Intel CPU Prices Stagnate As AMD Sales Decline

crookedvulture writes "Over the past few years, AMD's desktop processors have struggled to keep up with Intel's. AMD has slashed prices to make its chips more appealing, but Intel has largely held firm. Three years of historical data shows that Intel CPU prices have remained stagnant, especially for models that cost $200 and up. AMD chips, on the other hand, tend to fall in price steadily after they first hit the market. Some drop by up to 43% in the first year. This trend is a byproduct of the unhealthy competitive landscape in the desktop CPU arena, and it's been great for Intel's gross margin. Unfortunately, it's not so good for consumers."

Comments

AMD needs some high profile support

[crazyjj]

If I were them, I would be kissing Tim Cook's ass so hard that he couldn't turn around without slapping me with his junk. AMD needs some high profile names to adopt AMD processors. I mean, they've always been kind of fringe players, but in this tablet/notebook/smartphone age, they've become more fringe than ever. They could easily turn it around with serious support from just one big player like Apple, Motorola, Samsung, Google, etc. But it doesn't seem to be happening. And every time AMD has tried to court a big name or even merge with one, they seem to come up short.

Maybe they should try sending flowers.

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[Richard_at_work]

Have AMD solved their capacity issues, because that was why Apple went with Intel originally - AMD couldn't supply the quantities Apple wanted guaranteed, while Intel could.

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[gl4ss]

it wouldn't have been unthinkable for Apple to buy 100%. that's the apple way with many production runs(be it initial ipod hd's or whatever).

after all, they were pretty much buying all desktop chips produced in g3/g4/g5 form since pretty much nobody else was buying them.

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Unfortunately, Apple might be about the last company that AMD has a decent shot with:

Like it or loath it, Apple adores thin-'n-light, caters to a less cost-sensitive customer segment, and has a fairly tightly polished ARM+hardware decode device strategy when it comes to HTPC type applications...

AMD has products that are quite cheap for the punch, but they tend to run a bit hot for the performance you get, and much of their virtue lies in comparatively strong IGPs, perfect for the light gaming and HTPC markets that Apple either doesn't much care about or would prefer you use an iOS device for.

AMD's features, particularly the comparatively strong GPU showing on even cheap parts(Intel has gotten better; but, because they don't have to care, they still tend to tie their best IGPs to their best CPUs, so you need to order some damn expensive CPU silicon to get the full punch, which still is fairly tepid, though not downright laughable, as historically), are an excellent fit in cost-sensitive laptops, all-in-ones, and desktops that aren't likely to get a discrete GPU upgrade. Unfortunately, those are niches that command serious volume; but not much in the way of margins.

Honestly, AMD might have much better luck cuddling up to Corporate IT. They don't, presently, have 'VPro'(but they could probably put a whole damn ARM SoC on their 'enterprise' motherboard reference model for half of what Intel charges for a CPU and chipset that doesn't have most or all of those management features lasered off, if the market demands it); but Team Corporate burns through generic good-enough beige boxes by the palletload, and pays somewhat better for them than does Joe Bestbuy. They'd have a hard time cracking CPU-intensive workstation applications; but the zillion desktop typenboxes, computationally unstressed servers that need huge slabs of RAM, and similar absolutely infest enterprise IT...

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[gnasher719]

What you say is probably correct, but there were more reasons. At the time when rumors of Apple moving to x86 started, Intel sold the monstrosity named P4 while AMD had rather better chips. But Apple would have known about the Core Duo already, which was basically Intel going back to rational chip design and getting ahead of AMD again.

And another rational reason: By going with Intel, Apple knew that at most 10% of competitors would have better chips than the Macs. By going with AMD, Apple risked having 90% of the competition using better chips.

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[Sir_Sri]

It's never really a capacity issue. With enough money you can always build new fabs or you can have someone else produce for you. AMD spun off its manufacturing business into GlobalFoundries now, which aims to sell foundry capacity to anyone, so that changes the situation a bit.

AMD processors aren't as good as intel ones. At least not right now. They're worse performance, performance per watt etc. Apple is big enough they don't need to deal with the #2 anything. For the same reason McDonalds doesn't sell presidents choice or pepsi. Apple, for all of its many, many faults thinks a lot about the user experience, and frankly Intel CPU's produce a better experience right now than AMD parts.

AMD kinda sorta has the right idea on combined CPU-GPU packages. Unfortunately nVidia cards are a bit better (support for PhysX) which AMD doesn't, and 'eyefinity' while cool isn't a product most people can manage, and Intel CPU's are better performance if you want performance, or better performance per watt if you just want battery life, overall leaving AMD a rough place in the market. For Apple, who are married now to portable devices, and don't care so much about windows gaming API's AMD just isn't making a good enough product. When Intels previous generation (sandy bridge) parts are still wiping the floor with new AMD stuff it's just not a good move to commit your business to the losing team.

*I'm talking about Apple adopting AMD processors across an entire product line. Not individual home use. For whatever problem a particular person has AMD setups can certainly be competitive. But Apple has a brand and a certain user experience it wants, and for them adopting AMD processors is not a good plan.

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[Quakeulf]

I laughed for all the right/wrong reasons.

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[JDG1980]

Unfortunately nVidia cards are a bit better (support for PhysX) which AMD doesn't

Unless you really need PhysX (which is a niche feature), my opinion is that AMD video cards are better. The 7770 and 7870 have excellent price/performace ratios and no major weaknesses. In particular, thermals and power consumption are better than on corresponding nVidia cards.

You're right about AMD's uncompetitiveness against Intel in the CPU market, though.

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[Type44Q]

If I were them, I would be kissing Tim Cook's ass so hard that he couldn't turn around without slapping me with his junk.

Geez, dude, that's a hell of an analogy (at least you didn't suggest they give him a rusty trombone). :P

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[ifiwereasculptor]

Battery life, yes, but Apple isn't about performance. Both Intel and Nvidia GPUs perform worse on OSX than even on Linux, according to a plethora of benchmarks. That minute difference in performance, though, has never scared an Apple customer, so I don't think Apple would mind trading an i3 for an A10 in terms of x86 alacrity. Even considering their more demanding customers, like video editors, image manipulators and other stereotypical mac owners, those are areas AMD chips currently excel at, being threaded workloads. As for battery life, AMD currently uses a less juice than Intel when idle. The end result is that notebooks with Trinity chips are doing very well on battery life, last I heard. Makes sense, since most of the time a PC is idling.

Then again, even if they fare well versus the i3, AMD probably won't have anything to compete with cores i5 and i7. Piledriver is around the corner, but those listed 125W TDPs are a major sign that they aren't about to redeem Bulldozer. And Apple currently has a huge line of i5 and i7 PCs. Plus, there would be drivers to consider. A theoretical AMD OSX driver would probably be derived from Catalyst, which isn't all that great, to put it mildly. Nvidia isn't on performance parity with Windows on Macs, but they work very well.

So I agree with your disbelief that Apple would use AMD, but for slightly different reasons.

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[lengau]

IIRC, ATI/AMD GPUs tend to perform better on benchmarks (due to higher raw processing power), but fall short on actual graphics performance (due to different architectures) when compared to Nvidia ones. That's why a lot of people wound up with Nvidia graphics cards for gaming and AMD ones for bitcoin mining (back when that was big).

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[TeXMaster]

Unfortunately nVidia cards are a bit better (support for PhysX) which AMD doesn't

Unless you really need PhysX (which is a niche feature), my opinion is that AMD video cards are better. The 7770 and 7870 have excellent price/performace ratios and no major weaknesses. In particular, thermals and power consumption are better than on corresponding nVidia cards.

You're right about AMD's uncompetitiveness against Intel in the CPU market, though.

AMD video cards are significantly better than NVIDIA ones when it comes to raw computation power and when it comes to performance/watt and when it comes to performance/price; especially now that the 7xxx series has overcome the only weakness of the old series, the VLIW instruction set and architecture. Where AMD sucks big times is in software support. NVIDIA has pushed immensely CUDA, to the point that people now think that GPGPU = CUDA; and it has immensely pushed in creating a software environment around CUDA, including tons of external libraries that depend on CUDA. AMD has lost of a lot of ground with their CTM -> CAL -> OpenCL transitions, that have effectively prevented their technology to gain any significant traction, and they are just now starting to go back and getting some visibility. Their APU offering is probably the last chance they get in doing a significant breakthrough. Let's hope they don't bust it.

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[Anonymous Coward]

on the other hand they are fighting an epic battle with nvidia at the same time, with good success all things considered.

That's an incredibly good point that I had never thought of until you brought it up. While AMD is the underdog in the Intel v. AMD fight, they're fighting tooth and nail with another vertical market giant (nV) and doing quite well -- So was AMDs acquisition of ATI what took most of the focus away from the CPU market? Probably heavily influenced it...

I mean, AMD has /always/ been nipping at Intel's heels... Ever since my 486DX4, the only reason I've picked up an AMD proc was because my budget didn't allow for an Intel. As the TLP stated, they really do need some high profile support in order to make their comeback...

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[gr8_phk]

It's never really a capacity issue. With enough money you can always build new fabs or you can have someone else produce for you. AMD spun off its manufacturing business into GlobalFoundries now, which aims to sell foundry capacity to anyone, so that changes the situation a bit.

That is half the problem actually. The other half is inferior designs. AMD had the shit when the 64 came out. The only way Intel could compete in benchmarks was to stick with 32bit software. Hector the Sector Director (as they allegedly called him at his previous employer) then focused on marketing and left fabrication and design underfunded. When things were already starting to look bad they borrowed a bunch of money to buy ATI. The failure to spend on manufacturing led to the situation where the only way to keep up was to spin-off and outsource fab. Unfortunately Intel is now a full process node ahead of everyone else on the planet which gives them both cost and power advantages. The failure to fund design was followed up with Bulldozer which was late and not as good as hoped. So now they have both inferior designs and manufacturing when compared to Intel.

That said, their designs are very good and should be able to compete with many others (just not Intel). But that would mean new markets for AMD, and many of the players use ARM. Even nVidia chose to use their nice gfx and license ARM to get into those markets.

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[wonkey_monkey]

It's really more of a metaphor. I hope.

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[danomac]

Yes, but don't forget the profit margin which Apple is famous for. Using AMD would mean more money in their own pockets. It's probably not a clear-cut decision.

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[tlhIngan]

If I were them, I would be kissing Tim Cook's ass so hard that he couldn't turn around without slapping me with his junk. AMD needs some high profile names to adopt AMD processors.

Problem is I think AMD would be in even more dire straits if Apple adopted them.

One thing that Intel has that AMD doesn't is fab headroom. When Apple chooses the processor for their next computer, Apple will buy it in the millions. If Apple wants it customized to do X (e.g., in the early days, Apple insisted on having CPUs with VT-x in them, even though Intel didn't make any in that class), Intel can happily oblige.

For AMD, it could easily be a struggle, especially if demand for a top end low-yield processor surprises Apple.

You also have to remember that AMD has always had supply issues. Apple had problems with its G5 supplier, IBM, not being able to provide enough top-end G5s that its customers kept ordering (likewise, Motorola kept ignoring Apple to focus more on the military and commercial networking sectors for its PowerPC chips). So Apple was looking for a supplier who wouldn't be under such constraints, and would be able to ramp up production quickly.

AMD at the time was struggling to supply CPUs for the enthusiast sector - they probably had tons of the low end CPUs but likely Apple wasn't too keen on that - they wanted a range, and if they wanted high-end, it would mean the top end chips would end up with Apple, and everyone else gets the dregs.

AMD may be in trouble, but Intel will be in more trouble if AMD folds (think anti-trust and monopoly accusations, and possibly scrutiny and breakup). Intel's probably doing what it can to shore up AMD without directly investing in it. By keeping the price of Intel's chips high, they're letting AMD take the niche on the low end stuff to at least move product (Intel could easily lower prices and still make a profit).

Hell, Intel's probably got a AMD rescue plan in case AMD should really get into a bad spot (but not directly - through piles of third party investment companies).

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[dubbreak]

Using AMD would mean more money in their own pockets.

Would it? Intel chips are priced higher, but with the current process being ahead of AMD's it should be cheaper to produce per chip (basically Intel has a high margin on their chips). Had Apple started going in the direction of AMD I'm sure Intel would have met or beat prices and still would have been making a profit.

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[ifrag]

Unless you really need PhysX (which is a niche feature)

I'm not aware of any game in the market that actually *needs* PhysX to run (although perhaps one exists?) And until a game absolutely mandates support as a minimum requirement all PhysX gets used for is making more crap happen on the screen that doesn't have any direct impact on gameplay. On Borderlands 2 setting PhysX to high will result in tons of shrapnel being thrown all over the ground from explosions, but those objects are all non-clipping, so it doesn't matter beyond the fact that sometimes you have a hard time seeing through it to the weapon drops.

And that's generally all I've seen done with it, extra crap that doesn't impact any game entity or interfere with main logic. Other than the couple non-game demo-ish simulations or whatever, no developer has been willing to make it part of core engine design.

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[aztracker1]

It's worth pointing out that the driver team was from the ATI side of the merger... and at least has gone in a better direction since then... that said, I switched back to NVidia fairly recently, simply because the code available that I was interested in looking into for gpgpu was better supported by nvidia. PhysX is nice as well, but that could easily be a grafted layer on OpenCL as it is on CUDA, the tech company was purchased by nvidia. I actually like AMD, especially when you're talking 6+ cores, the power is a bit lower, and so is the performance, but for a VM server, AMD is a better choice imho. My whitebox esxi server is running an 8-core AMD, and runs great, with a performance/price that would be hard for intel to match... on the desktop a faster 2-4 cores works better... though I tend to go AMD for about 2/3 of my builds as the pricing is very competitive and the performance is "good enough" ... Intel seems to really favor the larger OEMs, and it's hard to do a home build at a comparable price point, with AMD I can compromise a little on CPU performance, but dump that extra cash into the graphics card, extra ram and an SSD. It tends to lead to a more well rounded system... it's not all-out performance, but for a mid-level price, hard to beat AMD.

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[aztracker1]

I think it's worth noting that in server environments, where virtual machine and highly parallel computing needs are king AMD does very well... Not the highest raw cpu power per compute node, but much better parallel scale.

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[PIBM]

That totally depends on what is a mid level price for you. If I'm paying 10% more for my computer, and it will be 10% faster overall, then I will do it. Luckily, with the low prices of the CPUs vs the full computer, it's easy to add 200 bucks and get a much better and faster processor for a 2000$ computer. But then, 2000$ is mid level for me, 1000$ is a cheapo computer (hell, I barely get a single 30" monitor for this price!), as when we purchased our first computer, we paid what would be worth a bit over 15 000$ in current money ..

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[TheRaven64]

it wouldn't have been unthinkable for Apple to buy 100%

Yes it would. That was exactly the situation that they'd been in with IBM and Motorola and wanted to avoid. By going with Intel, they are paying 10% of the R&D costs. Well, maybe 20% once you factor in Intel's profit. With IBM, they were paying 100% because IBM had no other customers with the same (or even very similar) requirements. With AMD, they'd have been paying at least 50%. Being one of the largest customers, but still a minority is a really nice position to be in. Your supplier gives you good deals, because a lot of their profit comes from the kinds of volume that you order, but at the same time you're not totally financing their R&D and they have enough total capacity that a production glitch won't affect you because they'll just restrict the supply to some of their less-favoured customers.

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[hairyfeet]

That ain't the problem friend, as someone who builds AMD exclusively I'll be HAPPY to tell you what the problem is, the problem is they FIRED all their engineers for computer layouts and tried to push a server chip onto the consumer market!

Here are some facts, FACT.-1- The AMD Bobcat was selling as fast as they could crank them suckers out, they were great for netbooks and even average user laptops and the OEMs were all ready to slap the new quad bobcats into tons of units, what happened? they canceled it. FACT.-2- The morons at AMD didn't bother to actually tell MSFT what they were doing so now ALL versions of Windows except for Windows 8 will tie a boat anchor to any Faildozer "half core" design" because the OS doesn't realize each module only has one FP unit so it'll slap two FP heavy threads on one module, just killing performance. FACT.-3- They KNEW before it came out that Faildozer was too hot, too power sucking, and didn't have the performance of the Thuban and Zosma chips, what did they do? they priced it against the fricking Core i5 2500K, a fricking monster of a chip, and to add insult to injury canceled the Thubans! They were getting damned near 100% yields on the Thubans, because one or two bad cores? Make it a Zosma quad. 3 bad cores? Phenom Triple. Bad cache? Athlon. And because they were having near 100% yields they could sell them cheap and still make good money, whereas the BD/PD design is expensive to make, hard to get decent yields on, and to make a profit they have to price them against chips that curbstomp them, what idiots!

Hell I could go on all day but why bother? AMD's biggest problem is NOT Intel, its frankly piss poor management. their only real hope now is the head chip designer they lured away from Apple recently, if he can come up with a design that replaces faildozer and puts them back in the game they'll have a shot. Hell let ME run that company and they'd be doing better! I'd kill the socket mess they are in now, settle on just two LGA sockets, one for server and one for desktop, I'd keep the integer heavy BD/PD design for servers ONLY and I'd be pushing $120 Thubans unlocked and $100 Lianos while I'd be riding the shit out of the engineers to give me a quad core Bobcat yesterday. Finally I'd tell my new Apple guy he had free reign, just make me a damned good low power chip, whatever you gotta do to make it happen? DO IT.

They HAD a damned good niche carved out. To steal a line from Steve Jobs "Intel doesn't have to lose for AMD to win" as there is a LOT of money that could be made by owning the low end to midrange market, but AMD has been pissing it away with bad designs, chips like Faildozer that cost too damned much to make while giving the consumer too little performance, and not cranking out sequels to the excellent low power Bobcats. Picture a next gen Bobcat Transformer style tablet, all your windows apps and all day battery life when hooked into the keyboard cradle and all for less than $550, who wouldn't want that? Hell with the price they were able to get the C series Bobcats cranked out for they could have the tablets start at $299 and make good money and again ALL your Windows programs would run...easy sale.

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[Guy Harris]

"amd64" is called that because that's what AMD branded their implementation of x86_64.

...which also happened to be the first implementation. They originally called it "x86-64" before it was released, and later called it "AMD64".

You know what Intel calls their x86_64 implementation? "Intel 64"

After having called it names such as "EM64T".

In any case, the history was "AMD came out with it first, Intel licensed it from AMD and came out with its own implementations, and there are several different names for it, with some OSes calling it "amd64", some calling it "x86-64"/"x86_64", and some calling it "x64"".

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[thsths]

> "amd64" is called that because that's what AMD branded their implementation of x86_64. You know what Intel calls their x86_64 implementation? "Intel 64"

No, they don't. Intel 64 is the Itanium architecture, which is lesson in how you can turn a good idea into a bad product.

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[hairyfeet]

Works just fine in Windows, I'm running HD4850s in mine and the boys PCs, run just fine under Win 7 X64 and since they have squeezed every drop of horsepower they can out of the chip already I honestly don't care if the drivers are put into legacy now or not.

Hell I've been using AMD GPUs in my builds for nearly 5 years now and the ONLY problem I ever saw was back when they used .NET for the CCC occasionally .NET would bork itself with an update and you couldn't launch the CCC, though the drivers worked just fine.

so I don't see what everyone bitches about, I've used Nvidia, I've used AMD, unless you are using either company's beta drivers (which if you are running beta drivers you know what you're getting into) the drivers from BOTH companies have been pretty damned solid.

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[Kjella]

It's never really a capacity issue. With enough money you can always build new fabs or you can have someone else produce for you.

I think you're forgetting how long the pipeline is between building a fab and it coming operational. You have to commit long before you know what your and the competitor's chips will be like, if you gamble that your next CPU line is a smashing hit and massively increase capacity but you're wrong you can have a company-killing loss on your hands. Sure the risk is spread a little for manufacturing companies but they too won't build massive new capacity without massive commitments. I doubt that within any single architecture AMD could increase their market share with more than half. So if they're at 20%, with a smashing hit I think they're at most 30%. Two in a row and 45%. If they go for the hat trick then 67%. But then AMD can't have any Bulldozers and Intel can't have any Core 2s.

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[Lonewolf666]

I'm running HD4850s in mine and the boys PCs, run just fine under Win 7 X64 and since they have squeezed every drop of horsepower they can out of the chip already I honestly don't care if the drivers are put into legacy now or not.

A pretty decent card for its time, going by the comparison table from Wikipedia. And I guess the "legacy" driver had time enough to mature.

Today I'd prefer the HD 7770 (which seems the closest equivalent in performance among the 7xxx) for its lower power consumption. But the difference is surprisingly small for four years of development. 80W vs. the 110W of the HD4850.

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[Pentium100]

On Borderlands 2 setting PhysX to high will result in tons of shrapnel being thrown all over the ground from explosions, but those objects are all non-clipping, so it doesn't matter beyond the fact that sometimes you have a hard time seeing through it to the weapon drops.

It looks nice though. I got a GT620 for PhysX (main card is AMD 6850) and I like how Borderlands 2 looks now, especially since I tend to use elemental guns (pools of acid, slag and blood after a big fight). The 6850 manages to render all this in 1920x1200 without slowing down most of the time.

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[default luser]

AMD has a long history of poor managment decisions.

Back in the late 1990s AMD's CPU busines was a money pit, and the company was kept afloat by their profitable NOR flash joint-venture, but they spent way too much money on their CPU business (for example, those two huge fabs in Dresden that they just divested), and there was nothing left to foster new flash technologies. In the 2000s, NAND became the flash architecture of choice, and since AMD was caught without spare cash, they couldn't afford a crash-course investment in the new chip tech, they spun the unit off as Spansion and left it to slowly rot. Last time I checked, Spansion had only offered competitive NAND THIS YEAR, because they didn't have the cash, and they're still making mostly NOR products. Spansion's sales have dropped to about a quarter of the peak since the spinoff with no end in sight, and they can thank AMD for putting them in that spiral of doom.

Intel (also a MASSIVE NOR flash maker) did not see NAND flash coming, but once they realized their mistake they had the massive piles of cash to make a quick transition. Now just seven years later they are one of the world's premiere NAND providers, all because of their diverse portfolio (and common sense on where they should spend their money).

AMD *had* the money to fix Spansion before they went on their fab spree chasing Intel. And given the peak revenue of over 1.5 billion yearly (nearly as high as their CPU revenues today!) it was worth saving. But they spent the earnings from Spansion on Fabs 36 and 38. They wasted 2.5 billion on Fab 36 alone! And then they spent way too much money (that they didn't have) on ATI, which really has not improved their fortunes.

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[Sir_Sri]

No one 'needs' anything in gaming. But if you're buying a card why would you want one that doesn't support PhysX (if you play lots of games). If you only play WoW or the like then sure, but it sucks to pick up an awesome game and not be able to turn a feature on with a top of the line card.

Don't get me wrong, AMD parts are perfectly competitive in terms of total performance, but missing a common feature (PhysX) when OpenCl just isn't there yet hurts. But it is only a software problem and feature parity is possible.

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[Sir_Sri]

NVIDIA has pushed immensely CUDA, to the point that people now think that GPGPU = CUDA

Well I wrote full working project in CUDA completed in 2008, OpenCl is not quite there yet....

But that was my point, it's a feature problem. In terms of performance for gaming, no, AMD isn't significantly better. They jockey for spots with releases but the 200 dollar ish cards are all about equally capable.

The AMD APU really gives them a leg up on intel for 'SoC' or just fusion type products. But Apple (who is the company in question) doesn't seem to mind intel integrated GPU's for their low end macbooks, and really, that segment of the market doesn't care about windows gaming performance, and the high end of the market (a 2000 dollar laptop) an intel cpu and an nVIDIA gpu or an intel CPU and AMD GPU is really a better setup than an AMD CPU + .
Now my 700 dollar Windows 7 laptop with full AMD works quite well for what I want it to be, but it's not consistent with the apple experience.

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[Trogre]

Purchaser for a large organization here.

We buy AMD where we can, but will be buying more intel in this next round.

AMDs biggest mistake in recent times was killing off the excellent Phenom 2 line. Their new bulldozer-based FX processors, while okay for office apps, are absolutely *terrible* at FPU-intensive tasks such as gaming or research software such as Matlab or Mathematica.

I know the bulldozer processors share one FPU per two "cores", but the performance difference between a six-core FX and a four-core i5 is at present a factor of four. Again, this is only for FPU intensive applications. Integer arithmetic tasks give much better performance by comparison.

AMD had better have something pretty special up their sleeve for the next line...

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[hairyfeet]

Plus you can get the HD4850 Lonewolf, which STILL just chews through games like Just Cause II, Cryisis 1&2 and Saints Row 3 for just $40 new and that's for 800 stream processors, a 256bit pipe, and easy OCing in Catalyst if you want to bump it up even higher. I have one exactly like the pic and it came from the shop with a "turbo boost" setting of 625Mhz GPU/993MHz memory over the stock 500/750 and since this only kicks in when i'm slamming the card it runs quite nicely without getting insanely hot.

So if you'd like a pretty damned powerful GPU for just dirt cheap i'd highly recommend. As I said I put me and both my boys on these, they tear through the latest games at our monitors 1600x900 with plenty of bling and just $40? Hell you can't even buy a halfass midrange card for that, its a no brainer.

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[Lonewolf666]

Well,
if I was living anywhere geeks.com delivers to, I'd consider the HD 4770 for $38. http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=7120674000G-CO&cat=VCD
Almost as fast but a bit easier on the power consumption. According to Wikipedia the HD 4770 is already in 40nm and it shows in the TDP, only 80W vs. 110W.

BTW I find it amazing that the 4xxx series is still sold new. I'd have guessed that production stopped years ago.

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[cheesybagel]

AMD supposedly got some next-gen console wins. That should help them get volume and some sort of steady income source.

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[cheesybagel]

I can understand why AMD used a shared FPU in Bulldozer. With their Fusion strategy the CPU and GPU are supposed to be on the same chip. The GPU simply kills the CPU in FP compute performance. They probably thought they would simply eliminate the FP units in the long term or that they would fall into disuse. Their new designs still have twice the theoretical peak FP compute performance of their old designs. The issue is most applications simply are not compiled to use the new FMA instructions and they probably won't be until Intel's Haswell comes out.

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[cheesybagel]

Actually you are wrong. AMD needed new CPU fabs since their old Austin fab did not have enough production to fulfill demand. At one point AMD was severely capacity constrained manufacturing Thunderbird. They could sell three times their production if they had it. Still they did well enough that even after the Dresden expansion they still had the cash reserves to build a new fab in New York state and get to the point where they could supply one of the three big OEMs (HP, Apple, Dell) all by themselves. This is important since often AMD lost business because even if a vendor wanted to use AMD CPUs on a certain product then Intel would come around and charge extra for any CPUs they sold to that vendor to make the business unprofitable. In order to break their first deal with a major OEM AMD had to give CPUs for free to Compaq I kid you not. Despite AMD having a superior product at the time it would have cost that much to Compaq to buy AMD from Intel price hikes. The AMD management issue was Hector Ruiz used up all these cash reserves, enough for a new fab, buying ATI stock over the market price just before the stock market crash and put AMD on the edge of bankruptcy. Then he sold the fabs to Arab oil businessmen who wanted to get into the semiconductor business and jumped ship.

NOR flash gave more profits at the time than NAND flash manufacturing. Once the NOR flash market started going under AMD spun off those operations. There was talk at a point of converting one of those plants to CPU production, which would have been great at the time, but it seems the manufacturing tools weren't similar enough to make such a choice viable. NAND flash manufacturing is a cut-throat business where players like Samsung and Hynix dominate. There simply was not enough margin for AMD to enter that market. For Samsung at least it makes more sense since they can include NAND into their consumer electronics products. Intel went into NAND flash by a joint venture with Micron so it is really not that much of a big win for Intel and I doubt they get a lot of profit from it.

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[cheesybagel]

The performance difference can be explained by a lot of things. Bad OS scheduling of tasks, applications not compiled to use the fused-multiply-add ops which Intel is only going to have when Haswell comes out (2x FP performance), and CPU scheduling issues. FWIW I'm probably going to buy AMD once Vishera comes out in the end of this month using the Piledriver core. I only need high performance in my Linux development platform and I compile the high-performance apps myself. The remaining applications are not performance critical.

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[Trogre]

Interesting, thanks!

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[hairyfeet]

But its still a BAD idea and the reason is because in games and multimedia the extra load of doing BOTH all the onscreen drawing, resizing, and buffering AND having to do all the FP work is gonna just be deep fried assholes as far as performance goes. remember we are already SEVERELY constrained when it comes to badwidth between the APU and memory, you have both the CPU and the GPU fighting over the same bus for memory, and you are gonna add FP work on top of an already stretched to the max bus?

Its retarded and the ONLY place it will work is in small laptop where you simply aren't gonna be doing anything heavier than watching The Avengers in 1080p. We've been down this road before, with dumping more and more on the CPU, and always the memory ends up a seriously bad bottleneck simply because you can't put enough traces on a board to feed the chip. Hell even on the weaker chips like Brazos and Liano we are seeing that, where OCing the memory can give you a 20%+ performance boost simply because all the bottlenecking is in the memory while the CPU/GPU is stuck waiting on data, its just stupid.

Intel can do this because they know their APUs will not be used for anything but playing The Avengers at 1080p, they are office chips NOT gamer chips but with AMD's lower IPC the only real selling point they have is gaming and they are slitting their own throats with this design. They should have kept Bulldozer in the server room where integer heavy code is king, kept the weaker FP units in Bobcat where nobody is gaming, and had strong FP in Liano and their replacement for Thuban where they could still tout gaming performance. Look up ANY reviews of their APUs and you'll see you simply can't feed the GPU cores enough memory, this is why you end up with framerates worse than a $20 HD5450, because you just can't feed the chip enough memory to really be useful. Dumb, stupid, retarded...sadly this has been words that describe AMD pretty well since Faildozer came out and this is coming from someone who sells AMD exclusively, but I'm sticking with Thuban until something truly better comes out.

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[hairyfeet]

I've tried 'em, don't like 'em. yeah they come close but a 128bit pipe vs a 256bit pipe and when push comes to shove that 256bit pipe can just keep all those cores fed better, worth the extra 30w IMHO.

Damned shame you don't live somewhere where they deliver, or don't have a bud that lives where they deliver so he could just pass it on, because both cards are pretty insane values when you look at the amount of raw GPU power VS what you pay, its just nuts. Now for non gaming jobs the HD4770 rocks your socks off, i have a customer running the latest Solidworks on one and no matter how intricate his engineering gets it never chokes, he can spin and manipulate the living hell out of everything for his customers with a Phenom I X3 CPU and it NEVER stutters or skips, just great for that task, but in really heavy games like Just Cause II or the Crysis series I'll take the 256bit pipe. That's why in another year when Geeks has the HD6850s at the same price I'll swap up, after going 256bit I just can't go back to 128bit.

But it really shouldn't be surprising they still make 'em, after all Nvidia still makes the 8600 chips. they are mature, have high yields, and do most everything your average user wants them to do at a VERY cheap price point, its a win/win. Like I said we all game our butts off and neither me nor the boys have a single complaint about our HD4850s, they play in those huge MMOs like LOTRO and no matter how huge the raiding gets they don't skip, and I'm playing Crysis and sandboxes like SR 3 and JC2 and no matter how much exploding death i spray across the screen its all above 30 FPS and smooth as butter, couldn't be happier and well worth the extra 30 watts.

Re:AMD needs some high profile support

[cheesybagel]

I'm old enough to remember when MMUs and FPUs were sold as separate chips. The additional integration will happen in due time. It always does. In fact it is happening now across the board. Whether it is Intel, AMD, or ARM everyone has a CPU+GPU solution. You can reduce bandwidth requirements by increasing on-chip cache and using memory compression. If eDRAM is used the on-chip cache will be large enough to fit the pixel buffer and z-buffer in core with the same area used for L3 cache in present processors.

This problem happened because AMD was caught by surprise with AVX doubling the register size over SSE once the Bulldozer design was well advanced. Then Intel pulled their little FMA4 to FMA3 switcheroo on top of it ensuring that code compiled for future Intel processors such as Haswell (FMA3) won't run at top speed on Bulldozer (FMA4). Piledriver supports FMA4 and FMA3. AMD could double the number of FP units but changing the decoder and load/store units to cope is non-trivial. Things will only get worse once Haswell comes out since it not only has FMA3 but gather-scatter support like the old Cray vector processors or GPUs.

A lot of people diss Bulldozer but the fact is making the leap to a four issue processor is bloody hard. It hadn't been done before and both Intel and AMD were the first to implement this in an actually working and available processor. It is hard to extract ILP to keep such a processor fed and it is hard to design the decoders. Compare an Alpha 21264 to an AMD Bulldozer block to see the difference. Look at the number of arrows coming in and out of the instruction decoder. The processor is flexible enough that a single-threaded application can use both integer cores in Bulldozer, while a multi-threaded application may use one integer core per thread.

Well, DUH.

[mcgrew]

Ten years ago if your PC was more than 2 years old, new software wouldn't run. Now? I'm running five year old boxes that run everything fine... as long as they have enough memory.

The fact is, you no longer have to replace that PC and its CPU every other year.

Re:Well, DUH.

[ledow]

More like, AMD haven't been making enough of a difference for long enough to justify buying them over Intel.

Back in the 486/Pentium days I saved a LOT of money by buying AMD - I got better performance for less money, and virtually perfect compatibility.

Nowadays? There's so little difference between the specs of processors that I might as well just buy Intel. There's no compelling reason to go AMD any more, so nobody's buying them.

Sure, they get an "advantage" for a few months on their top-of-the-line gaming processors of a few percent, but by the time those chips are available in any pre-fab computer you might pick up in a shop, that difference means nothing at all and the price difference isn't worth straying.

Not to mention that since buying ATI (which was an absolute DOG for hardware compatibility and drivers), AMD seemed to have followed suit and there are problems reported with certain games and AMD processors / chipsets / ATI cards that aren't present in similar Intel / nVidia setups.

Honestly, it's nothing to do with people lacking upgrades. It's everything to do with there just being no compelling reason to go with one or the other, except that everyone's HEARD of Intel and they've been making x86 chips before AMD even existed.

Re:Well, DUH.

[drinkypoo]

Nowadays? There's so little difference between the specs of processors that I might as well just buy Intel. There's no compelling reason to go AMD any more, so nobody's buying them.

An Athlon 64 X6 may have half the performance of the most expensive i7, but it's a quarter the price and the motherboard is half the price. If it'll run everything you want to run, you win. Or in my case, I win. When I built it, the intel chips had higher power requirements, too.

Re:Well, DUH.

[Trent Hawkins]

You can play most modern games these days because they were designed to run on six year old hardware.
Namely the PS3 and XBox 360.

When the new consoles start popping up you can bet that your old rig will need updating.

Re:Well, DUH.

[beelsebob]

An Athlon 64 X6 may have half the performance of the most expensive i7, but it's a quarter the price and the motherboard is half the price. If it'll run everything you want to run, you win.

The problem is that a Phenom II X6 (I assume that's what you meant as that's the only X6 CPU AMD make, and even that's a generation old now), costs the same as an i5 3450, and is significantly slower than it. This is why Intel is winning now –same price, higher performance. Comparing everything to an i7 is dumb when the i5 and i3 are faster than what you're comparing.

Re:Well, DUH.

[Sir_Sri]

Depends on the software.

Games right now are mostly pegged to the consoles, so if you have a reasonable capable Dx9 machine or anything upgraded after that (Dx10 or 11) you can run pretty much anything. Next year or so when we start seeing new consoles we'll see if the next major upgrade cycle needs Directx 12 class hardware (not yet in existence) or if the current crop of dx11 will be good enough.

Lets have a quick glance at the system requirements for borderlands 2:
OS: Windows XP SP3
Processor: 2.4 GHz Dual Core Processor
Memory: 2 GB(XP)/ 2 GB(Vista)
Hard Disk Space: 13 GB free
Video Memory: 256 MB
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 8500 /ATI Radeon HD 2600
Sound: DirectX 9.0c Compatible

In other words an 8800 series card from Nov 2006 can run the game, probably reasonably well (the 8800 is about 8x faster than the 8500). That will even run black ops 2, which has made press for requiring dx10.

For every other piece of not exceptionally high performance software computers reached good enough with Windows Xp SP1 and it's a matter of convenience, and what versions of things you're most familiar with rather than hardware. SSD's, and hardware that takes full advantage of an SSD is awesome, but it doesn't completely transform what you can do on a computer.

Re:Well, DUH.

[Mashiki]

Bingo. Though considering developers are still fleeing the console market, and PC's are the new golden egg again. This might be changing all for the better. 10 years ago, 12 years ago, 14 years ago, it was gaming that drove PC hardware sales. Remember the near constant CPU wars over speed, scaling, battle to reach 1ghz with air cooling? Yeah. The near constant battle for 3d accelerators, slap a couple of pci voodoo 2's in SLI mode with your matrox card and awayyyyy we go! Then it got dirty, ugly, and really interesting with nVidia and ATI getting into the all in one 3d accelerator market.

But alot developers saw the cash cow or thought they did, and believed that consoles would that selling their souls out, would save them at the end of would make it all work out. Yeah...worked for...uh ID right? Who are they owned by now anyway? Bethesda. If EPIC wasn't making engines they'd be toast as well. I could mention a few other studio's too.

Re:Well, DUH.

[h4rr4r]

No an x6 is cheaper and has 6 cores. Not everyone is only interested in single threaded performance.

Re:Well, DUH.

[drinkypoo]

Er yes, I meant the Phenom II. I actually started with an X3 720 at $110 and upgraded when I could get an X6 used for cheap ($110) to replace my X3. The motherboard was $100 as well, as opposed to $200 and up for comparably-featured intel boards, which also required more exotic power connectors, for which I would have had to buy a new power supply.

Re:Well, DUH.

[bastafidli]

If by "cost the same" means you can get Intel with motherboard for $90 as you can get the AMD

http://www.microcenter.com/site/products/amd_bundles.aspx

then I would love to know where you source your components. Microcenter lists the i5 3450 at $145

http://www.microcenter.com/product/388579/Core_i5_3450_31GHz_LGA_1155_Processor

which is whooping $500 more than the AMD and doesn't even include the motherbord. Newegg has it $100 more.

Re:Well, DUH.

[rubycodez]

no, that intel chip will not run the multiple VMs I use, core count and memory not clock speed are the big considerations for me. For an average desktop user, maybe one or two core is all they *can* use, but for me buying an AMD chip and motherboard is a no brainer and saves hundreds of bucks

Re:Well, DUH.

[beelsebob]

The problem is, the i5 is faster for multithreaded performance too (and that's even an older, slower i5 than the one I asserted)...

If you cared only about the single threaded performance, an i3 would do, and be half the price.

Re:Well, DUH.

[beelsebob]

The X6 1100T has averaged £150-160 for the last good long time... The i5 3450 started at about that price and is now down to about £130

Re:Well, DUH.

[beelsebob]

Hmm? Even Z77 overclocking boards cost all of $130-150. Standard H77 boards with all the features under the sun cost $100, cheepies cost $50-60... This is constant with AMD and Intel. Neither of them use exotic power connectors, they both use 20+4 ATX power and 4+4 ATX CPU power.

Re:Well, DUH.

[beelsebob]

Uhhh, the AMD system with motherboard for $90 there is an FX 4100... Which is slower than a Pentium G630. So yes, you can get comparable intel systems for the same price ($50 G630 + $40 crappy board), even without retarded sales.

The 3450 starts at $145 because it's faster than an FX 8150, which costs $160, even without the board.

Re:Well, DUH.

[bastafidli]

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

AMD Phenom II X6 1045T - scrore 4999
Intel Xeon X3450 @ 2.67GHz - score 5223

X6 costs with MB $90.

Re:Well, DUH.

[bastafidli]

Sorry
Intel Core i5-3450 @ 3.10GHz - score 7052.

So yes, you pay for higher performance. The point is though to get best value. Once you count in the motheboard you have 2x cost for 1.4x performance.

Re:Well, DUH.

[firesyde424]

SSD's, and hardware that takes full advantage of an SSD is awesome, but it doesn't completely transform what you can do on a computer.

It may not change what you can do, but a SSD definitely changes how much you can do and how quickly you can do it. In better than 21 years of being a computer nerd, I can't remember another single hardware upgrade that could change the perfomance of an average computer by so much as even a budget SSD can.

Re:Well, DUH.

[beelsebob]

The point being that the X6 only costs $90 including mobo because that retailer still happens to have some left, and is massively discounting an old CPU to get rid of them. Also, CPUbenchmark.net is not an indication of CPU performance in any way shape or form. Their error bars are about 20% either side, as can be seen by the fact that a Xeon E5-2670 scores 20% more than a Xeon E5-2680, despite being the exact same chip at a lower clock.

Re:Well, DUH.

[Githaron]

The fact is, you no longer have to replace that PC and its CPU every other year.

Now you have to replace your smartphones instead.

Re:Well, DUH.

[bastafidli]

We all buy products at certain point in time. At this point in time, this is the best value. Few years ago when Fry's was offering crazy discounts on Intel CPU/motherboard bundles, Intel value was much better a well (not accounting for future upgradability prospects).

Re:Well, DUH.

[bill_mcgonigle]

yeah, same here - phenom II x6 is a great sweet spot for scaling horizontally.

As a bonus, the AMD chip has a HT bus to the memory and in theory should be able to handle ECC memory directly, even on the low-end chips.

But, finding a BIOS to support it is all of the battle. If AMD wanted to take that market, they'd work with motherboard vendors to get their chips' features supported by the BIOS. With EFI BIOS'es becoming prevalent, this shouldn't be as hard a task as it used to be. I'm using ASRock currently, but just because it's well-priced and stable, not because it's all-that in terms of features.

As to why they're not doing this already? - hey, they're AMD!

Re:Well, DUH.

[TheRaven64]

Nowadays? There's so little difference between the specs of processors that I might as well just buy Intel. There's no compelling reason to go AMD any more, so nobody's buying them.

Depends on the market. For example, when I built my NAS I was originally looking at Atom. Intel, however, cripples the chipsets and so the only way of getting a decent number of SATA connections on a mini-ITX system was to go with an AMD Fusion board.

Re:Well, DUH.

[NonUniqueNickname]

I'm a long time AMD customer and a satisfied one. My rig needed a performance boost and an upgrade to a Phenom II X6 1100T could have been just the thing, but AMD stopped making them a while ago, left me hanging. Shopping for a mobo+cpu on a $300 budget was completely one-sided, I'm running an i5 now.

Re:Well, DUH.

[baka_toroi]

You are right: only 90% of the market is interested in single threaded performance.

Re:Well, DUH.

[unrtst]

Just got an ASUS M5A99X for that very reason - ECC support, USB 3.0, eSATA, SATA 6Gb/s, 3x PCI-E x16 slots, etc.
Chose a (slow) FX-4100 quad core for its TDP, but x6 is only $10 more, and phenom II x4 965 is $10 less.

I wanted to go with the A series (did that for my HTPC), but I can't stand the quirks with the graphic drivers. If/when the drivers get much better, it'll be a very good option for most anyones desktop. Intels graphics can't compare, and adding a separate nvidia card uses significantly more power and adds another cost... it's sitting right in the sweet spot IMO, I just don't like the driver support. For a laptop or desktop with a single screen, I'd recommend the A series to anyone.

Re:Well, DUH.

[bill_mcgonigle]

ah, good to know. Unfortunately I just switched away from ASUS as I had to always disable many BIOS features (e.g. 1394 port) to get Xen to boot on it. And the last board let the magic smoke out. :( But, for a large deployment with redundancy and ECC requirements, those might not matter.

Re:Well, DUH.

[Sir_Sri]

Without a doubt. I recommend 60 or 120 gig SSD's for all new office machines. 100 bucks in hardware makes employees much more productive because they aren't waiting for their computer and aren't looking for things to goof off to as much, and at home it makes my time on the computer feel like I'm actually using the computer, not waiting for the computer.

But in terms of system requirements, we're a ways out from anything being able to require it.

Re:Well, DUH.

[beelsebob]

The problem is, Intel's 4 core chips are faster at very parallel workloads than the X6, and even AMD's "8 core" (really also 4 core + hyperthreading, just with int/int instead of int/fp) bulldozers.

Multiple VMs will run better on an i5 3450 than on an X6 1100T or an FX-8150, in the same way as single threaded tasks would work better on an Athlon XP 2.5Ghz than on a Pentium 4 3.6Ghz (because core count, just like clock speed is just a number, and doesn't directly reflect performance, even at parallel tasks).

If all you were after was single threaded performance (which you aren't, but for the sake of completeness), even an i3 2120 (a generation old at that!) beats the shit out of the X6.

Re:Well, DUH.

[rubycodez]

the problem is, that 4 core intel cpu alone will cost over twice what my CPU + motherboard did

it's a no-brainer, AMD for the win

Re:Well, DUH.

[danomac]

I need more coffee - I thought this post was talking about the iPhone 5. Imagine my confusion.

Re:Well, DUH.

[toddestan]

SSDs for office machines? Why? Modern computers are already vastly overpowered for basic office tasks as it is now. It's not like the SSD is going to launch Excel that much faster when it already launches nearly instantly. All you're really doing is setting yourself up for having to do mass replacements of the SSDs when they start to fail after about 2 years, and paying $100 more per machine right now.

Re:Not enough price difference between AMD and Int

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using AMD for well over a decade and I've never once seen a program that would work fine on an Intel CPU but malfunction on an AMD. I call FUD.

Whats unhealthy about that?

[vlm]

AMD chips, on the other hand, tend to fall in price steadily after they first hit the market. Some drop by up to 43% in the first year. This trend is a byproduct of the unhealthy competitive landscape in the desktop CPU arena

Whats unhealthy about that? Virtually no CPU purchasers are going to be CPU limited, if a 5 year old CPU currently does everything the average user needs, then a 6 month old one for half the price should be massive overkill. So your best economic move seems to buy a 6 month to 1 year old AMD processor for half price and spend the savings on something that actually matters to the user experience, like graphics card or high res (higher than clunky 1080) monitor, or a decent keyboard like my model M, or larger SSD, or ...

Re:Whats unhealthy about that?

[Krneki]

Until you bump into an unoptimized game that barely can use two cores. Yap, they are still out there. SC2, Total War series, WoW, ......

Re:Whats unhealthy about that?

[OzPeter]

Whats unhealthy about that?

Not unhealthy for you .. unhealthy for AMD. Those fancy 6 month old CPUs don't design and build themselves - well at least not until after the singularity.

Re:Whats unhealthy about that?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's unhealthy that AMD is forced to do so while Intel is not under such pressure.

Re:Whats unhealthy about that?

[Anonymous Coward]

Until you bump into an unoptimized game that barely can use two cores.

Yap, they are still out there. SC2, Total War series, WoW, ......

To be fair, Star Control 2 is pretty old and back then dual CPU setups were mostly limited to server situations. I think the fan recompile might be better about threading.

Re:Whats unhealthy about that?

[Kjella]

I think you're putting the cart before the horse here, AMD isn't lowering prices to give you a great deal they're lowering prices because consumers don't think it's worth the price AMD is asking for. Right now AMD doesn't have a CPU they can charge $200+ for except their server line Opterons. That's not good for AMD and in the long run it's not good for the consumers either. Their APUs are quite okay but I think AMD is setting themselves up for a squeeze as Intel and ARM clash in battle for domination of the new mobile devices, the competition there is going to be intense.

Re:Whats unhealthy about that?

[Krneki]

I was talking about Star Craft 2

Changing World.

[jellomizer]

The PC landscape is changing.

Your chips need to be fast, or they need to be small and mobile.

Back in AMD good days, People bought PCs for different reasons, You had the Power User who got as big and fast as they can afford, you got the budget PC where you buy a PC not for its speed but because you need a cheap Computer. Laptop/Notbook computers were the ultra mobile devices, and they were much more expensive than a PC.

That isn't as much the case anymore.
If you are going to get a cheap Computer, you are going to get an iPad, or a netbook, that gives you mobility, you are going be less likely to buy a cheap Desktop. If you are going to power you are going to get it with the fastest chips. AMD has been lagging so they can't compete there either.

Cheap Desktop CPU that under perform are not going to sell well, because the new Ultra Mobile Devices are at a price point where it competes with the cheap PC.

Re:Changing World.

[Ambassador Kosh]

I have a llano laptop and it has been working great for me. I have gone back to school to become an engineer and I run various engineering programs that are GPU accelerated. On battery power this thing stomps on the intel chips since it can do GPU acceleration on battery power. In some operations it is hundreds of times faster while still having good battery power.

Also with web browsers and other office types apps getting gpu accelerated a decent igp is good for performance and battery life. Sure you can turn on a dedicated gpu while on battery power but your battery won't last long doing that.

Re:Changing World.

[jellomizer]

It is in the $400-$700 range. Compared to ultra mobile devices in the past that costed over $2000 it is cheap.

Depends on the consumer.

[serviscope_minor]

Bad for some consumers, but not others. The others being those who can figure out to buy AMD machines.

You can get cheap, high peforming AMD machines which is great.

Have you seen the price of a Quad socket 6100 or 6200? You can get 48 or 64 decently performing cored and 1/t TB of ram for about £8000, with top end cores. Backing off a bit, you can get one for aroung 5 06 6k.

The value is astonishingly good.

Re:Depends on the consumer.

[Tom Womack]

I have a quad 6168 in my shed; I do very parallel number-theory jobs, and it's really very good at those.

But for my work each core offers less performance than one hyperthread of a current i7; my 48-core machine is comparable to about 20 cores of Ivy Bridge. For the cases where I'm not taking full advantage of the 6168's amazing memory and interconnect bandwidth (and I don't have enough of those to keep the machine busy), I'd be getting the same performance for half the price with five i7/3770K boxes; they'd take more space and a bit less electricity. I'm hoping the 6168 will keep working for several more years, but I can't see why its successor wouldn't be a pile of haswell+1 machines.

Re:Depends on the consumer.

[serviscope_minor]

I have a quad 6168 in my shed; I do very parallel number-theory jobs, and it's really very good at those.

That's quite a slow one.

I'd be getting the same performance for half the price with five i7/3770K boxes;

Almost certainly. I built a cluster quite recently (after an Ask Slashdot) and went for a pile of top end Phenom II x6. Generally piles of desktop machines are significantly cheaper than the quad socket ones. I think you pay a lot for the unified machine which involves having 3 fast, wide HT links per socket, rather than one weedy one for a single socket machine. You also have to pay for ECC memory rather than this being optional. Actually, if you are building a cluster, one big advantage of AMD cdesktop CPUs over Intel ones is that you pay no premium for systems supporting ECC, whereas for Intel, you have to pay through the nose for some super low end Xeon branded machine.

You also pay for server grade hardware like the really high density, and the ILM system. Even an acceptable chassis and PSU is pretty pricey compared ot the £12 for a cheap case with PSU for single socket machines.

To get a better comparison of server grade hardware, compare the price of the quad socket Xeons to the quad socket Opterons.

Also, if you are planning on upgrading your cluster, then the choice between Intel and AMD is very marginal. The 5 year electricity cost is not that expensive compared to the price of the machines, which means that $/FLOP is as important as $/Watt. AMD generally win handily on $/FLOP.

Re:Gigapros

[Ash-Fox]

Anyone else having problems with GigaPros hosting? All servers are down.

So they were using AMD processors?

Re:Not enough price difference between AMD and Int

[MarioMax]

I've been using AMD for well over a decade and I've never once seen a program that would work fine on an Intel CPU but malfunction on an AMD. I call FUD.

It happens (and vice versa), but it's so few and far between it's not even worth noting.

Re:Not enough price difference between AMD and Int

[Alioth]

For 64 bit you have it the wrong way around - it's Intel who are AMD-compatible (that's why many operating systems still call the architecture amd64, since the x86-64 architecture was from AMD, and not from Intel - Intel being forced to follow AMD when their bet on Itanium failed). So if you want the genuine article for 64-bit, then you ought to be buying AMD.

Re:Not enough price difference between AMD and Int

[serviscope_minor]

Well, this is another reason: FUD.

In 64 bit world, AMD *are* the real thing.

There are no AMD compatibilities that I've ever heard of, except perhaps for the lack of a F00F bug.

Maybe marketing could help some

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

Most of my friends and relatives are non-techie people. A lot of non-techie people have the perception that AMD is cheap junk. Amongst my techie friends, a lot of us use AMD. It's all I buy because I feel very strongly that somebody should support it and I'm willing to be that somebody. I've been able to convince my brother (non-techie) that AMD is OK to buy, but I also know non-techie people who will pay more for Intel merely in the perception that it's "better" somehow. Intel used to advertise on TV and AMD never did. Maybe AMD could use some ads to at least give the perception that they are a player. And some wins where a big player uses them would really help.

AMD is now a GPU company

[Anonymous Coward]

Theit x86 processors are now a sideline. Yes they helped with 64-bit adoption but now it is standard in Intel as well.

Re:AMD is now a GPU company

[Dave Whiteside]

yes and they did not really do well with the 7xxx roll out of the video cards,
they are really good on integer GPU programming but Nvidia beat them with FP GPU programming.
if you want games perforce then it's down to NVidia
if you want bitcoin then it's down to ATI video - though this is going be be hit BIG time by asic mining in the next 6 months - AMD need to take note on this as they will not get more sales on this unless someone can come up with a good Multiscaler general GPU programming solutions [and tasks]

down at the bottom end it's all ARM chips [arm all the way down?] and they are moving up to take the middle ground...

I suggest AMD look at making a CPU / GPU / RAM / single board very small form factor computer in a plug type thing.

my work here is done

Re:Not enough price difference between AMD and Int

[boristdog]

FUD.

I can't think of ANY time when an AMD chip could not run any x86 software. Nice try, Intel Shill.

Re:as long as they have enough memory.

[DocSavage64109]

I work at a non-profit charity and many of our machines are donations from various companies. Many of these machines are 10 years old! (Granted 10 year old machines are at least 1.8GHz P4's now days) As long as I can get 512MB ram on XP or 1GB for Win 7, these machines perform common tasks such as web browsing and document writing just fine, though extra ram helps a lot if running antivirus.

Re:Not enough price difference between AMD and Int

[MyLongNickName]

Seriously? Is this really a problem anymore? I know in the 80's you could experience issues like that, I'm not sure I even had problems in the 90's. I am asking honestly and without sarcasm, are compatability issues still an issue today?

Re:I call FUD.

[DocSavage64109]

I have bad history with AMD from way back in the day when they had poor motherboard chipsets. Perhaps that is no longer the case, but why even risk it? I've also been bitten by the big Intel Sandy-Bridge chipset bug, but at least Intel recalled all of those and replaced the motherboards for free.

unhealthy

[PopeRatzo]

There's an "unhealthy competitive landscape" throughout our economy. It's because ineffective and insufficiently-enforced regulations have created an economy that is tilted toward the top.

First we need a Justice Department that will bust some balls. The entire Fortune 500 should be facing anti-trust prosecution, and those cases could easily be made to stick. CEOs and entire boards of directors should be facing criminal prosecution.

Ah, but none of that is going to happen as long as corporations are "super-citizens" that have unlimited ability to influence, not just elections, but legislation at every level of government. Now we have corporations sponsoring voter suppression laws ("This Law has been brought to you by the fine people at Massey Energy"). How clear can it be?

Re:unhealthy

[cheesybagel]

No kidding. A lot of it I think is the politicians are scared that by dismantling the megacorps the US will be more vulnerable to offshore competition. However in the long run it will only lead to stagnation and losing to the same competition. It has happened elsewhere before.

And power consumption,

[Robert Frazier]

Desktop CPUs towards the low end work fine for what I do. However, I now take power management into account in a way I never did before. For example, my main desktop uses a core i3. The CPU speed and built-in graphics are fine. What sold me on it was the power use profile. Similarly for a router/nas/etc that I recently built using the DN2800MT motherboard. What finally sold me on on it was the low power use. When I was looking at components, it seemed to me that Intel was much better than AMD when it came to computing power vs power consumption.

Best wishes,
Bob

Re:And power consumption,

[paraax]

I've been an AMD purchaser for years. As mentioned previously when you look at cost of processor + cost of motherboard the best performance per dollar is almost always in AMDs favor for low-mid range systems. At this point, however, the difference in the power used between comparable systems is getting harder to ignore. For a system that is on all the time there is a big difference between an Ivy Bridge 65 watt and a Phenom II 125 watt. And while that is the max, the idle states have a similar gap.

I really would like to buy AMD if anything to avoid the above situation where Intel has no true competitor. That is good for no one. But unless intel gets arrogant and raises its prices before its done driving AMD out of the desktop chip arena, I don't see a way for them to recover.

Re:And power consumption,

[Life2Death]

Its a shame too. Around the AMD Athlon X2 era they were ahead of intel in every way. My dual-core Athlon X2 was faster and power sipping at 45W where intel was at 95W for their crappy Pentium D's. AMD lost its way somewhere, heres hoping they get it back.

Re:And power consumption,

[Gravatron]

The problem was Intel throw their massive fortune into the mix, and created the Core cpu series. AMD never really had an answer, and quickly lost the performance crown. They never regained it after that.

Buy AMD

[muon-catalyzed]

Sorry, but your CPU lore is outdated. AMD CPUs are compatible nowdays. Further, since AMD invented x86-64bit, Intel has even played catchup in many areas. The new and current AMD Trinity APU is a really good value, it beats Intel in bang per $ gaming performance (CPU+GPU) for example.

Re:Buy AMD

[Guspaz]

That's true from a financial standpoint, but according to Anandtech, it takes 30 to 40 extra watts to beat Intel's performance. In many use cases, such as a desktop, 30 extra watts isn't going to matter. But anything mobile or that has heat dissipation constraints (like ultra small form factor or embedded things), it matters more than price.

There are two factors to this, as far as I can tell. The first is that AMD doesn't hand-design their chips anymore (Intel and Apple are the only people doing that, I believe), instead using high-level design tools. Easier to design, but less efficient. The other factor is that AMD is far behind Intel from a manufacturing technology perspective. They're at least a full process generation behind Intel (32nm versus 22nm), and Intel is already using multi-gate transistors (Intel announced they were starting work on them in 2002, AMD announced it in 2003, but only Intel is shipping them yet).

These various factors, among other things, all add up to really hurt AMD's power consumption. They can match Intel's performance, but only by throwing more power at the problem. This means that they can offer a good value to customers, but they can't offer good power consumption for mobile. That, more than anything, prevents them from being considered for big players like Apple.

Re:Buy AMD

[Guspaz]

They do, but it suffers many of the same problems. It's not just AMD that suffers from being a full process behind Intel either, TSMC and other fabs making ARM chips are suffering from this too. It's one of the ways that Intel is able to start making inroads into mobile phones despite their chips being less efficient; they can get away with it because of their better fab process.

As for AMD's automated designing, they may have changed their behaviour, but it was what lead to the disaster that was Bulldozer:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20111013232215_Ex_AMD_Engineer_Explains_Bulldozer_Fiasco.html

Re:Buy AMD

[Guspaz]

POWER7+ isn't out yet, so I don't know how you can claim that it's the "highest performing processor right now". It's also a 190W TDP part, as far as I can tell, so if you're trying to compare performance-per-watt, it would have to be more than three times faster than an Ivy Bridge E3-1280V2 to beat it in performance-per-watt. About the only current advantage it would have is physical density, but that's usually not as important since it's not the limiting factor.

Re:Buy AMD

[cheesybagel]

IBM has lower power processors as well like the ones they use in Blue Gene/Q. A Blue Gene/Q system called Sequoia is currently #1 in the TOP500 list and those guys care about performance/watt. All current generation consoles use IBM designed processors be it XBox 360/PS3/Wii. IBM don't sell really low power processors but if you want that you are better off using ARM anyway.

Re:Buy AMD

[Guspaz]

And yet the most powerful supercomputer in Europe, which is built by IBM, uses... Intel processors. That said, I'll grant you that IBM has an edge in high-performance processor power consumption, but Apple didn't ditch IBM processors because they had a burning desire to switch the x86, they ditched IBM processors because IBM consistently failed to put out anything that could fit in the power envelope required by a laptop.

A more useful comparison might be to benchmark the performance per watt of Apple's A6 versus a comparable Qualcomm Krait; they're very similar architecturally, and use the same instruction set and fab process, but the A6 was laid out by hand while the Krait was done with automated tools.

But even if we were to agree that hand-designed chips didn't have a significant power advantage, Intel still has the full generation lead on process technology. A 22nm part is going to be substantially more power efficient than an identical chip made on a 32nm process... TSMC and Globalfoundries really need to solve that, or Intel is going to eat everybody else's lunch. 22nm is more than double the density of 32nm, even if that doesn't produce a 1:1 power saving...

Re:Buy AMD

[cheesybagel]

IBM will sell and maintain for you anything you want to buy or service even if it comes from a competitor. They earn most of their money from services. Intel's manufacturing edge at the moment is not something easy to surpass. It's not like the other non-Intel manufacturers are doing any better. IBM does have some unique technology like large low-latency on-chip eDRAM which is used in their higher end processors. IBM usually does not optimize their processors for mobile applications and I doubt Apple was willing to pay IBM for doing a custom design with such capabilities. Motorola would have been more inclined to do so since they sold for embedded markets however once again Apple was unwilling to fund the design by themselves. So they had to use a higher volume processor from Intel which means someone else is paying for the R&D as well not just them. Personally I would take the more automated approach for CPU design since it provides good results at much lower R&D costs at this moment. I am unaware of how Qualcomm does things despite having met some of their hardware design people once (I'm a software guy). There are rumors that the 22nm Intel process power savings are indeed lackluster as the performance comparisons between Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge processors will show but like you said it means they can get more chips for wafer so they do it.

Re:Buy AMD

[cheesybagel]

That article flies in the face of AMD's recent statements regarding Steamroller where they claim they are moving from doing layout by hand to maximize performance and density as practiced in Bulldozer to using a high-density cell library for layout.

Shown above is a portion of the chip's FPU. The top image comes from a current Bulldozer chip, which employs the hand-drawn custom logic that's generally used in high-end x86 CPUs. The lower image comes from a potential future chip that uses a more automated high-density cell library. On the same 32-nm process node, the high-density library purportedly crams the same logic into 30% less area, with 30% less power use. As the slide notes, gains on this order would usually come from the transition to a newer, smaller fabrication process. We'd expect the more automated approach to design to reduce AMD's time to market, as well.

Re:Buy AMD

[cheesybagel]

Dear moderators: You are overrated! And I don't like hearing the truth != Troll.

Re:Buy AMD

[cheesybagel]

POWER7+ was discussed at Hot Chips and released a couple of days ago.

Re:Buy AMD

[Guspaz]

Ironic, then, that Apple wasn't willing to pay IBM for a custom design, which would have been a derivative of existing products, but then ended up designing their own CPU from scratch for the A6 (presumably they had nothing to base their designs on, unless ARM provides a reference design with the instruction set license).

The Ivy Bridge power savings aren't too bad. Comparing the 3770k to the 2600k, we see near-identical idle power usage, and an full load difference of 53w for the 3770k and 79.4w for the 2600k. If we factor in the relative performance of the two processors (using multi-threaded cinebench R11), we see the 3770k is 11% faster in terms of absolute performance.

I don't know how much power those chips are using in isolation of the rest of the system, but 11% faster performance at 26 watts lower power usage is pretty substantial. If we argued the CPUs used zero power when idle (which is probably not that far off with modern chips), we could argue that Ivy Bridge was 66% more power efficient than Sandy Bridge, a pretty huge difference.

The thing is, that's under full load. Consumers don't use their processors under full load constantly in the real world; processors spend most of their time in low power modes, so you'd never see these sorts of savings unless you were actually maxing out your processor 24/7 on battery or something.

Why isn't it good for consumers?

[Chrisq]

Intel CPU prices have remained stagnant, especially for models that cost $200 and up. AMD chips, on the other hand, tend to fall in price steadily after they first hit the market. Some drop by up to 43% in the first year.

Surely that's the market working. You can pay more and go with a market leader or pay less for an alternative. This gives you a reasonable choice in the lower price market between a newer Intel budget design or an older AMD one that has decreased in price - or an AMD budget CPU and change for a flat-panel screen!

Re:Why isn't it good for consumers?

[jandrese]

The reason Intel's prices have not moved much is because AMD is failing as a competitor. Bulldozer has problems, and the Core iN models are just kicking their butt. Intel can afford to charge more because they've got a better product.

Re:Why isn't it good for consumers?

[timeOday]

Even Intel's OLD processors are holding value. I have a Core 2 duo system I was considering upgrading to Core 2 quad, but their cost - new or used - is almost the same as it was when they were released 4 years ago.

For example the Q9550s released at $369 and now sells for around $300.

I guess you could argue the high resale value makes it very cheap to own so long as you remember to sell it a few years later.

Re:Why isn't it good for consumers?

[hhw]

That's because you're trying to buy an old CPU in brand new condition, long after production has stopped. Usually, the best window to buy a CPU new is when the next generation comes out, but you are already 4 (2 ticks + 2 tocks) generations behind. You can easily find the Q9550s used for less than $100.

Re:Why isn't it good for consumers?

[timeOday]

You can easily find the Q9550s used for less than $100.

No, the going rate on ebay is about $200.

OK - I understand now

[Chrisq]

Intel CPU prices have remained stagnant, especially for models that cost $200 and up. AMD chips, on the other hand, tend to fall in price steadily after they first hit the market. Some drop by up to 43% in the first year.

Surely that's the market working. You can pay more and go with a market leader or pay less for an alternative. This gives you a reasonable choice in the lower price market between a newer Intel budget design or an older AMD one that has decreased in price - or an AMD budget CPU and change for a flat-panel screen!

Having read TFA I see that what happening is that AMD processors are not living up to expectation, which is why they reduce in price quickly. This means that Intel has little competition and has no incentive to reduce its prices, which is why it is bad for the consumer. I understand and would like to redact my previous comment!

Re:OK - I understand now

[Trogre]

This also raises an important point. If enough people stop buying AMD processors and the company folds, what are Intel going to do?

I'll wager we would see two changes:

1. Prices for Intel processors will go up due to no competition on price.
2. Fewer new processors and refreshes due to no competition on innovation.

Both of these would of course be bad for us consumers. IOW, competition is good.

Mind you, this would only apply to desktop and perhaps laptop processors. Intel's real competition in the ultra-portable market (tablets, etc) is ARM, to whom they are losing badly.

Re:Give me Free Shit

[MyLongNickName]

Five are in the first
Seven are in the second
Five are in the third

Re:Not enough price difference between AMD and Int

[Chrisq]

when their bet on Itanium failed.

But ... my HP rep tells me it is a fine architecture with a long future!

Re:I call FUD.

[FreonTrip]

Because the risk you speak of doesn't exist any more. The manufacturers of those excruciating old chipsets aren't in the running: as best I recall VIA only manufactures chipsets for its own products, and SiS got out of the motherboard racket altogether. AMD's chipsets are good, reliable, and feature-competitive.

is Apple the largest CPU maker now?

[peter303]

Their iPads and iPhones together outsell every other brand of computer. Apple uses its custom A4/5/6 brand of chips for this.

Even if Intel still beats Apple, it is not growing as fast as Apple. Intels anemic Atomic chips arent that great.

I never write Intel off. Like Apple both have immensely clever hardware engineers.

Re:is Apple the largest CPU maker now?

[geekoid]

"Their iPads and iPhones together outsell every other brand of computer"
And you don't see why that's a false comparison?

AMD is the best value

[bastafidli]

I buy and use AMD simply because it is the best value for the money

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_available.html

Microcenter or Fry's throws is also cheap motherboard. For $90 you can get top performing AMD CPU and motherboard. My 4 core AMD supports 3 way multiseat and runnning 4 X11 sessions on Ubuntu 12.04 just fine. Match that Intel.

Re:AMD is the best value

[ak3ldama]

Don't confuse them with the facts!
I agree, AMD still holds a price to performance lead - though there are lots of aspects that are concerning. Just not concerning enough to me. Or... you can buy Intel and support their comfy profit margins, market segmentation of features and vPro technologies.

Re:AMD is the best value

[bastafidli]

Dont even get me started on upgrade path where Intel changes the socket so often that it is hard to keep up and you not only have to change the CPU but also the motherboard. My latest Intel (yes I have both :-) used LGA 1156 which was replaced with incompatible socket LGA 1155 soo after. That means that I cannot reap benefits of decreasing prices (if any such decrease would happen) without incurring additional cost of upgrading motherboard.

With AMD and AM2/AM3/AM3+ socket evolution I am able to purchase better motherboard and lower cost processor and then upgrade as prices decrease.

Re:AMD is the best value

[spire3661]

Now go look at your power meter and try to keep that same smugness. AMD makes fine products, but they run hot and consume almost double the power of intel equivalents. Heat and power are a big deal to me.

Re:AMD is the best value

[bastafidli]

You know that the difference between Phenon II X6 1045T and Core i5 3550 is less than 20W? Most people would not even notice. I certainly don't.

Re:AMD is the best value

[rubycodez]

I do look at power, my CPU isn't the big eater of it. everything else is.

Re:AMD is the best value

[spire3661]

Phenom x6 1045T is 500 MHz slower at base, and in turbo single-thread mode the intel chip is a full gigahertz faster and does more work per clock while being cooler and more energy effcient. Further, the AMD part doesnt have a built in GPU, which if taken away drops the intel TDP even more. Im not trying to slam AMD here, but the we are no longer talking minor differences.

Re:AMD is the best value

[geekoid]

A) that's at least 3 KW a month.
B) Multiply by millions of chips.

Protip: You aren't the only person on the world.

Re:AMD is the best value

[geekoid]

I don't mind paying more to a company that puts so much money into RnD, uses less power, and supports so many of the sciences.

People talk about RnD and Science, but talk is cheap.

Re:AMD is the best value

[bastafidli]

There is definitely no discussion about which chip is faster and had more features. My point is, the AMD provides a really good value for the money. Sure you can outspend yourself to higher performance, but spending money is easy.The question is if the higher cost will reflect itself in higher productivity, satisfaction, usability, etc. In my opinion at today's performance levels 99% percent of people will not notice. I have a monster dual CPU 4 core each (8 with HT) Intel workstation I am writing this on which I use for daily hard code SW development and let me tell you, I don't see difference in may daily routine between this and my AMD based desktop which I use for similar tasks.

Re:AMD is the best value

[bastafidli]

Of course assuming that you run at top performance :-). The real usage is not nearly that. Most computers are most of the time idle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_design_power

Re:AMD is the best value

[kenh]

AMD has a few different CPU sockets on the market currently:

The AM2/AM3/AM3+ series (each of which is a backwardly-compatible MB - an AM2 board can't take an AM3+ CPU) , the FM2 socket and the G34 socket.

Your comment implies that an older MB could take a newer processor - well, sort of - if you bought a plain-old AM2 MB, no, but if you bought a multi-standard AMD MB (AM2/AM3/AM3+ yes) - it isn't as simple a question as you seem to want to make it.

Intel is currently selling:

Socket 775, 1155, and 2011 - the 1156 you complain about is really no longer a current model (See: http://www.techspot.com/news/46589-intel-to-discontinue-lga-1366-and-lga-1156-processors-in-2012.html )

Each brand has three currently supported sockets, what exactly is the problem Intel has?

Re:AMD is the best value

[bastafidli]

You misread my comment. My comment implies that I can buy newer/better motherboard and slower/older CPU and upgrade to newer/better CPU when the prices decrease. This is possible becase the newer motherboard supports the older CPUs and the CPUs actually decrease in price. With Intel motherboards it is not simply as easy. For one, the socket change and they are not backward compatible and for two as this article comfirms, the CPUs don't decrease in price as much.

1156 was current model at the time I bought it 2 years ago. Too bad it lasted only 1 generation of CPUs.

Now lets look at AMD3+ socket

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socket_AM3

You are correct that there is more caveats to this and the comparison is not as simple, the point though is that the value and savings go beyond just CPU when you start taking into account other components.

Re:AMD is the best value

[spire3661]

Notice how my post is facts, figures, and data pulled from the respective websites and your post is full of subjective terms, 'I dont see' 'value' 'satisfaction' 'opinion' '.

Re:AMD is the best value

[bastafidli]

You are correct, but there is a reason for it. Value is subjective to a given user. My posts in this topic (not necessarily in reply to you directly) have plenty of facts, e.g. price, performance, etc. At the end the numbers are just that, numbers. You have to translate the numbers to real world meaning. Thats where the words like 'value' 'satisfaction' 'opinion' come in.

If you ask user to spend $100 for product A and $200 for product I, the user will ask, what do I get in return? You can thrown the numbers you used on him, but most user will come back in return and say, is the difference in numbers really WORTH (another word!) the $100 (or twice) the difference? Or maybe, since we are talking about computers, can I use the $100 and spend it on something else that provides much more value (here it is) that if I spend it on CPU? How about more memory, how about better graphics card, how about bigger monitor. How about not spending it at all on computers and taking your wife out for a nice dinner, she will see lots of value in that :-)

Good conversation, there is no right or wrong, just different people look at this differently. Intel is doing a decent job with pushing the performance and power savings, it is just not that important to me.

Intel increases performance-per-dollar

[default luser]

Hardcore AMD fans like to point out that Intel hardly ever reduces prices on chips, and they always conveniently ignore the fact that Intel is constantly increasing the performance-per-dollar at every price point. For example, the desktop "around $200" price point has seen the following since 2007:

2007 - Core 2 Duo E6300 - 1.87 GHz
2008 - Core 2 Duo E8400 - 3.0 GHz
2009 - Core i5 750 2.6 GHz - upgrade to quad core and turbo boost!
2010 - Core i5 760 2.8 GHz
2011 - Core i5 2500 3.3 GHz - major increase, also gets integrated graphics for the first time
2012 - Core i5 3570 3.4 GHz

So the prices are set when they are launched and stay that way, but this is because Intel has a complete planned lineup and does not need one chip to step on all the others. Instead, Intel replaces their entire lineup every year ot two, and each replacement bumps the performance-per-dollar up.

Even without AMD around to push things, Intel is forced to do this because the PC market is saturated, so they can't sell the same-old-thing on the low-end and expect people to upgrade before their computer breaks. And since Intel has a comprehensive lineup of processors, today you can buy a CPU with TWICE the processing power of that 2007 Core 2 Duo E6300 plus integrated graphics for under $50!

I don't really see a problem here. AMD served their purpose keeping the market moving forward a decade ago, but now they are not needed.

Re:Intel increases performance-per-dollar

[gooner666]

Really?? See what happens to Intel prices the minute AMD goes out of business. Those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it.

Re:Intel increases performance-per-dollar

[captjc]

AMD is also the king of Multicore. Try finding a sub-$200 six or even 8 core processor from Intel. For those of use who care about multiprocessing and parallelism over single core performance, AMD is pretty much the only game in town.

Re:Intel increases performance-per-dollar

[geekoid]

Those that use platitude instead of actual understanding the subject are doomed to look like an idiot.

Re:Intel increases performance-per-dollar

[default luser]

AMD is also the king of Multicore. Try finding a sub-$200 six or even 8 core processor from Intel. For those of use who care about multiprocessing and parallelism over single core performance, AMD is pretty much the only game in town.

And benhmark after benchmark shows the reason for that: the AMD quad-core is nowhere near powerful enough to compete with the Intel quad core (this goes for both Stars AND 'dozer). Just see here where the A10-5800K (their best quad core right this second) gets bested by the Intel 2500 (priced at around $200) in their best test. It just goes downhill from there.

AMD is offering 8 cores at $200 not because they're nice guys and want to share the love - they're offering them because they can't compete wth just 4 cores at the same price point. If they did have that ability, you can bet they would be charging a premium price for that.

So, what is the result of the $200 showdown? Pit the 2500 versus the 8150 (their best 8-core chip)! In this one test the 2500 wins the first pass by 30%, and the 8150 wins the second pass by 25%. Now, the second pass takes much longer, so the 8150 still wins (by about 15%), but it's a small win in a sea of disappointment.

h.264 video transcoding is AMD's BEST BENCHMARK, and they barely scrape by with twice the cores. Add Hyperthreading to the mix (i7 3770K), and they get blown away once again.

People wonder idly why Intel charges so much money for their quad-core parts, but the reason is obvious if you see the test results - they're almost twice as fast in single-threaded tasks!

Re:Not enough price difference between AMD and Int

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck are you rambling on about?

I just saw the opposite

[gman003]

I have an old, first-gen Mac Pro (and no, I didn't pay for it - it was free, secondhand; I made it an explicit goal to get it back up and running without giving a cent to Apple, and I succeeded).

I recently looked into upgrading it. Xeon processors seem to *plummet* in price after a few years. Processors that once cost upward of $2000 now cost $40 on Newegg, with free shipping. Some go down to $20 if you count dodgy-looking Amazon prices.

Now yes, Xeons are only "desktop processors" for myself and a few others who use Mac Pros to browse Slashdot and play Minecraft.

Re:I just saw the opposite

[Tom Womack]

Similarly, I built a two-socket Opteron machine out of ebay parts a few years ago; companies are really bad at realising the value in the components in equipment that they're getting rid of, so quad-core dual-socket Opteron processors that sold for four figures new were two for $99. A current similar effect is happening with the slower-speed Infiniband interconnects from decommissioned supercomputers; DDR Infiniband (20gbit/second and much lower latency than 10GbaseT ethernet) cards are pocket-money cheap on ebay.

Re:Not enough price difference between AMD and Int

[PRMan]

I can give you an easy example. On Lego Star Wars II for PC, in coop mode, if you are using an AMD CPU and both players change screens at the same time, it will lock up the entire game. This does not happen on Intel chips.

I have a lot of friends that work as game testers at gaming companies and they HATE AMD chips. In fact, they don't even test the AMD until the Intel work perfectly and then they only fix about half the AMD-specific bugs.

Add FPU Units to Bulldozer/PileDriver

[BrendaEM]

AMD's Integer core idea was novel, but perhaps adding another FPU core to each unit would have made a difference in Cinebench. They need work of their scheduler as well.

Re:Add FPU Units to Bulldozer/PileDriver

[ak3ldama]

It is not really a novel idea. From a simple wiki-cite of the AMD Bulldozer page:

AMD has re-introduced the "Clustered Integer Core" micro-architecture, an architecture developed by DEC in 1996 with the RISC microprocessor Alpha 21264.

Rather, what I would like to see is a detailed analysis of why the 256 bit floating point math is being done. Is this necessary? For what kind of work? Are some just using it due to its being there? Is this maybe solved now due to AES being hardware accelerated, or am I way off track...

Two symmetrical 128-bit FMAC (fused multiply–add capability) floating-point pipelines per module that can be unified into one large 256-bit-wide unit if one of integer cores dispatch AVX instruction and two symmetrical x87/MMX/SSE capable FPPs for backward compatibility with SSE2 non-optimized software

Re:Add FPU Units to Bulldozer/PileDriver

[ak3ldama]

Thanks for the post AC.

Re:My experience

[Anonymous Coward]

FUD or uninformed?
There's *plenty* 9xx chipset AM3+ boards that support SLI.
No FM1 or FM2. Reason? Nvidia refuses to license SLI on anything with integrated ATI/AMD graphics.

Re:as long as they have enough memory.

[Wrath0fb0b]

I work at a non-profit charity and many of our machines are donations from various companies. Many of these machines are 10 years old! (Granted 10 year old machines are at least 1.8GHz P4's now days) As long as I can get 512MB ram on XP or 1GB for Win 7, these machines perform common tasks such as web browsing and document writing just fine, though extra ram helps a lot if running antivirus.

I understand that capital availability is a tough spot in non-for-profits but please consider buying a Kill-A-Watt and evaluating whether this strategy is costing you more money in power bills than it would be to buy a more modern efficient machine.

For light-duty machines that you can ensure are put to sleep when not in use, this almost never helps. On the other hand, for labs that run 10 hours a day, saving 200W by switching from a old 300W desktop to a modern 100W one saves you 1KWH = $.50 a day and so a $300 investment pays off in 2 years.

Apple should buy AMD

[mkaushik]

They can get AMD for chump change right now. Fits well with their model of being vertically integrated. They could pump some money into AMD and get them to improve their x86 processors, and then dump Intel. They could get the GPU division of AMD to make a mobile GPU for their mobile products. And AMD's CPU engineers would come in very handy for custom ARM CPU design for mobile.

Re:Not enough price difference between AMD and Int

[FreonTrip]

Citations beyond a single allegation would be helpful, here.

Re:as long as they have enough memory.

[danomac]

Another IT guy working at a nonprofit (we have over 100 staff) - we did get the Kill-A-Watt. Most of our machines are asleep when not in use via Faronics Powersave, which actually tracks the times when the computers are on and off on a server, and you can set policies, and if you input what you pay for power it will generate a report for you.

We also have machines that are around ten years old. We just replaced one last week that was from 1998. All staff here do are email and writing reports. Things that need more power (like accounting packages) have newer machines.

Last I checked we are saving over $1000 in power costs due to this power management software. We aren't going to replace 100+ machines to save $2 in power per machine per year. Governments might, as they can't seem to do math or ROI, but we won't. We'll let them live out their useful life.

Re:Not enough price difference between AMD and Int

[ergean]

So many people forget about how AMD changed the game more then once, It would be a shame for them to go under.

x86-64, on CPU northbridge and memory channel.

And ITX motherboards with e350 have like 4 sata3 ports - I have one of the beasts running a storage server... you have to buy some expensive motherboard from Intel to have that.

As a data point to consider

[geekoid]

Intel does a lot more RnD, and spends a lot more on cutting edge fabs.
Also, the cost per transistor per sqr. cent. isn't really declining like it used to.

AMD SHOULD be doing better...

[ProppaT]

The biggest issue for AMD is that consumers don't understand the market, and there's little AMD can do to change the opinion at this point. Are Intel processors, as a whole, faster than AMD? You bet. They're also pretty efficient as well. People know this, they're not dumb. But what they don't understand is that when they're buying that low end $400-500 laptop, it's not all about processor power. AMD's line of APUs are a phenominal value to the consumer. It gives the low end buyer all the CPU they need and great baked in graphics to boot. In the long run, the extra boost in graphics over the Intel HD3000/4000 line makes a pretty significant difference.

Lets face it, unless you're doing extreme gaming or doing a lot of audio/video work, you just don't need an i7. Or even i5. An i3 or AMD chip is going to be good enough. If people knew they could save money, go AMD, and actually have a reasonable chance of being able to play modern games, I think the choice would be obvious. Unfortunately, those Intel vs AMD benchmarks are all most consumers know to look at.

Re:AMD SHOULD be doing better...

[baka_toroi]

Intel is a whole litho process node ahead of AMD. That translates into better battery life to your laptop. Only if you're a gamer on a budget should you consider going with Llano/Trinity and most people are not gamers (Flash games are not what I mean)

Bulldozer is almost useless unless you can fully take advantage of all of its "cores"

Windows 8

[ThatsNotPudding]

And Windows 8 won't lift either of their boats. Do you personally know anyone looking forward to Win 8?.

"Waiter, three Dead Cat Bounces, please."

Re:Not enough price difference between AMD and Int

[ifrag]

When AMD first released dual core CPU's there was some problem with RDTSC. AMD then released this utility. A lot of games had stupid stuttering issues without it, so not always as dire as an application crash, but it was on more than a few games. Problems could also be resolved by forcing the application to a single core.

Re:Not enough price difference between AMD and Int

[lindi]

Interestingly a recent serious virtual machine security vulnerability affected Intel but did not affect AMD:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/qubes-devel/JIpZoQUP6dQ/g6TvtpUHzBQJ

Re:as long as they have enough memory.

[Wrath0fb0b]

Awesome tool, glad to see an integrated and thoughtful approach to power management on a large scale.

I think I noted that if you can sleep the machines a lot then it doesn't make sense to upgrade since the duty cycle is pretty light. On the other hand, if you are running 10 hours a day then you save $2 per machine per week, not $2/machine/year as you said.

Re:I call FUD.

[triffid_98]

Exactly. I too experienced the pain that is dealing with buggy VIA chipsets but that's currently a non-issue and has been for some time now.

Mostly though I think AMD is just not in a competitive place. They can't compete on the high end, and on the low end their only big win is in GPU performance, which targets um...HTPCs and really broke gamers?

The China price

[Animats]

Allwinner A10/ ARM system on a chip - $7 in quantity. This is the chip inside most low-end tablets.

No American intellectual property inside.

Re:Not enough price difference between AMD and Int

[kimvette]

Even in the '80s it was a non-issue. Per IBM demands, AMD was set up as a secondary CPU vendor and the CPUs were absolutely compatible. What made some clones incompatible were add-on hardware and BIOS issues, not CPU compatibility issues. Even NEC CPU clones (reverse-engineered x86 chips) were very compatible and didn't introduce any real problems. The only "problems" that may have been encountered was in games where the software would run too fast, hence the "turbo" mode which would slow the processor down to a clock speed more compatible with older or poorly-written games which assumed a 4.77MHz Intel or AMD 8088 processor.

Re:I call FUD.

[FreonTrip]

Well, for servers I wouldn't count them out. I'm planning to build an AM3+ Piledriver box because I process a lot of data that owes itself to massive parallelization (hello, seismic depth migration and DVD/Blu-ray ripping), and the price point's just too good to pass up. Given the current price delta between an FX 6100 and an entry-level i5, I can afford to use ECC memory... But in the consumer sector I'm a bit afraid for AMD - Llano's still appearing at the low end of their FM2 offerings, which highlights just how many problems the new architecture's presenting.

Re:Not enough price difference between AMD and Int

[FreonTrip]

I remember running into the RDTSC problem in Windows XP x64 with Left 4 Dead back in 2009. It's an irritation for anything as latency-sensitive as a first-person shooter, but still not a deal-breaker on the order of PRMan's accusation.

Competition, falling prices = Unhealthy industry ?

[bug1]

Some drop by up to 43% in the first year. This trend is a byproduct of the unhealthy competitive landscape in the desktop CPU arena, and it's been great for Intel's gross margin. Unfortunately, it's not so good for consumers.

When prices drop its bad for consumers and the industry is unhealth ?

Dude has it backwards, needs to find a 10 year old to teach him economics.

Basically, its good when people can afford ot buy stuff they need. Compeition helps to make stuff cheap.

Re:as long as they have enough memory.

[danomac]

I think I noted that if you can sleep the machines a lot then it doesn't make sense to upgrade since the duty cycle is pretty light.

Yes, sorry, I saw that but it didn't register until after I posted. Sigh...

The Faronics Powersave utility I've installed is the best I've seen so far. Centralized power policies and detailed reporting, not to mention it uses wake-on-lan so if you need to do an update or change a policy you can tell the workstations to wake up, apply the policy, and go back into standby. If you have a very large organization it can literally save thousands of dollars in power costs, but the clincher is it will do up a report and actually tell you what you are saving, using what you pay for a kWh. You can even set up groups (sort of like OUs in Active Directory) and apply different settings to different machines, so in our case I have a separate one for laptops so users can put the things into presentation mode. The workstations themselves are locked so users can't change the power profile.

It's a really nifty tool. It's also helping our "green" policy as well.

Re:Not enough price difference between AMD and Int

[kimvette]

Most of the "glitches" you refer to were timing related - particilarly where AMD sped up IO. Remember when Windows (9x I think) would not install on AMD without a patch, and AMD's CEO quipped that their chip was "too fast to install Windows?"

I used to buy AMD when they were genuinely the faster option - you could overclock their 386 and 486 offerings much higher, and the AMDX4 could be overclocked past 160MHz, making it quite a bit faster than Intel's initial Pentium offerings.

Re:Competition, falling prices = Unhealthy industr

[lpq]

You didn't read the paragraph -- it's AMD's chips that drop by 43% in the first year -- not Intel's. AMD's chips drop because they can't compete in terms of performance, so their prices fall. Intel's prices -- especially on their over $200 cpu's, ***DON'T*** fall -- (stagnate). The fact that both companies CPU's don't fall over time is what is bad for consumers -- they are left with no choices other than what they can afford... It's not like a choice of 1 model car for another in the same price range -- there is no choice.

You want a high perf chip, you have 1 choice (which isn't a choice), you want a low-price chip, you are likely to have 1 choice -- which also isn't a choice.

Choices dictated by necessity are not *choices*. They are taking the only
path available.