Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Apparently you didn't RTFA, because they describe the problems that AMD is having and then go on to say why the problems may be surmounted. In other words, you're overlooking the obvious position that AMD's in. nVidia doesn't have a CPU line that's one of the top CPUs in the market and in performance. Intel doesn't have a GPU that's competitive in performance. With the market moving towards greater integration and interaction between the CPU and the GPU, there's only one company that can deliver both.
So it's going to come down to whether or not AMD has the ability right now to keep pushing their product lines and innovating fast enough to beat Intel and nVidia to the punch. Their financial situation hurts their chances, but it doesn't negate them completely.
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.
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.
From the introduction of the Athlon by AMD (the first really "modern" x86 CPU that finally eliminated most of the CISC disadvantages), though on-die memory controllers and dragging Intel kicking and screaming into the 64-bit world, right up until AMD's lack of a solid response to Core, I'd say AMD led Intel's thinking. Now they're the followers again.
E pluribus unum
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.
OS X runs just fine on SSE3 equipped AMD CPU's as it stands. It's not supported of course but it runs just fine. They (Apple) could easily support AMD even if they didn't optimize for them quite as much as they do for the Core 2 architecture. Frankly, I'm not sure the difference would be all that noticeable compared to the already noticeable delta in performance between the two main x86 architectures.
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.