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AMD Admits To Slowing Sales
An anonymous reader writes "Forbes is reporting that AMD has fessed up to investors about slowing chip sales. The price war that Intel has initiated seems to be taking its toll on the manufacturer." From the article: "The current drivers of business in the computer chip industry seem to revolve around Intel and AMD price war, uncertainty about how a slowing economy will impact consumer spending plans, and imminent product introductions from Intel that may be causing some consumers to hold off on purchases. Investors should get a better picture in the next few weeks--AMD will issue its full second-quarter report on July 20, a day after Intel is scheduled to report its results."
are the customers - without competition we would have been paying a lot more for the power we get.
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I have to say I am very impressed with the Core Duo on my Mac Mini (1.66 GHz). For a long time I would only buy AMD, but with a Mac I don't really have a choice. But after hearing how quiet this thing is, and seeing how it flies, I'm happy it has a Core Duo in it.
What a terrible comparison to make. Your benchmarking an old generation of AMD's chips (non-Opteron/non-AMD64) to the latest of Intel's chips.
And even with that, it's highly subjective, since AMD had a wide range of mobile processors, some of which were just as low power as the best (common) Intel chips, and still rather fast.
I know you're not really trying to say Intel chips are better, but still... What a terrible comparison.
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I am currently in the market for a new computer. I was going to buy a new computer back in January, but I waited for a price drop for the AMD X2 chip that I wanted. Then I learned that there was going to be a completely new socket AM2 coming out that will use DDR2 RAM. So I held off a little longer. Its six months later, and now I hear that there is another AMD chipset coming out in January with 4 cores, and a new Intel chip coming out in a month that trounces anything AMD has.
Plus, there are no reliable reviews of the new motherboards yet...and the reviews of both the new AMD and Intel chips are all preliminary...so, why should I commit right now? In fact, most major websites and magazines are saying to hold off buying!
Can anyone even imagine similar competition in the OS market. MS competing with Apple with a comparable market share like this would be a beautiful thing. :')
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The CPU industry will probably implode in the next decade or two.
1) Upgrade cycles just keep getting worse as business and people realize they do not need the latest and greatest. During the boom, a 3 year upgrade cycle was average, now it is in the range of 7 years. For the majority of businesses, all the box has to do is run Office decently. Only the high end enterprise and HA market will care about upgrading to the latest. And even they are getting cheap by simply clustering 2nd generation boxes.
2) They are hitting technology limits. It is doubtful that they will be able to get below 32nm silicon (right now the best is 65nm). That is why we are seeing multi-cores and performance/rating specs being redefined to account for threading capability; It is more an act of desperation than innovation. Yes, some technology will take over-- quantum, bio, optical, but there will probably be a significant waiting period for the new tech to emerge. Moore's final predicition is rapidly coming true; It is becoming too expensive to build state of the art fabs to justify the returns.
It's not surprising that sales are down, considering this is always the weakest quarter and the huge price war.
However according to Inquirer (http://uk.theinquirer.net/?article=32880), server sales continue to improve.
Price fixing, in a nutshell, is when competitors join forces to set prices in such a way to inflate the market value of a product. Price fixing is illegal, but it isn't what is going on here.
What is going on here is Intel decided that it can afford to lower its margins in order to either take back the market it lost, or squeeze its competitors because they cannot afford to operate on lower margins.
There is nothing illegal about operating this way (though some might find it immoral). AMD employed a very similar strategy in the late 90's, early 00's in order to position themselves where they are today in the market.
From TFA, it is still unclear if AMD is losing market share or if the whole chip market is slowing right now. Basically Intel and AMD are in a price war (good for consumers) and we will have to see how it all works out.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
Price-fixing is when multiple companies collaborate to set the price for their products or services. This makes them, together, essentially a monopoly. Since monopolies are not subject to market forces, this tends to be a bad thing. Thus price-fixing is illegal.
Price-fixing does not mean lowering the prices of your products to squeeze your competitors out of the market. That is normal behaviour, even encouraged behaviour. If both parties engage in a price war, the end result is that both end up selling their products at the lowest possible price for the company to remain viable (unless they make a miscalculation and go belly-up). What Intel is doing is responding to normal market forces, and it's the best thing for them to do, both for themselves and the consumer.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
From Newegg:
Athlon XP2 3800+ : $297.00 Pentium D 930: $170.00
Benchmark results are very similar with the Athlon winning most of the game benchmarks by a bit. Is that bit worth $130.00? Hell no.
I really wanted the 3800+ but it's price has remained the same for a very long time now. Meanwhile, Intel has been slashing prices daily. At the end I caved in and could not be happier. Until AMD starts price matching Intel processors, I'll stick with my Pentium D.
If O2 is good, O3 must be 1.5 times better!
Yes it is... That's why I said so, repeatedly.
AMD64 chips run 32-bit code just fine. The point is that T2400 is a new chip, and the only new chips AMD makes happen to be 64-bit. So you're disadvantaging AMD in your comparison, just because Intel is dragging it's feet on 64-bit support.
You can compare all you want, but you can't draw any useful conclusions with such varied systems. I could compare my Intel 386/33MHz laptop with a modern 2GHz AMD Turion notebook, but what could that possibly tell me?
That is absolutely moronic. There have been significant changes to both companies' products in that time.
You can say so, but you can't rationally justify such a stance.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
It's not such a terrible comparison. The T2400 is not a 64-bit chip, so comparing it with an AMD 64-bit chip is useless. I'm comparing mobile to mobile.
4 _microprocessors
Actually you're not. You're comparing mobile to very old mobile. There was a lot more difference than just 64-bit between XP-M and Turion. Turion runs cooler, it is faster and uses much less power.
This claim of yours is the same as for example: Aero industry puts out a four winged plane. And since all planes have two wings the only sensible solution would be to put them against four winged from 40's.
Also, since neither chipmaker has had any real innovation for a while, the only thing they can do is put more CPU's on one die.
XP-M and Turion IS quite a difference.
So I figured a Mobile AMD XP compared to a T2400 meant for a laptop was a fair comparison.
You figured wrong. You would have to compare it against AMD Turion AM2 X2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Athlon_6
32-bit case is the lowest denominator in your function, while you forgot all the others
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I think it's bound to happen if AMD can't muster enough resources to continue competing that they will need help. And no, I doubt AMD buying ATI will do much of anything. It seems AMD will have to be bought by IBM if they want the same deep pockets necessary to compete with Intel. They already work together, so it's definitely possible. I don't see how AMD can possibly do more for every bit of money than Intel forever.
A 10 w cpu is not a hardly noticable improvement over a 95 wat proc in a laptop.
It translates into much longer battery life with a smaller battery, ie, a lighter laptop.
A lighter laptop is much easier to carry around, and even small improvements in laptop weight are very noticable. Yes, most cpus run at a lower wattage, when they are clock throttling. But if their continuous full clock power were 10 W...
Especially if the laptop turns into a pda / cell phone / blackberry.
There is tons of room for improvement in these directions, not to mention all the other directions available but not yet made, like complete voice control, the ability to talk to the computer and let it do the writing (dictation),...
Get real. Anyone who says the cpu industry is about to implode is an idiot. Just like the one who said 640k is all anyone will ever need (Bill Gates?) or the one who said everything has been invented, let's shut down the patent office (in ~1900)
the cpu implode statement is just a troll, and a fairly stupid one, at that. From a clueless idiot.
Yes, I am a computer designer - engineer, and I work at Dell.
wake up and hold your nose
1) Intel is dumping its aging Netburst cores onto the market at such low prices that they're displacing lower-end AMD sales.
2) Intel is setting up for a Big Bath in their Q2 earnings report. Their selling off of their ARM processor unit to Marvell is part of this (they'll have to recognize a huge loss on the sale).
3) All of this is obvious to AMD, so they're putting even more emphasis on Opteron sales where Intel is weakest. This results in lower total sales, as they sell in far fewer numbers than low-end CPUs, but should keep net income at a nice level since they're extremely high margin chips.
4) Since each Opteron sale displaces an Intel Xeon sale, Intel's net income is hurting.
5) Any advantage Intel will gain from C/M/W will be gone when AMD does their transition to 65nm in Q4. Sooner if Intel screws up, as is reported.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I see, that's because no one needs more than 640k of memory, right? The funny thing about computers is how every time someone says no more power is necessary somebody else invents a new application.
What do you mean, run office "decently"? If it's just basic text editing, then any old VT-100 terminal coupled to a 6502 CPU motherboard with 64k memory and a 1.44Mb floppy will do. However, if you mean the whole lot of tasks one does in an office, then we still need a lot more power than we have today.
Let's see, for a start, how about a system that reliably corrects the "to-two-too" mistakes that so many slashdotters commit? Do you have an idea on how difficult is that? Or how about automated translation? Or reliable OCR, including handwriting recognition? Or speech to text?
A truly "decent" office software would need a CPU with at least the same processing and storage power as a human brain. Meanwhile, we have to cope with office systems that in many cases hinder more than help us.
Moore's law predicts transistor density, not clock speed. The law is pretty much holding up, for now.