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Is AMD Dead Yet?
TheProcess writes "Back in February 2003, IBM predicted that AMD would be dead in 5 years (original article here), with IBM and Intel the only remaining players in the chip market. Well, 5 years have passed and AMD is still alive. However, its finances and stock price have taken a serious beating over the last year. AMD was once a darling in this community — the plucky, up-and-coming challenger to the Intel behemoth. Will AMD still be here in 5 years? Can they pose a credible competitive threat to Intel's dominance? Do they still have superior but unappreciated technology? Or are they finally old hat? Can they really recover?"
When AMD came out with low priced CPUs that were highly overclockable and great performance at stock they became *the* CPU for any serious geek. When they changed their mind and decided to price-match Intel causing massive price increases they alienated their primary sales force. Geeks selling to family & friends was a great system and without that AMD has been hurting. It's possible they would have died anyway sticking to the cheap, but they've never made a sufficient argument to their customers of why they can't keep the prices low like in the past without letting it on that they like all big business care more about short term cash than long term relationships.
They think - or at least they claim to think - it's all about the platform. With ATi under their wing, they can now offer a complete PC ("Spider") or notebook ("Puma") without giving any sales to Intel on the CPU side or Nvidia on the chipset/graphics side. To be honest, I'm not convinced that's what they needed, but I can sort of see the appeal for them.
I'm hoping that their new interest in opening up documentation and APIs is along term winner and they follow that through properly. OSS really needs a top hardware vendor on board that is open. If ATI is a secondary income stream then "we're protecting our IP" *should* be heard less and less. If the open model is right then a vendor that makes solid open hardware should be a winner over closed locked down stuff.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Fixed that for you. Anyway, the mass market is where the money is. Pandering to gamers is more of a prestige thing, 90-something percent of the PC buyers don't care about that.
Let us all hope they don't die, I'm almost an Intel fanboy but my god if AMD dies! Intel would rape us all. Competition is always healthy. I think AMD has good low priced CPUs though and they sure do the job.
What's better for Intel: to be charged for being a monopolist by the competition authorities or having an ineffective token competitor? Thus: Intel will keep AMD in business.
That good high end technology often gives you a good low end too. That is the current case with Intel's Core technology. You take a Core 2, but instead just make a single core version with less cache and clock it way down. You then have a chip with extremely good performance per watt, and good yields (and thus low price) to boot. The Core Solos, as Intel calls them, are extremely competitive on the low end. They've got ones with a TDP as low as 5.5watts.
So it can be hard to try and just compete on the low end of things, since you can't charge as much, and often the people doing the high end things get killer low end products as a side effect.
This is something companies have found out with graphics cards. There have been a number of companies who have tried to compete with nVidia and ATi in the lower end market. Their idea is that while they don't have the R&D to produce a top flight graphics card, that's ok because most people don't buy one of those anyhow. They'll make midrange and lower end cards and sell those.
Great idea, it seems, until you consider that ATi and nVidia get great midrange cards as a side effect of their high end cards. Graphics cards are highly parallel beasts so all they do to make a lower end card is cut some of the units off, put on less memory, maybe clock it down a bit to improve yields and they are good to go. An 8800 GTX and an 8600 GT are the same beast at heart. The 8600 basically just has 25% the number of shader units the 8800 does, and other things like a smaller memory bus. End result is nVidia has and extremely fast $100 card that cost them very little in terms of R&D that wasn't already done for their high end card.
So the companies that have tried have thus far met with little success. Their offerings just haven't been able to compete with the big boys and it is no surprise. You can pour a lot more in to R&D when you are going to sell graphics cards at $500+ and then make use of that very same technology in midrange and low end cards.
2005 did arrive. You must have still been in high school then.
1) People do not choose their BIOS(yet, anyway); so you're going to have an awful lot of people caught when they start having 'Trusted' Bios not allowing them the kind of control over their computer that we now have.
2) You're assuming that your ISP is going to allow you to connect without 'trusted' software running.
TCPA is designed to "secure" whole networks of computers for the trusted computing group, not just your own device(as if *anything* you own is going to actually be your own). Unless you are solidly sure that you'll always be able to connect to a 'non-trusted' network, this is fine. But for the rest of us, this stuff is *not* our friend.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Dell is finally selling PC's with AMD processors right along the Intel offerings.
They finally, now, have the platform.
Not just that - the difference between Intel is hubris vs economics. As nerds, WE have the responsibility to show people where they're wasting their money. If you're shelling out $6000 to get something bleeding-fucking-tomorrow-edge, yes, you want Intel. If you want something you can use for the next 3 years, but not top of the line (which most people don't need), then an AMD chip will cost you less than half as much as an equivalent-powered Intel.
My hope is that AMD continues to grow and gets their chips into lines from a few other commodity manufacturers. The best thing for the consumer would be two companies competing on approximately equal footing.
Intel's failings on Itanium and Netburst were common corporate faults.
When the competitive marketplace isn't driving you, you have to drive yourself. Once that starts to happen, the directions can become bizarre, with Itanium and Netburst being to very good examples.
Itanium: The problem Itanium was designed to handle was cloning. First and foremost, they sewed up the I.P. so that it was not subject to any existing cross-licensing agreements. Second, the architecture was sufficiently different that they were outside of the realm of existing art ahd cross-licensing, so their I.P. was "strong." Notice that I haven't said a word yet about performance, cost, or any of that normal stuff. When mere technical and marketplace concerns are that low in the priority schemes, guess what happens.
Netburst: It seemed like someone in marketing got overly focused on clockspeed as the Ultimate Metric. The rest falls from there.
The reality is that ANY corporate product, will turn to junk without a competitive marketplace to keep it focused on delivering value to customers. Once competition is gone from a specific marketplace, the company will either focus its development budget in other areas where it needs to respond to competition, or it's development will be driven by motivations internal to the company, that are likely irrelevant or even negative to customers
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Sure, if the *only* things you are doing with your PC are looking at web pages and "doing email" (as some put it), or "office work", then our current PC's are fine. Of course, the same was true of the computers at the time I was quoted in the paper, too. I want to do *more* and I'm not alone.
Just look back to '93, then compare that with what we can do now. Now, try to imagine what we could be doing in another 14 years...
bork bork bork!