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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?"
Are we talking people who went out and upgraded their processors here, or people who bought amd equipped machines?
if the latter, then it's down to manufacturers not favoring the chip, not consumers as such.
most of the people I know who regulerly upgrade bits in the box (ah yes, bask in the technical terms...) have only recently (last year or so) purchased AMD XP 64 chips, at some considerable cost. It's not like buying candy you know, people generally like to get some use out of stuff before upgrading, not just buying because new stuff is out.
It takes a while for new tech to drop in price, and then there's mindshare, how well aware are people of the product in question?
If your mates have a particuler chip, chances are you will get that one, and not everyone's flush with money, so it won't be top of the range that gets bought.
the chip I bought, an AMD64 4000 jobbie, will do me for a few years now. probably longer, since the machine will be relegated to server duty while I buy spiffy new bits for my next desktop.
What went wrong... with TFA? Perhaps they can't afford an editor? Some examples (emphasis mine in all):
"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."
"Where did things go wrong for AMD, a company that was on a legendary upswing, during which it could seemingly do no wrong."
"They were clearly unable to do so (or did not intend to) so most 939 owners were never inclined to upgrade"
"This is just simple economics, as in it does not make sense to invest the money in going with AM2 when consumers can get a 939 computer for less."
And many others; I just ran out of patience. I apologize for my grammar nazism, and I am prone to making lots of mistakes myself, I admit; also, many of these aren't actual mistakes but just bad style. However, if you want your articles to be taken seriously, make sure they are polished beyond that of a high-school student's blog. Regardless of content, the writing here is so poor that I am surprised/disappointed that this was posted on Slashdot.
I feel like the fight has just begun. We are only a few punches in. AMD was slow to start, had a few HUGE hits(64 bit, hyper-transport, Opteron, Dual cores that perform like dual cores and not two CPU's chained to the same FSB) and Now Intel actually has thrown a punch. This will be back and forth every 6 or 8 months for a long, long time. I've looked at the Core 2 Duo's processor specs (a riveting read, I swear) and they are not introducing anything that special, it really is an evolutionary breeding of AMD athlon64 tech with the P3, and I think they got the mix wrong. They will be hitting memory walls and scalability walls sooner than one would hope, they new FAB process will help with that, but they are shooting for massively parallel systems (4 cores,, etc). AMD is sticking to better per core and co-ordinated performance. AMD will bounce back, and Intel will face problems getting cross-core communication to even hint at what hyper-transport can do for in that arena. I'm going to be watching this fight with great interest, but even though I'm rooting for AMD I will still follow my wallet when the time comes to buy.
md5sum
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