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AMD Confirms Commitment To x86
MrSeb writes with an excerpt from an Extreme Tech story on the recent wild speculation about AMD abandoning x86: "Recent subpar CPU launches and product cancellations have left AMD in an ugly position, but reports that the company is preparing to jettison its x86 business are greatly exaggerated and wildly off base. Yesterday, Mercury News ran a report on AMD's struggles to reinvent itself and included this quote from company spokesperson Mike Silverman: 'We're at an inflection point. We will all need to let go of the old 'AMD versus Intel' mind-set, because it won't be about that anymore.' When we contacted Silverman, he confirmed that the original statement has been taken somewhat out of context and provided additional clarification. 'AMD is a leader in x86 microprocessor design, and we remain committed to the x86 market. Our strategy is to accelerate our growth by taking advantage of our design capabilities to deliver a breadth of products that best align with broader industry shifts toward low power, emerging markets and the cloud.' The larger truth behind Silverman's statement is that no matter what AMD does, it's not going to be 'AMD versus Intel' anymore — it's going to be AMD vs. Qualcomm, TI, Nvidia, and Intel."
The larger truth behind Silverman's statement is that no matter what AMD does, it's not going to be 'AMD versus Intel' anymore — it's going to be AMD vs. Qualcomm, TI, Nvidia, and Intel."
Considering the execution of Bulldozer, you could possibly add AMD to the vs. list.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
that had to google "inflection point"? From a marketing standpoint it might be good to have a CEO who isn't an engineer :P.
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AMD is a leader in x86 microprocessor design, and we remain committed to the x86 market. Our strategy is to accelerate our growth by taking advantage of our design capabilities to deliver a breadth of products that best align with broader industry shifts toward low power, emerging markets and the cloud.
This is a completely meaningless statement. You could say the same exact thing about any microprocessor company. For example:
"Freescale is a leader in PowerPC microprocessor design, and we remain committed to the PowerPC market. Our strategy is to accelerate our growth by taking advantage of our design capabilities to deliver a breadth of products that best align with broader industry shifts toward low power, emerging markets and the cloud."
This statement is true even though AMD and Freescale aren't competitors.
This is the kind of garbage that makes employees think that their managers are clueless and don't know how to fix the company.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
'We're at an inflection point. We will all need to let go of the old 'AMD versus Intel' mind-set, because it won't be about that anymore.'
I actually find that a little saddening. I miss the good old Intel vs. AMD days when there was a legitimate choice to be made by performance enthusiasts. Mind you, those days are long gone, but I will still hold a special place in my heart for my AMD Athlon64 3400 :)
In the past, I always advocated for, and employed AMD chipped systems. I was once burned by my advocacy when I lost several AMD mobos after they all got fried!
This was a contributory event to my getting fired, though a poorly written application was partly responsible. My employer could not listen because other AMD systems survived. They did because they were to be running the application next.
What is the experience of slashdotters using these systems? Do they still consume lots of power or overheat?
Let's say AMD is planning - or thinking about, at least - stopping the manufacture of x86 processors. What's a responsible company spokesperson going to say? "Yes, we're working on an exit strategy and are hoping to be out of the business by 2014" - does anyone believe that would be stated? If it was, their x86 business would tank immediately, and all employees working on x86 now would update their resumes and get while the getting is good.
Several years ago, we had an important faculty member accept a dean-ship at another university. The lead time was going to be a bit more than a year. In the meantime, this faculty member still had research projects going full bore. So what did he do? He told his staff that the research projects were going to continue, and would remain at our university for the foreseeable future. Guess what happened a year later? Yup - the "foreseeable future" he spoke of 12 months before turned out to be almost exactly 12 months long.
#DeleteChrome
"Our strategy is to accelerate our growth by taking advantage of our design capabilities to deliver a breadth of products that best align with broader industry shifts toward low power, emerging markets and the cloud."
We will continue to make chips for servers, and low end crap. We can't compete with Intel for the consumer market in the short to medium term, however we are still relevant in business circles.
Consumers prepared to be gouged by Intel as soon as they figure this out. Also other than to just "say it" this has been the truth for some time, years in fact. I don't know if it is AMD stumbling or Intel just continuing to hit home runs, but there hasn't exactly been a whole lot of competition since the days of the ye old Athlon 64 series of processors. Ever since Intel came out with the Core 2 Duo, AMD has been unable to come up with an answer. Perhaps it had something to do with diversifying by buying up ATI, diverting capitol or focus away from core business. Ironically the AMD/ATI brand of video cards has a better reputation than the AMD CPU division, if only my opinion...
"Our strategy is to accelerate our growth by taking advantage of our design capabilities to deliver a breadth of products that best align with broader industry shifts toward low power, emerging markets and the cloud."
Maybe they could also leverage their synergies.
My understanding is that Radeon cards are still competing neck-and-neck with Nvidia's offerings these days, especially per-dollar. I may be mistaken, though, as my video card is still an 18-month-old ATI Radeon 5850 (back before Nvidia even had a DirectX 11 card on the market, and before the AMD-ATI buyout), which can still play everything I've thrown at it on full settings at 1920x1080.
Even if their CPUs are lack-luster (even at the lower price point, it would seem, where they used to be quite competitive), they may be able to survive mostly on the GPU market without too many troubles. For a while, at least.
The x86 market? Wtf still runs on x86, x64 was meant as the replacement, not side by side architecture. It's superior in every way, shame people can't dev for it proper, but that's not the architecture's problem and enough works on x64 that it's 99.9% impossible for me to justify x86 for anything. A few years ago I was building PCs for clients (my hobby, not profitable at all) with AMD processors for the price point performance. More recently it's been harder and harder to justify AMD over intel even on eco builds. I don't know what's going on with AMD, but I would appreciate a new competitor entering the consumer market that isn't intel or AMD that can compete w the former on some level. Stating they are going to go the x86 route sounds like they are throwing in the towel, I don't see this as a sustainable business strategy, every consumer desktop at best buy on display has been x64 for the past few years.
I just upgraded my PC from a Intel E6600 to a AMD Phenom II X6 1100T. I chose AMD, for one reason. How the heat sink / fan attach to the motherboard.
I have dogs, and kids and my PC doesn't reside protected under a desk. It gets bumped all the time from them playing and those stupid plastic plug brackets that Intel uses to attach the heat sink and fan to the motherboard were absolute garbage. Someone would bump my PC and the heat sink would hang off and cause the CPU to overheat. Not to mention after re-attaching it a few times, the knobs break and you have to buy a new heat sink and fan.
At least AMD still uses the clamp style that clamps to the socket. There is no way that is going to come off unless you intend to take it off. I won't buy Intel again until they re-design how the heat sink attaches.
When we contacted Silverman, he confirmed that the original statement has been taken somewhat out of context and provided additional clarification. 'AMD is a leader in x86 microprocessor design, and we remain committed to the x86 market. Our strategy is to buzzwords buzzwords buzzwords buzzwords buzzwords buzzwords.'
I love you guys but recently only have been buying Intel i5 and i7 because your Math coprocessor still stinks badly compared to Intel. For video compression and really heavy maths, I really wanted to use your 6 core processors, but they were slower than the 4 core i7 I bought instead.
Give me a 6 core that runs like a raped ape and has a really good math coprocessor and I'll be back. give me an 8 core that can also do multi chip on the same motherboard so I can build a 16 core for a cheap price, and I'll be back with a whole lot of friends.
There are lots of us that actually do real computing that has really heavy math. I know you guys can do this.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Intel is pushing forward because it's beneficial to them at the moment not to rest on their laurels.
AMD is underperforming, yes, but not so much that Intel is given any real leeway to slack off;
That is to say, if the i5/i7 lines were only a 5% increase over C2D performance for 1/3 higher price, AMD would have destroyed them, so while AMD hasn't been "real" competition for Intel for quite some time now, they've been good enough to keep the industry trudging along.
If AMD outright left the market, there would be absolutely no incentive or real immediate threat necessitating actual improvements until desktop ARM chips actually started getting established.
Why do we still use this terminology (x86)?
I thought the last x86 processor produced was the Pentium Pro
When the Pentium 4 came out, it was frequently called the "7th generation", but it was never called the 786 or 80786, either formally or informally. Sure, it's just naming conventions, but that's exactly what x86 is about, it's about a trend in naming conventions.
My new hobby will be referring to processors as having x87 architecture, as a distinction to indicate they support floating point instructions.
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Shame- I usually support the underdog- and always wanted AMD to be able to run Intel neck-and-neck.
Nowadays though AMD seems to stand for A Mediocre Design
I hope they can recapture their mojo and challenge intel again- if for no other reason than to provide a lower pricing incentive to intel.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
It will be deployed in 2014:
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4230160/ARM-unveils-64-bit-architecture
"Indeed, the first processors based on ARMv8 will only be announced sometime in 2012, with actual server prototypes running on the new architecture expected in 2014."
Frankly am amazed they even have a wesbite...
China needs a processor company, and even without AMD being leading-edge if their products are sold inexpensively there is a huge potential market worldwide.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
maybe i'm just slow .. but i LUV my EeePC that has a AMD c-50 (dual-core) APU inside. .. just shrunk to 10 inches. WOW!
it sits on the table (on) and is happy with no powercord for 6+ hours.
with some google searching and linux voodoo it can even output (via HDMI) 1080p movies to my LCD tv.
it has 2x usb 3.0(!) ports (which is like 80% as fast as new-fangled COPPER thunderbolt?)
it's basically my old AMD Athlon 2700+ (from 2003) plus a modern mid/low range GPU
which was in a lian lee alu full-tower case
-
maybe AMD is betting that we HAVE the good software already (like XP?), we don't need MORE software hence MORE CPU grunt, but
we want smaller computer (that use LESS electricity) that run that good (old) software? *shrug*
They don't beat the comparative Intel chips at said tasks anywhere near well enough to justify the heat and cost tradeoffs.
If intel isn't so stubborn about x86 it needs to license the ARM instruction set and do what they always do: out manufacture everyone else, this time in the ARM space, squishing TI, qualcomm and anyone else who's currently in the ARM mix. And when they start to dominate ARM processors then they can "take over" the ARM instruction set and bend it to their will.
I know it's evil, but it's probably the best way for intel to leverage what it does best to stay on top of the market.
The Bulldozer release showed AMD's commitment to low-end computers. I opted for Phenom II over Bulldozer because of the architecture changes. My next setup, if not another Phenom II, will be Intel.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
AMD doesn't care what any of those companies do. It will still be making microprocessors for your microwave long after x86 and ARM are dead.
Given how ARM has been all conquering on portables & embeddeds and in a position to take on laptops, I'm not surprised that AMD is thinking along these lines @ all. If they were to drop 32-bit support from their CPUs, then the 64-bit only CPU would be a RISC CPU, from what I understand, and AMD would find it easier to match promised performances. As for Windoes XP, MS no longer sells it or supports it, and so XP only needs to support existing boxes. If it was just an issue b/w XP and 7, AMD could have dropped 32-bit compatibility already. I think Windows 8 is going to be the point where one sees support for CISC instructions being dropped.
Incidentally, does AMD have any IP rights to the Alpha? If it does, that's another processor it could resurrect, and offer in a range of bins - from low power to high performance. Slap the Android on it, and they'd have a viable platform for tablets & laptops, while w/ FreeBSD, they could even return to servers. I do think that they'd be incredibly stupid getting into the ARM market, overcrowded as that market already is w/ multiple suppliers. Or else, Intel would have stayed there w/ XScale & succeeded.
I disagree w/ the GP that Intel is forcing AMD to stay in the x86 business. First of all, anti-trust only means that Intel cannot deliberately cripple AMD in order to gain market dominance, but if AMD, for other business reasons, decided that the platform is a dead end and chose to abandon it, that wouldn't make it an anti-trust case. Besides, a credible argument can be made that there are still other CPU vendors one can choose - MIPS, SPARC, POWER, ARM. Also, if Intel is discovered manipulating AMD business decisions, does anyone think that that itself would come under an anti-trust scanner for being anti-competitive? Does anyone remember Adaptec being under any anti-trust scanner when they acquired Symbios, thereby becoming a monopoly?