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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.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
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.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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!
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.
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!
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
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
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,
Consumers are holding off purchases...because they don't need new computers. The processor is the last thing most "Best Buy"-level consumers need to even think about replacing these days, and with upgradability so easy for the other major components the need has simply leveled out.
We've reached a threshold where some people aren't going to need any "better" computers for quite some time. For the average user, once you've got a nice flat screen, a nice big HD, and a reasonably fast computer, that's all they are ever going to need to email, burn CDs, and browse the web. The people that have driven the market the last few years (newer and/or first time buyers) are not falling to the "new box every 24 months" syndrome that felt like the norm before.
Add to that how easy things like storage and RAM are to upgrade these days (especially the former, aided by the convenience of USB), and most of the casual users (i.e. one or possibly two PC's in the home) I know are quite happy with what they've got. Unless you are an extreme gamer, there is little reason to upgrade. Same reason people don't upgrade Office every year (if they still use it...); to most people Office '97 does everything they'd ever want to do and then some. The only people upgrading are IT departments and corporations that just like to spend money. Very few industries need state-of-the-art tech, and even fewer individuals do.
The individuals are learning, because they aren't buying. At least that's what it seems like to me.
AE
Moore's law predicts transistor density, not clock speed. The law is pretty much holding up, for now.