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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?"
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
Ah, but it is more than Conroe Duo. But to make a very quick summary of the article, it is this: cost.
The cost of replacing a 939 system with AM2 doesn't justify the price point.
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
Why should anything be wrong with the AM2 platform?
Nothing.
It is just an evolutionary step for the AMD.
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.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
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.
Sigs are for Terrorists.
AM2 really is an excellent platform, it consolidated AMD's Value, Mid-Range, and High-End market segments into a single platform. The reason it's not viable in the larger market-wide Enthusiast, Performance, and High-End segments is simply that Core 2 Duo rapes it. If you're already considering spending the money for a higher-end Athlon 64 X2 or FX processor, you can move to a Core 2 Duo-based platform that will destroy the AMD options performance-wise by a margin that is nearly unprecedented while still providing good power and heat usage. Basically, if the market was perfectly rational and had no transition times, all systems would be AMD AM2-based until you reached high enough prices that it was cost-effective to use a Core 2 Duo, and the P4 and Celerons would be merely a bad memory. AMD's aquisition of ATI helps it in this regard, as ATI has been making some chipsets that are very reliable, very fast, and rather inexpensive. ATI definitely has the best integrated graphics solution in the laptop market, and AMD's Turion 64 X2 is more competitive here than the Athlon 64 X2 is in the desktop arena.
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.
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.
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.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
Conroe (VHS) gives you more for less than AMD(Beta)'s superior Hypertransport and on-cpu memory controller. Conroe entirely stole the thunder of AM2, and consequently AM3.
When you can get a Core 2 Duo E6600 and have it crush an FX-62 and at a fraction of a FX-62's price... It's the same formula as always, price to bang. You get more bang with 939, or go straight to Core 2 Duo.
You could always argue time. AMD folks are used to living a long time on a socket type. 939 was only around about a year before AM2 came, whereas 754 and the previous socket 7 were very, very long lived. In another couple years, maybe AM2/3 will pick up steam, but it's too early.
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.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
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.
My blog
1) While virtualization is immensely useful to a small number of people, it is virtually useless to most end-users.
2) While DDR2 offers greatly increased bandwidth, it does so at the expense of latency, and in many common applications, doesn't really perform much (if any) better than the 128-bit DDR memory of the socket 939 Opterons did.
When you look at it that way, other than being more "future-compatible", there aren't really any benefits to *most* end users, and if there aren't any benefits, why would they upgrade?
The Athlon64/Opteron chips were popular because they were innovative in useful ways, which gave the end user something more for his money. The AM2 hasn't kept with that tradition.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
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.
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.
Conor "You're not married,you haven't got a girlfriend and you've never seen Star Trek? Good Lord!" - Patrick Stewart
Customers and motherboard vendors alike are simply annoyed by the permanent socket changes. Sockets are hardware APIs which these days shouldn't change for a decade and not within a year or so. Besides the performance increase from 939 to AM2 is so insignificant there's no reason to switch.
IMO the best what AMD could do is scrap AM2 and replace it with a socket which is able to plug in 939 (DDR) processors and possible DDR2/DDR4/DDRx processors. Since this will take some time AMD should release any AM2 processor parallel as 939 processors, else AMD will possibly loose some market share.
O. Wyss
See http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html
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.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
It hasn't been for ages... Yup, decades I believe.
C SIFFD/IDESCSIFFD/Products_/SCSI_Products/FFD_Ultra 320_SCSI.htm
The performance bottleneck is the disk and it has been forever. You want a really fast system today? This is what you need:
http://www.m-systems.com/site/en-US/Products/IDES
320Mb/sec burst rate, 40Mb/sec sustained and key... 0.02ms access time. It's the biggest performance upgrade you can make to a computer.
Deleted
AMD put out 3 different socket sets to maximize their profits- socket 754 for low end, non-64 bit computing, and single channel memory, socket 939 for mainstream users, and socket 940 for server and extreme users. All marchitechture, but all forgiven because the AMD users could buy dual cores that weren't just space heaters. Yeah, the price for the good stuff wasn't any cheaper, but the benefits were so obvious that only the Intel/Dell fanboys "stayed the course" or at least, held off from buying.
Then Intel releases a near perfect CPU, great performance, good heat, medium power, just no upgrade to memory acces. Intel fanboys rejoice and finally upgrade. Middle of the roaders feel like they have a choice. AMD is suddenly left in the position it had occupied for all those years, second place. Yeah, it has a lot of options, and is still competitive for server stuff, but it's no longer a lock for the desktop user.
Amd reverts to what worked for them previously- move all desktops to the same socket and give that socket a lot of upgrade life. Since DDR2 is finally available in quanity, and at speeds that actually don't produce a slower OS than using DDR 400, AMD decides to make the change to DDR2. Save for the recent attempt to make money, AMD users have been able to buy one socket for the majority of AMD cpus available at that time, and that provides them some marginal sales, for those users who want a chance at a later CPU upgrade.
SO, socket AM2 is released at a time where it doesn't make much sense to upgrade for AMD fanboys. Intel fanboys are buying all the core 2 duo's their pocketbooks can handle, and middle-of-the-roaders are picking and choosing, just like always, versus performnce and price. AM2 is not cheaper than Intel solutions; the real deals for AMD are the clearance of older socket 754/939 stuff. Any real wonder that AM2 sales, at the moment, have been lackluster? As I see it, AMD took the long view, and released AM2 for the upcoming K8L and newer stuff. They'll take whatever sales they can get, but they aren't overly worried about sales right now. I mean, Dell is finally selling AMD's and I'd bet that AMD is waiting on that cash cow to come in.
The Internet has no garbage collection
This very thing is coming back to bite intel on the ass lately. The idiots who cant let go of the clockspeed thing. I had a notebook I was recently trying to sell, a guy that was interested was completely irate because I had the nerve to sell a 1.6ghz notebook for only a few dollars less than some other guy was selling a 2.0ghz system. He refused to comprehend that the one I was selling was a centrino while the other one he was looking at was an early p4 mobile and that mine was actually faster and cheaper. I finally grew so frustrated that I lied and told him I sold it already and reposted the ad with a new picture.