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

Nothing went wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should anything be wrong with the AM2 platform?
Nothing.
It is just an evolutionary step for the AMD.

Re:Nothing went wrong.

[Znork]

"This new memory might help also with quad cores and beyond."

True, and if AMD had waited with the platform upgrade until memory starvation did become an issue, the newer motherboards would have had a greater advantage compared to the old ones. So, complaining about the incremental nature of the change and lackluster performance increase means complaining about AMD being proactive and adressing the potential problem before it becomes serious.

I suspect some reviewers are a bit bored and are just fishing for hits, because as far as I can tell, if AM2 isnt living up to expectations in some particular fashion, it's the expectations that are off, not the actual hardware.

Asked, answered.

[shmlco]

How did AMD go from record growth and being the darling of enthusiasts to having a new platform which failed to impress?"

Question asked, question answered. It failed to impress, and they let Intel jump ahead.

One only has to look at the seesaw video card wars between ATI and NVIDIA to realize the truth. The people who care about such things are a fickle lot. Let one or the other realize a huge gain in performance and odds are that most people--even "loyal" customers--will jump ship in a second.

And if you don't care about such things, then... well, you don't care. So there's no demand, and you might as well have a hamster cage inside the box.

Re:Asked, answered.

[Jekler]

When I was younger, I had (misplaced) loyalties to certain brands. Now that I've matured, I realize that AMD, Intel, ATI, NVIDIA, Microsoft... none of them have actually done me any favors. In the past I was loyal to AMD, ATI, and 3DFX - it was like I had some kind of "underdog" complex. I have come to understand that these companies are the technology equivilant of Nike and Reebok. They want us to be fanatical and pick sides like they're our friends, but they're not friends, they just want cash. With that in mind, I no longer pick my processors or video cards based on brand loyalty. I study some benchmarks, examine some price comparisons, and go with the winner. There are other companies, like many GNU/Linux developers, GNU/Linux distributors, and Google, that HAVE done favors for me and that actually warrants loyalty. But for all those companies I'm paying for a product, they've got me only as long as theirs is the best.

Three words

[oskard]

CORE 2 DUO.

It just did, really, really, unexpectedly well. It is a good processor and has changed a lot of peoples opinions about the processor market and AMD's (and Intel's) competitiveness. I appreciate the fact that Intel, the top dog, is still willing to put up a fight and compete in price, performance, and power in a market that they already dominate.

Oh Woe is AMD!

[segedunum]

I found the article a bit desperate to be honest in trying to portray some sort of honeymoon period being over for AMD. So AMD have released a product that wasn't in itself bad, but just didn't have enough gains about it over what had gone before for people to really go for it. So what? This just means that what went before was pretty damn good, isn't goint to be improved on much and is going to be hard to beat. For Intel, of course, beating what had gone before wasn't hard at all ;-).

The only major gains AMD are going to make is when they shift to a new 65nm process and then kick off a newer architecture from there.

It's because Vista, 2007, and HD video

[A Wise Guy]

Currently, my pc runs fast, i can do everything I want on it and easily. Plus I am running an amd 3200. I have not been willing to update anything because my pc runs just fine. If I upgrade now, vista is around the corner and also unreal 2007. I want to make sure I can run the game when I get it. I also have not forked out for a new video card since I am running AGP. The last card I can use to upgrade my rig to play at least the current flock of games nicely is the 7800gs+ agp. This pc is going to become a Linux box to run unreal 2007 and I have no intention of updating until i see some benchmarks. at the moment, it runs just fine just like every person I know who owns a pc and does not wish to update. There is also HD video playback, HD video editing, currently, people are asking me about this and I keep telling them the technology is coming and there is no reason to update because your pc needs to be hdmi ready which current new brands and video cards are just barely getting into it. Current flock of technology is no reason to upgrade and most people I know are still making rediculous payments for the current pc's to lowsy dell and circuit city.

writeup? wtf?

[macadamia_harold]

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?

well, the article itself answers this question in the first paragraph:

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.

Has it?

[LarsWestergren]

It would have been nice if they could have started by showing some hard sales numbers to back up their statement that it is "being dismissed by consumers". I don't have any special love for either company, next time I'm going to upgrade I'll just pick whatever gives me the biggest bang for the buck, but when you write a whole article about "where did they go wrong", it helps your credibility if you can just quickly show some evidence that they HAVE gone wrong.

Especially since many online hardware sites tend to be pretty low journalistic standards, and pretty high on drooling fanboyism.

AMD is not focussing on the consumer market

[pieterh]

AMD has, pretty much, wrapped up the high-end market with its Opterons. All the noise about Itanium - it's turned into Opteron sales.

So now Intel has made a strong come-back on the desktop... and AMD calculates, do we make slices of silicon that sell for $100, or that sell for $1,000 and the answer is pretty clear. AMD does not have the capacity that Intel has, so it's making the most out its fabs by aiming at the server market.

I think people missed the point a bit.

[pjr.cc]

It wasn't AMD doing anything wrong, it was intel doing something right. AM2 was a natural progression from the 939. But intel came out with conroe, a low-power, low-heat-output and blisteringly fast that made AM2 look lacklaster and even worse comparing the bang per buch factor. 939 was so popular because of things like prescott (a cpu that had such a huge heat output a new case spec was required), add to that power consumption and lackluster performance (while trying to maintain the same price-point) and the 939 was hot (figuratively speaking). So where too from now? AMD have already hinted at multi-core cpu's that "look" like single core cpu's and i suspect that will be a killer feature that will rocket AMD back into the lead again, consider a cpu that has the power of 4 cpu's while allowing a single threaded application to take full advantage of it... that would be dam impressive. On a side note, anyone else find it very amusing the evolution of computing since the PC? We've swung from serial to parallel since the dawn and hopefully we will continue to.

Sick of pointless upgrading.

[Conor Turton]

People are becoming increasingly sick of having to upgrade a large proportion of their hardware for a minimal increase in performance.

I have a AMD X2 4800 Socket 939 with 2GB of RAM. It does what I want. For me to upgrade to the next level, it's not only a new CPU but new motherboard and new RAM too and that DDR2 stuff ain't cheap if you go for the higher speed stuff to try and futureproof.

Many, including myself, are starting to see the introduction of a new CPU socket type as nothing more than a vain attempt to try and keep revenue flowing by trying to persuade us of all the benefits that these new sockets can offer which apparently the old ones can't. Two downsides to this. The first is ASROCK who have proven that the chipsets are more than up to running new sockets with the help of a low cost adapter to allow you to use the different RAM and CPU. The second is Intel who have come along with the undeniably impressive Core 2 processors that not only run on the existing 775 socket but also the i965 chipset with many boards requiring nothing more than a BIOS update to recognise the new range of processors.

So my message to you, AMD, is simple. We're sick of CPU sockets changing every 18 months. For christ sake, Socket 754 had about 6 months before it was superceeded. Slot A, Socket A, Socket 754, Socket 939, AM2 in less than 6 years with the last three having no real benefit over each other..WE'VE HAD ENOUGH.

Re:Easy, two things...

[Kjella]

When you look at it that way, other than being more "future-compatible",

Which is majorly overrated. What am I missing in my fairly current machine?

1) No Dual-core. Motherboard just won't support it, no matter if you tweak the BIOS.
2) No PCI Express. Last generation AGP port.
3) No DDR2 support (not important unless I could upgrade my CPU to a memory hungrier CPU)
4) Too few SATA ports
5) Too few SATA power connectors
6) No PCI Express slots for expansion cards
7) No eSATA port
8) No SATA II support
9) No RAID5 support

The best future-proofing you can get is the money to buy a machine in the future. Chances are that by the time you're ready to upgrade, all the standards have changed. Unless there's a *very* compelling game that requires a better GFX card than I got coming out in 2007, I expect I'll get a new one in 2008. By then I expect it will have already skipped one generation and go straight for DDR3, DirectX 10 card etc etc.