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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
An inflection point is when the second derivative of a curve is zero, and is generally where a curve changes from concave down to concave up. I'm assuming the guy was talking about a profit over time curve or something.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
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
that had to google "inflection point"? From a marketing standpoint it might be good to have a CEO who isn't an engineer :P.
or a CEO who picks up a word or phrase from an engineer and thinks, 'Hey, that sounds good, I'll use it in my next meeting or press statement!'
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
This is why it's good to have a background in math, even if you're not employed in an STEM field. All sorts of processes can be described in mathematical terms, knowing what those terms mean helps you understand the world better. People often say "calculus? I'll never use that after high school!". But the truth is, I use my calculus education every single day without ever touching an integral or derivative.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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...
Indeed. Which is why words and phrases like "pushing the envelope" and "quantum leap" are so often used wrong, and marks the CEO (who reflects on the company) as a dummy.
AMD chips seem to consume more power than comparable Intel chips, but I'm pretty sure they have thermal throttling these days.
I was impressed with one of the old P4 systems in my previous job because the fan was just lying on top of the heat-sink and every once in a while someone would knock it off and the CPU would just throttle down until someone got around to putting it back (yeah, I don't know why we never spent a few dollars to buy a fan that could actually be screwed into place). In those days an AMD CPU would probably have burned out.
When people say "x86" they usually include the 64-bit extensions in this category. Every x86 CPU made today, whether from Intel, AMD, or even Via, supports the AMD64 extensions.
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.'
Why not just buy a third-party heatsink that comes with its own backplate? You don't have to use the default mounting hardware.
x64 is an extension to x86. What we need a a whole new class of computers designed and built for 64bit architectures. But that calls for a complete redesign of the most popular OS and probably MOBO architecture as well.
The problem is, who would want to do that?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
There are lots of us that actually do real computing that has really heavy math.
So shouldn't you be using SSE instructions rather than x87?
He just read, "The Innovator's Dilemma," by Clayton Christensen. He sees new innovation in x86 chipmaking as having diminishing returns, making the entire architecture susceptible to other architectures and competitors where new innovation still provides increasing returns.
I'm a radeon guy to... always buy AMD/Radeon, but even I have to admit.. Radeon cards have a lot of problems that NVidia cards just dont have. You go to nearly every major game releaseds support forums, and what's stickied at the top? "Radeon owners issues click here"
Add to that Nvidias clearly superior support for hardware accelerated HD decoding and really, my favorite card has some catching up to do. I spent months trying to get a Radeon card to work in my HTPC and I think I got the hardware decoding to engage on one movie... and it was a hardware encoding demo. I ordered a $30 Nvidia card that was 2yrs old and threw it in... bam, it just worked. I didn't even have to mess with settings. Hell, when I did mess with the settings I was having a hard time getting it NOT to engage.
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
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
But they are all x86 compatible, because they can all run code compiled for 8086, 80186, 80286, 80386 and 486 processors.
My new hobby will be referring to processors as having x87 architecture, as a distinction to indicate they support floating point instructions.
People do refer to x87 when talking about the FPU on x86 chips. It's commonly used when differentiating it from SSE - modern compilers will emit SSE instructions instead of x87 ones unless you specify a backwards compatible target architecture (PII or earlier).
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Linux has had better support for ATI than Nvidia cards for at least a generation now.
I am John Hurt.
If AMD can offer a single chip that does both, and does it well (key factor here)
You can't put a 300W GPU and a 125W CPU on the same die. At least not if you're sane.
The only use for graphics integrated on the CPU are for cheap low-end systems or for extra performance if you can offload some processing to the GPU cores. Putting a high-performance GPU there makes no sense because you need insane cooling to get the heat out and it will be crippled by the slow, shared memory interface anyway.
Plus, of course, you can't just upgrade the GPU in two years when the CPU is still fast enough for current games but the GPU isn't; you have to replace both. CPU manufacturers might love that, but users won't.
Thank You.
And I think VirtualDub is compiled to take advantage of the AMD64 architecture.
I am John Hurt.
Precisely. It meant "the point where AMD goes from a desktop chip maker that also makes mobile chips, to a mobile chip maker that also makes desktop chips".
It doesn't help that Intel integrated graphics made GREAT leaps forward in Sandy Bridge.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Not really. AMD has really crap proprietary drivers, nVidia has slightly crap proprietary drivers. AMD's open source drivers are poor, nVidia's are nonexistent. If you're willing to run a blob, nVidia's support is better. If you aren't, they both suck.
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Yes you do have to do your research and make sure you purchase a compatible motherboard, that is true whether you are dealing with Intel, AMD, or VIA.
125W is still the highest of the desktop chips from AMD, but many AMD motherboards are rated at 140W. You can buy a motherboard that only supports up to 95W, but why would you do that?
Intel has some 130W chips.
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