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Why AMD Could Win The Coming Visual Computing Battle
Vigile writes "The past week has been rampant with discussion on the new war that is brewing between NVIDIA and Intel, but there was one big player left out of the story: AMD. It would seem that both sides have written this competitor off, but PC Perspective thinks quite the opposite. The company is having financial difficulties, but AMD already has the technologies that both NVIDIA and Intel are striving to build or acquire: mainstream CPU, competitive GPU, high quality IGP solutions and technology for hybrid processing. This article postulates that both Intel and NVIDIA are overlooking a still-competitive opponent, which could turn out to be a drastic mistake."
Year over year annual growth has ceased and this past quarter shows a 0.2% decline in revenues.
I'm sure those AMD shares will come in handy some day... I, for instance, am out of paper towels.
Amd has supposed to have been dead and written off how many times in the past years? Ati as well?
:)
Its nice to know that they still maintain an edge, even though they have no where near the capitol on hand that nVidia and Intel do.
I for one always liked Underdogs...
~DF
I'm still rooting for AMD. I think that they can pull themselves out of the mess they made. Why? No sane reason. But whenever the U.S. economy decides to come back up, so will AMD.
I thought AMD was dead!
I used to know an engineer who worked for AMD, and one of the things he would tell me about were the problems with the merger with ATI. There were a lot of manufacturing and engineering differences between the two companies that made it difficult to combine designs from the two. In addition, the poor financial situation of AMD meant they didn't have enough time and money to complete the "Fusion" CPU/GPU combo -- one of the main drivers behind the merger in the first place.
He said that the company will still bring something out, and that something will still go by the codename "Fusion", but it will not be the product originally envisioned at the time the companies decided to merge. He speculated maybe some kind of Multi-Chip Module -- essentially just a separate CPU and a separate GPU die mounted into the same packaging.
I respect AMD and had faith in their ability to make a comeback in the past, but there's a new wrinkle this time: Apple.
Apple computer sales are growing at 2.5 times the industry rate, and they use Intel CPUs. With all the growth in the PC market going to Intel CPU's, is there much room for an AMD comeback?
I can see two ways for AMD to make a comeback. If Apple's agreement to use Intel CPUs expires and AMD can win some business with Apple, AMD can latch on to Apple's growth. But Apple chose Intel for its ability to ramp up production. Will AMD be able to provide the same? Will AMD be willing to give up other customers to meet Apple's demand?
If Apple chooses this route, how big of an architecture change will this be? I've no doubt Apple can provide developer tools to aid the migration, but will Core 2 optimizations easily translate to AMD optimizations?
Will Apple take the risk of supporting both architectures? They are very active in LLVM development, which allows dynamic optimization of code. If LLVM works as well as many hope, Apple could deliver software in a common binary format that automatically adapts to any architecture using LLVM. This would be quite novel. Apple would benefit from ongoing competition between Intel and AMD while giving AMD a fighting chance in a market increasingly dominated by Apple.
The other potential AMD savior is Linux. Can the open source community deliver software that can take advantage of AMD's CPU-GPU architecture spectacularly enough to give AMD the sales it needs?
If Apple weren't in Intel's camp, I would invest in AMD with confidence in a turnaround, but I think the fate of AMD lies largely with adoption by Apple or Linux.
What do you think?
Nvidia has a better chance to compete successfully against Intel because their executives do not think like Intel. AMD, OTOH, is a monkey-see-monkey-do company. Many of their executives (e.g., Dirk Meyer) and lead engineers came from Intel and they only see the world through Intel glasses. Having said that, this business of mixing coarse-grain MIMD and fine-grain SIMD cores on a single die to create a heterogeneous processor is a match made in hell. Anybody with a lick of sense can tell you that universality should be the primary goal of multicore research and that incompatible processing models should not be encouraged let alone slapped together. Programming those hybrid processors will be more painful than pulling teeth with a crowbar. Heck, breaking programs down into threads is a pain in the ass. Why would anybody want to make things worse?
The best strategy, IMO, is to work on a universal processor that combines the strengths of both MIMD and SIMD models while eliminating their obvious weaknesses. AMD needs somebody with the huevos to say, "fooey with this Intel crap! Let's carve our own market and create a completely new technology for a completely new paradigm, parallel processing". Is Hector Ruiz up to the task? Only time will tell. For a different take on the multicore and CPU/GPU issue, read Nightmare on Core Street.
There's always an element of drawing the bullseye around the bullet hole in business planning. Your position is never quite what you'd want it to be (with rare exceptions), so you job, in part, is to imagine a bright future that, through an incredible stroke of luck, start right where you're standing right now.
The thing is, while that is all necessary and good as part of business planning, individual investors really ought not to make investment decisions based on this kind of planning, unless they have their own teams of researchers and analysts and their own sources of information.
If you know nothing about the technology, you can't really examine something like this critically. If you know a great deal about it, you are even less qualified to make prognostications, because your opinion about what is good technology messes with your opinion about what makes good business sense.
Mark Twain was a very intelligent man, who lost his entire fortune investing in a revolutionary typesetting system. The things that made him a great writer made him a lousy investor: imagination, contrariness, a willingness to buck convention. Of course, exactly the same qualities describe a superb investor. The thing that really did him in was overestimating his knowledge of a market he was peripherally involved in.
It was natural for Twain to be interested in the process of printing books and periodicals, and to be familiar enough with the process of typesetting in general to see the potential, but not quite intimately enough to see the pitfalls. He would have been better off investing in something he had absolutely no interest or prior experience in.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Nvidia and Intel are well aware of AMD and have not "written this competitor off". The only one ignoring AMD is the technology press because they are generally too stupid to focus on more than two things at a time. Most articles are presented in a context of "x is going to overtake y" "technology x is a y-killer". Conflict sells and overly simplistic conflict sells to a wider audience.
AMD has some financial problems and their stock may sink for a while but they are not about to go bankrupt. If anyone should be worried about their long-term prospects it's Nvidia. Intel and AMD both have complete "platforms" as in they can build a motherboard with their own chipset, their own GPU and stick their own CPU in it. Nvidia has a GPU and not a whole lot more, their motherboard chipsets are at an obvious disadvantage if they need to design chipsets exclusively for processors whose design is controlled by their direct competitors.
Nvidia's strength has been that on the high-end they blow away intel GPUs in terms of speed and features, Intel has been slowly catching up and their next iteration will be offered both onboard and as a discrete card and will have hardware-assisted h.264 decoding.
Nvidia's advantage over ATI has been that ati has generally had inferior drivers regardless of what platform you were using, since AMD took over ATI has been improving their driver situation significantly both with respect to thei proprietary drivers and their recent release of specs for the open source version. Meanwhile Nvidia seems to have been doing everything they can to trash the reputation of their drivers over the last year both with their awful Vista drivers and their buggy/sloppy control panel that they have forced on everyone.
The consensus lately is that we are looking at a future where you will have a machine with lots of processor cores and cpu/gpu/physics/etc functions will be tightly coupled. This is a future that does not bode well for Nvidia since the job of making competitive chipsets for their opponents will get tougher while they are at the same time the farthest from having their own platform to sell.
Why AMD + ATI Should win: Hypertransport. Putting the GPU on the same bus as the CPU should theoretically eliminate whatever roablocks the PCI bus created. Plus, allowing for die-2-die communication and treating the GPU as a true co-processor instead of a peripheral should open up huge possibilities for performance boosts.
Why AMD + ATI won't win: AMD won't risk alienating their OEM partners who also manufacture Intel motherboards and NVidia boards. Also, it's AMD.
... and I recall during company meetings we would be told that Intel was "keeping an eye on nVidia". AMD not so much. Intel looks at nVidia to be a new and strong threat.
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
This is definitely a win for the A-Team. I'm sure Mr. T feels pity for the fools...
Right now AMD has some great CPUs on the low end and the best integrated graphics solution.
A huge number of PCs never pay a game more graphically intensive than Tetris and are never used to transcode video!
Right now on newegg you can pick up an Athlon X2 64 4000 for $53.99
The cheapest Core2Duo is $124.99. Yes it is faster but will you notice? Most people probably will not.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Oh, certainly. I wasn't making a specific point about you.
If you've ever been on the product management end of the stick, though, the biggest danger is overestimating the number of people who think as you do or visualize their needs as you do. That's why it's dangerous for people with lots of technical knowledge to use it to guide their investments. You can overcome this, but it's a serious trap.
That's why I don't invest in tech companies at all; whenever I have it hasn't worked out.
I did pretty well in the financial services sector for some time, although I'll admit I had more than my fair share of luck. I simply chose that as one of my investments because money bores me. I'm mostly out now, but I'm thinking of getting back in now that that a disaster is making people scared of these stocks. That's the ticket: if you balance your portfolio, every time an industry goes down, you end up buying. Every time it goes up, you end up selling. Which is just another way of buying low and selling high.
It doesn't pay to get excited by a single company's brilliant potential. I'm actually contemplating getting out of stocks altogether because it's too tempting to be clever rather than patient. It's really a lot of trouble for an amateur to try to out think the market; it's better to out wait it.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
And to add to my previous comment for 50 dollars I can buy a DVD burner and a 100 pack of DVD-Rs and I can have enough storage for almost 500 gigs of data. You on the other hand would have to buy almost 59 of those USB drives to match that at a cost of almost 1800 dollars. Have fun with that.
What is overlooked by most of the PC enthusiast press is that AMD still offers an excellent price/performance ratio that Intel does not match.
We have AMD to thank for the reason high end CPUs from intel costs $300 instead of $1000 right now.
Thats why I only invest in alcohol and gambling stocks
Ok let's talk about heat.
Putting both GPU and CPU in close proximity to each other should help, not hinder. I think you mistook the GP for saying they'd be on the same die, but he said bus, not die.
It may be that they need to be separated a couple of inches from each other to allow room for fanout of the CPU signals to the rest of the board rather than having them in the same socket. If they weren't separated, and the chip packaging was the same height, they could design one heat sink over both chips. This reduces the parts count for the fan and heatsink and therefore increases reliability.
Having something on a plug in card with such an extreme cooling requirement just doesn't make sense. You aren't allowed much space for heat sink design between it and the next slot. Having the GPU on the motherboard gives case/motherboard designers more room for the heatsink design.
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
I just bought a portable hard drive, it's got better read-write speed, portability and it's easier to back up data too.
AMD cheaper than intel yes, but ATI?
They were better and more expensive than their nVidia counterparts at several points over the last few years.
And whilst phenom has been a crash, AMD lead Intel by a considerable margin through the Athlon64/Opteron days, before Intel got the "Core" architecture up and running. They left the giant rival chipmaker in the dust, struggling to figure out a way to make the P4 competetive.
BTW, before anyone accuses me of fanboyism, I'll mention I'm posting from a Core 2 Duo box with an nVidia chip. The last upgrade cycle was AMD and ATI all the way, and I hope we do get back to the state where we have multiple players really able to compete and continually outdo each other.
That's good for all of us.
AMD processors are great. I've used them exclusively for the last 9 years. But AMD has a fundamental business problem that will prevent them from competing as the article says. They are out of money. It takes a lot of money to build the state-of-the-art fabrication facilities that are needed to be in the business that AMD and Intel are in. AMD builds a new fab and then they sell the products so cheap that they never come close to recovering the money they spent to build the product. Then they go out to investors for more money and the cycle starts again. After doing this a few times, their debt piles up, their stock tanks, and their ability to borrow money slips away. The bottom line is that whatever new cool product AMD is going to build will have to made in their current fabs and in the fast-moving semiconductor business, if you're not updating your fabs, you're dying. AMD slashed prices over and over to get market share from Intel and max out their production but their sales prices were way below their fab replacement costs. Intel said fine...have some more rope. Now...no more new fabs. AMD just never learned how to sell their products and their technology any way other than with a low price. Yes, Intel didn't play fair and pressured computer companies to buy Intel but AMD's problems were far deeper than that. AMD needed an accountant to tell them 'wait a minute...your fab will only last for 5 years so you've got to sell that product for 50 percent more than you are or you won't stay in business.' Yes, it's a competitive market and Intel sets the price for their competing products and AMD can't control that...now. But I've also watched AMD sell their products for dirt cheap prices even when they had Intel in a hammerlock...and I'd scratch my head at how little money AMD would make even in those good times when AMD was setting the price points.