What Went Wrong for AMD's AM2?

An anonymous reader writes "When AM2 was first announced it seemed like it was going to be a guaranteed hit. After all, this platform would be moving the tremendously successful socket 939 into the future with its use of DDR2 memory, a greatly increased memory bandwidth, hardware virtualization, and a number of exciting new CPUs. Despite everything AM2 had going for it, this includes a dedicated enthusiast base and a tremendous amount of pro-AMD spirit at the time, the new platform has largely been dismissed by consumers. The question now is, what happened? How did AMD go from record growth and being the darling of enthusiasts to having a new platform which failed to impress?"

Comments

Article reposted

[Anonymous Coward]

Before it gets slashdotted, or if you don't want 3 pages with ads -- here's most of the text.
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Before we get started it should be made clearly that despite what people may say, AM2 does make for a capable computer. We took a look at an AM2 build based on an Asus M2N32 SLI motherboard not too long ago and were happy with the system. The disappointment in AM2 is not a result of its failure to perform, but rather the failure to match the performance gains seen in the move to the K8 platform. Our testing has confirmed what the industry at large has found to be true- the move to AM2 should bring performance gains of about 3-10% when compared to socket 939, with an average increase below 5%. This is what we would comfortably call an "incremental" performance boost, but nothing more.

So what happened to AM2? Where did things go wrong for AMD, a company that was on a legendary upswing, during which it could seemingly do no wrong. Even with reasonable pricing, a well-timed release date, and high availability AM2 was unable to take off in a way that was commensurate with its potential.

1. Conroe
An appreciably part of the success of sockets 754 and 939 were due to a colossal blunder on the part of Intel: Netburst. This architecture was kept around since 2001 and was always being improved in piecemeal, rather than simply being replaced. The whole episode was capped off by an unimpressive dual core architecture that was kept alive practically on price alone. During this time (754 came out in fall 2003 and 939 came in early summer 2004) AMD did their homework and put out the impressive but short-lived socket 754 and then 939.

But the landscape was changing by the time AM2's release date was announced. Intel had released its Core architecture and the word had begun to spread about Conroe, what would come to be known as Core 2 Duo. Early benchmarking by a number of hardware sites not only let consumers know that AM2 would be a slight performance increase, but that Conroe would be a dramatic one. By the time AM2 was available Core 2 Duo was one of the most highly anticipated processors of all time and AM2 was the "also ran". There was no way that AMD could compete with Intel's marketing clout, regardless of the performance or previous successes.

2. AM2 is setting up AMD for the future
As good as 939 was, it could only last for so long. AMD had to start to look towards the future, which meant moving to DDR2 memory, increasing the availability of memory bandwidth, launching a platform for improved chipsets and the like. Improvements must be done in stages: Socket 754 brought 64-bit, 939 brought dual core, dual channel memory, and mass acceptance of PCI Express video, and AM2 would bring us DDR2. AM2 may not be terribly exciting, but it is paving the way for K8L, AM3, and AMD's 4x4.

3. AM2 is confusing
Unless you follow the processor market closely, AM2 can be confusing. The naming convention "AM2" or "M2" is much different from 754 or 939 and a little investigation reveals that AM2's socket uses 940 pins. As you may recall AMD has already has a socket 940, it came out along with 754 and was used for Opteron and high-end FX systems. Despite the numerical similarity AM2 and 940 are extremely different and are not compatible with one another. Once consumers get past that they will have to figure out the processor they want, more than a few of which have the same name as their 939 counterpart.

4. 939 was too great
OK, a platform can't perform too well, but the success of 939 meant that in order to top it AMD would have to do bring something really innovative. They were clearly unable to do so (or did not intend to) so most 939 owners were never inclined to upgrade. The strong performance of 939, the availability of cheap processors and great motherboards, and the overclockability of most systems meant that convincing people to upgrade has been difficult. A new system would require a new motherboard, memory, and a CPU in the very least, possibly more if the user was upgrading from a

Re:Article reposted

[racermd]

To answer the original post of "Why isn't AM2 as successful as it could have been?", I offer the following:

1: Timing - Intel was already releasing chipsets that offered most of the major features that AM2 brought. Namely, that's DDR2 support. Put simply, AMD waited just a little too long to get the AM2 platfor out the door. I remember seeing (very eager) questions about when AMD would be releasing a platform that supports DDR2, but AMD stated - and I'm paraphrasing, here - "You don't need DDR2, yet. See? Look at the performance numbers." While this is true, they missed the perfect opportunity to hit a market at peak interest. As AMD delayed the rollout, interest waned. By the time they brought it to market, it appeared that most of the buzz they generated was gone.

2: Poor release - After telling everyone that they didn't yet need the features that AM2 would have brought them, they failed to re-generate the buzz and interest in the product upon release. Most people I know (myself included) really are perfectly happy with the performance of Socket 939 and DDR. I have no interest in buying an AM2 system mainly because the performance gains I'd get by upgrading nearly my entire system isn't worth it. I suspect that many others feel the same. This attitude is a direct result of AMD's earlier position on the lack of performance benefits of DDR2 and the other new technologies.

In other words, AMD missed the boat with AM2 and they have nobody but themselves to blame. I suspect their teams could feel the consumer anticipation, but just didn't have a product ready to get out the door. And, instead of releasing a half-finished platform, they decided to downplay the seemingly minor advantages until their product was made ready. Adjusting consumer expectations in that manner killed the interest in their newest offerings mainly because it they didn't bring anything new that Intel wasn't offering.

Just my $.02

Re:VHS vs Beta

[nxtw]

Motherboards vary by about $10 for comparable features. Seems like the AMD fanboy is just grasping for straws here...

Core 2 motherboards start at $46 (Newegg; VIA chipset) and Athlon 64 FX AM2 motherboards start at $47 (Newegg; SiS chipset).

A motherboard with an Intel chipset can be found at $66, while a AM2 motherboard with the nForce 410 can be found for $57.

The cheapest SLI board for Intel costs $78 (rebate). The cheapest SLI board for AMD costs $85 (sale). Their original prices were $97 and $95 resepectively.

LGA775-compatible CPUs start at $45 (Celeron D 326). Dual core CPUs start at $90 (Pentium D 805). Core 2 Duo CPUs start at $180 (Core 2 Duo E6300).

AMD AM2 compatible CPUs start at $41 (Semprom 64 2800+). Dual core CPUs start at $153.

Summary -- Intel motherboards are usually within a few dollars of an AMD equivalent. Budget CPUs start within a few dollars of each other. Intel dual core is cheaper. Core 2 Duo is $27 more expensive than the cheapest AM2 Athlon 64 X2, but faster.

Meaning that that Core 2 Duo E6600 still crushes that FX-62.

Re:2 things: price / speed, speed / power consumpt

[amliebsch]

Back in the day if you're shopping for CPUs and come across a P3 933, you instantly had an idea of the chips performance, at least enough to say well that's probably a bit faster then an Athlon 750. I'm sure some nitpicking AMD fanboys will argue and say it wasn't, but lets face it 933 > 750.

Your own example is the very reason that AMD "broke" the naming scheme. It was because idiot consumers like yourself were apparently incapable of making the leap of logic that "clock speed" != "performance." Since Intel was aggressively pushing clockspeed while AMD was pushing the operations per cycle, this would leave AMD at a great marketing disadvantage. So they named their chips with numbers represented the clock speed of the Intel chip they roughly performance-competitive with. In reality, you got what you wanted - numbers that represented performance, not just clock speed.