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Why AMD Is Still In The Race
Steve Kerrison writes "Despite a woeful inability to provide some of its most loyal customers with stock, and a range of CPUs that, currently, loses out to Intel's Core 2 processors in both price and performance (and who would I be not to mention the diminishing AMD fanboy numbers?), AMD's still got enough tricks up its sleeve to retaliate against Intel in due course. HEXUS.net has an opinion piece on why AMD isn't up the creek. From the article: AMD has been showing off its 65nm wafers for a few months now, which means the Rev G core is on its way. Even if the DDR2 memory controller which arrived with the Rev F only had a small performance benefit, Rev G has a few more improvements than just the die shrink. The latter will enable higher clock speeds and a lower price, plus allow AMD to compete on an equal playing field to Intel, which has been manufacturing 65nm processors since the Pentium XE 955 at the end of 2005."
AMD is in the race to stay alive as a company but they are not in the race to have the top CPU of 2006/2007, which is what really matters.
With their aquisition of ATI, I am much more worried about chipset instability. Anyone else remember the bad old days with the horrible via chipsets and mystery conflicts with nvidia hardware?
Then the finger pointing starts, and we're stuck in the middle. I'm upgrading for the first time in 3 years, hopefully I can wait all this mess out. It'll be an AMD chip though. If I had to pick, I'd go with whatever platform Nvidia supports in the future. Their commitment to driver quality deserves to be rewarded and won my loyalty - and interestingly enough, I have never purchased another ATI product after their little opengl driver fiasco.
Why doesn't AMD have a chipset, anyway?
..don't panic
AMD is only behind this one generation, a company doesn't just throw in the towel after their competitor comes up with a better product... AMD is working right now to come up with their own response. Plus I don't think the stock holders would be happy if AMD came out with a press release "Good Game Intel, you win, we are dissolving the company"
As any race like that between AMD and Intel goes, there is an ebb and tide that goes on between them. It wasn't until just recently that AMD's opteron, X2 and FX lines of chips were top of the class when it came to their prospective markets. However now with Core 2 Duo out, and Core Quadro just coming down the chute, Intel has gained significant ground on AMD. That's the way this industry works, one comes out ahead for a while, and then the competitor surges ahead. I wouldn't be surprised to see AMD back in the lead in a year or two with their new 65nm process and 4-way chip
The Core 2 Duo is pretty impressive, but I still see the 80 core chips that top out at 1 TeraFlop as vaporware. Intel has made big promises before, remember the 5 GHz Pentium 4?
All you can (somewhat) rely on in this business are the things that are already close to rollout. For instance, I'm pretty sure that AMD will get their quad-core released in 2007, Intel maybe sooner. Anything beyond that is speculation.
C - the footgun of programming languages
"A woeful inability to provide some of its most loyal customers with stock" can only mean that demand for AMD chips still exceeds supply. Otherwise, they would be happy to deliver.
Yes but buyers can only wait so long, and if enough buyers are forced to go elsewhere then the demand will vanish too.
Having something in demand is desirable but in the long term you have to eventually meet demand for a majority of customers or perish.
I don't think AMD is anywhere near perishing of course, but the supply of these chips seems tight enough that it's not a healthy level of demand at the moment.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I think the 65 nm process is key here. It doesn't really surprise me that Intel can create faster and cooler CPUs on 65 nm than AMD can on 90 nm.
Just the decrease in size alone will give AMD's processors a boost, and might well propell them past Intel again; at least from what I've seen, the FX (90 nm) already consumes less than the Core 2 Duo (65 nm) in power save mode, whereas the advantage that the Core 2 Duo has in performance mode is nothing that a die shrink wouldn't overcome.
And that's at the high end. At the low end, I see Intel still selling 32-bit CPUs, where AMD's offerings are 64-bit enabled. I recently helped somebody pick a laptop, and I noticed the biggest differences between Intel-based and AMD-based systems in the applicable price range were slightly better game performance for Intel and 64-bit support for AMD. I recommended AMD, because (1) the laptop wasn't for gaming anyway, and (2) I expect AMD64 (especially the extra registers that come with it) to eventually offer better performance; and at least you can run 64-bit software on it. These benefits aren't so obvious now, but I expect they will be.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Give those old machines to churches or other non-profits if you never touch them. Any chance to save money is always welcome by them and they don't need powerful systems.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Intel didn't die when it was #2 so why should AMD? They have the smarts and $ to stay in the game. When you are #1 you can only go down so give AMD a year or two.
I'm glad Intel has start pushing ahead again. Competition keeps the fire lit under their butts and is good for the consumer.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
If I were in the mood (and financial position) to dash out and purchase a new system right now, I'd consider both offerings carefully but probably still go with AMD. The difference between the performance offered by a new AM2 and an Intel Core Duo would still not make that big a difference given that I'm upgrading from a midrange Athlon XP. More to the point, a certain amount of consumer loyalty isn't fanboyism. AMD's treated me very well since the original Athlons came out, and I have no intention of turning my back on that - particularly since a growing body of evidence suggests that their platform is more forward-thinking and less prone to regurgitation of the same product with minor tweaks, more cores, and mounds of expensive cache being thrown at an inefficient design just to make it performance-competitive. Time will tell, but Intel hasn't done anything to persuade me yet; after living through the last seven years seeing AMD upstage the Pentium III with the Athlon, the Pentium 4 with the Athlon XP, and the Prescotts with the Athlon64, you'll understand my skepticism if I don't immediately believe that the Core 2 Duo is manifestly superior in every way, and always will be, forever and ever, amen.
The opinion piece compares the cost of the Athlon proc to the Core 2:
Let's take Dell for example - one of AMD's big wins of the last year, and the one everyone is saying looks stupid now Intel is back. As a business customer, you can either buy the Dimension E521 for £499 + VAT (with an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+), or the E520 for £50 more (with an Intel Core 2 Duo E6300). They're both dual-core, and the performance difference is essentially irrelevant to a business customer. But if you're buying 100 of them, you'd save £5,000 by going for the E521. That's a fairly easy decision for a financial director to make.
It's not always about the power, but rather the sock to the wallet, and when finances factor into decisions, a cheaper previous generation proc for a competitor will always win out over the current generation of the leading vendor. I would tend to agree with this assessment. Business decisions are most often made based on cost, not performance, and in IT, it seems more the case that long term consequences are not the predominant factor considered prior to making final decisions. it's always about the money...
Just another nameless binary in a crowd of 1's and 0's
Hope AMD can capitalize on what...getting away with an inferior product. Spoken like a true fanboy. Right now Intel has the better product and that won't change if a lawsuit is smacked down on them. Whether or not they had shady business deals is seperate from the fact that the consumer would be better in picking an Intel product. I may be a bit trollish here but your comment isn't insightful...it's the cry of a sad, sad AMD fanboy who doesn't want to see the big bad Intel back on top. AMD can capitalize on whatever it wants once it has a better chip.
Indirectly Intel helped create this AMD shortage.
Here are the causes
1. By hyping Core 2 so early, it eroded confidence in Netburst, now no one wants a P4. (so the choice is Core 2 or Athlon x2)
2. Intel cannot produce enough Conroe's. So those who cannot get Core 2 look at Athlons.
3. AMD had to cut prices in half to match Core 2 (because Intel actually priced Core 2 a little too cheap*) it created more demand than AMD could handle until 65nm and all the Chartered product comes into the channel.
4. Intel started kissing up to Apple instead of Dell, forcing Dell into the AMD camp.
Yes, maybe AMD should have turned Dell away, but the real truth is that there is a shortage of everything but the netburst chips! Because Intel made/makes so many P4's the market will be this way for a few more months.
* if Intel had priced Core 2 duo's 25% higher, it would have helped them clear out the netburst chips. It seems they were more interesed in stopping AMD than they were in making a profit.