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AMD Cancels 28nm APUs, Starts From Scratch At TSMC
MrSeb writes "According to multiple independent sources, AMD has canned its 28nm Brazos-based Krishna and Wichita designs that were meant to replace Ontario and Zacate in the second half of 2012. The company will likely announce a new set of 28nm APUs at its Financial Analyst Day in February — and the new chips will be manufactured by TSMC, rather than its long-time partner GlobalFoundries. The implications and financial repercussions could be enormous. Moving 28nm APUs from GloFo to TSMC means scrapping the existing designs and laying out new parts using gate-last rather than gate-first manufacturing. AMD may try to mitigate the damage by doing a straightforward 28nm die shrink of existing Ontario/Zacate products, but that's unlikely to fend off increasing competition from Intel and ARM in the mobile space."
So far I have been totally unable to tax my current CPU past 40% utilization. I think we can take a break and let software catch up and older systems fall off the support map before the next generation of CPUs hit.
Just because your usage scenario is not CPU-bound does not mean everyone else's is.
Every end has half a stick.
I salute you, mythical IT-worker who manages to get an overclocked computer work-approved.
The description is somewhat misleading in that Global Foundries is not a "long-time partner," but what were AMD's own internal wafer fabs until Global Foundries was spun out as a separate company in 2009.
With multi-core CPUs, just because you can't reach 100% usage doesn't mean your not CPU limited.
Your assumption that you can simply ignore AMD's influence in the CPU market and still end up with a relevant model to explain and predict its outcome is both naive and disingenuous. AMD does have products which outperform equivalent Intel products, even when not accounting with Intel shenanigans such as relying on funny compiler tricks, and AMD happens to price them quite attractively. If you haven't considered any AMD offering on any budget for any serious desktop and instead opted to rely only on Intel products then you are both clueless and economically-challenged.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
All true; but, they're down to 9% ownership and according to the articles no longer have rights to appoint someone to the GloFlo board. Looks like the relationship is becoming increasingly sour.
No but he IS touching on something that we retailers could have told you is one of the biggest reasons for the slowdown in PC sales, and that is for the vast majority PCs are good enough for the jobs they have.
Look at one of the big sellers around here which is backed up by AMD having trouble filling all the orders...brazos. is brazos gonna compete with some Ivy bridge desktop replacement? not a chance in hell. Then why is it selling like crazy? For the same reason i sold my laptop and bought a Brazos EEE PC, and that is the jobs people have on the go aren't that computationally heavy and therefor the battery life and price make a bigger difference. in my own case i'm not transcoding video on the road, i'm accessing my webmail, watching HD movies, listening to music, maybe some light gaming. What in that list needs a monster PC?
I've found with my years of working PC retail that I'd be considered a "hardcore user" compared to most since i have a Deneb quad at home and actually DO play shooters and transcode as well as multitrack audio editing AT HOME but most of my customers, what do THEY do with a PC? they go to Facebook, play Farmville, check their webmail, watch YouTube, maybe do a little MS Word editing or play some game they got off the Walmart "300 games for Windows" rack. Now what there needs a giant CPU? Not a damned thing, in fact even the Brazos chip while running a full Windows 7 HP spends most of its time idle. hell i found playing full HD videos the CPU was barely hitting 15% with the GPU roughly the same depending on the action. Having the decoding in silicon drops the hell out of power usage.
So while the guys that run gamer sites or live for benchmarks will scoff frankly the average user, which outnumbers them by a 100,000 to one (last number on hardcore PC gamers I saw put the number at 30 million) and they won't give a crap that Brazos is 'long in the tooth" or that Thuban isn't king of the hill because "Will you look at that price? And look at how nicely videos play, woo hoo!"
This is why I really wasn't surprised when I walked into my local Walmart, a place that just a couple of years ago you were lucky to find a single Sempron in the back, to find that more than 2/3rds of the units had bright red AMD Fusion stickers. Hell I paid $350 for A Brazos EEE that gets 6 hours watching HD video, plays L4D or TF2, has 320Gb HDD to hold my music and movies, and that is INCLUDING an 8Gb RAM upgrade and a nice carrying case to put it in. Hell if AMD can keep prices THAT low nobody but the niche hardcore users will give a shit.
I know I can't keep the AMD desktops and netbooks in simply because the price is so much lower. For the jobs the average Joe has the AMD platforms are more than "good enough" and even someone like me who thought I'd always lug a 20 pound desktop replacement has found that I don't frankly miss it. 3 pounds, 6 hours 720P HD, light gaming and all for $350? Sold AMD, thanks for taking my money.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.