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AMD: What Went Wrong?
Barence writes "In 2006, AMD could seemingly do no wrong. Its processors were the fastest in the PC market, annual revenue was up a record 91%, expansion into the graphics game had begun with the high-profile acquisition of ATI, and it was making exciting plans for a future where it looked like it could 'smash Intel's chip monopoly' for good. Now the company is fighting for its very survival. How did AMD end up surrendering such a advantageous position – and was it given an unfair shove on the way down? This article has plotted AMD's decline, including the botched processor launches, the anti-competitive attacks from Intel and years of boardroom unrest."
AMD made good products too, they just made them for the wrong market. This is why commercial semiconductor manufacturing is so difficult. You give your engineers a set of constraints and then about 5 years later you have a product. Intel, back around 2003, bet heavily on laptops and power-conscious servers. AMD bet on desktops. Intel's market predictions were better and so the products that they brought to market turned out to be the ones customers wanted by the time the related products made it to market. AMD's were not. Of course, Intel only made this bet after seeing how badly they'd underestimated the importance of power consumption with the Pentium 4 so, if anything, their later products were an overreaction to the poor performance of the P4.
So, in summary, AMDs problem was that they didn't screw up the previous generation, so assumed that the next one could be more of the same and missed the industry shift to mobile devices.
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The article is pretty explicit about how AMD dug its own grave. I don't think blaming an Intel monopoly is all that convincing.
Really? The article mentions how Intel managed to get Sony money to cancel ALL AMD shipments, and how they paid Dell roughly 3/4 of a billion dollars in a single quarter to not use AMD chips. But I'm sure you're right, I'm sure keeping AMD out of all of the major OEMs(except to some extent HP) had nothing to do with it.
If i had one dollar for every brain you dont have, i would have $1.
In essences what AMD was evolution vs Intels attempted revolution. They evolved x86 with a 64-bit extension rather than attempt to revolutionize like Intel went for.
Now however the roles have switched. Intel goes for a evolution, while AMD tries for revolution with their APU concept of shifting floating point onto the GPGPU.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
No, it's not Slashdot. These days, it has become hard to tell the difference between Apple and Microsoft, except maybe Apple sues more people.
Excuse me, wtf r u doin?
If I were a major computer manufacturer these days, I'd spec in AMD CPUs (Black Editions, etc.), then attach a self-contained coolant system to it, and crank it until it reached the temperatures that the i7 normally operates at. The $500 in cost savings would appeal to my customers, and I'd be able to price my competitors out of the market.
A core i7 2700k (unlocked for overclocking) only costs $369 on Newegg ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115095 ). Pair it with the most expensive LGA 1155 motherboard they have at $339 ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131760 ), and you're paying $708. Do you mean to tell me that you can get an equivalently powerful AMD processor, with a motherboard with similar features, for less than $210?
Now what if I were to tell you that you can get a motherboard that ticks all the same boxes as the other one, for $129? ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157271 ). That brings the total cost down to $498. Could you please enlighten me on how it is possible to *save* $500 by building an AMD solution instead of Intel, when the Intel option is less than $500, at retail ?
The only consumers spending over $1000 on a CPU are the folks with too much money and not enough brains. And while you can spend that much on an extreme edition 6-core Intel processor, you're forgetting that it's also overclockable, by about 30%, and that you'd really be pushing things if you tried to get an FX6 running stably at 4.5GHz. You'd also be forgetting that unless something is massively parallel, the i7 still retains a performance edge over the bulldozer architecture. Chiefly, though, you'd be forgetting that for 99% of what you do, you'll never see the difference between the i7 2700 and the FX6, except perhaps that the ability to use a small SSD as a cache drive to improve spinny platter drive performance, something that's built into the Intel Z68 motherboard chipset and, at least last I checked, didn't exist on the AMD platform, would actually give the i7 a boost in real world usage, for significantly less price (pair a 32GB SSD with a 3TB spinny platter drive, and you get the write speed of the SSD, coupled with the capacity of the spinny platter drive). You may see a performance increase in things like video encoding, depending on the software you're using, but it's not going to get you any more frames per second in Skyrim. And truthfully? When I rip a DVD, I queue up the transcode in Handbrake before I go to bed, set it to turn the computer off when it's done, and don't really care if it finishes 2 minutes earlier.