Slashdot Mirror
AMD Announces A Shift In Focus From PC Processors
slughead writes "Forbes Magazine is reporting that AMD will no longer compete with Intel to make faster, smaller, and more efficient processors. Just as Mac users would be worse off if Windows didn't exist, Intel users will be much worse now that AMD will no longer compete. You see, there's this thing called demand, and when there are no competing products in a market, a good or service will always increase the price to the economic equilibrium, unless forced not to by the state (forget that right now, communists!!). In English: you're going to get less new technology, and higher prices on existing technology." On the other hand, AMD is definitely not exiting the chip business -- they're just trying to branch out from chips for microcomputers.
penis burning devices
I really don't see anywhere in the article where it actually says that "AMD will no longer compete with Intel to make faster, smaller, and more efficient processors."
There's something else called supply which is what actually changes when a more aggressive supplier enters the market, moving the equilibrium price to a new spot on the same demand curve. As long as you're handing out patronizing lectures on microeconomics...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
AMD will probably still have the best bang for your buck desktop processors but they wont be as fast, and that is all right with me. I never buy the absolute fastest cpu as I do not like to pay out my ass for the litte bit of extra performance that is not absolutely necessary.
Viral software licensing is not freedom, it is in fact GNU/Socialism.
I'm an AMD fan... their processors often offer more bang for the buck compared to intel.
They do run hotter, but so what? (and how else will I heat my server room in the wintertime?)
competition is always good; free markets demand it, and consumers will suffer when choice is reduced.
Does anyone know some more specifics? C'mon you AMD employees out there... I know you read slashdot... Please tell me this is some kind of sick joke.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
It seemed that AMD couldn't make money even when the Athlon was the hottest thing going (literally and sales-wise), simply because the PC market is so driven by price. It takes far more R&D costs to come up with a processor that can compete with the latest from Intel, and the profit per unit is probably abysmal.
To compete with Intel, they were finding that they had to compete in every area, in order to please the OEMs it was courting. They had to make a mobile chip, they had to make a low-cost chip, and a multiprocessor-capable chip, and now they're hard at work on a 64-bit chip. All of which will sell a fraction of what Intel will sell but with similar R&D costs.
It's just another example showing that it's very hard to compete against an entrenched monopoly.
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
Their president said that they're branching out into different markets, and Forbes went on the comment that this is a shift away from an emphasis solely on the PC market. But nobody said that AMD is going to stop making chips for PCs.
I don't see this as necessarily being a bad thing. The consumer computer processor market is a funny market today--the fabs cost billions to construct, the research costs millions and these chips are some of the most complex things ever created--and you can get then for $50 basically.
What's the point of every home user having a 3.0GHz processor? I'm not saying "640k should be enough for anyone" but at the moment, few applications (minus gamers) even need a 1ghz processor to shine--processors will no doubt continue to improve but until some radical paradigm shift in computing, it won't be that big a deal (memory, 3d cards, bandwidth are where I see the possibilities for a lot of improvement).
Let AMD get into market where the r&d is lower, and the margins are higher, this sounds like a good thing to me.
Sadly, the AMD 64 bit processor has now slipped to "the first half of 2003". It was supposed to ship in Q4 2002 not so long ago. I wonder if it will ever ship. This is bad. Intel's Inanium is not a place you really want to go.
AMD's prices are just *dirt* chip, this is why they aren't making any money. An 800mhz PIII chip costs 89$, on pricewatch (which I would never buy from by the way). 87$ buys you an Athlon 2100 cpu, which is just about 1ghz faster then the intel part. AMD's processors are an amazing value, but AMD has to have trouble making a profit on them.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think this is in the best business interests of AMD. I am a software developer by trade, and gamer by hobby. For years I was on the bleeding edge of technology (and paying a hefty sum for the bragging rights). I used to dabble in overclocking/custom cooling and really "pushing the preformance" on my machines. But the truth is, right now, as a software developer (VS.net[C#/C++], Java, Perl, Python) and a gamer (Worms, Warcraft III, Natural Selection), I simply feel no pressing need to upgrade my system.
In the days of 3.06Ghz HT boxes and 64bit processors... my systems are meek by comparison... My primary machine is a Sony Viao Laptop 1.0Ghz (AMD) with 512 + 40gig IDE (15.1 inch screen). My gaming machine is a 1.7Ghz (P4) with 1024 + 120gig WD (Special Edition). Yet despite my primary machine being 1/3rd the fastest(and more so if you count the advantage of HT) in the industry -- I feel no pressing need to upgrade.
The bottom line is, nowadays I don't feel like I am waiting for my system todo what I ask it too-- and until that feeling returns due to more powerful [or more bloated] software, I don't think I will be running out to buy a machine based on CPU.
If AMD is cheaper, cooler and does everything I need to in a smarter way (sound like Transmeta's plan anyone?), they will get my bucks.
ya gotta wonder with all the rumors of Apple sending out AMD boxes running OS X if all the rumors were wrong to conclude x86 was involved at all....
Maybe AMD is 'branching out' by manufacturing PPC chips for Apple. No evidence is conclusive but this will definitely add fuel to the rumor fire around the AMD/Apple connection.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
For those too lazy to click though, here's a sample quote:
It says nothing about "not competing with Intel". What a load of sensationalist crap.
Slashdot.
Tabloid News for nerds.
-- kwashiorkor --
Leaps in Logic
should not be confused with
Jumping to Conclusions.
Please read the article. Note that there is
nothing in it about "no longer competing with
Intel." Notice also that Forbes article came out
of Comdex, which was full of AMD CPU demos
for the PC market...
When there are no competing products in a market, the door is wide open for competition. As the equilibrium price rises (out of lack of competition), the barrier to entry lowers. As the barrier is lowered, competing firms will surface. These firms will fight it out until one "wins" by forcing the others out of business. Then there are no competitors in the market, and the door is wide open for competition...
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." -Voltaire
I've been waiting for YEARS to get me an AMD branded toaster oven. Wonder if it'll use Athlons as the heating elements?
I share some of the concern regarding the effect on competition with Intel, because there's only so much R&D money to go around in any company. However, let's say that they slow down trying to compete with intel over the very fastest chip on the market. People buy AMD because you get more chip for the money/the same performance at a lower price. If they invest enough to keep themselves just a step behind intel in their fastest chip, but still delivering better value, they might be able to sustain similar profits with substantially lower R&D and other costs. This would still keep the pressure on intel.
> And before you flame me for not reading the article, I didn't read the article.
:-)
And now that I have, you can flame me for replying to myself
The article talked not so much about ditching the CPU business, as partnering with other companies on non-desktop-PC applications--Gibson for digital audio workstations (using the MAGIC network protocol, covered here), JAK Films/ILM for video/storyboarding gear, and Cray for a new Sandia Labs supercomputer--the first two of which look more or less like specialised versions of desktop PCs anyway. So presumably you'll still be able to throw together a 1337 Athlon box for your own use, but they may be treating the Dell/HP/whatever market as a lost cause.
Click here if you just like to click on shit.
Many people choose the higher price/performance ratio of AMD proc's over Intel. But you have to keep in mind that many disciminating in-the-know users still prefer Intel's slight lead in motherboard (chipset) stability. A quick look at any x86 server-class rig will show you that Intel is still recognized for their stability. (Note: I'm not trying to start a fight here, as I own procs from both companies, but you have to admit not many servers run AMD stuff.)
The other big factor is marketing. Intel spends much more money marketing their stuff, and they seem to be doing it in an efficient way. AMD is still thought of by many people who don't know any better as a "cheap imitation."
As far as R&D goes, they seemed to be doing quite well until recently. Maybe someone else can shed some light on this for us.
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." -Voltaire
Once Intel sells everyone a P4, they need to convince everyone to buy a second P4.
Then they have to invent some reason to replace the P4; and the second P4, and buy a new P4+.
Intel has to compete with itself.
That's why Macs have such high resale values, as a corrollary; they only have to compete with themselves, and the way Apple has structured the G3 and G4 lines, they don't cannibalize and compete with each other, and thus maintain a high initial price and a high resale price.
All because Apple only has to compete with itself. If, like AMD, Apple competed against Intel, Apple would be forced to compete on price-since it doesn't, though, Apple can price according to other features, such as Altivec, OS X, iDVD/iMovie/iPhoto/iTunes, iCal/iSynch/iChat, long battery life, appearance, etc.
GPL Deconstructed
AMD will put compatibility ahead of sheer speed. The press release mentions embedded devices, but also demos of 64-bit game and database software. AMD is emphasizing that its 64-bit processor has better backward compatibility than Intel's with 32-bit software, even though its 64-bit mode is slower. This looks to me like a bid for industry support for its x86-64 architecture, hardly a concession of the PC market.
May I remind you that Intel is not exclusively in the chip market either. Intel spread to new concepts in computing years ago and are better of for it (e.g. From their site: Consulting Services, Compilers, Performance Analyzers, Threading Tools, Training Center, LANDesk* Software etc...) While most of these are certainly related to the PC chip industry it is not nearly as narrow as AMD.
In doing what Intel did years ago, they are actually increasing their competitiveness. In fact a quick look at Intel's (INTC) financials confirm just that.
Hats off to AMD. for keeping capitalism and competitiveness alive.
I hate people that dont have a sig
In fact before AMD started hounding Intel in the x86 market they made a wide range of processors and chips! I do electronic repair work for the military and I see plenty of older and newer boards with chips from AMD, Motorola, and TI. Not too many from Intel.
I understand the vision they have about future computing, if you try to shove a AMDXP or PIV in ever piece of hardware you will limit your capabilities greatly. There are times when a RISC processor will do a better job then a chunking x86.
Sure their stock took a hit, but those damn investors always freak out when change is in the air.
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
*buzzer sound* Wrong. Both IBM and Motorola make PPC processors. From what I learned in school, that is two vendors, not one. But you probably knew that, which is why you trolled as AC.
and it sounded like marketing-speak. however, I think some concern is warranted, particularly when you read between the lines (which always requires a bit of interpretation and speculation, but still...)
A shift away from the PC market could mean that they will no longer be trying so hard to compete with intel. The comptetition has arguably been good for BOTH companies, and even better for consumers. Isn't that what is often argued here, that competition against microsoft (in the form of linux, OS X, etc) would be a Good Thing (TM)? Improve quality? Lower price? yes?
I think we are justified in asking the question, and being concerned about this move. I'll repeat my call to the AMD employees that read this site... more information, please. Don't be shy... the worst you can be is an Anonymous Coward!
I love your nick, by the way...
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Forbes Magazine is reporting that /. reader slughead recently failed his 2nd grade reading comprehension test. Even more astounding is /. editor Timothy failed to do his homework - err job function.
Come on people.
I can't help but put on my conspiracy goggles on this one. Wasn't AMD the only Wintel chipmaker to openly vow to continue non-Palladium based chips? Were they muscled out my Microsoft and Intel in efforts to control the home computing experience?
moto411.com
Yes, I can't really understand why AMD would pull out of potentially the most lucrative area of the chip market, having gained an extremely tough-to-gain foothold there! Maybe they just can't handle the heat against Wintel? Sigh...
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
"FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!"
This is what I believe is on the minds of savvy techies all over slashdot in response to this announcement. While I'm not intending to be a troll, I'm trying to simply tell the truth (and see if I can get a post with the F-word modded up!)
Less Competition != Good for Consumers
Hell, they way things have been going, get ready in the next 12 months to be buying your Computing Devices from Microsoft Intel Inc.
Chicago2600.net more than a lifestyle, its a survival trait.
A modern fab is a billion dollar investment. Given that AMD can't charge a premium for thier chips and that thier credit is not as good anymore I don't see how they can expect to conitnue the race to make smaller faster chips against Intel. Intel has very deep pockets and more production capacity so in a way the Mhz race is how Intel is pushing AMD out of serious competition. Deemphasizing the cpu part of their business is a smart move for AMD but not good news for consumers.
Again, verbatim from my site:
Attention Slashdoters:
Don't get all your news from Slashdot
I should really start out by saying that I have never owned and Intel chip, my PC is an AthlonXP. I'm about to attempt to put an end to any dispute, and I'm going to use Forbes as my main source (because I think the man might know a thing or two about money, because he's got a lot more than me).
After the PC market's recent downturn, AMD was facing tough times. However, unlike Intel, AMD has little diversity in chip manufacturing. Recently, Intel announced their 3ghz processor with hyperthreading (a way of fooling software into running more efficiently). So AMD cut 15% of their employees shortly after.
Not that anyone needs to be reminded, but when a company cuts jobs, it doesn't just mean that they will have less employees, it also means that they will pay taxes. In addition to their current financial problems, just 5 days ago, AMD converted $300m of debt into stock, which will hurt their economic standing in the future, and by extension, the present (the news left AMD's stock in shambles at $5.90).
Converting debt into stock on such a large scale has consequences. Like, for instance, S & P could cut your credit rating. Of course, when the S & P does that, you have to convert more debt into stock.
Just a bad time for PC CPU mfg.ers? Well Intel's doing great, so how about that?
So whether the article said it directly or not (I read it 5 times and I think it pretty well did), AMD will not be competing in the PC market for a while. Their 64bit chip might help bridge the gap between 32bit and 64, but it has to come out first, and then it has to beat Intel's benchmarks on 32bit applications (which I could presume it will not). It will beat it in UT2003 though, hopefully that'll be enough!
Latewire
contrary to what a lot of the above posts say, there _is_ a hint that AMD will be withdrawing (to what degree, who knows) from the processor market. but i think the most interesting part of the article is where it mentions that AMD will be raising $300 million in convertible notes.
what does that mean? it means they're not really retreating. i think it means that they're going to be broadening their efforts; they'll stop focusing so much on processors for PCs, and dedicate some resources to other places.
they did very well with their flash memory division for a while (nevermind how it's doing now). that shows that they are able to succeed in areas other than the PC processor market. this gave them a taste for pursuing interests besides processors. additionally, their bitter struggle to compete with intel, and it _is_ bitter and brutal, led them to realize that in order to truly succeed as a company, they're going to have to work on multiple fronts instead of tying their success on one admittedly difficult marketplace war.
in short: nevermind the hype about AMD retreating. focus on the interesting aspects of the article. focus on the fact that they're taking a risk in raising $300 million and lowering their credit rating. then think about _why_ they're doing it.
Is there a way to mark this whole thing as a Troll?
1. Make great chips
2. Sell them low
3. ???
4. ????
5. ?????
6. ??????
7. well?....
Table-ized A.I.
Also, I don't think it's fair to assume Intel's primary domain is purely in PC Chips. Their work in Communications chips is nearly as important, and is becoming more so. I think they're trying to develop it into a stronger market force in the next few years.
All circuits busy.
Didn't AMD just mention that it planned to surpass Intel as the world's number 1 chip maker?
And I quote:
AMD BOSS HECTOR RUIZ says AMD is "dead serious" about ousting Intel to become the number one player in the "computational processor market".
"We're not just trying to be a good number two," he said.
Ruiz claimed its "competitor" had done "everything possible" to keep it from competing in new segments of the market but, despite Intel's best efforts, AMD was on course to make significant progress in a number of areas.
Surely AMD didn't change its entire business direction and core corporate strategy in a matter of days. It seems to me that there is a misunderstanding, and seeing as how the Forbes article quoted not one single comment from AMD brass stating that they "will no longer compete with Intel", I think it's Forbes, and the story submitter.
I seem to recall rumors back when AMD was kicking ass that Intel planned to leave the PC CPU business to pursue more "long term profitable measures." Well, what sure doesn't seem to be the case.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
Urm, I think this is true. One time with my Athlon 1.4ghz, I took the heatsink and fan off, to see what it would be like if I turned the computer on without them. The CPU kind of... melted, within a couple of seconds.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Yes--I agree that AMD is making a smart move. The only segments of the PC market that are going anywhere are the budget PC market (think under US$500), the mobile market (notebooks, tablet PCs, etc) and new form factors and "non-pc" consumer devices(ultra-compact desktops, set-top boxes like PVRs and game consoles). These all have a few common elements: the edge goes to the one who can produce low-cost, low-power, low-heat designs. The high-end desktop/workstation market is flat at best (and most likely in decline). Few in the market for a new PC are geeks who want to compile their Linux kernels faster than all their friends or render sophisticated 3D videogames at framerates higher than their eyes can perceive them (or most monitors can display them).
BUT---hold on a minute. Who said AMD was just going cheap. I got the idea that they were diversifying their market strategy. Until now, their marketing has been very unsophisticated to be polite. Hell, in an effort to win a petty pissing match over who is the king of the crap-pile they have gone so far as to give their processors "model numbers" instead of labelling them by clock speed. Joe blow on the street gets very confused when you try to explain what the 2100+ means on his "Athlon XP 2100+" (no it isn't REALLY a 2.1 GHz chip--it's only 1.733GHz but it's just as good...huh?). time to shape up.
Now, AMD is promising to get a bit smarter in selling their bleeding edge technology. Why languish in a stagnant high-end PC market with razor-thin profits against a giant comptetitor? Instead of trying to find, retain and support thousands (millions?) of geeks and "keep-up-with-the-joneses" types, each with 1 to maybe 8 processors each, perhaps it would be better for business to land a deal with hundreds of customres like Cray, or NASA, or JPL, or governments and big corporations, who each need thousands of processors to meet their needs?
Big customers don't need their hands held--they order in volume, making production runs easier to manage and cheaper and margins higher. They engineer and support their own products. These big guns are also much better at showcasing the latest technology. Think about it. What would be more impressive to the average person (and the mainstream press):
* If AMD powered supercomputers rendered the latest CG animated hit movie, an AMD-powered cluster of servers made Google search 500% faster, or predicted storm movements on Jupiter or repeatedly beat Kasparov at chess...etc
* AMD scored higher on some obscure benchmark on Andtech and Tom's Hardware, the pizza-faced kid next door got his 3D gam to go 120FPS at 32-bits and some insanely high resolution (ultimetely more a testament to his video card's performance anyways), and the computer salesman made and Athlon XP system boot faster than a similar but higher priced P4 system
I'd say the former would garner more respect and a higher profile than the latter.
Motorola did the same thing a few years ago and that's why IBM is now Apples only source of PPC.
I bet there are a lot of motherboard engineer that will be looking for work when this happens.
Shouldn't that be "Windows users would be worse off if the Mac didn't exist"?
Plain and simple, they lost. And its a shame, because they came into the game losing (post-K6, beginning Athlons). At the peak, less than 6 months ago, they were the favorite chip among hobbyists, and really had the better, cheaper, faster chip. They were winning (in the way that it counts, at least to me).
What a shame, especially when they realize that Intel can beat them in the areas they are focusing on too.
are "fast enough" for consumers, at least for the time being, and are looking at a PC marketplace in the near future where MOST (typical users) will be satisfied with their PC experience for several years to come. With a shrinking market for NEW PC cpus they should logically look elsewhere to sell their product, elsewhere being other consumer markets, whatever they may be.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Free trade has nothing to do with the FREE MARKET. The free market is THE REASON AMD is in the financial situation they are currently. You can't control what the market will do to the value of your stock as a company and the market doesn't always, if ever, do things that make sense. Your average trader couldn't give a shit if AMD has superior technology to Intel. Intel has superior marketing. Why? Because they have MORE MONEY coming in from stock holders to invest in more marketing.
At the end of the day, that is all there is to how the system works. It only rewards the company with the highest earnings/dividends per share.(read: the company that can fuck their customers over the hardest without the consumer getting too upset and perhaps even make them feel good about their ass reaming) Who here doesn't understand why converting 300M in debt into securities was a bad move for AMD long term? It is because it gives them less control over market forces on their company. This is a very bad thing when you have a lot of INTC stockholders who would love to see AMD stock plummet(thus making Intel more valuable).
For all that is good about a free market system, if I ever had the chance to own a company, I would avoid being publicly held at all costs. You can't even be responsible to your employees when you have an obligation to share holders.
Russian Russian Russian RussianDollSig DollSig DollSig DollSig
Intel isn't exactly betting the farm on the PC market, either. Although Itanium isn't quite as do-or-die for Intel as the Hammer series is for AMD, they both know full well that making CPU's for PC's will be a shrinking part of their revenues. Making chips for servers is the market they are both shooting for. The margins are much higher and the market is actually growing at a good clip, unlike the PC market.
So I guess this may be bad news for folks who want really cheap bleeding-edge performance on their desktops. But business users don't need any more performance on the desktop than they already have, and even gamers are increasingly looking toward GPU's and not CPU's as the most important factor for performance in their systems. Intel and AMD are laying their bets in the server room.
Given that AMD already has the technology in hand to deliver more bang-per-buck than Itanium and with a smooth and solid migration path, this may be the most sensible move they've made in years.
Knocking a chip and its "mobo", because you bought it for something it was not meant to be used for - well guess the egg is on your face!
The mini-itx works great at what it is meant to do, low-cost, very low noise, low power consumption, low heat, small footprint - hmmm....lovely in the office enviroment. Does Internet (mail, web), does Office programs and when the boss is out it plays DVD's like a dream. Works as a server too, with file and print and the low-end mini-itx "mobo" (5000) does not even use a fan - less mechanical parts to cause server failure. Give it plenty of RAM (which is cheap today) - supports up to 1GB and give it a fast HDD - supports ATA 100/66/33 and there are some great PCI-graphics cards (GeForce too) out there - the little box will spin nicely but quietly along. There is also a 1U server rack case available for the mini-itx, several telecoms use it.
For most users the mini-itx is great value in price and able to meet most computer user demands, but most importantly it gives choice - which is what it is all about.
- Kenzai, Master of the Little Penguin. "Long Live BeOS...ehhh, where is everybody going!?"
My first PC was 386 SX 16. It had Intel CPU of course. Then I bought 386 DX 40, then AMD 486 DX (DX4? something like that) 100, then Cyrix 6x86 166+, then K6-2 500, then Athlon XP 1800. As you see I haven't used Intel for a long time.
If AMD is going to increase prices and stop active development - there is a place for a new competitor. You probably don't remember Cyrix CPUs from pentium times. Thanks to Cyrix - Intel and AMD put new CPUs faster on market. Of course they also created very aggresive marketing (I still hear "Cyrix is unstable" sentence). If AMD stop now - whole market will slow down.
We need Transmeta in Desktop PC. Is it possible?
what about Crusoe? what's the status of the Crusoe processor and why don't they take advantage of this opportunity and jump into the market?
"The ones who dont do anything are always the ones who try to pull you down" -- Henry Rollins
eWeek has another write up...
Haven't you watched any science fiction movie in the last half-century? What we need is a debugged HAL9000, but at this moment our computers can't even read lips.
I don't think AMD is leaving the x86-compatible CPU market anytime soon. I think AMD was just unfortunate that the current market conditions won't allow for the company to be profitable in the CPU market; what AMD wants to do is expand into building other specialty products that will better insulate itself from market conditions. If you look Intel's wide range of products they are heavily into networking, specialized-market RISC CPU, and so on.
The thing is that AMD--unlike previous competitors in the field like Cyrix--has demonstrated that can produce CPU's that are very competitive performance-wise against Intel's products. The Athlon XP 2800+ --which should ship any time now--has proven it can keep up with the Pentium 4 2.8 GHz CPU in most benchmark tests. Intel can't sit on its laurels with the new Pentium 4 3.06 GHz CPU that has the Hyperthreading functionality; they very well know that the Barton-core Athlons due the first quarter of 2003 will probably keep up with the Pentium 4 3.06 GHz, because the new Athlons will not only sport 512 KB L2 cache on the CPU die but also other changes to the main CPU core to improve performance.
We had a customer the other day who dropped her computer in friday morning (after a storm) complaining that the modem was not working. We found that somehow (probably the storm) had fried the COM port.
Now she took the computer back home and we rang Intel on friday lunch time to get an advanced replacement for the 2.5year old motherboard (Basically they send the board first, then you send the broken one back).
Monday lunch time, the courier came and delivered the new board. Now this board had made it all the way from Malaysia or somewhere to Brisbane, Australia.
In other words with intel products we are able to offer the customer a warrenty repair in three days at no cost to us at all. You can't get that kind of service from AMD.
While I think this forebodes evil in the PC market in that, if AMD goes under soon, Intel will be able to fix prices much higher than they recently have. What might very well happen is that the latest Intel CPU's might slowly start selling at prices in the $1000 range. Without much competition Intel can charge what it likes and treat customers the way Microsoft, or even worse, Quark , do. The end result is that PC prices might start going up again and that PC makers will make bigger margins. The end effect is that realistically, standard PC's could be selling in $2000 range again, in the next few years.
Although that is a rather dark scenario that will probably not happen soon, the recent announcements of PPC based motherboards and a revival of the Amiga on PPC using morphOS might very start up that market again. Although I cannot really see the practical advantages of Amiga over Linux, Amiga had it's largest user base in Europe, especially in Germany, where the national need to tinker with things found a partner in the Amiga. Although I seriously doubt that they'll market it well and that it will take off in a large fashion, it might provide that need critical mass to get the PPC into the mainstream, thereby providing a small bit of competition to Intel.
What might also happen though, is that China's x86 efforts finally take off and that China becomes a major deliverer of low cost commodity x86 CPU's. Who knows.
Yes, I can't really understand why AMD would pull out of potentially the most lucrative area of the chip market, having gained an extremely tough-to-gain foothold there!
/., well for us 1GHz is plenty.
They aren't pulling out of the PC processor market, they are saying that demand for high end processors is weak and the cost of R&D to produce 5GHz+ chips may not be made back. So they are changing their focus away from competing with Intel on the very top end. When the market picks back up and suddenly everybody is demanding enough processing power to run their own simulation of a thermonuclear detonation, then AMD will spend more R&D money on top end processors. They won't stop producing Athlons, they will stop investing huge chunks of money into making faster chips.
For most people like myself who only use their computer for 3D gaming, software development, video & image editing, writing papers, checking email, talking on IRC and reading
Much of this is a response to the fact that they're asking for a $300million note, and the market they are in is depressed.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
Here is the actually press release from AMD. Theres nothing in there that says they are stopping consumer chips (infact, they talk about the 64bit chip, and unreal). they do mention that they are 'branching out' Microsoft branched out from Operating systems (everything from keyboards, to chairs, to crappy networking hardware) but they still make the same great os!
I guess that people just miss the point that nowhere in the linked story does AMD ever say they're going to stop producing PC chips, it says that they are seeking to diversify. This is a good thing. It certainly doesn't say that they aren't bailing on the market, but it's pretty obvious that they're not going to bail on the PC market so soon after developing the Athlon XP and the Hammer.
Then again, it's 5am, I could be reading a story about chickens taking over New Zealand and not about AMD market share.
If there is a God, you are an authorized representative. - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Ahh, I see your point. If you have a Mac you don't even have to worry about a fast processor, because you aren't going to get one for a few more fucking years anyway, right?
If I remember correctly, Intel just released its 3.0 GHz chips. If I were AMD, and I wanted Intel to slow down a bit, I'd want them comfortable and happy in their current position so they didn't have quite the same sense of urgency about developing newer, better, faster technology.
;)
In fact, I might just start off with such a press release. I might continue by quietly starting up subsidiary firms, owned by the AMD corporate head office, and moving people and tech over to those companies, while making a big show about how the AMD CPU processor focus is being back-burnered, production factories are being retooled for different things, the corporate vision is changing (frequently), etc... All the signs of a firm that is visionary, bold, courageous - in other words, about to show up at fuckedcompany.com.
And when Intel was sitting pretty, regaining market dominance and feeling pretty good about its position vs. "former competitor" AMD, AND the market is starting to boom and demand is increasing, AMD could release something that blows Intel's doors right off.
Yes, it's risky. Long term profit in the face of a short/medium bear market usually is.
With Transmeta still trying to push into the PC CPU market I'd think AMD backing off a little would be good news for them. Two names is about all most customers can keep track of. This will let the Transmeta name have a chance at becoming known outside the geek society. If the recent news of Transmeta's new much faster and even more effecient CPU is true and that CPU is cheap and faster (and more energy/heat effecient) than a 1.8Ghz Intel CPU then they might grab some decent market share.
Just to make a wild prediction I'd say handheld wireless devices will be a big boom over the next decade or so.. faster CPU's probably will matter less than extending battery life. If they can make them cheap enough and so that they don't need massive cooling then they also should work well for parallel designs.. for the power users.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Yes, I also found his comment a bit odd. 3D gaming? Software development? Video editing? And he thinks 1 GHz is enough? Either he only does small stuff, or he has a LOT of patience. The codebase for the project I'm working on at work is currently about 170,000 lines, big, but certainly not a "huge" project, and it takes nearly ten minutes to rebuild on a P4 2 GHz. One often has to make changes to header files fairly high up in the dependency chain .. :/ .. there is only so many times in a day you can "go make coffee" or "check your email". It is very typical for me to have to spend more than 70% of my time in a day just WAITING for the computer to do one thing or another.
And of course, video editing is much worse...
As for AMD, I hope they keep making great processors. I've become annoyed with Intel's focus on GHz. Intel's idea of performance seems to be, "Let's just throw lots of clock cycles around!"
To be fair, AMD got caught up in the MHz race too, and they are, what, only 10%-15% better per clock? That's easy to beat if you have a 20% faster clock.
I am still somewhat bitter with AMD's pathetic K6 releases, their performance simply didn't measure up as well as others claimed, even with "integer" operations.
I was also wary of how easy it is to crack a core, AMD's physical chip design is simply too unstable, even the frigging huge heat sink is only held on by a tiny clip. Not exactly the positive bolt-on lock that the heat sinks that my Alpha and Xeon system have.
Couldn't agree with you more as far as AMD underpricing stuff. While I like the fact that AMD has made ludicrously fast chips available quite inexpensively over the last few years, I've always wondered about their pricing.
/OPINION
I've always viewed Intel's strategy as "price the fastest available chip considerably higher than the rest, and that'll pay for R&D." This seems to have held reasonably true over the years, where the fastest chip out there is more expensive than the second fastest by 50% or more. If people really want that much more performance, then that'll give Intel the financial incentive (and more importantly, the finance) to go out and develop something faster.
AMD in the grand scheme of things, hasn't had a whole lot of experience with ground up development in the x86 arena (i.e. very complicated chips) until recently. (Note that this does not apply to other chips, such as the terrific 29xxx RISC processors they made for embedded control, and then dropped.) They started life in the x86 world as a second source x86 manufacturer. (I imagine IBM wanted more than Intel making 8086's, because Intel was pretty small at the time.) They built x86 chips under license from Intel (i.e. they got the masks from Intel and just ground out copies) up to and including the 386 to my knowledge.
Then Intel marketing really started to turn up the heat and realize that there might be something to that whole PC processor business right around the time the 486's were getting popular. The "Intel Inside" campaign started to take off sometime around then. Also with this came the fact that Intel was well established at this point as a manufacturer, and no longer felt the need to license to second source manufacturers, and AMD was sort of left holding the bag and scrambling to do design in the x86 market, something they hadn't needed to do before.
Right around the same time, Cyrix, who started in the PC biz making the notable "FasMath" math coprocessors (because Intel's weren't terribly fast until the Pentium; more on this later), started to make whole x86 procs themselves. With the 486, doing this design wasn't too bad for AMD and Cyrix because the 486 was mostly a logical extension of the 386 (with an internal math-coproc), and added things like more L1 cache (a few bytes vs. 256 bytes in the 386), higher speeds, some other things I don't remember, and clock multiplying (i.e. running the proc at some speed faster than the system bus). In fact AMD and Cyrix were typically bettering Intel's designs at the time due to this fact. (Cyrix, I think, had a write back cache before anyone else did, and AMD built some crazy fast version of the 486; up to 160mhz if memory serves me right!)
What really started to bring Intel forward was the Pentium. Intel, I think, has always seemed to have a gift for getting a feel for what's coming along in the next 3-4 years, and designing ahead of time to meet it. When the 486 came out with an integrated mathco, everybody was like, "only CAD weenies and the like need those; they just add cost!" Even Intel catered to that crowd and made the 486SX, which shipped (at much lower cost), with the mathco disabled, and later versions had it removed entirely. But that decision proved to be fortuitous in the fact that applications begin to take advantage of that power in the 486's lifetime.
In the Pentium, Intel pushed farther by doing 2 big things to make the chip faster:
1. Making it superscalar (multiple exectition units that could perform operations simultaneously, for the most part)
2. The performance of the mathco really got good in the Pentium
Enter now AMD into the Pentium forum. Now they're beginning to get caught with their pants down. The stopgap solution to counter the performance advantage of the Pentium was just to make really fast versions of the 486. They would do a performance rating of equivalence to a given Pentium. I think the 133mhz version was equivalent to a Pentium 75, and the 160mhz version (anybody have one of these?) was I think equivalent to Pentium 90. After a while, it became obvious that this strategy wasn't going to work. So after much apprehension, AMD rolls out their home brewed competitor to the Pentium, the AMD K5, and in a nutshell, it ends up totally sucking.
In all fairness to AMD, it wasn't that bad a chip (I still have one in a rsync backup machine) but they made some short sighted design considerations, and fixed relatively minor problems while leaving larger ones untouched. Notably, they decided to spend their transistor budget (I'm talking physical transistor count on the chip, not money), which was slightly less than Intel's, but not a whole lot less, on fixing the 'u'/'v' pipeline interdependency problem (one of the pipelines on the original Pentium couldn't support every instruction the other could) and making considerations to make mixed 16/32 bit code (think Windows 3.11 and Windows95) run faster, instead of making their FPU go really fast. They sort of banked on the fact that the FPU performance still wasn't terribly important compared to integer execution speed. Which was probably true when they were developing the chip.
But all of a sudden the internet got big, and people wanted to do really FPU intensive things like 3D gaming, playing MP3's, and digital video. The fact that they had a shitty FPU and the fact that they were manufacturing on a process that was old, and consequently couldn't get the chip to clock as fast as Intel's offerings began to hurt them. The K5 was not going to cut it. Which brings us to the next important part of AMD's corporate strategy, buy your way out of trouble!
Lucky for AMD, a small company called NexGen was working on a comptetitor to Intel's x86's, but their offering, the NexGen 586 (anybody have one of these?) was not doing so well. They were also working on a fairly impressive chip that was basically RISC inside but chomped up x86 instructions into RISC sized bites, sort of like the Pentium Pro (and P2, and P3). This chip was the NexGen 686. AMD liked it so much that they thought buying NexGen out was a good idea, and the NexGen 686 became the AMD K6. Because NexGen had applied a modicum of thought to the design, it turned out to be relatively extensible too; over the course of its life it added a 100mhz bus speed (Super Socket 7) and some onboard L2 cache (64k for the K6-II, 256kb for the K6-III). While it still wasn't as fast as Intel's offerings, AMD could offer it quite a bit less expensively than Intel's stuff. They even managed to get the 3dNow! stuff going and sold a chip with inferior FP performance to the gaming crowd. An impressive feat.
But by the time the 450-500mhz chips were coming out, AMD was once again in trouble. Intel had figured out with the Celeron-A how much faster having an onboard full speed cache could make a proc, and more importantly they could get themselves into a much less expensive design to manufacture (Slot 1 was hella expensive to make). AMD's K6 was beginning to show it's age.
The solution to this, from what I understand, was basically to buy portions of the Alpha processor design (and maybe some members of the design team) to put the Athlon together. This theory seems to hold some water in the fact that the original Athlon (and maybe the later chips too) used the Alpha EV6 bus for I/0, so obviously there must of been some resemblance in design.
What AMD chose to do here is to crank out Athlons as cheap as they possibly could to try to sway consumers, PC manufacturers, and maybe some Wall Street analysts on their side and beat Intel in the raw numbers game. What they should have done was raise the price of their high end chips somewhat and started putting money in the bank for R&D, and get prepared for the time when the Athlon would start to fall behind. We're now beginning to see this, I think, with AMD having to shift away from the clock speed battle (probably a smart move) in the Athlong XP performance rating system. More recently, the setbacks with the Athlon XP 2800+ and faster seem to imply that AMD is starting to reach the limitations of the Athlon design.
OPINION
I wonder if the Clawhammer (and other x86-64 designs) are going to be all that good because, clearly, AMD has less of an R&D budget to play with. My interpretation of their recent annoucement is that it is possibly some spin-doctoring to buffer the fact that when the Hammer comes out, it's not going to be in the same class as Intel's and will not to be able to compete. From a marketing/PR standpoint, and perhaps a relations with investors standpoint, this may make some sense because investors are less likely to have their faith shook if they think that competing with Intel on the desktop market wasn't part of the game anymore, as opposed to x86-64 failing while in open competition with Intel. Customers are also less likely to lose faith with AMD as well, and simply see them once again as a budget manufacturer of x86 chips, as opposed to one that offered better chips.
If AMD does focus less on making fast x86 processors to compete with Intel, the hobbyists will be disappointed, but I applaud AMD for having the business acumen to make that decision and try to stay in business doing what they can do, as opposed to trying to go for broke in a CPU performance "pissing contest" with Intel. In the early to mid '90s, AMD cancelled production of the very good (and reasonably well selling) 29000 series RISC chips because the cost of supporting them (making compilers, etc.) was too high to make any money from the chip. Maybe if AMD had priced the chips just a bit more they could still be in business of making 29xxx devices, and maybe, just maybe, if they had charged $5 or so more for each of their procs, they would have had the R&D funding to go after Intel, and keep up in the clock speed dept.
it's not a troll, i remember paying $700 for a p200 (just the chip) the day it came out oh so many years ago and now i would have to pay someone to come throw away the same machine (if i stil had it anyway)
and i worked at the store i bought it from
Right now, most users don't need to perform such operations, as it is, video is as extreme as it gets for most people, and that's more about bandwidth and RAM. The people that DO need to perform them can get higher-end computers that are designed for such tasks. Besides, a lot of people would probably like that stuff you outlined, but wouldn't pay much of a premium to get it, even if it were possible yet.
For a while, it was gamers that was a big part of pushing the market for faster CPUs, but now, as many others suggest, that horsepower focus is now in the video cards, so gamers really aren't as much of that picture any more. Game companies don't want to offend the less hardcore gamers by requiring the latest systems, as such there is often less benefit to getting the latest.
just recompile your carbon or cocoa app as 386 in project builder an it will run.
I cannot recompile Photoshop because Adobe does not provide the source code for its applications. Heck, I don't even think Adobe could "just recompile" signal processing cores written in assembly language.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Why does Intel having no other competitors making PC Chips mean that they have no competition.
The truth about intel's competition is found by changing your sites on where the competition lies.
The Internet, as Microsoft correctly concluded was their competition. More and more processing power moves away from the PC, and onto large servers processing all the information, thus, rendering the great masses of PC's as Dumb Terminals. "The local operating systems as a replaceable commodity."
Let's face it, more and more, Intel Pentiums have become processors for dumb terminals.
Once a PC's processor has the capability to display any image in realtime at 24 Frames Per Second, then there is no need for advancement in processing power. All the additional processing power is used and demanded by servers.
Seems to me some of the greatest advancements in PCs' performance has come more from:
1. Cheaper yet faster Memory (RAM and HARD-DRIVES)
2. Faster more powerful Graphics Display Hardware.
Than from the microprocessor's MIPS rating on the CPU.
I really can't think or conceptualize over 1 Billion commands to give my Pentium ever second. But, I certainly could visualize a Billion Bytes worth of info for my Graphics card to process in the form of an (.mpeg), say, to watch a movie or something.
AMD is saying that besides desktop chips, they are also moving into workstation and server chips. How exactly is this "pulling out from competition with Intel"...? Quite the contrary, they will now be competing not only with the Pentium and Celeron, but also with the Xeon and Itanium (and with chips from Sun, HP, etc.). And judging from the support they're getting before even releasing the Hammer, I'd say their future looks quite bright indeed.
I'm sorry for the rant, but for the last couple of years Slashdot has become a swamp. Half the articles are from someone pushing their personal agenda ("Microsoft sucks", "Apple rules", "Person X is a bastard", etc.), and the other half are simply wrong. The readers then comment on the Slashdot "news items" without even bothering to read the original articles (thus propagating the ignorance) and finally the moderators mod things as "interesting" or "insightful" without bothering to see if they're even remotely true.
RMN
~~~
First of all, AMD does have diversity in chip manufacturing. They make flash memory.
Second, cutting employees doesn't mean you pay less taxes. The pre-tax charge that you link you has nothing to do with taxes. This pre-tax charge is a one-time expense associated with the restructuring. It mostly represents the severence pay they'll be giving people.
I've read your story submission (which slaughters any reasonable economic theory) and this. You shouldn't try to write about finance until you get an education.
That which does not kill me only makes me whinier
The market for PC is soft, and probably will be for a while. Most people now have an fast enough PC.
On the other hand, the market for embedded devices is still thriving, as everying seems to have a processor embedded in it.
Yeah, the embedded market isn't as sexy as the processor market, but there is huge volume potential.
Then again, it's 5am, I could be reading a story about chickens taking over New Zealand and not about AMD market share.
I knew this day would come. All hail our new chicken overlords!
AMD has a very effective roadmap ahead for Athlon, where it basically goes head to head with Celeron. Athlon is smaller and faster there. Hammer is expected to debut at 3400+ ratings and Opteron is expect to hit 4000+ and higher in 2003. Besides being faster, these chips will have native 64 bit capability which P4 lacks. They will smoke P4 across the board, and have a smaller die size to boot.
If AMD can execute (every sign is they can) they should take off during any tech recovery. Believe me, when Hammer starts selling like hot cakes, the CEO will sing a whole different tune! :-)
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Smarter devices instead of raw computing power.
Realtime rendering is sorta nice, but not really in the general interest of computing. Look at a human brain: A single neuron transmits information much slower than a microchip. But as a whole, the system simply wrecks a intel (amd, motorola, etc etc) in computing power.
Its specialized, sure. But in terms of speed, microchips already fulfill 80 - 90 percent of our daily computing demands - the stuff where a mass of neurons is bad at, e.g. all sort of clulating. Difficult, but not real smart stuff.
On the technical side, the current hype is phones, not pc's - think Europa & Asia. And the next big thing will require smartness. Something a single general purpose chip, even in its multi giga hertz form, can't handle. Raw Speed alone is losing it's selling point.
AMD seems to get it.
The only skin on a computer should be porn.
True enough and point well made. Missed that one.
Mind you, the highest min. req. spec. on a game I know of right now (could be slightly out of date here) is UT2003 with a massive graphics card requirement of about 32Mb GeForce level or something like that and a processor of about 733 MHz. Even if this is a bit low on the current scale of things, the top of the range gamers PC is at least 2.3 GHz with a really beefy graphics card and memory sticking out of every oriface. My guess is that it'll take about a year (maybe two) until this level of system is too slow to run most new games. This is including advanced AI and physics models.
I could be a bit biased here since my own computer use tends towards anything new and shiny and processor intensive. But it's against the game manufacturers to make their products SO high spec that only the top of the PC system crop will be able to play it.
But, I'm rambling now...
If you can't think of something nice to say then don't say anything at all. No, REALLY.
Wow, XP 2100 and P4 1.7 run at the same clock - look at the diff in price (well, the XP runs 33MHz faster, even)
arg. Don't you know that an Athlon and a Pentium with the same clock speed are not the same speed!! Clock speed is just one variable in CPU speed.
You notice how it says XP 2100? That means it's equivalent to a P4 2.1 gigahertz! (Actually, it's faster than a 2.1 gig.)
Don't go bashing something you don't know anything about.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
jez9999: And you think it's AMD's fault that their processor melted when you took off it's fan and heatsink!?
My Athlon is perfectly stable, even overclocked to 137 FSB. Athlons don't have heat problems. If you just have a proper fan and heatsink, you will have no instability.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
Perhaps we'll see long gone competitors make a comback now? ...like Cyrix??
he... hehe.... hahha...hhahaaahhahaha..HAHHHAAHAHAHA!
man I crack myself up...
LOL, no, I was just saying. I now have another Athlon, of exactly the same spec, which is working fine with my new Volcano 7+.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
One time with my Athlon 1.4ghz, I took the heatsink and fan off, to see what it would be like if I turned the computer on without them. The CPU kind of... melted, within a couple of seconds
Moron. Did you then drain the water and oil from your car and drive it around to see what it would do?
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
There's been a growing shift of attention to embedded devices in the last few years. In the last five years or so, we're starting to see Joe Consumer spend more time with their embedded computers:
Palm Pilots and Handheld PC's.
Smart Cell phones (with games and cameras, even!).
Sophisticated set-top boxed.
In-car navigation/entertainment systems.
Portable entertainment and recreational technology.
One of the reasons Microsoft went into developing WindowsCE is the realization that there is consumer demand for lower-performance systems that are also less resource-intensive.
AMD is going after some of this market -- witness their acquisition of Alchemy -- the Au1x core cranks out 500 MIPS of processing at 1 Watt. (Heck, at lower speeds, you can almost get down to 1/4 watt.) And does it much cheaper than Intel or Motorolla.
AMD also came out with their new 802.11b chipset that will wifi-enable the next generation of portable gadgets, reducing processor overhead and power demands.
AMD should stop trying to compete head on only int he PC Market. There's a lot of money selling silicon for other applications.
Back in the day, AMD was a chipfab. Intel made processors, but most of them were contracted out to independent companies, who could do a better job. Then one day, AMD realized that with their efficient factories, they could make a pretty good 486 clone. Intel sued, and in the end, AMD was forced to [a] stop directly copying Intel, and [b] use a different name.
The rest of the story's history. AMD started making the K5 and K6; then they made the K7, their first processor to not be compatible with Intel-standard mobos (remember when every processor used Socket 7?) And their custom architecture, in the end, almost netted them 25% of the chip market.
Then, for whatever reason, AMD started doing badly. And they said to themselves, maybe competing with Intel isn't such a good idea after all.
I expect AMD to release Barton and the like, simply because they're already developed. I expect them to release Opteron and future x86-64 processors, but only with cache/speed/price configurations designed for servers, because there's still money in people switching from proprietary Unix to Linux. I expect Apple to soon make an announcement that AMD is its new supplier; whether that means AMD buys Motorola's desktop PPC chip business, or whether it simply becomes a fab for Apple/IBM-produced designs, I have no idea. But I don't expect AMD to announce any new desktop x86 processors from now on. If this article means anything, it's that Barton's it.
No, no, no. You see, there's this thing called demand, and when there's not enough demand for a product, it generally exits the market place.
If consumer processors make AMD money, AMD makes consumer processors. If consumer processors don't make AMD money, AMD doesn't make comsumer processors.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
AMD is thinking on the right track.. they are essentially saying that they will expand their market because there IS something as 'too fast' (for the workstation market, anyway)..
/w 128mb ram is more than enough for web-browsing, email, and an instant messager and fast enough to use any bus architectures required to access your devices such as cameras, pdas, mp3 players. Why should people upgrade if there is no need? Sure, there may eventually be a need for real-time digital editting in Grandmom's computer.. but it isn't needed yet.. so why should Grandmom buy a computer that can do that??
Sure, chips will keep increasing in speed.. but they can't increase so drastically their uses drastically overshadow the uses of their target audience.
A 400mhz Celeron
Computer purchases will slow down considerably in the next few years (and it has already begun) until there is a new 'killer app' that requires something more..
Perhaps when we finally have 3d capable desktop software, we may begin seeing more upgrades... and even more when 3d capable screens are available (holographic 'screens'!).
The point is that the consumer market has been leveling while the chip speed as been flying higher.. there isn't any money in doing R/D if nobody is buying the product! So they want to start looking into other markets, the markets of which the consumers are shifting their eyes to. Digital Cameras, PDAs, Wireless networking, etc.
AMD is standing on one leg, they need another foot otherwise they may topple once the chip market levels. Intel has already done it, they are making wireless equipment and webcameras... they know that when the chip-market is doing poorly, they have a little leg to stand on.
We shouldn't hate AMD for doing this, they have to look *realistically* at where the market is going. I don't want to see AMD go the same way as BeOS, I've seen too many good companies disappear.
Of course the CEO of AMD can't say, "Yeah we're coredumping that entire market"
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
AMD's can't hold a cabdle to the new P4's with a decent chipset. I just don't see where they are going to survive ? Their chips can't compete in the imbeded market, to much energy use. Their chips can't compete in the Server market, to SLOW and not enough memory addressable. Their chips apparently can't compete in the desktop market either...I think it is time to drop the last few shares of AMD I've got left....This is really bad news for the consumer though...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Or at least it's to the point where there's no point to it all, except for the people who just have to buy an $75,000 Lexus, because they perceive it as being better than a $25,000 Toyota. Sure, it may be better but it isn't three times better, nor is it worth the higher maintenance costs and poorer fuel efficiency. But you really can't argue with those people anyway.
Here's where we stooped to: Intel reports a 9% increase in raw clock speed, which translates to a 4% increase in synthetic benchmark performance, and the power consumption increases by 15% at the same time. Great. Or NVidia ships a new graphics card that requires an external power supply and has all these great features that are effectively worthless, because it's just barely getting to the point where a game can require hardware T&L--something that's several generations old--and still make a small profit. Never mind all the stuff in later generation cards. Unless you're John Carmack, there's no incentive for developers to support this stuff, especially when an entire game console costs half as much as new video card.
Fans do fail. Intel chips will slow down or shut
down if they get too hot, to keep from self-destructing.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
Well, we've finally found out what slashdotters fantasize about. The site is slashdotted!
On the up side, this means that it's much more likely that the ugly Hammer will be stillborn and we'll get a new 64-bit architecture *without* all this IA32 backwards compatibility crap.
May we never see th
AMD is right...they should diversify into catering like my company.
I'd like 50,000 Athlon microprocessors...oh, and a carrot cake, please. With the little sprinkles.
May we never see th
Yeah, this is true, boardside support for the diode was dodgy when THG did the test, but to state that they began incorporating it because of the THG test is...
dodgy.
Man, 3D gaming, video & image editing _needs_ processing power. Besides you'll be more comfortable with faster processors in developing, believe me. (Compile time counts.)
I play counterstrike regularly. OpenGL with wait for vsync off. I sit at 100fps nearly the entire game. Complex scenes in UT2K3 still see excellent frame rates, and much of that is work done by the GeForce 3. So why is it I need more than 1GHz for 3D gaming?
99% of my time spent developing is writing code, thinking about code, and designing the architecture of the system or subsystem I'm working on. When would I need a 2GHz processor to increase compile time? Especially since the compile time is mostly I/O bound on disk access.
My video & image editing has never needed anything faster than my 1GHz machine with one exception - compressing an hour of raw footage into mpeg. The tools let me preview the entire thing from the raw footage though, so I don't have to wonder what the final copy will look like. That simply runs overnight and I never notice that it could have finished at 12am instead of 6am. I don't care.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
One often has to make changes to header files fairly high up in the dependency chain .. :/
It is very typical for me to have to spend more than 70% of my time in a day just WAITING for the computer to do one thing or another.
It sounds like you have an architecture problem. A serious one too if you have to make changes to pieces for which substantially all of the software is dependent on a regular basis.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
5GHz isnt going to be nearly enough. ;>
Yes, but right now 2GHz is too much. That's why AMD is taking its focus off making ever faster processors... too few people want them.
When is 5GHz not going to be nearly enough? Judging by soft high end chip sales, it isn't going to be in the next three years. That's why AMD is doing this.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
Technically, your interpretation of their words is valid. However, since AMD is ALREADY producing plenty of non-solely-PC-market items, such as
* flash memory (they and Atmel more or less 0wn the flash-memory market),
* high-throughput ethernet controllers (the 79C976 is WAY too efficient to justify putting in today's average desktop box), and
* embedded microcontrollers (the Elan SC520 is pretty much an entire 486 motherboard and processor in one chip),
I tend toward a more pessimistic interpretation.
Paranoid
Bwaahahahahaa.
I don't think the Forbes article was telling the whole story. From bits and pieces I've seen around the web, it seems like AMD is just going to get the Athlon scaled up a little more and shift focus to the ClawHammer. Who cares about a 5GHz P4 if it can't run 64-bit apps which might be common in two years? A lot of people who buy computers today thinking they're hot stuff are going to be very pissed off in the near future when they start having compatbility issues, even if software developers do both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of their apps. If Hammer is on time for next year (Yeah, right!), I suspect we'll see mass migration to 64-bit apps by '05. A lot of people probably don't anticipate upgrading for another five years or more.
if apple can do it
The Classic application environment is more of a virtualized native environment than it is emulation of hardware.
Carbon vs Cocoa, on the other hand, is like Winelib vs Qt, just a different toolkit to access the same underlying graphics system (Quartz or X11).
the onus isnt on the user to recompile
But if your proprietary software publisher refuses to recompile its application for your hardware platform, tough shit. One more reason for free software.
Will I retire or break 10K?
AMD makes a really good competing processor to Intel. It's hard to find anything in the tech industry nowadays that competes well as a substitute for another product. I hope AMD will at least keep up with Intel even if not aiming to beat them. I think AMD is perceived as a good solid company by standards, but seems to have entered the race a bit too late. I guess now they are trying to enter new races earlier, which might not be a bad idea.
The codebase for the project I'm working on at work is currently about 170,000 lines, big, but certainly not a "huge" project, and it takes nearly ten minutes to rebuild on a P4 2 GHz
Perhaps you should stop using such a crappy compiler/linker.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Context: Porting to "just recompile your carbon or cocoa app as 386 in project builder an it will run."
Then cwebster wrote: photoshop is available on i386/win32 nativly
True, recent versions of Adobe Photoshop Elements are available on Intel(tm) i386 architecture, win32 platform. However, recent versions of Photoshop rely on Windows features that remain poorly understood by independent implementors of Win32 API services on, say, FreeBSD/i386. (Darwin, the Mac OS X kernel, is FreeBSD on top of Mach.)
Thus, Mac OS XI users on hypothetical Mac hardware based on i786, Hammer, or Itanic processors would still run into hurdles for Mac apps that 1. aren't recompiled for i386 and 2. don't have an equivalent that runs in WINE.
its not like they lack i386 assembler to match thier ppc stuff...
But you still have to deal with the fact that the publisher reserves the right to refuse to make or to publish the port, in which case access to source code + patches distributed under 17 USC 117(a)(1) is the only way to get a port done.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Apple fans are probably pissing themselves with excitement. Perhaps now Apple will actualy be able to deliver faster computers!
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
A lot of OS-X apps are written in java these days, and those would run right off.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Itanium chips do Run x86 code, but, they are not optimized for it. They have a new, modern ISA thats supposed to be really good. Hammer on the other hand, is simply a 286->396 style extension to x86.
:P
Of course, Itanium chips don't really seem to run all that fast, so who knows what's going on
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
What I'm really hearing here, is that AMD won't be shelling out tons of bucks in competing with Intel to crank out the latest 9-gazillahertz equivilent chips. It's not to say that they're backing out of making processors, or even that they won't make fast chips, just that it will no longer be their target focus.
As many may notice, Intel's been cranking out higher-gigahertz chips on a fairly regular basis. AMD can probably hit the same numbers, just not in the same amount of time. Fine by me, how many people would actually *USE* a 3.2Ghz chip?
If they're expanding their market, perhaps we can forsee AMD moving into more intelligent chips, and perhaps assisting more in other peripherals (video cards, etc).
If this switch is successful, perhaps we'll see a happy ending. AMD gaining a stronger market in other areas could give them a bigger push in comsumer processor market a few years from now, whereas at the current time it's costing them money to compete.