power but the CEO they had closed down production of all the Stars cores (again to get a stock bounce and cash out) so there really is no plan B here.

I just hope the game console chips can give them enough operating capital to keep them afloat while hopefully the new chip designer they hired, the same one that did the Athlon64 and the Apple A6, can come up with a new design to make AMD at least kinda competitive. Until then I'll hang onto to AM3+ and Stars as long as I can and then start looking at the i3s and i5s.

I don't "hate" the APUs in any way, as I said I have an E350 APU netbook and for the tasks I perform on a service call, checking wired and wireless networks, downloading drivers, hell even watching videos on it is just fine.

I think the problem people have with the APUs is that they are being pushed, especially by Intel, into places where they just don't belong. For example if one is building a gamer PC then the GPU on that new Intel chip is not only pointless it is hamstringing the rest of the chip by adding heat and limiting how far you can OC, they have found the same to be true of AMD APUs where the CPU clocks are being hampered by how fast the GPU can go.

But the problem with both the X720 and PS4, and this is coming from somebody who owns and builds AMD exclusively and have for over 5 years is NOT that its an APU, its what KIND of APU they chose. if they would have chosen the A series which was based on Liano and then piledriver? Sure it would be great, those chips make great HTPCs and with some GDDR 5 would make sweet gaming consoles. The problem is they went with Jaguar which...its just not made to do that, its like trying to pull a boat with a Kia. Look up the specs on Jaguar yourself and prepare to go WTF as it is based on Bobcat which is a VERY limited APU designed to go up against Atom and nothing else, its cores are MUCH more primitive than even a K8 which means a first gen Athlon X2 is gonna best it when it comes to number crunching...and you are gonna put that in a system that requires 1080P and heavy physics?

Second of all its using the same mistake of a layout for their chips that the "now infamous" bulldozer used which is a "half core" design. All you have to do is read any review of the bulldozer to see that its a SERVER chip that AMD had to force out as a desktop because the previous CEO did a slash and burn and fired nearly all the engineers so he could get a stock bounce and cash out. but here we are talking about a console...can you think of ANYTHING that is more unlike a typical server load than playing video games? BD makes a great server chip because a good 90% of the work a server has to do is highly threaded integer heavy loads, most games hit one or two cores very hard and are heavy on floating point which is the weakest part of the half core design.

Finally you have the fact that because they went the bulldozer route of "half cores" what you have is NOT an octocore but a quad core with hardware assisted hyperthreading, which again would be curbstomped by that $65 Athlon quad and which makes no sense when it comes to video games as you are taking a lightly threaded FP heavy load and sticking it on a chip designed for heavily threaded integer loads. So the whole thing makes no damned sense!

But as far as Intel goes...don't buy 'em, ever since i heard about how Intel was bribing OEMs and rigging their compiler I've been avoiding them like an STD and have never been happier. I have found that MAYBE 5% of the population are doing jobs that require every cycle they can get, the rest are just as well served by that $45 Athlon triple (that just FYI I've been seeing better than 75% core unlocks with) so I not only take every chance to tell folks they don't need Intel's douchebaggery but i put my money where my mouth is, 5 desktops a laptop and a netbook in my family and they are ALL AMD. Hell Tigerdirect has been selling the 1045T hexacores for just $89, that is cheaper than the bottom of the line crippled Pentium Dual. The bang for the buck from AMD is just awesome ATM, better than it has ever been, and thanks to how long they stick with the AM socket you get plenty of upgrade options down the road.

But lets face it Intel should have been busted for antitrust over both AMD and how they locked Nvidia out of the chipset market so they could keep the whole thing for themselves, so Intel using this to force APUs where they don't belong and adding a price raise to boot really shouldn't be surprising as they are a pretty douchey company. I'm just glad we still have AMD to give us choice and at such cheap prices to boot.

Actually, and while I agree 100% that a free market can never exist (and when we got close to one we got "the age of the robber barons") one could reasonably argue that the reason the US corps have become so damned short sighted is the fact that the government has blown a MASSIVE stock market bubble using instruments like 401K and 403B and even pumping cash directly into the system.

What is wrong with that? Its actually quite simple, as the video i linked to demonstrates, what happens is by throwing all this money into the stock market you change it from an investor market to a speculator market. The reason this is bad is an investor market rewards companies that plan long term, that produce real growth and which grow their bottom line through actual growth.

The speculator market is all about the "quick flip" so it doesn't care if the company will even exist tomorrow, its all about the short term bump. For examples of the damage this can cause just look at Westinghouse, where the CEO brought in to "save the company" just sold all the valuable assets, got a short term bounce and cashed out, or Circuit City where the CEO simply fired everybody that was making a decent wage while ignoring that was their best sales staff. Again short term bounce and cash out, final result the company left in ruins. We'll see if that ends up the final fate of AMD who according to a former engineer had a similar slash and burn pulled by a previous CEO who fired all their chip designers and replaced them with computer layouts with predictable results. But again this doesn't matter if all you are looking for is a short term bounce that will allow you to cash out, you can then walk away with a big fat check while the company burns.

So as long as you have the government flooding ever larger sums of money into such a small market, so that you have more and more money chasing fewer and fewer stocks, then short term gains are the only gains that will really matter. Wall Street has gone from its roots as a place where a company could show a sound business plan and get much needed capital into Las Vegas with nicer outfits and sadly the only way to fix it is gonna hurt no matter how you slice it. I'd say a good 40%+ of our "financial district" doesn't need to exist and wouldn't if not for all the money flowing from DC to wall Street, that is a LOT of people that are gonna end up out of work but frankly it has to be done, otherwise like the housing bubble eventually you won't be able to keep feeding the monster and the bubble will blow. Be sure to look at the graphic at around the 3.20 mark, look at how much of our GDP was in there right before the 29 crash (which took a world war crushing our competition and still took until 53 to dig out of) and how much is in there today, its truly frightening how many life savings are sitting there waiting to evaporate.

Yeah and my ass can "basically" fly south for the winter, i just haven't gotten a high enough flap rate on my ass cheeks.

I mean do I REALLY have to post the benches which show you kill half the cores and the benches go UP and not down? And I've been building AMD exclusively for over 5 years now so if anybody wants them to come out with kick ass chips I do but the "half core" design honestly just doesn't work. you look at the arch for Bulldozer followed by Piledriver and then Excavator and you can see they are going AWAY from the half core design because it hobbles performance too much. it gives you frankly lousy single core IPC and in return only VERY modest gains on very heavily threaded loads.

Now will the half core design turn out to be an advantage on consoles? Who knows it certainly didn't on desktops and laptops but since with consoles you are running very specific loads with a highly optimized OS who knows? Personally it makes me happy either way as this will get AMD some much needed predictable revenue and hopefully the ex Apple and Athlon64 chip designer they hired will be able to turn the ship around after the slash and burn the previous CEO did to the company.

But until that day comes as long as I can continue to get socket AM3+ boards and chips cheap I'll stick with AMD and hope they come out with a better design down the line. Lets face it a Stars based Athlon triple makes for a damned good system, even plays games nicely and they just haven't been able to get the bang for the buck crown back with the BD/PD line as they can't get the costs per wafer down. And personally I'll stick with my Thuban X6, 6 true cores and turbocore for just $100 makes for a damned good cheap gaming PC and should have no problem playing games for the next gen consoles with a good GPU like the HD 7770.

Via is a corpse, all they make is a few embedded products and its damned near impossible to get your hands on the Nano because they make so few of them. As for AMD...wanna know what REALLY happened at AMD? One of the engineers off on a far flung section of the net spilled the beans about what was REALLY going on at the company and before Bulldozer even came out laid out all the failures AMD was gonna have, you can read it for yourself right here. Basically they ended up with a CEO and board that didn't give a rat's ass about the long term, ONLY the short term, and gutted the whole fucking company. The guys that built Bobcat? GONE. The guys that built Athlon64? GONE. Phenom? GONE. They burnt their own fucking company for a short term bounce which they used to cash out their bonuses and walk away from the wreckage, another sadly typical western trick when it comes to making a quick buck and bailing, see Western Electric or Circuit City.

In the end the west is doomed by its minefield of laws crippling innovation. I'm all for those that come up with tech making money off it but it needs to be RAND and instead we have tollbooths set up all over the technology highway so that nobody can do shit. I gave up on a product I was working on because I was told flat footed I would NEVER be able to build it in the west and hire Americans, that the cost of dealing with all the vultures and trolls would make it a 100% certainty that I would be crushed like a bug, but I could take the product to China and have them cranking out by next quarter. Its fucking disgusting, that is what it is, lawyers have made copyrights and patents so fucking toxic in this country only the most mega of the megacorps can afford to build any damned thing and even then they'll be looking at a couple of years worth of court cases for each new product. Lets face it, the west had its time in the sun but its over, the leeches at the top done pissed in the chili and ruined it for everybody.

I'm afraid the problem Alexander is that all the talented engineers were given the pink slip by the previous CEO who did a classic "slash and burn" on the company, so all you'd be getting is a shell NOT the teams. The Athlon64 guys? GONE. Phenom guys? GONE, Bobcat? GONE, he fired ALL the real top talent for computer layouts which is why the performance on Bulldozer was worse than Thuban, Thuban was the last chip laid out by hand while BD was computer designed.

Actually the company was already dead sadly, the former CEO completely gutted the company by firing ALL the chip designers for lousy software automated chip layouts, killing the next gen of the promising chips like Bobcat, and killing Thuban when he knew that bulldozer was gonna be a dog.

Let us just hope somebody buys them and turns the company around, they could do just as Intel did by going back to their K8 design and doing to it what Intel did to the P3 that became Core, because if they close their doors get ready to get royally fucked by Intel. You think their chips are high now? Wait until they have ZERO competition, hell the ONLY reason you have the Pentiums and Celerons is to keep a foot in the low to mid markets, no AMD? You won't find anything but Ultrabooks and $600 chips, mark my words.

Its a fucking shame, that's what it is, just a fucking shame. the Thubans still have a hell of a bang for the buck as do the Athlon triples and quads and work great for almost any task. I'm just glad i got my Thuban when i did, it should last me for a good 3 or 4 years and maybe by then this whole mess will have straightened out for the better.

One final thing, for those that are cheering ARM as its "anything but win tel"? Enjoy your black boxes suckers, Apple is showing the future there, locked down black boxes where you can't add shit, upgrade shit, and you throw it in the trash and buy another every couple of years because you can't even add fricking storage space to the damned things. don't think android will save you either, there are already several locked down Android devices out there, remember Android is based on GPL V2 and NO GPL V3 is allowed, that is so they can "TiVo trick" your ass.

Frankly I look at the future and i don't know whether to be sad or fucking disgusted, because it looks like we are gonna go back to the 80s, with everything proprietary, and damned if consumers don't line up to get screwed with a smile on their stupid faces...damn, just...damn.

In theory, yes (I'll take your word for it). But in practice, something went wrong. In actual benchmarks, the four-module/8-core FX8150 could barely beat the fastest Phenom II X6 "Thuban" 1100T, despite being made in 32nm instead of 40nm like the Phenom II.
Using your metric of "75% more performance - in the worst case", the FX8150 should have performed like a 7-core Thuban, not counting any advantages from the improved manufacturing process. As it is, it did perform much like a 7-core Thuban. Except that in some benchmarks the Thuban actually won.

A Thuban 6-core in in 32nm would probably perform on the level of the FX8150. A Thuban 8-core in in 32nm might even beat the "Piledriver" FX8350.

So one really has to wonder what happened at AMD. Maybe the anonymous AMD ex-employee told the truth about a premature switch to automated design. (see http://www.insideris.com/amd-spreads-propaganda-ex-employee-speaks-out/)

What's sad is how bad the former CEO fucked AMD by doing a total slash and burn on their engineering and R&D and pushing for cheaper automated layouts that simply don't cut it. The Athlon64 guys? GONE. The Cryix guys? GONE. they pretty much have their backs against the wall because the former CEO burned the fucking company to get a short term bounce, which I'm sure he cashed out on.

And anybody who thinks ARM will save them might be interested in some magic beans I have for sale, as ARM frankly doesn't scale very well and from the early looks ARM64 isn't gonna be really any better for power than the CULV Intel chips while having a HELL of a lot worse IPC. Frankly, and this is coming from someone who has been building AMD systems exclusively for awhile now and is still hanging onto AM3+ for all its worth, the only real selling point they had was "bang for the buck" but by burning R&D and killing Thuban the former CEO left them holding the bag without shit besides Bulldozer, which we all know blows too much power, is too damned hot, and frankly their octocores get stomped by Intel quads on IPC while using a third of the power.

I have to agree with the engineer in that link, they should have done the same thing Intel did with Core, go back to their earlier K8 designs and start from there just as Intel did with P3 mobile but now they just don't have the money or the time. I truly hope the Athlon64/Apple A6 chip designer they hired back can come up with a design to save the company because right now? Right now they really got nothing. Hell the former CEO even pulled the plug on Krishna, which would have been a sub 20w quad core bobcat, which is why all we're seeing now is minor speedbumps on a 3+ year old design. I swear they got fucked raw by bad management and I only hope they pull through. Maybe if they would have done this 4 years ago they could have the niche Nvidia now holds, but now? Its just not enough.

Notice how I got marked down for what even one of their former engineers says is true? Oh well, truth is truth. I do have a question though...why are you choosing the 8350 over the X6? Do you have a specific workload that can use 8 integer cores that doesn't have much if any use for floating point?

Because you look at the benches and the BEST the X8s do is 6-8% over the Thuban X6, and that is with workloads practically tailored for the chip. In most everyday tasks they are within a couple of points of each other....only the X6 is $110 and the 8350 is $180.

BTW you should probably also know that the core scheduling problems in Windows have been marked as "will not fix" and they even pulled the patches for Win 7, the ONLY way to get around this problems is Windows 8 as they replaced the scheduler in Win 8 with one which understands how the BD cores work (which is as you said, more like hyperthreading than true cores, which means that X8 is really an X4 with hyperthreading) so if you don't want to switch to Win 8 right away you'll be tying a boat anchor to your system.

Don't get me wrong, the X8 does have a place, for example its real good with running DBs or if you're doing a bunch of GPU heavy work like renders it can keep the GPU fed just fine, I just don't see any real selling point for the X8 at its current price, not with it so close to the X6 on performance. If it were me I'd pick up a cheap X6 and wait for excavator to see if things improve.

Although that right there should show AMD has some serious trouble with the BD design, since they are sticking with AM3+ for one more chip even though AM3+ is a dual channel design. You KNOW that has to be a serious bottleneck but you can just hear the engineers going "Look the best we're gonna get out of this chip isn't gonna beat the i5, if we try to force them to buy a new board too it just won't fly" as why else would they be sticking with a dual channel design and PGA when its obvious that LGA and quad channel is the way to go?

Actually what you are describing happened 3 CEOs ago and as you can read from that link by an ex AMD chip man you can see that the engineers they got now? Not really what is needed. All the Cyrix guys? GONE. All the Athlon64 guys? GONE. All the K8-10 guys? GONE. One of the first things that happened when the CEO musical chairs started was a slash and burn of the engineering dept which is why they are in the shape they are in now, Bulldozer was done using computer layouts which add 20% to power usage while losing 20% performance.

so anybody who wants to know why AMD went downhill so quick and why Bulldozer was such a disaster, please read the link, its an eye opener. personally I hope they can turn things around but after a slash and burn THAT bad its gonna be damned hard to recover, especially when Intel is so far ahead already. Hell since one of the previous CEOs killed Thuban they don't even have a single slot on Tom's hardware build list for cheap PCs, and haven't had a single slot in over a year. They don't even have good deals on the low end anymore as the Pentiums based on Sandy curbstomp them, its just NOT a good time for AMD.

A quote from an engineer who used to work for AMD

What did happen is that management decided there SHOULD BE such cross-engineering ,which meant we had to stop hand-crafting our CPU designs and switch to an SoC design style. This results in giving up a lot of performance, chip area, and efficiency. The reason DEC Alphas were always much faster than anything else is they designed each transistor by hand. Intel and AMD had always done so at least for the critical parts of the chip. That changed before I left - they started to rely on synthesis tools, automatic place and route tools, etc. I had been in charge of our design flow in the years before I left, and I had tested these tools by asking the companies who sold them to design blocks (adders, multipliers, etc.) using their tools. I let them take as long as they wanted. They always came back to me with designs that were 20% bigger, and 20% slower than our hand-crafted designs, and which suffered from electromigration and other problems.
That is now how AMD designs chips. I'm sure it will turn out well for them [/sarcasm]

source: http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=9746191&postcount=619

more:
http://www.insideris.com/amd-spreads-propaganda-ex-employee-speaks-out/

While that is good to know, I'm more interested in the rumor that xbox 360 games may run on Windows 8. Unfortunately, it may include a monthly fee like XBL.

http://www.insideris.com/more-xbox-360-games-on-windows-8-details/