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Is Qualcomm the New AMD?

colinneagle writes "It's a darned shame, but the writing is on the wall for AMD. The ATI graphics business is the only thing keeping it afloat right now as sales shrivel up and the company faces yet another round of staffing cuts. You can only cut so many times before there's no one left to innovate you out of the mess you're in. Qualcomm, on the other hand, dominates this space, and it has the chips to back it up. The Snapdragon line of ARM-based processors alone is found in a ridiculous number of prominent devices, including Samsung Galaxy S II and S III, Nokia Lumia 900 and 920, Asus Transformer Pad Infinity and the Samsung Galaxy Note. Mind you, Samsung is also in the ARM processor business, yet it is licensing Qualcomm's parts. That's quite a statement."

331 comments

  1. If AMD Dies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If AMD folds Intel will bend the consumer over and stuff them even harder than they are now. But if you like being penetrated by cement-filled pringles cans....

    (Intel does make good stuff, but they gouge you for the brand and they behave very unethically).

    1. Re:If AMD Dies... by Pinhedd · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Intel is already years ahead of AMD. They have well over 80% market share in the PC market and over 90% in the server and workstation market. There's a large performance spread between AMDs processors and Intels processors in both single threaded performance and overall performance per watt. If Intel wants to bend consumers over, they are already in a position to do so. However, they seem to be sticking to their roadmap despite the fact that AMD has been falling farther and farther behind.

    2. Re:If AMD Dies... by cheesybagel · · Score: 5, Interesting

      If Intel wants to bend consumers over, they are already in a position to do so. However, they seem to be sticking to their roadmap despite the fact that AMD has been falling farther and farther behind.

      Have you looked at Intel CPU prices lately? It hasn't been this bad since the Pentium II times. I would also point out that there are no Ivy Bridge server processors available, nor is their 6 core processor based on Ivy Bridge despite the first Ivy Bridge processors coming out a long time ago.

    3. Re:If AMD Dies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Have you looked at Intel CPU prices lately?

      Yes. A high-end i7 costs less than my Pentium-4 did last time I built a Windows PC.

    4. Re:If AMD Dies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      What are you talking about? In performance per US dollar, Intel has been winning the race hands down. I can get a Core i-5 3570k for about $220 USD. With decent memory, motherboard and cooling I can clock it up to 4.4 ghz and it's stable and not running too hot. To get that kind of performance at that price from AMD... oh, wait.. I can't.

    5. Re:If AMD Dies... by symbolset · · Score: 1

      You can say goodbye to the 32 core AMD64 dually for the rest of this decade. If you want one, buy it now.

      --
      Help stamp out iliturcy.
    6. Re:If AMD Dies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

      Intel is already years ahead of AMD. They have well over 80% market share in the PC market and over 90% in the server and workstation market...

      Gee, that's nice for them. Too bad in another few years there will be no such dominant animal as the "PC". It can and likely will be replaced by the ever-growing tablet and smartphone environment, which as the article has nicely pointed out, Qualcomm is dominating quite well in.

      As far as multi-threaded, multi-core performance, well chances are that will live solely within the server market in the future as they look towards massive virtualization efforts, which is about the only thing left truly driving CPU architecture...unless you actually somehow think you really are going to maximize that i7 processor you have now. 99% of people I know don't even come close, which is yet another reason Intel may be dominated by other architectures. The average computer simply no longer has the CPU demands anymore, regardless of what Intel is trying to shove down our throats. Hardware caught up and surpassed software demands in that space LONG ago (as evidenced by the 5-year old systems that are still plenty capable of running the latest OS and productivity packages).

    7. Re:If AMD Dies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And you can get a 1090T at half that price with just about the same stock clock speed... but you want to talk about overclocking your equipment by 30% and pretend like that's not a time/cost sink worth considering. Intellectual dishonesty is dishonest.

    8. Re:If AMD Dies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      And you can get a 1090T at half that price with just about the same stock clock speed...

      Isn't that the one that's beaten in benchmarks by a slow i3 that uses half the power?

      You see, AMD don't sell their top-end CPUs cheap because they like you, they do it because they can't compete with Intel at higher prices.

    9. Re:If AMD Dies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      No, they do it in large part because Intel has engaged in some pretty obnoxious antitrust violations over the last decade or so and got what's barely a slap on the wrist. AMD for it's part did some really stupid stuff as well, but it's hard to make a profit when your competitor is paying systems integrators not to use your products.

      Also, while most folks here seem to be on the AMD is walking dead meme, the fact of the matter is that Intel can't afford for AMD to go out of business any more than MS could have afforded Apple to go out of business during the '90s. If it really does get to that point, you'll see Intel laying off for a while to let AMD catch up.

      The big problem that AMD has right now is old debt and an inability to produce enough chips to satisfy demand. That's not something that's generally true of chips that are being sold for the maximum price people will pay.

    10. Re:If AMD Dies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      No, they do it in large part because Intel has engaged in some pretty obnoxious antitrust violations over the last decade or so and got what's barely a slap on the wrist.

      Right. If not for EVIL INTEL they could sell their chips for much more money even though Intel's are superior in almost every respect. The only reason I could see for buying AMD would be if I wanted a cheap CPU with a mildly capable GPU, such as the low end of the laptop market which AMD now pretty much seem to own.

      The big problem that AMD has right now is old debt and an inability to produce enough chips to satisfy demand. That's not something that's generally true of chips that are being sold for the maximum price people will pay.

      It's something that's generally true of poorly run companies. If you're right, AMD should just increase the price of their chips, and they'll be able to sell all they make even though Intel's are better. Why wouldn't they do that if people are prepared to pay more?

    11. Re:If AMD Dies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You know, you can just say somebody is right without having to move the goalposts.

      To answer your rhetorical question, though, yes, it has been beaten by a processor using a fabrication process two generations more advanced. It has also slammed all of the current i-series processors against the wall on a handful of other benchmarks, including modern, high-demand games -- the very market where Intel's current offering should be untouchable.

      Your implication is quite clearly that they cannot offer a competitive product... and while that's certainly true of the very highest-end of the Intel line, it's certainly not as black-and-white as you suggest across the board. AMD is down, for sure, but they're not out by any stretch of the imagination; just hearken back to the day of the K5 and the K6, and this situation will look very familiar.

    12. Re:If AMD Dies... by Kjella · · Score: 2

      If Intel wants to bend consumers over, they are already in a position to do so. However, they seem to be sticking to their roadmap despite the fact that AMD has been falling farther and farther behind.

      Of course they are, because their process and IPC improvements is how they have such a huge gross margin - I think around 62%. AMD has been in the 40s but their last quarter was an abysmal 37%. Look at this chart over die sizes. From Lynnfield in 2009 to Ivy Bridge in 2012 their mainstream die has shrunk from around 300mm^2 to 150mm^2 which makes the chips far cheaper to produce while their prices stay high and Intel pockets the difference. That might be good for Intel but with fierce competition they could have easily delivered an 8-core chip for $332 instead of a 4-core IVB. And with AMD increasingly bailing on the traditional CPU market, it's not going to get better.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    13. Re:If AMD Dies... by thePowerOfGrayskull · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Only in tech would someone consider a gross margin of 37% abysmal.

    14. Re:If AMD Dies... by Billly+Gates · · Score: 2

      The Phenom IIs were not that bad. They had the best value. It was the bulldozer ones that suck goatballs. But they are from 2009 and there time has come. They were only 10% slower than the first generation icore5s/icore7s, but I could get a whole cpu + motherboard for $229! Not just the cpu. If you want the extreme edition of intel you would pay$700 just for the chip and that would cover the cost of the whole system.

      Today though you are correct. The newer Bulldozers that just came out are competitive with icore5 with games on laptops due to intels abysmal HD graphics which are in the process of improving by the way but still suck. Better than the icore3s with integer performance.

      But I agree AMD lost and bet that accelerated HTML and flash would be much bigger now back in 2009 when AMD designed Bulldozer. Worse the Windows 7 kernel can't utilize the cores to share the FPU properly. Windows 8 can but it doesn't count as no one is going to run it due to METRO.

      I am really worried and afraid Apple or someone will eat htem up and you can expect your intel cpu that is $225 to turn into $550 by years end!

    15. Re:If AMD Dies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If not for EVIL INTEL they could sell their chips for much more money even though Intel's are superior in almost every respect.

      Didn't AMD create the x86-64 extension?

    16. Re:If AMD Dies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Funny

      A moment later they will explain how those evil oil and insurance companies make too much money (both single digit margins!)

    17. Re:If AMD Dies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      do you realize the disparity in performance there is between a core series cpu and the best qualcomm chip? the best qualcomm chips can't even beat a pentium 3 clock for clock. while it's true that this isn't needed for office, there are plenty of things still done by many people that can use all the cpu power available.

    18. Re:If AMD Dies... by Pinhedd · · Score: 5, Interesting

      It's a lot more complicated than that. photolithography is a very complex process. As dies shrink due to a smaller nodal size it becomes increasingly more difficult to fabricate a single chip until that process matures.

      All 150+ 4/6/8 core Sandybridge processors were sourced from only 5 different chips with 2/4/8 cores a piece and varying amounts of cache. The yield on the 8 cores is low even on the mature 32nm process so they demand a huge price premium. Those with defective cores have some disabled and are sold as 6 core variants.

      Since defects are fairly consistent per wafer, yields on a 200mm^2 Sandybridge are exponentially higher than they are on a ~400mm^2 Sandybridge. The same is true for Ivybridge. I'm not sure if Intels 22nm process has matured enough to make 8 core Ivybridge processors economically feasible quite yet. Thus, 220mm^2 yields on Intel's 32nm process may be comparable or even higher than 160mm^2 yields on Intel's 22nm process.

      TSMC's 28nm process was backlogged for quite some time due to low yields. The GTX680 was unavailable for the longest time because it required that a large chip be fabricated with no defects, the GTX670 which came later allowed for part of the chip to be disabled, thus increasing yields. AMD had the same problem with their HD 7000 series, low yields on the top end processors reduced their ability to ship those processors. Fortunately for them they had a stripped down version (HD 7950) ready to go at the same time rather than months later.

      Intel is a remarkably conservative company. They're not known for announcing a product unless they know that they can make it available and thus it doesn't make sense to introduce an 8 core Ivybridge processor unless they know that they can actually deliver it. This is why the Sandybridge-E processors came around much later, and the same will be true for Ivybridge-E

    19. Re:If AMD Dies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Worse the Windows 7 kernel can't utilize the cores to share the FPU properly.

      Only because AMD didn't set the hyperthreading bit in the CPU flags. But I guess not setting the bit allowed the fanboys to keep claiming that it was a brilliant design and it would have ruled the CPU world it not for EVIL MICROSOFT.

    20. Re:If AMD Dies... by Ironhandx · · Score: 3, Informative

      Yes, in fact if you read the fine print every Intel processor built today is built on the AMD64 architecture.

      IMO the biggest mistake AMD ever made was to license that tech back. Due to Intel licensing them the X86 arch though it may have been forced due to some sort of reciprocity clause for anything developed to supplement x86.

      AMDs market share was too small for courts to go after them for market abuse though, if existing deals didn't force it then they should have kept it.

    21. Re:If AMD Dies... by rsmith-mac · · Score: 1

      In the tech world that is abysmal. R&D costs are so high that you'd almost certainly take a loss in the end.

    22. Re:If AMD Dies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They've been so unethical they should have had enough money taken from them to break them for their ethics and punish their stockholders for their gains from criminal activity.

      I will be damned if I buy any Intel product.

    23. Re:If AMD Dies... by ifiwereasculptor · · Score: 2

      I don't think Intel can afford that type of strategy anymore, even if AMD was gone. If they started charging $550 for i5s, then gamers and light users will turn to consoles and ARM chips, repectively. Demanding professional users (video editors, programmers etc) would be stuck, but only for a while. I think what Intel is doing now is as far as they can go: artificially disabling advanced features on cheaper chips. They're the top dogs because x86 is the stanrdard for desktops, and it's only still the standard because it's cheap. Why do you think they sell $40 Celerons? It's not because they're charitable, it's because if they lose the low end, the high-end will surely follow in about five years, and all they'll have left the server market. We might all be using ARM or loongson CPUs, but we won't keep paying ridiculous sums for what will probably be unneeded computing power.

      As for Bulldozer, besides the Windows 7 scheduler problem, compilers are only now implementing BD-specific optimizations. They seem to improve performance quite a bit in a few tests. I think BD's performance potential has been misjudged (though its power consumption has been correctly assessed and it sucks incredibly).

    24. Re:If AMD Dies... by thePowerOfGrayskull · · Score: 2

      Gross margin is essentially your profit after most expenses. That seems to make a loss unlikely at that margin- which is pretty healthy.

    25. Re:If AMD Dies... by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      That is because it is patented by Intel. I doubt Intel would let them use it wihtout paying an exhorbent price. It was smart for AMD to avoid this but their answer was poorly engineered. AMD Phenoms are not hyperthreaded, but offer hyperthreaded features in a different way.

    26. Re:If AMD Dies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      You're a damned liar. Health insurance companies have recently come under scrutiny for bringing in margins upward of 20% -- one of the key provisions of the Affordable Care Act dictates that any profit above this value must be returned to the customers. Oil companies have been setting record profits, worldwide, across all businesses, year-over-year, for the past decade or so.

      Did somebody pay you to spout that nonsense, or are you honestly this fscking stupid?

    27. Re:If AMD Dies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      In the chip market the high GPM is essential. Without it the ever increasing costs associated with fabs, process design and new machines to support both are too expensive to afford. It is an odd situation where a business has to make enough money to pay for the obscene costs of a the next modern fab. It cost AMD the fab race and then eventually its own fabs. That is ultimately what put them in this bind.

    28. Re:If AMD Dies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Where can you get a 1090T anymore? They seem to be out of production and the only place I can find them is ebay where the bidding on one is up to $140 with 42 bids, and buy-it-now auctions are for $220+. That's more than a top of the line bulldozer brand new. Who would pay that?

    29. Re:If AMD Dies... by ExecutorElassus · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Well, I'm not entirely sure of that. For example: I do audio work, and video work, and like gaming, and compile my own software. All of those things take a robust desktop architecture to do well. You're not really suggesting that I'd switch to a tablet running BOINC in the background 24/7 while I process high-def audio files, are you?

      So let's discuss alternatives. Say AMD goes down. What are my options as a consumer in, say, five years if I want to avoid Intel, but want all the horsepower I can get my hands on for a desktop workstation? I really don't thing it's going to be Qualcomm, if they're targeting low-wattage mobile devices. Are there any other CPU manufacturers who are positioned to step into that market?

    30. Re:If AMD Dies... by cheesybagel · · Score: 4, Interesting

      That's bullshit. AMD couldn't afford to build a new fab because Hector Ruiz blew up AMD's cash reserves buying ATI lock stock and barrel over the stock market price just before the 2008 market crash. In fact this particular little deal smelled so bad a lot of people went to court and Hector was forced to quit his post.

    31. Re:If AMD Dies... by jon3k · · Score: 1

      I think that would have gotten ugly, considering they were licensing tech from Intel. I don't remember the details but I remember their being some kind of reciprocity there. I'm sure someone more informed than me will clarify.

    32. Re:If AMD Dies... by jon3k · · Score: 1

      They're the top dogs because x86 is the stanrdard for desktops, and it's only still the standard because it's cheap.

      No, they're top dogs because of "Wintel". If Windows had been running on ARM since XP it would be a whole different story.

    33. Re:If AMD Dies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yea... AMD needs a government bail out...

    34. Re:If AMD Dies... by 0123456 · · Score: 1

      That is because it is patented by Intel.

      Setting the hyperthreading bit in the CPU flags is patented by Intel?

    35. Re:If AMD Dies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Keep telling yourself that. The most powerful ARM tablet is at least 15 years behind a modern PC. Maybe the PC will go away for the common, computer illiterate person who doesn't need much processing power, but that's ok. The PC market will just return to the way it was before every layman decided that they needed a computer. I prefer it that way because it gives us techies our arena back.

    36. Re:If AMD Dies... by rsmith-mac · · Score: 5, Informative

      I can't speak for other industries, but for the semiconductor industry gross margin is measured as revenue from a chip minus the immediate production costs. For AMD this would be how much they paid GloFo for the chip (or rather averaged across the wafer), plus the costs of testing, assembly/packaging, boxing, and shipping. It does not include advertising, R&D, taxes, etc. And as I stated earlier, R&D is a massive expense. All of those engineers designing the next chip are a huge cost that have to be paid.

      You can take a look at AMD's finances first-hand and see how this plays out; AMD has never made a profit with gross margins below 44% or so. Intel would be an even better example: 13.5B in revenue, 3B in net income, and a gross margin of 63.3%. That would put Intel's profit margin at 22% versus their gross margin of 63.3%. Where did all the money go? R&D and fab upgrades. Gross margin only covers your immediate expenses in the semiconductor industry.

    37. Re:If AMD Dies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Intel behaves "very unethically?" How so? Be specific.

      "Gouging" is a questionable and spurious accusation, at best. Their new chips are sold at a price the market will bear. $200-$300 for a high-quality, fast, multi-core multi-threaded CPU does not seem excessive to me. And the newest chips that come out might be $600-$900 but then those represent the latest cutting-edge technology in CPU design, speed, and performance.

      You realize each CPU Intel produces represents several billion in R&D, right? Do they not have a right and indeed a fiduciary obligation to not only recapture that huge investment but ultimately make a profit? If you owned Intel shares you'd certainly feel that way.

      Intel is a publicly traded company, subject to all sorts of Federal oversight and regulation. Not to say that big public corporations don't cheat (they do, duh) but if they were being truly unethical and illegal it's only a matter of time before they get busted.

    38. Re:If AMD Dies... by hairyfeet · · Score: 2

      This is why I'm still selling AMD units, although I've been sticking with the Phenom II and Liano chips. The problem is the Bulldozer chip is really designed for server loads, not desktop. You can find the AMD Phenom II X6 new for less than $120, the Deneb quads for a little less than $100, and the Athlon triples and quads for $60-$80, that's a damned good bang for the buck.

      But I wouldn't count AMD out just yet, they did recently hire back the lead designer of the Athlon64 who went to Apple and designed the A6 so the guy knows his stuff. And their APU units are waaay better than anything Intel puts out thanks to the Radeon GPUs. This is one area I think they nailed it, as users get more and more multimedia heavy having a "good enough" CPU with an excellent GPU makes a lot of sense, I can watch videos for nearly 5 hours on my E350 netbook and that is with a year old battery.

      So I do hope that more people will put their money where their mouth is and buy AMD, they still have some really good chips at crazy cheap prices. I paid just $110 for my 1035T and when combined with my HD4850 it plays all the latest games and just chews through video transcodes and other multithreaded programs. Oh and you can get the Liano quad laptops starting at just $400 new from tiger, I've picked up a couple of those for customers and they are quite nice, the build quality is good, doesn't get too hot, and gets a hair over 4 hours on the battery which really isn't bad for 4 cores and a midrange GPU. And if the rumors are true and they can get the Bobcat quads under 25w I have NO doubt those will sell. I've already switched offices that were hanging onto old P4s and Pentium Ds for E350s and the lower cost of electricity and cooling make them practically pay for themselves, i can only imagine how many SMBs would like desktops that use so little power yet run all their programs with decent speed.

      As for ARM taking over from X86? That is like saying mopeds are gonna replace pickup trucks, they are simply two different use cases. With ARM most folks toss the device every couple of years or when their contract is up, whichever comes first, whereas with X86 frankly the PCs I was selling on the low end 5 years ago would be more than enough for most people. With ARM you are seeing an early 00s style MHz race while on X86 frankly the Phenom I X3s and X4s I was selling 4 years ago give you cycles to spare, its really no comparison.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    39. Re:If AMD Dies... by Billly+Gates · · Score: 2

      They're the top dogs because x86 is the stanrdard for desktops, and it's only still the standard because it's cheap.

      No, they're top dogs because of "Wintel". If Windows had been running on ARM since XP it would be a whole different story.

      Yep. Corporations are the bread and butter. Consumers are fickly and dirt cheap. They will happily pay $1800 for a desktop if no competition exists because that is what their tools require. This is what they used to pay back in the 1990s. DO you think Intel actually cares about gamers? Then why such a horrible crappy graphics that is 10 years behind and so terrible that game developers are quiting the PC platform due to it owning 70% of the market!

      Intel wants crappy graphics so you go out and buy an icore7 extreme instead of an icore3 with a dedicated card. They love things running in software and bloated operating systems. So to them no competition and high margins will make them more money and raise the share price which is the goal of any corporation that is public.

      Yes Intel would be happy to charge $500 and more after that annoying AMD is out of the picture because they know you will pay for it to run Windows.

    40. Re:If AMD Dies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If not for EVIL INTEL they could sell their chips for much more money even though Intel's are superior in almost every respect.

      Didn't AMD create the x86-64 extension?

      The old rule was that AMD made inroads and then Intel would take the technology lead. It looks like those days are over and with nobody to push Intel onto better things then ... .

    41. Re:If AMD Dies... by xswl0931 · · Score: 2

      Some people will laugh at this idea, but cloud computing is a viable alternative.

    42. Re:If AMD Dies... by tlhIngan · · Score: 1

      If AMD folds Intel will bend the consumer over and stuff them even harder than they are now. But if you like being penetrated by cement-filled pringles cans....

      Intel won't let AMD die. Because Intel's under a LOT of scrutiny for anti-trust both in the US and abroad (remember the OEM case?).

      If AMD dies, I'm certain the courts won't allow Intel to buy over the remains purely because of it (patents and such - too much would be concentrated in Intel's hands). And they'll be under heavier scrutiny once they're the only big guy in town making high-end processor chips.

      And you can bet the EU would be ready to start applying lots of fines to Intel for anti-competitive practices.

      So the alternative would be to find a way to prop up AMD (which Intel has apparently done by holding back their top of the line to at least make AMD more competitive), probably place orders for millions of AMD chips just to dump 'em in the landfill (to give AMD cash) or othe rmeasures. Or face years of litigation and fines over anti-trust violations and subsequent hamstringing of operations, which may even include splitting it into two - the foundry and the design.

    43. Re:If AMD Dies... by TeXMaster · · Score: 1

      I think he's referring to the hyperthreading technology itself, for which you probably can't set the HT bit unless you actually support it. Still, even though Phenoms don't have HT, they _will_ perform at closer to peak performance if you overcommit (in terms of threads). I've don some testing, and you need about 18 threads to truly saturate an X6, which is about the same number of threads that you need to saturate a dual Xeon (8 physical cores, 16 with HT).

      --
      "I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
    44. Re:If AMD Dies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I thought it was Llano, not Liano.

    45. Re:If AMD Dies... by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 1

      Also even when Intel announces something, they don't release it until the supply chain is full. When the Ivy Bridge launched, you could get it from every OEM, every online retailers, and in quantity. There was none of this "Just a few parts that sell out quickly." You could buy more or less as much Ivy Bridge as you wanted, from whomever you wanted.

      Not saying that is the only way to do things, but I can respect that. Intel's launches are very hard launches. They have made sure there are plenty of parts ready to go so that people can buy them. GPU vendors often do very soft launches, where only a few parts are out there and they are perpetually out of stock as new units are produced, until finally the chain gets saturated.

    46. Re:If AMD Dies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sorry, but you're an ignorant fool. Worse, you're probably fucking 11 years old.

      The demand for faster/more robust/cores CPUs is not driven by Intel or AMD. It's driven by consumer demand. As the user experience improves, so does the processing requirements.

      I say again, you're an ignorant fool.

    47. Re:If AMD Dies... by Guspaz · · Score: 1, Insightful

      So, a few years ago the high-end processors from Intel cost $1000 a pop. Today, the high-end chips like the 3770 cost roughly $300... and that's probably their fastest consumer chip, except maybe last generation's hexacore sandy bridges... This seems like a pretty big improvement in price to me. Intel's pricing is better than it has been for many years. I certainly can't ever remember a time before the i-series era where Intel's fastest chips were selling for $300!

    48. Re:If AMD Dies... by Guspaz · · Score: 1

      but I could get a whole cpu + motherboard for $229! Not just the cpu.

      I'm not sure what you're going for here... $58 for an ivy bridge compatible mobo, $100 for an ivy bridge processor (G2120), that's $158. That number is smaller than $229.

    49. Re:If AMD Dies... by bemymonkey · · Score: 1

      If you're willing to live with the (much!) higher power consumption and less performance per clock, then sure...

      As for overclocking a K processor being a time/cost sink... not really. If you've ever overclocked a regular old system in the last decade or so (with all the different clock speeds, voltages, multipliers and latencies that all interacted), overclocking a Sandy or Ivy K desktop processor will seem easier than flipping a light switch.

    50. Re:If AMD Dies... by hairyfeet · · Score: 0

      In American English one generally doesn't capitalize more than the first letter of a proper noun, but really who cares? could you not understand the context? could you not simply copypasta "Liano" into Google and be taken to the correct page?

      seriously dude, take a pill, smoke a joint, drink a beer, whatever. because I have heard of Grammar Nazis being anally retentive before but this is the first time I've ever sen one go to all the trouble to post not because of misspelling or sentence structure, but because he didn't like the fact that a single letter wasn't capitalized.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    51. Re:If AMD Dies... by tstrunk · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Have you looked at Intel CPU prices lately? It hasn't been this bad since the Pentium II times.

      I agree. You are quoting a retail CPU. It's even worse in the server market, especially if you want many cores. We recently required a 32 CPU machine (single thread performance was not vitally important).
      Suitable CPUs were:
      1x16 Core AMD Interlagos: about 500 Euro
      1x8 Core Intel Sandy-Bridge EP about 1000 Euro.

      I know that people are going to say: but hey, single thread performance and Hyper Threading are going to make up for it. But that's not true: There is NO Intel CPU below 1000 Euro we could put into the system. There simply is no equivalent. It's a similar situation as with Apple: They make high-end products and people justify the price with it. That doesn't help the people who search for a low cost option.

    52. Re:If AMD Dies... by silanea · · Score: 2

      The second letter in Llano is not capitalised, it is a lowercase L. Not trying to be a spelling nazi, this is quite a common misunderstanding.

      --
      Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
    53. Re:If AMD Dies... by zidium · · Score: 1

      Yes, it is.

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    54. Re:If AMD Dies... by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

      Too bad in another few years there will be no such dominant animal as the "PC". It can and likely will be replaced by the ever-growing tablet and smartphone environment

      ... which we'll make at home on our 3D printers with open source raw materials paid for with bitcoins.

      --
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    55. Re:If AMD Dies... by Xest · · Score: 0

      Meh, this is the same bollocks we saw with the IE anti-trust case, but the problem is, it's exactly that, bollocks.

      AMD's probablem isn't just old debt or lack of ability to satisfy demand, it's the fact they only offer an inferior product and it's as simple as that.

      Anti-trust cases against Intel, like the anti-trust case against Microsoft were not attempts to stop the sole reasons these company's competitors were struggling, but to at least try and take the pressure off a bit, the problem is when said companies (AMD, and Netscape) were continuing to produce an inferior product the end was inevitable anyway. No amount of court restrictions against the likes of Intel/Microsoft are going to change the fact the problem is an inherent inability at their competitors to produce a competitive product and will at best delay the inevitable (though that in itself may be a good thing).

      IE6 ruled supreme for quite a while because there was nothing competitive to it out there, but as soon as Firefox came along that changed, Microsoft had really done little to reduce browser integration into their OS, and yet Firefox, and later Chrome, stripped away at it's marketshare with ease- if nothing had changed from the Netscape days and as people like you imply, the reason that Netscape died was because of Microsoft's practices, then how can you explain Firefox/Chrome's rise when they were up against the same thing? As I say, the fact is they succeded by simply just producing a better product than the competition.

      I think AMD is the walking dead, and I don't see why Intel would need it at all, it's not competitive enough to push it along, but more importantly I don't think it matters. There are already others out there producing a better product than Intel for modern needs (low power consumption and mobile), companies like, as TFA mentions, Qualcomm, and others based on ARM's designs so I don't even really buy the idea that much harm will be done if AMD does go away, it just opens the door for companies that are now simply more competent to fill it's shoes. Some degree of Windows 8 support for ARM suggests Microsoft sees this as the case too.

      The market is changing and that's why AMD is dying - it neither managed to compete in it's existing markets, nor has it managed to move convincingly to the new markets of mobile. Let it go and let someone better take it's place. Business is about survival of the fittest and AMD just isn't fit to survive anymore nor has it been for quite some time.

    56. Re:If AMD Dies... by citizenr · · Score: 1

      If AMD folds Intel will bend the consumer over and stuff them even harder than they are now. But if you like being penetrated by cement-filled pringles cans....

      Intel won't let AMD die. Because Intel's under a LOT of scrutiny for anti-trust both in the US and abroad (remember the OEM case?).

      Yes. I remember that case. they got penali.. oh wait, they got SLAP ON THE WRIST! For destroying AMD during K7 era, when AMD had the BEST and FASTEST chips on the market. During a time AMD had a chance to really grow.

      --
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    57. Re:If AMD Dies... by unixisc · · Score: 2

      As for ARM taking over from X86? That is like saying mopeds are gonna replace pickup trucks, they are simply two different use cases. With ARM most folks toss the device every couple of years or when their contract is up, whichever comes first, whereas with X86 frankly the PCs I was selling on the low end 5 years ago would be more than enough for most people. With ARM you are seeing an early 00s style MHz race while on X86 frankly the Phenom I X3s and X4s I was selling 4 years ago give you cycles to spare, its really no comparison.

      You are talking apples vs pineapples here. Right now, ARM is a phone chip and x64 a laptop chip. But at this point, it depends on how things go b/w MS, Google and Apple. If Microsoft really blows it w/ Windows 8, Intel will go down w/ it, despite all that technological superiority and fab capacity. As the history of RISC in the 90s proved, the best technology doesn't always win.

    58. Re:If AMD Dies... by aix+tom · · Score: 1

      Not with video work. With upstream being a lot slower than downstream, it's not viable to wait a few hours before your video is uploaded into the cloud.

      I work for a company with about 20 branches, and while all or office/mail stuff runs in (our own) cloud desktops, even things like "upload a couple of pictures to mail to a supplier" bandwidth into the cloud become problematic. That's why we still have to keep at least one machine "local" to do such stuff in every branch.

    59. Re:If AMD Dies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Right and Qualcomm are licensing from ARM, as are Apple, and Samsung (Xynos)

      The market needs more competitors and it will happen if / when optical processors take off. That's inevitable.

    60. Re:If AMD Dies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Haha, disregard everything I have posted, I suck cocks.

    61. Re:If AMD Dies... by vakuona · · Score: 1

      My biggest problem with AMD is that they are trying to compete on Intel's terms. AMD should have quit selling chips and started to design and sell their own consumer hardware. AMD is playing for pennies in trying to sell to Dell and the like, and they can only ever be used by Dell and HP as leverage to get Intel to keep prices down.

      If they designed their own complete systems, they could extract an additional $5 from each buyer for example, and maybe they could be sure to turn a profit and have a bit of money to invest in their core business of developing processors. CPU's are not commodities, so AMD should stop trying to compete as if they were.

      Yes, AMD wouldn't be making the top end systems, but that doesn't mean it couldn't make decent money.

    62. Re:If AMD Dies... by Smallpond · · Score: 1

      That include the -64 part. It didn't hurt Intel to have AMD do all the heavy lifting to get that market going then Intel just included it since it was previously licensed.

      Umm.. you are forgetting the money Intel spent developing Itanium.

      Intel is a great company, but AMD did better on 64-bit, better on integrating stuff into the CPU, and better on selling low-cost CPUs that hit a certain market segment. They really only started falling behind when Intel forced them out of socket compatibility. Now the new mainboard features show up on Intel platform first, and AMD later. Intel is selling tons of boards.

    63. Re:If AMD Dies... by thePowerOfGrayskull · · Score: 1

      Thanks for the info/clarification.

    64. Re:If AMD Dies... by cyber-vandal · · Score: 1

      You're so right. The anti-trust case against Microsoft was solely to do with Netscape and nothing to do with repeated violations against multiple companies and refusing to comply with a previous ruling at all *eye roll*. Honestly can none of you free marketeers use Google? It's all there under "Microsoft findings of fact". Read it. The Intel anti-trust case ruling is also available and makes very interesting reading. I bet you haven't bothered with that either in your zeal to pronounce these illegal practices as the fault of the victims.

    65. Re:If AMD Dies... by hairyfeet · · Score: 1

      I think you are wrong and here is why...Vista. Remember Vista? Remember how many said it would be the OS that gave the market to Linux, or that the iPhone would be the new desktop? So what happened?

      Simple people stuck with XP instead because everyone and their dog has Windows programs they want to run and they couldn't do that at all or without major studying and hoop jumping in the case of Linux. There is a reason why you see article after article proclaiming "Windows 7 is the new XP" because that is what it is. People like Win 7, it runs nice even on first gen dual cores, and it lets them keep all those Windows programs that they know and prefer over having to start from scratch.

      You see there is some facts the press just refuses to speak of and which makes the numbers they tout meaningless. 1.-When MSFT, Intel, and AMD were putting up those crazy year after year numbers we were in a "MHz war" where a PC that was just 2 years old would struggle to run the newest software because taking advantage of faster single threaded performance is easy, whereas many programs simply won't or can't multithread so for a user of those programs there will be no difference they can tell between the first gen Athlon X2 and the latest octo-core monster. 2.- When AMD and Intel switched to cores over MHz the chips rapidly became more powerful than the jobs the users had by an insane amount, hell i have businesses running Phenom I multicores and they simply can't even come up with enough useful work to slam even a chip 5 years old. so for them there really isn't a point in getting a new machine before the previous one dies, even the first gen Core Duo and Turion X2 laptops do all your basic tasks with cycles left over.

      Now for the ARM side..1.- ARM units are by and large disposable. How many phones do you have sitting in a sock drawer? Talking to customers from all different backgrounds i can tell you the average number is four. 2.- for every Asus Transformer or iPad you are selling probably 30 on the low end, just like the PC you are seeing a race to the bottom, hell I'd argue its coming faster for ARM than it did for X86. 3.- ARM is going through its very own MHz war, where programs released today will struggle on that 2 year old tablet or smartphone if they will run at all. 4.- finally just as X86 ran into a wall so too is ARM about to hit a wall, only with ARM its gonna be power and not heat.

      So X86 isn't going anywhere and neither is Windows, the OEMs will simply sell "Windows 8" systems that are just Win 7 along with a DVD of Win 8 nobody will use, this lets Ballmer save face while keeping the OEMs from talking about jumping ship. Intel has Medifield running on phones and tablets already overseas, and AMD has Hondo so those that want the tablet form factor but want to run all their Windows software will be able to do so, and there are still hundreds of millions of desktops and laptops sold each year, that's nothing to sneeze at. Its just in a dead economy people ain't blowing money to replace what works fine and while there are plenty out there that don't have a tablet yet while everyone has a desktop or laptop or often both.

      But Win 8 won't be the death knell of X86 anymore than Vista was, there is simply too much Windows software that folks want and need to run out there.

      --
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    66. Re:If AMD Dies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Maybe because a 3770 is not high-end but upper midrange?
      You can bet your ass when IB-E xeons are out there'll be a $1k desktop variant.

    67. Re:If AMD Dies... by Xest · · Score: 1

      1. I'm not a free marketer, but this doesn't prevent me recognising that being competitive is still a core tenet of staying in business, I mean, how else do you think companies survive? If anything you dismissal of the concept paints you as the direct opposite - a state controlled communist, because it implies you believe that all companies should be allowed to survive regardless of their fitness. Now I'm sure you don't really believe that, but thus is the implication in your desperate rush to declare extreme positions on the issue and assume that any simple mention of the way business works must inherently mean some extreme position. So well done on completely failing to have a rational conversation.

      2. It's nothing to do with blaming the victim for the illegal practices, but merely pointing out that the illegal practices weren't the reason these companies have struggled, but in fact they struggled because they were too incompetent to compete, and that given that, they made a lot of noise about how it's the competition's fault, when it's merely their own, for doing a shit job. Or to put it simply, I'm not defending Intel/Microsoft for their illegal practices, but pointing out that the demise of Netscape/AMD was inevitable simply due to the fact they weren't competitive through no fault of their own and that that would've led to their downfall regardless of any anti-competitive actions or not. Again, as I say, whatever Microsoft or Intel did doesn't change the fact that Netscape's product was shit, and that AMD's products are shit.

      Still, well done on jumping to conclusions and launching into a knee jack wingnut style argument, at least you managed to do that well, not that that's something you should be proud of.

    68. Re:If AMD Dies... by tyrione · · Score: 1

      Have you looked at Intel CPU prices lately?

      Yes. A high-end i7 costs less than my Pentium-4 did last time I built a Windows PC.

      Gee that only took 6 going on 7 years. Color me unimpressed which is a reason this fluff piece about the demise of AMD is greatly overrated.

    69. Re:If AMD Dies... by tyrione · · Score: 1

      So, a few years ago the high-end processors from Intel cost $1000 a pop. Today, the high-end chips like the 3770 cost roughly $300... and that's probably their fastest consumer chip, except maybe last generation's hexacore sandy bridges... This seems like a pretty big improvement in price to me. Intel's pricing is better than it has been for many years. I certainly can't ever remember a time before the i-series era where Intel's fastest chips were selling for $300!

      Intel's high end Xeon processors which you cite still cost over $1000.

      http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117261&name=Processors-Servers

      In fact the: Intel Xeon E5-2690 Sandy Bridge-EP 2.9GHz (3.8GHz Turbo Boost) 20MB L3 Cache LGA 2011 135W 8-Core Server Processor BX80621E52690 cost $2,039.99 each.

      http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819105272&name=Processors-Servers

      The AMD Opteron 6174 Magny-Cours 2.2GHz 12 x 512KB L2 Cache 12MB L3 Cache Socket G34 115W 12-Core Server Processor OS6174WKTCEGOWOF cost $1,239.99 each.

      Let us revisit this discussion of AMD and their premature demise. The pricing on Piledriver alone will make big news, not to mention all the past negative press has been silenced to date.

      The APUs continue to evolve rapidly and nothing Intel can to match that will happen in the next 24-36 months, if ever.

    70. Re:If AMD Dies... by tyrione · · Score: 1

      A moment later they will explain how those evil oil and insurance companies make too much money (both single digit margins!)

      Last time I checked the stamping out of ICs doesn't shit the bed like Petroleum.

    71. Re:If AMD Dies... by mdmkolbe · · Score: 1

      Wouldn't Intel then just have gone and made their own x86-64 to compete with AMD64? Given the market shares, I don't see AMD winning that fight.

    72. Re:If AMD Dies... by Ironhandx · · Score: 1

      It took them almost 2 years just to implement AMDs solution and get it to market. They had been trying for years already to come up with an X86-64 solution and failed big time.

      So no, Intel would not have won that fight, other than how they actually did already go about winning it, or by revoking the x86 licensing from AMD(if that was possible). But Intel's engineers wouldn't have won that fight. They would have at best been another year+ behind, which would have been enough to make them irrelevant. In the 2 years that AMD had them completely and utterly trounced(As bad as Intel has AMD trounced right now actually, in some ways much worse than the current situation) their market share went straight down to about 50% on consumer and 70% server. The only thing that kept that from getting worse was their existing long term contracts, which another year would have seen some of the biggest ones expire. Those two years cut their cash on hand balance by over half and there was some real concern that Intel might go belly up.

    73. Re:If AMD Dies... by AvitarX · · Score: 1

      Man would that be nice, high-end AMD portable chips in non-junky and huge laptops.

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    74. Re:If AMD Dies... by AvitarX · · Score: 1

      Great, so now the extra Integer units don't get used?

      It's not HT, and it's not 2 cores, it was something new. I am somewhat surprised they couldn't work in parallel with MS to get this into a service pack, but oh well.

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    75. Re:If AMD Dies... by AvitarX · · Score: 1

      I don't know if that's true, because "Wintel" needs both Win and tel to be relevant.

      The only value to Wintel is the applications, and though Office is HUGE, once they stopped breaking compatibility with every version, it became a surmountable obstacle to work without it (also, save as PDF in other applications for distribution helps).

      Winarm, even if it'd been around since XP would still be in a similar state. Wintel is about the armfuls of software you can get, and running existing software already purchased and custom made.

      Windows is not all that is needed on a computer to make it useful for legacy things, it's just a piece, and without a huge performance jump perhaps the less important part (Wine vs true emulation).

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    76. Re:If AMD Dies... by jon3k · · Score: 1

      While two targets would have been tougher, making Visual Studio compile to both would have largely overcome that problem. But let's see how WinRT plays out and we'll be able to better judge.

    77. Re:If AMD Dies... by metaforest · · Score: 1

      I would think Intel prefers to penetrate with 300mm ingots of Si.

      (However; Intel is going to risk running afoul of Anti-trust laws if AMD folds... It will make it much harder to claim that they don't hold a monopoly in the desktop class computing market. I don't think Intel would like being similarly penetrated by some blindfolded chick using a marble sword. )

    78. Re:If AMD Dies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes but you completely got the name wrong. It's LLANO not LIANO, moron.

      For someone who is constantly boasting about how much you love and support AMD, you sure as shit don't know anything about them.

    79. Re:If AMD Dies... by Guspaz · · Score: 1

      No, I'm talking about their consumer chips. In the P4 era, and even into the Core 2 era, the high end consumer chips cost $1000, and now they cost less than a third that. Intel's pricing (on consumer parts, at least) is substantially better than it was a few years ago.

      AMD still has a decent showing in the server market, it's the consumer market that their offerings are lackluster. The only bright spot has been their APUs, but those are only useful in scenarios where fast onboard graphics are more important than fast CPUs, and that's true in very few places. The majority of use cases, like office use, don't need the extra performance, and places that do need the extra performance tend to go discrete anyhow.

      There might be a market for them in the mobile space, but AMD's poor performance-per-watt on the CPU side of things hurts the prospects of APUs there.

    80. Re:If AMD Dies... by Guspaz · · Score: 1

      I'm not sure how a chip can be the fastest consumer processor on the market and not be considered high-end...

    81. Re:If AMD Dies... by toddestan · · Score: 1

      Because the fastest chip on the market is some ridiculous $1000 Extreme Edition CPU?

    82. Re:If AMD Dies... by hhw · · Score: 1

      Uhh, the Xeon E3 V2's which are the single socket Ivy Bridge server processors have been out for several months. However, the Xeon E5 V2's i.e. Ivy Bridge-E(P|N) for 2 sockets aren't going to come out until Q3 2013, which is quite the delay from Ivy Bridge's initial release, and well after Haswell will be released.

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    83. Re:If AMD Dies... by Kartu · · Score: 1

      Could you name the "high end i7" you've used pretty please.

    84. Re:If AMD Dies... by ByOhTek · · Score: 1

      Not to mention, Qualcomm tends to produce some of the lower performing ARM chips for their clock, in my observations.

      I think the Tegra3 chips provide a nice option. No, they don't have the horsepower of an x86 by Intel or AMD, but if AMD goes down, I can see nVidia picking up the slack. Also, you could probably get some way of managing the Tegras in parallel, since most audio/video processing is rather parallel friendly.

      That being said, I hope AMD doesn't drop out. I hate their GPUs, but they usually have at least one segment of the market where their CPUs are the better choice. They may not rock Intel's world, but they at least help keep them on their toes.

      --
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    85. Re:If AMD Dies... by Kartu · · Score: 1

      Intel - Core i7 i7-3960X
      $1,029.99
      BestBuy

    86. Re:If AMD Dies... by baka_toroi · · Score: 1

      The big problem that AMD has right now is old debt and an inability to produce enough chips to satisfy demand.

      So why did they delay Trinity on the desktop? They did it because they needed to get rid of old Llano stock. That's not exactly a "satisfied demand." Moreover, Bulldozer was a disappointment and I'd rather buy a Sandy/Ivy Bridge i5.

      I'm sorry. I love AMD but they're rapidly going down the gutter. Trinity is mildly interesting, but not really that much. The future also doesn't look great for them, other than the GPU division.

    87. Re:If AMD Dies... by Guspaz · · Score: 1

      That's a last-gen part, a Sandy Bridge. It would be slower in everything but heavily multithreaded applications, since it has slightly lower IPC and clockspeed.

    88. Re:If AMD Dies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes, in fact if you read the fine print every Intel processor built today is built on the AMD64 architecture.

      IMO the biggest mistake AMD ever made was to license that tech back. Due to Intel licensing them the X86 arch though it may have been forced due to some sort of reciprocity clause for anything developed to supplement x86.

      There was such a reciprocity clause. Consider that without it, the cross licensing agreement never would've been worth anything. Whichever party was dominant at any given moment could make up new x86 extensions which the other side wouldn't be able to copy, squeezing the weak party out by slowly redefining what x86 was. The cross licensing agreement does say that both sides automatically get licenses to any new x86-related intellectual property invented by the other party (patents and so forth).

      That said, Intel is usually firmly in the driver's seat. AMD has attempted to extend x86 many times, and x86-64 was basically the only time they didn't fail. Usually what happens is that whenever AMD does something sufficiently compelling to warrant a response, Intel coopts it by doing the same thing in an incompatible way. Given a choice, ISVs will go with the Intel way because it's not really any more effort for them to target one or the other, but the Intel way gets them 70 to 80% of the market.

      AMD64 was an exception due to unique circumstances. At the time, Intel was actually sitting on its own equivalent to AMD64. They developed it in case they needed it, but Intel executives were committed to a strategy of keeping x86 32-bit and trying to get 64-bit customers to use Itanium processors instead. So, instead of revealing their cards shortly before 64-bit Opterons shipped (as they usually would have), they let it happen without any public response other than a reiteration of the "want 64-bit? Go Itanium!" marketing line.

      It's now known that Intel did secretly ship their own 64-bit x86 in one generation of Pentium 4, but it was permanently disabled through factory fuse bits. If they'd chosen to, they could have turned it on very quickly. And after it became clear to Intel management that Opteron was kicking Itanium ass, Intel actually tried to float the idea of doing just that.

      However, they'd waited too long. Microsoft made it known (in no uncertain terms) that they were much too far along on AMD64 Windows to tolerate Intel splitting the market with a new and incompatible CPU, and that MS absolutely would not consider porting to anything else.

    89. Re:If AMD Dies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If anything you dismissal of the concept paints you as the direct opposite - a state controlled communist, because it implies you believe that all companies should be allowed to survive regardless of their fitness.

      This word, "communism". You are using it, but I do not think you know what it means.

      "State controlled" is actually the polar opposite of "communist". The ideal Communist state has no central government any more than it has corporations as we'd recognize them. In communism, the workers are supposed to own the means of production, not the government or corporations. Yes, that means most nominally-Communist governments which have ever existed actually weren't Communist at all. Most of them claimed to be working towards the implementation of true Communism, but in practice worked mainly for the elites who controlled the system. (Which, you may have noticed, is distressingly similar to the way things work in the US today.)

      (Is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea really democratic in any sense, controlled by "the people", or a republic? No, no, and no. What a state says it is, for PR purposes, isn't necessarily what it actually is.)

      Personally, I don't think true Communism would work any more than fake Communism did, but raising Communism's ghost to score points against someone who is clearly not arguing for Communism is beyond idiotic.

    90. Re:If AMD Dies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think he's referring to the hyperthreading technology itself, for which you probably can't set the HT bit unless you actually support it. Still, even though Phenoms don't have HT, they _will_ perform at closer to peak performance if you overcommit (in terms of threads). I've don some testing, and you need about 18 threads to truly saturate an X6, which is about the same number of threads that you need to saturate a dual Xeon (8 physical cores, 16 with HT).

      I think you're a bit confused. This subthread is about Bulldozer and how its unusual design (where each pair of "cores" are not truly independent cores because they share a common floating point unit, instruction cache, decoder, and a couple other blocks) interacts with the Windows scheduler. Due to the superficial similarity to hyperthreading, some people maintain that if AMD had only been smart enough to make pairs of Bulldozer cores declare themselves to be one hyperthreaded core, it would have magically made Bulldozer much faster in Windows. This isn't really true, but fans looking for a reason to believe don't ever notice they're simultaneously claiming AMD was smart enough to design a great CPU and dumb enough to accidentally sabotage it in a really trivial, easy-to-fix way.

      Also, your test was probably somewhat bogus. You can easily saturate a Phenom II X6 with six threads. I'd guess you ran a program where individual threads cannot individually saturate 1 CPU core. That is, they frequently go to sleep or wait on each other quite a lot. That's the only way you can continue to get significant scaling after N threads (where N equals the number of hardware threads available). Not all programs behave that way, so it's not real useful to report that one particular program happens to "scale" all the way up to 3 threads per core. (And if it does behave that way, there's no reason to believe it would behave any differently on Intel CPUs.)

    91. Re:If AMD Dies... by Ironhandx · · Score: 1

      I don't normally respond to ACs... but most of what you say checks out, except for the fact that Intels own X86-64 implementation was about a 30-40% performance loss on both 32 and 64 bit instead of the performance gain that came with AMDs version. If intel had had their own viable version ready to go they wouldn't have had to start from scratch and rebuild their roadmap around AMD64, claiming otherwise is just being out of touch with reality. The costs they took on the nose for that were extravagant. In the billions extravagant. MS had nothing to do with Intel being forced to go with AMD64, MS was pushing Intel to get their own product ready.

      After 6 months of Intel saying it was just around the corner without even providing MS a working instruction set MS essentially said "Sorry, you took too long, we're standardizing on AMD64 because our enterprise customers want 64 bit now, and this is ready now."

    92. Re:If AMD Dies... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's a last-gen part, a Sandy Bridge.

      It's not really last-gen.

      There are actually three types of Sandy Bridge: regular "consumer" Sandy Bridge (2 or 4 cores plus integrated graphics), Sandy Bridge-EP (Xeon, 4 to 8 cores, no integrated graphics), and Sandy Bridge-E (defeatured -EP Xeon with a maximum of 6 cores enabled, sold as a high end desktop part, aka that $1000 i7-3960x).

      The same is true of Ivy -- there's Ivy Bridge, Ivy Bridge-E, and Ivy Bridge-EP. The thing is, Ivy -E/-EP are still in Intel's validation labs. It takes a much longer time to validate the big multi-socket Xeons (and any products derived from them like the '-E' desktop parts). So right now, that $1K Sandy Bridge-E is a current generation CPU, not discontinued old stock. Ivy Bridge-E/EP aren't due out until sometime next year, I believe.

      That said, you're not wrong to say that few people have a need for it. Few people actually need more than two cores, provided the individual cores are fast, and four is pretty much enough for the vast majority of desktop computing. About the only common desktop application which can make good use of more cores is video encoding, but do you really want to pay triple the price for far less than triple the encoding performance? Especially if you don't encode videos 24/7? Didn't think so.

      So both of you in this spat are right. Intel does still charge $1K for a high end desktop CPU, and it doesn't actually matter. 99% of people looking for "the fastest" desktop CPU should buy Intel's own $330 part instead of their $1000 part. Effective pricing has dropped even if the $1000 tier is still there.

    93. Re:If AMD Dies... by Xest · · Score: 1

      "Personally, I don't think true Communism would work any more than fake Communism did, but raising Communism's ghost to score points against someone who is clearly not arguing for Communism is beyond idiotic."

      Right, and claiming someone is some right-wing free-marketer based on nothing more than a statement of fact about the way business works in the real world is equally beyond idiotic. That was kind of the point I was making, so well done on getting that.

    94. Re:If AMD Dies... by Stuarticus · · Score: 1

      1. - You don't have to be competitive if you have managed to obtain a monopoly...

      2 - You obviously don't remember the days when Netscape was the best browser out there.

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    95. Re:If AMD Dies... by AvitarX · · Score: 1

      I email a couple of pictures using the cloud all the time.

      In fact, I recognize a couple drawbacks to using a web application for my email, but will likely never go back to a local client anyway.

      My asymmetric upstream with cable (both home and business) uploads decent quality (the high end of what you'd be mailing) in 16 seconds (250 KB/s, 4MB photo).

      Also, I click send, and as long as I don't close out, it happens in the background.

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    96. Re:If AMD Dies... by TeXMaster · · Score: 1

      I think he's referring to the hyperthreading technology itself, for which you probably can't set the HT bit unless you actually support it. Still, even though Phenoms don't have HT, they _will_ perform at closer to peak performance if you overcommit (in terms of threads). I've don some testing, and you need about 18 threads to truly saturate an X6, which is about the same number of threads that you need to saturate a dual Xeon (8 physical cores, 16 with HT).

      I think you're a bit confused. This subthread is about Bulldozer and how its unusual design (where each pair of "cores" are not truly independent cores because they share a common floating point unit, instruction cache, decoder, and a couple other blocks) interacts with the Windows scheduler. Due to the superficial similarity to hyperthreading, some people maintain that if AMD had only been smart enough to make pairs of Bulldozer cores declare themselves to be one hyperthreaded core, it would have magically made Bulldozer much faster in Windows. This isn't really true, but fans looking for a reason to believe don't ever notice they're simultaneously claiming AMD was smart enough to design a great CPU and dumb enough to accidentally sabotage it in a really trivial, easy-to-fix way.

      You are indeed right, I totally missed that part. And I don't know anything about the Windows scheduler, so I have no idea if advertising the core pairs would perform better if they looked like a single core with HT.

      Also, your test was probably somewhat bogus. You can easily saturate a Phenom II X6 with six threads. I'd guess you ran a program where individual threads cannot individually saturate 1 CPU core. That is, they frequently go to sleep or wait on each other quite a lot. That's the only way you can continue to get significant scaling after N threads (where N equals the number of hardware threads available). Not all programs behave that way, so it's not real useful to report that one particular program happens to "scale" all the way up to 3 threads per core. (And if it does behave that way, there's no reason to believe it would behave any differently on Intel CPUs.)

      The thing it, it does behave different on Intel CPUs. Tested on both a dual-Xeon (2x4 cores, doubled by HT) and on an i7 (4 cores, doubled by HT), and in both cases peak performance was achieved with a number of CPU threads matching (or very close to) the HT-advertised performance (more specifically, 18 threads in the Xeon case and 10 threads in the i7 case.

      Of course this is just a very specific application, and I'm sure that the effects I'm seeing are influenced by bottlenecks from other subsystem (memory throughput, most likely); still, I find the difference between Intel and AMD CPUs is quite peculiar.

      --
      "I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
    97. Re:If AMD Dies... by AvitarX · · Score: 1

      Have you used, tried using a computer from 1997? The most powerful arm tablet is quite a bit beyond that.

      I would by maybe (a big maaaaaaybe) 5-10 years, but no way are they 15 years behind. I can say my phone stutters on flash about the same as my Athlon 3500+ (I think that's what it was).

      --
      Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
    98. Re:If AMD Dies... by AvitarX · · Score: 1

      That's not true, I work in printing, and if our gross margin were 37% we'd be losing massive amount of money (ours is significantly higher, and being in a commodity market, we pretty much break even).

      Leases, interest on leases, depreciation, some employee pay, insurance, rent, and I'm sure a lot of other things I'm not thinking of, are not included in gross margin.

      Only pay for production workers, paper, ink, electricity, service costs are off the top of my head.

      Non boxstore retail generally requires a 50%-100% gross margin to stay open.

      Restaurants even higher.

      --
      Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
    99. Re:If AMD Dies... by Xest · · Score: 1

      "1. - You don't have to be competitive if you have managed to obtain a monopoly... "

      Er, try and keep up with the conversation. You've just instigated a circular argument. The point was that these monopolies were obtained precisely by outcompeting the competition. Intel just produces better chips than AMD, there's no ifs, no buts, they're just too far ahead of AMD, and it's not to do with being a monopoly because they're not yet, it's simply that they've done a better job than AMD.

      Microsoft was the same, the only reason it got a monopoly in the first place was by just producing a product more people wanted. Linux was too young as to be irrelevant at the time, and everything else (OS/2 lol) was second rate.

      "2 - You obviously don't remember the days when Netscape was the best browser out there."

      That's because it was never true. Netscape was a truly second rate browser compared to IE. People were using IE over Netscape not because of bundling, but because IE was just that much nicer to use. Even the basics like Netscape's UI was fucking horrible (http://www.supportcave.com/images/netscape4.bmp vs. http://www.favbrowser.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/internetexplorer4.png for example), and that's before you get into the technical fails of actually browsing with it.

      I just did a random search, and found this old article for example, look at the comments, look at people's sentiment towards Netscape in reply to a neutral story about it:

      http://www.geek.com/articles/news/navigator-475-out-now-20000821/

      This isn't to say Netscape didn't have it's fans, particularly in the anti-MS crowd (read: Stallman's crowd), but IE was just so much more user-friendly to the general public, and that's ultimately what mattered.

  2. We NEED Processor Competition by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 3, Insightful

    We MUST have competition in the high-end processor market. Intel has a long history of abuse and monopolistic practices. Without a decent competitor, you can expect your processor prices to soar, just as they did in the past when Intel was essentially the only player.

    This is not an option. We MUST have somebody to compete with Intel.

    1. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I've been boycotting intel for years because of their anti competitive bullshit. Nvidia too. Unfortunately I'm in a tiny minority. Nobody really gives a fuck.

    2. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      We MUST have competition in the high-end processor market

      AMD really hasn't competed in the high-end CPU market They've made most of they money in the low-to-mid range market and their line up hasn't even been close to Intel's offerings since the Athlon XP days.

      Someone will eventually enter the market to compete with Intel, it's not going to be AMD though. The writing has been on the wall since they spun off their fabrication unit.

    3. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by n30na · · Score: 1

      I've never heard of nvidia having anticompetitive practices.. not questioning you, just curious if someone could expand on it.

    4. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by Buminatrain · · Score: 1

      Perhaps you mean since Phenom II was butting it out pretty much head to head with Intel's Nephalem based chips. Which was just 3 years ago, as opposed to the 9 years you are suggesting.

      If you don't understand why AMD is the only company that can compete with Intel I suggest you look into the history of why AMD was/is allowed to continue manufacturing Intel compatible chips, and you might as well read about the 64 bit architecture that Intel uses while you're at it.

    5. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by Twinbee · · Score: 1

      Usually, I'm all for efficiency, and think it's a good thing when everybody isn't in on the game, as it wastes time for all of us on the average. If Amazon eat up all the smaller outlets (including in meatspace), and only two or three car manufacturers remain in the world, I would see that as progress, as it streamlines production, without unnecessary duplication (often by those who would be less efficient anyway).

      However, I do agree with you that I think at least TWO companies are required for any particular product, maybe three, and would be sad to see AMD go.

      --
      Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
    6. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by Gothmolly · · Score: 0

      You need architecture competition, who cares if AMD makes x64 knockoffs? Who cares if 10 companies make them?

      --
      I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
    7. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by TheKidWho · · Score: 1

      You mean like how a new FX-8150 just keeps up with an i7 920 that was released 4 years ago?

    8. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Knock-off? You do realize that AMD pretty much invented (derivation aside) the x86_64 instruction set that Intel now uses in their Core lineup, right?

    9. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by sphealey · · Score: 1

      Well, you are assuming that there are never dis-economies of scale. Which in my personal experience at least is not the case. Not always, and certainly a task such as designing the 787/A350 takes a very large entity. But I have seen many cases where the optimum entity size was exceeded and inefficiencies increased exponentially.

      sPh

    10. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by _Shad0w_ · · Score: 2, Informative

      AMD created x64; Intel licences it from them. In return AMD licences x86 from Intel. If AMD does go tits up at some point, it will almost certainly be Intel at the front of the queue to buy all the x64 rights.

      --

      Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.

    11. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by Buminatrain · · Score: 1

      What does that have to do with my statement, that at the time Phenom II's were competitive with Nephalem? I completely agree that Bulldozer is a non-competitive chip.

    12. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Phenom II was butting it out pretty much head to head with Intel's Nephalem based chips

      You're on crack.

    13. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by Sir_Sri · · Score: 2

      We MUST have competition in the high-end processor market.

      Strictly speaking you don't have that now. The best AMD offering is barely at the mid range of an Intel lineup. But that is, believe it or not quite secondary to the story.

      AMD bought ATI, that was probably good from a technical sense, but they went from having no money to having 5 billion dollars less than no money. So they sold their ARM business to Qualcomm. Who, if you frequent job boards for these things, are either actually at old AMD/ATI facilities, or they are right next to them, including ATI headquarters.

      Qualcomm have money, they have marketshare, and AMD is worth nothing, oh, and they've had tremendous success buying AMD's arm business. See what I'm getting at? AMD is in deep trouble, but someone has the foresight to be very well positioned to pick up all of the pieces...

      See now that AMD doesn't own globalfoundries they're free to do business with other customers, like Broadcomm, Qualcomm and a few others use them a major supplier, Qualcomm avoids anti trust issues buying from them, they can probably scavenge the remnants of the x86 licence for a pittance if they want it, and if not they can just pull in all of the staff worth having.

      We may see two high end processors, one ARM and one x86. That's probably bad for the market as a whole, but with windows and their 90% marketshare forking windows 8 to be both that's certainly a direction the industry can move in.

    14. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Perhaps you mean since Phenom II was butting it out pretty much head to head with Intel's Nephalem based chips.

      The only time I ever saw a Phenom II 'head to head' with a comparable Nehalem (i.e. not the fastest Phenom II vs slowest Nehalem) was in the GPU-limited benchmark results the AMD fanboys kept pushing, which were, you know, GPU-limited. It would have been sad if their rabid fanboyism wasn't so funny.

      When I build a new PC I buy the best hardware for the job, and that hasn't been AMD for a long time.

    15. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Bet you don't boycott Apple or Google over their practices. But maybe Microsoft?

    16. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      We MUST have competition in the high-end processor market.

      You mean in the chip fabrication business. It's not just a lack of competing designs. Intel is not a full process generation ahead of the entire industry. This along with their new tri-gate transistors is giving them huge advantages. The only company I can think of that might be close is IBM, but I don't know because I don't really follow them and last I checked Power 7 was either 28 or 32nm. TSMC sounded like they were going to have no trouble with the next few process nodes, but talk is cheap and they don't seem to be keeping up.

      Oh wait, is this whole dilemma an example of outsourcing vs vertical integration? Does this lesson apply more universally? That would be interesting.

    17. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by GarretSidzaka · · Score: 1

      your not alone, brotha.

    18. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by jalefkowit · · Score: 1

      If Amazon eat up all the smaller outlets (including in meatspace), and only two or three car manufacturers remain in the world, I would see that as progress, as it streamlines production, without unnecessary duplication (often by those who would be less efficient anyway).

      It certainly would cut out all that complicated "setting competitive prices" stuff that Amazon has to do now. Efficiency FTW!

    19. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      It is pretty sad that a previous generation chip beats the current. I love my phenomII. It was very price competitive than an icore5 (1st generation) and I do not care if it is just 10%. I got the whole damn desktop including an ATI 5750, 8 gigs of ram for just $550. Not bad for a gamer and VMWare workstation computer that is fast. Sure it is not the $1200 but I am on a budget. I do plan to replace the powersupply and vidoe card with an ATI 7850 within the next few months. It runs fine for what I need and all 6 cores only run at 65W!

      The Bulldozer would run over 110W and be loud, require a 700 watt power supply with that video card listed above (not the quiet 500 watt powersupply) and actually be slower unless I overclocked it and it produced heat and noise.

      The Thunderbird is AMDs pentium 4.

    20. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Well, their partnership program for game developers essentially ensures that resulting game will perform crap on competitor's GPUs. Granted, AMD came up with their "Gaming Evolved" counterpart, but it was nVidia who devised it and this solely is a reason to hate them passionately.

    21. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by LordLimecat · · Score: 1

      The problem is, yes, people can boycott personally. But when IT folks go to work, it would generally be way out of place for an employee to place his personal boycott preferences above the customer's requirements. Intel delivers the best performance-per-socket and performance-per-watt, so that is what people tend to buy.

      AMD is still competitive in some small areas, for instance if you needed AES or virtualization acceleration but didnt want to pay for the upgrade to the i5 line (since all AMD procs AFAIK have all features enabled, even their budget ones). AMD is also competitive if you need core count above all other considerations-- as I understand it, if you were to try to achieve high consolidation ratios in VMWare, you're better off going with lots of cores than lots of performance per core due to the way things are done (one thread per vcpu). Im not 100% why that would matter, but Im guessing some kind of penalty for switching between threads on a physical core vs having twice as many cores running half as fast and no switching penalty; Im not however sure if the switching penalty is sufficient to make AMD or Intel the better prospect.

    22. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 2

      "Strictly speaking you don't have that now."

      That is mostly true, and I don't like that situation at all.

      Back when Intel was pretty much the only player in the desktop market (there were a few Z-80 systems later on, but relatively few), the CPU could be half the cost of the whole PC, and that just kept getting worse until they actually got some competition in the market.

    23. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I have boycotted Intel ever since they destroyed OLPC's market. Sure, maybe OLPC kind of accomplished their goal through Intel's expense. And we the consumers got cheaper laptops, the atom line, and the entire net book category (and by extension, tablets) but it was still a crappy thing to do.

    24. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by ifiwereasculptor · · Score: 1

      What if they didn't sell, though? That's a funny thought. Since pretty much all OSs and programs are now 64-bit (even Adobe's suite is almost completely x86-64 by now, if I recall correctly), what would happen if Intel simply couldn't make x86-64 anymore because AMD decided they want to take it to the grave? I don't think it will actually happen ever, but Intel would be in a bit of a picke, wouldn't it?

    25. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well, we can only conclude, then, that you weren't paying any fscking attention. At the time, they were slamming the i3 and i5 series against the wall, and hanging in there with the low-to-mid range i7 series. No, they couldn't compete with the highest-end i7 product, but at a price discrepancy of several hundred dollars, what could you reasonably expect?

      Yes, the current-generation Core lineup beats AMD's lineup pretty much universally, but that performance is not indicative of the previous-generation Core products. Stop being obtuse.

    26. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by Shippu · · Score: 1

      Yes, they basically pay developers to gimp their games for radeon users. Also, they broke physx for anyone who had a radeon card in the system.

    27. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Their cross licensing agreements don't work like that.

      I suggest you read up on the subject further before making any more off the cuff comments.

    28. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sorry, not possible. Business are dismantled. Taking it to the grave is not even a possibility. It if quite funny in concept however. We might all have to switch to VLIW iTanium. :-P

    29. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That depends on what you want it to do for you. I only need CPU power for 2 things: Games and video encoding.

      Games can be done just fine by pretty much any CPU out there now as long as you have a decent GPU (I don't care if i7 gets 170fps and 8150 gets 100, they're both more than I need).

      In x264 video encoding, FX-8150 is only something like 1 or 2 frames/sec behind a i7-3770k, but it's like $140 cheaper. So I'll probably see what the FX-8350 has to offer, and likely pick that one up.

    30. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by cheesybagel · · Score: 2

      So they sold their ARM business to Qualcomm.

      Eh? AMD only got an ARM license recently while Qualcomm was selling Snapdragon four years ago. Intel were the ones which had purchased xScale off Digital but sold it off to Marvell.

    31. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I still blame them for what they did to 3DFX, but my knowledge on that was more of an issue with consumers and 3DFX listening to them.

      3DFX made power cards putting out as many frames as possible, so consumers asked for cards that gave better image quality. 3DFX answered with the Voodoo 5 & 6 lines that pushed image quality above frames per second, and at this time nVidia was pushing frames per second and not enough of the newer Voodoo cards sold even though people asked for such cards. nVidia bought them and their tech and promptly ignored it.

      I wish I could give an appropriate anecdote, but it is late. I want to blame nVidia for anything I can. I'm just starting to get over Microsoft for ruining Mechwarrior and buying Rare.

    32. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by currently_awake · · Score: 1

      Two competitors in the US political arena looks to be leading the country to ruin.

    33. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by Sir_Sri · · Score: 1

      ATI was making SoC's as infineon, those have become adreno as part of snapdragon. In the course of acquiring ATI and then divesting the SoC business they kinda went through the whole process quickly.

    34. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by Sir_Sri · · Score: 1

      I disagree, it stopped getting worse when we stopped seeing much benefit to marginally faster CPU's, and when the main market shifted from geeks willing to pay 5 grand for a computer to grandmothers looking to check e-mail for 300.

      But sure, competition is good, and the idea of having just Intel in the x86 business is not appealing.

    35. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by phoenix_rizzen · · Score: 1

      AMD had an ARM license and SoC division which they sold to Qualcomm. The Adreno GPU inside each Snapdragon SoC is derived from AMD IP.

    36. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by Guspaz · · Score: 1

      I don't think anybody can be blamed for 3DFX except 3DFX. They made a crappy product in the VSA-100 and bet the farm on it. The industry rejected the crappy product. nVidia picked up the pieces. I don't think you can blame them for the VSA-100 chip being crappy. The single-chip VSA-100 cards were simultaneously more expensive than the competition but slower in every way than the competition. Throwing multiple VSA-100 chips on a single card was just silly, and then you had the situation where the dual-chip voodoo 5 was outperformed by cheaper single-chip cards from their competitors.

      The last decent product 3DFX put out was the Voodoo 2. The Voodoo 3 wasn't a bad product per-se, but it was a result of their moronic purchase of STB. It was the fastest card on the market for a while, but then the GeForce 256 came out and from that point on 3DFX never had any competitive products again.

    37. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by Guspaz · · Score: 1

      You've got an extra letter in "Nehalem".

    38. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      Strictly speaking you don't have that now. The best AMD offering is barely at the mid range of an Intel lineup.

      As long as you can still save money buying enough computer for the user to get their work done that is irrelevant. As long as intel chipsets are expensive, intel motherboards will still carry a price premium.

      Speaking for myself, my problem is that AMD has alienated me with poor graphics driver support and poor linux support for hardware I happen to own. Intel has better linux support. But I realize I am part of a very small slice of the market.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    39. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      I've been boycotting intel for years because of their anti competitive bullshit. Nvidia too. Unfortunately I'm in a tiny minority. Nobody really gives a fuck.

      What's anticompetitive about nVidia? Are you really talking about PhysX? Virtually nobody out there has both nVidia and ATI cards in their system at the same time. Anyone who does is trying something exceptionally unsupported, I'd block it too since I would never want to support it.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    40. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by Rockoon · · Score: 2

      You mean like how a new FX-8150 just keeps up with an i7 920 that was released 4 years ago?

      FX-8150 $190

      If you are spending $190 on a processor, you have two choices.. the FX-8150 or the i5-3330. There is absolutely no doubt that the FX-8150 beats the crap out of that particular i5. Intel has no competitor to the FX-8150 at its price point.
      Why do you Intel fanboys always do faulty comparisons?

      --
      "His name was James Damore."
    41. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by gsnedders · · Score: 1

      The switching penalty is real, but isn't *massive*. The bigger issue is with four cores against eight you'd need double the single-thread performance to be equal, even ignoring the switching penalty: certainly, the Intel chips are far quicker at single-threaded operations (this is, after all, Bulldozer's weak point), but they aren't double.

      If you can keep all eight cores busy, Bulldozer is massively better in terms of performance/price compared with anything from Intel.

    42. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by Uberbah · · Score: 1

      Bet you don't boycott Apple or Google over their practices

      But neither of those companies is verging on monopoly status. If Yahoo goes under and Microsoft calls it quits on Bing, then we can talk about Google.

      But maybe Microsoft?

      A convicted monopolist.

    43. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by Uberbah · · Score: 1

      If Amazon eat up all the smaller outlets (including in meatspace), and only two or three car manufacturers remain in the world, I would see that as progress, as it streamlines production, without unnecessary duplication (often by those who would be less efficient anyway).

      Eh? When has the creation of a monopoly or an oligopoly benefited anyone but the primary shareholders of the companies involved? Can you name a single example?

      Here's a counter-example: the rollout of "upgrade fees" for cell phones in the U.S., which are nothing more than an excuse to screw their customers for more profit. If the market was competitive, Verizon never would have been able to get away with rolling out a $30 fee (yes I know they weren't the first) because Sprint would have eaten their lunch by offering Verizon customers $30 off the cost of a new phone if they switched carriers.

    44. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by Twinbee · · Score: 1

      The phone industry needs an overhaul yes, but I'd say Google and Amazon which are both pretty big have benefited everyone including the public.

      --
      Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
    45. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by LordLimecat · · Score: 1

      Doesnt AMD have 12-core solutions? I thought like a year or two ago they had some 12-core procs (Magny-Cours?)

    46. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Do you nitwits not understand what licensing means? They have a license to it, it is surely not revoked if AMD goes away. In any regard, they have had cross licenses for interoperability for decades. It likely falls under those. Who mods this crap up?

    47. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by unixisc · · Score: 1

      The best opportunity for that was in the 90s, and could have been done by Microsoft had they seriously promoted the RISC versions of NT. That would have given Alpha & MIPS a fair chance. Similarly, IBM could have done a better job on OS/2 for PPC, and helped make PREP successful. NEXTSTEP similarly could have been a good success on Sun, HP and maybe even SGI workstations.

      But what really destroyed the RISC advantage was NT becoming more and more multi threaded & multi-processed, so that tossing in more cores into a system did improve things, unlike earlier, when it was not an option. Once you could have 2, 3, 4, 8, or more cores on a CPU, any theoretical advantages of VLIW and practical advantages of RISC were pretty much washed away.

      Maybe one of AMD's best chances for survival is opening up the x64 architecture & licensing in ways similar to MIPS, ARM, SPARC or POWER. While they have no rights on x32, they could allow x64-only CPUs to get created, and let there be a marketplace in that, and only collect licensing fees. As it is, they've gotten rid of their fabs, and all their assembly sites in China, Thailand and elsewhere can go as well, and they can become a purely IP company. Oh, and spin off ATI as well, and let them compete independently against NVIDIA.

    48. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by unixisc · · Score: 1

      Architecture competition made sense in the 90s when there was little software for anything To do that now - when x86 is a clear winner, NT on RISC is dead, Linux/BSD on everything but x86 is marginal and most of the CPUs in question have either been abandoned, or are exclusive to servers - is a futile exercise.

      At this point, the only ones standing are x86 and ARM. PPC has its niche in the games market, while MIPS had its in the game market and right now survives only in the router market. SPARC & POWER are now exclusively server CPUs

    49. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by LUH+3418 · · Score: 1

      One of the silliest things about the multi-chip cards is that each chip needed its own instance of texture data... So you could have a Voodoo 5 with 64MB of memory onboard, but you were limited to less than 32MB of texture memory. Then they announced the Voodoo 5 6000, which was going to have 4 chips and 128MBs of RAM, but each chip was still limited to 32MB. A very poor use of RAM chips.

    50. Re:We NEED Processor Competition by gsnedders · · Score: 1

      Their workstation/server CPUs for use in multi-CPU applications go up to 16 cores (actually two eight core chips on a multi-chip module (MCM)), whereas Intel go up to eight.

  3. What is Samsung licensing the competing CPUs for? by PhrostyMcByte · · Score: 1

    I know one area where they really don't have a choice: Windows Phone. Microsoft standardizes the hardware, and so far Qualcomm has been the only option available.

  4. Samsung's relationship by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Samsung is licensing the SoCs for the US market only. The flagship products (Galaxy S II,III and Note) are all using Exynos for every other market.

    1. Re:Samsung's relationship by Buminatrain · · Score: 3, Informative

      Yup, entire article (if you can call it that) is garbage. Not even really clear to me what they're trying to say... "Qualcomm dominates this space"? what does that even mean? Qualcomm has no slice of the x86 market, Adreno GPU a success where AMD failed? Ummm... pretty sure Qualcomm needed a quality chip to integrate into it's Snapdragon and AMD was happy to sell one, unless AMD had some secret ARM program that they were planning on taking over the mobile market with that didn't succeed that I never heard of.

    2. Re:Samsung's relationship by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 2

      Samsung is licensing the SoCs for the US market only. The flagship products (Galaxy S II,III and Note) are all using Exynos for every other market.

      Yeah, the summary misses that. And, frankly, my takeaway from this is exactly the opposite of the submitters' - Qualcomm is beholden to the competition, and that's not a good situation to be in. Apple has shown where the future probably lies, being well on their way to bringing their chip production completely in-house; and Samsung obviously has the means to do so. I wouldn't be surprised to see Google itself do some strategic purchasing in this area, if it hasn't already.

      Microsoft might also get into this game, but I imagine they'll wait a bit longer and see how the Windows tablet market develops (or fails to develop). They're already in the weird position of moving into direct competition with their existing partners while pretending not to be, and right now they seem to be trying hard to pretend the elephant in the room doesn't exist. If they started buying up chip makers, that would basically be the official announcement "goodbye, guys, and thanks for all the fish". Not that Asus and others don't already know what's coming, but they probably would just as soon play along for a couple more years while they try to figure out what the heck they can do, since their entire business model involves being completely dependent on Microsoft.

      --
      #DeleteChrome
    3. Re:Samsung's relationship by ReeceTarbert · · Score: 1

      Samsung is licensing the SoCs for the US market only.

      Not to mention that the "article" is making it sound as AMD and Qualcomm are even in the same market: "Qualcomm, on the other hand, dominates this space". What space is the author talking about, exactly?

      Also, Qualcomm is licensing ARM Holdings PLC's technology, like just about everybody else, but you won't find many people waxing lyrical about them.

      And yes, we need AMD around -- unless we want to go back to days when a Pentium costed an arm and a leg just because Intel said so.

      RT.

    4. Re:Samsung's relationship by DamageLabs · · Score: 1

      We all know what is coming but it feels like the industry has been moving backwards the past few years. Features that were standard are disappearing being replaced by much more elaborate procedures in the name of idiot friendliness. The OS is being marginalised by it's shell UI. Not more computers, just appliances.

      I am starting to miss Microsoft. And that is not a good thing.

    5. Re:Samsung's relationship by PCM2 · · Score: 1

      Does Qualcomm even "dominate" the ARM space? Last I heard, Nvidia SoCs are showing up in quite a few "prominent devices," too, and there are numerous other vendors. Some of them target niche applications, but what does that matter? It just demonstrates that the ARM processor market is much less homogeneous than the x86/x64 market traditionally has been, so it's less likely that any single chipmaker will dominate. If anything, it's ARM Holdings that wins, not Qualcomm.

      --
      Breakfast served all day!
    6. Re:Samsung's relationship by Sir_Sri · · Score: 1

      They did, it was Adreno. They ran out of money due to the ATI acquisition before mobile really took off.

      Had they been able to hang onto everything they sold to Qualcomm they'd be doing much better right now.

    7. Re:Samsung's relationship by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There is a BIG difference between using someone's chips and licensing a chip.

      You don't need to license a chip if you are buying a chip from the vendor. Just like you and I can call up the vendor and buy 100k chips/month.
      On the other hand, you are licensing for the chip design and making it yourself in house.

    8. Re:Samsung's relationship by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      We currently have four major high-end ARM vendors in my opinion: TI's OMAP, Nvidia's Tegra, and Qualcomm Snapdragon, Samsung Exynos. This will go down to three soon, as TI might be killing OMAP for phones and tablets in the long run, and focus on automotive instead.

    9. Re:Samsung's relationship by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Actually, they DO dominate the space. Next set of Nexus devices will be sporting S4 quadcore Snapdragons. They were the preferred choice for Android devices before NVidia rolled out Tegra 2's- and Tegra 3's aren't as compelling as Google had hoped for (power consumption on Tegra's higher than they want...) TI's OMAP4's in a few design wins, but the bulk of the phone market (Not just US...remind yourself of this...) is with Qualcomm's parts.

    10. Re:Samsung's relationship by PCM2 · · Score: 1

      but the bulk of the phone market (Not just US...remind yourself of this...) is with Qualcomm's parts.

      Did I say phone market? ARM chips are used for much more than phones.

      --
      Breakfast served all day!
    11. Re:Samsung's relationship by unixisc · · Score: 1

      What about Freescale? Aren't they major in this market?

    12. Re:Samsung's relationship by tlhIngan · · Score: 1

      Samsung is licensing the SoCs for the US market only. The flagship products (Galaxy S II,III and Note) are all using Exynos for every other market.

      The reason for this is because of legacy fallback mode - worldwide, Samsung can ship a GSM/HSPA/LTE phone. But in the US, that would get you only two providers - one major and one minor. If you want to have the other two major carriers, you need to add CDMA2000 support, and Samsung's chipsets don't have that. Qualcomm's does, though and in one chipset you can have GSM/CDMA/CDMA2000/HSPA/LTE support (iPhone, for example uses this). Of course the tricky bit is now the antennas and power amps - having all those basebands means you need to carefully decide which bands you want to support.

      So far, chipset wise, there are three major players - Infineon (Intel), Qualcomm, and Broadcom - who make a complete end-to-end chipset for mobile telephony. It's not easy, and it's a huge patent minefield (and where patent exhaustion kicks in).

  5. Anything that ends in a question mark.... by chris200x9 · · Score: 4, Informative

    ...can be answered with a "no"

    1. Re:Anything that ends in a question mark.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Anything that ends in a question mark.... ...can be answered with a "no"

      9 of 10 times.

    2. Re:Anything that ends in a question mark.... by ThePeices · · Score: 4, Funny

      Anything that ends in a question mark.......can be answered with a "no"

      Can anything that ends in a question mark be answered no?

    3. Re:Anything that ends in a question mark.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No.

    4. Re:Anything that ends in a question mark.... by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 1

      I see what you did there.

      --
      #DeleteChrome
    5. Re:Anything that ends in a question mark.... by ericloewe · · Score: 5, Funny

      I must ask that you refrain from creating paradoxes. You might trap a defenceless AI that happened to be reading these comments.

      Have a heart and help those who can't defend themselves.

    6. Re:Anything that ends in a question mark.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You mean any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered "no".

    7. Re:Anything that ends in a question mark.... by Sir_Sri · · Score: 1

      In this case that would probably be incorrect.

      A major portion of Qualcomm is quite literally old AMD, because they bought it, and they've positioned themselves to be not the new AMD, just the new owners of anything AMD ever had worth paying for.

    8. Re:Anything that ends in a question mark.... by Gothmolly · · Score: 1

      But this is Slashdot, the navel-gazing, furiously-masturbating group of guys who flunked high school journalism. So expect a lot of question marks.

      --
      I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
    9. Re:Anything that ends in a question mark.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What did he do there?

    10. Re:Anything that ends in a question mark.... by supersloshy · · Score: 4, Funny

      What did he do there?

      No.

      --
      "Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
    11. Re:Anything that ends in a question mark.... by fellip_nectar · · Score: 1

      What's the square root of 36?

      --
      Worst. Signature. Ever.
    12. Re:Anything that ends in a question mark.... by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 1

      Norman, correlate.

      --
      #DeleteChrome
  6. i love propoganda by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    aint it great to have a qualcomm employee posting....and other posters wonder where people have gone ....well to real news places....after all , all your doing here is posting links to other news places....haha

  7. Maybe so ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    But one day, all that R&D and manufacturing plants that were sent overseas will come to bite them in the ass.

    Some sharp engineer over there will learn enough to go and start his own company and make chips - perhaps better than Intel or even come up with something so revolutionary that it makes Intel obsolete overnight.

    And we have no idea what the future holds. Maybe this quantum-light computing becomes commercially viable and that makes Intel obsolete.

    People thought Microsoft would be on top forever and look at them now.

    1. Re:Maybe so ... by the_other_chewey · · Score: 1, Informative

      But one day, all that R&D and manufacturing plants that were sent overseas will come to bite them in the ass.

      What are you talking about?

      All current-generation Intel fabs are in
      the US (note that 65nm is far from being current).

    2. Re:Maybe so ... by Btarlinian · · Score: 3, Informative

      Intel has sent nothing overseas. Their manufacturing R&D is all done in Oregon, and most of their leading edge chips are made in Oregon and Arizona with fabs in Israel and Ireland as well. They have exactly one fab in China that makes 65nm products, which now just consists of some old chipsets.

    3. Re:Maybe so ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/04/10/2236228/us-justice-dept-investigates-it-hiring-practices

    4. Re:Maybe so ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Israel and Ireland aren't overseas?

    5. Re:Maybe so ... by cheesybagel · · Score: 1

      There are trade restrictions on selling advanced lithography equipment to China that's why they only have 65nm production lines in there. Granted, Intel could be manufacturing more chips elsewhere, just not in China.

    6. Re:Maybe so ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you are someone who lives partly in the US, partly in Isreal, and partly in Ireland, then no.

    7. Re:Maybe so ... by Doctor_Jest · · Score: 1

      That's one helluva commute, I tell you.

      --
      It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
    8. Re:Maybe so ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      All current-generation Intel fabs are in
      the US (note that 65nm is far from being current).

      From the list "Fab 28 - Kiryat Gat, Israel - 22 nm"-

    9. Re:Maybe so ... by Guspaz · · Score: 2

      Your own link shows a 22nm fab in Israel, so all current-generation Intel fabs are not in the US.

    10. Re:Maybe so ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Some americans (including some presidents and presidential candidates) have no grasp on geographics.

    11. Re:Maybe so ... by dlingman · · Score: 1

      If you are someone who lives partly in the US, partly in Isreal, and partly in Ireland, then no.

      "Yo mamma is so fat she works in three Intel fabs at once." was the first thing that game to mind when I read that.

    12. Re:Maybe so ... by baka_toroi · · Score: 1

      The Sandy Bridge architecture was developed in Israel.

    13. Re:Maybe so ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The original Core architecture was developed in Israel, they have a second R&D group there.

  8. Qualcomm is but a shadow of AMD by bug1 · · Score: 1

    Qualcomm manufacture ARM chips, like a dozen other companies, there is nothing special about them.

    AMD are doing real long term innovation with integrating CPU and GPU.

    Qualcomm is licensing other peoples innovation and putting them near each other.

    1. Re:Qualcomm is but a shadow of AMD by Microlith · · Score: 1

      AMD are doing real long term innovation with integrating CPU and GPU.

      From all the reports coming out of AMD, they're doing no more than what every ARM SoC vendor is doing and including GPU cores on the CPU die, which they were doing well before AMD released the Fusion line.

      Only for AMD, the SoC design process they've adopted has resulted in newer processors being slower than older ones.

    2. Re:Qualcomm is but a shadow of AMD by Btarlinian · · Score: 4, Informative

      Qualcomm manufacture ARM chips, like a dozen other companies, there is nothing special about them.

      This is explicitly false. Qualcomm designed their own cores that implement the ARM instruction set. They did not license the Cortex A-x designs and glue them together (like every other ARM SoC vendor, including Samsung.) That also ignores the fact that they are the only ones making usable LTE basebands right now. Qualcomm right now is so dominant that if anything, they're the Intel of the mobile world.

    3. Re:Qualcomm is but a shadow of AMD by cheesybagel · · Score: 2

      Well Qualcomm designs their own chips. They don't just license a CPU core. In that regard they do something similar to AMD which licenses the X86 architecture from Intel but design their own chips. It used to be that AMD had their own manufacturing capabilities but this is no longer true. We can thank Hector Ruiz for that.

    4. Re:Qualcomm is but a shadow of AMD by cheesybagel · · Score: 1

      Remember the Cyrix MediaGX? What the ARM vendors are doing isn't new either.

    5. Re:Qualcomm is but a shadow of AMD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      why would anyone want to reimplement the arm instruction set? not that it is super complicated, it has been done before, but ARM has shown every time that they intent to protect it with lawyers and patents so you'll need a license from them whether you get the source from them or write it your self

    6. Re:Qualcomm is but a shadow of AMD by Sir_Sri · · Score: 2, Interesting

      In AMD's defence - CPU speed doesn't actually matter that much. This is one of those odd quirks of where we are in the software - hardware cycles. A good GPU will likely have *much* more impact on your noticeable computer performance than a 10% faster CPU. It's really bad form to release a brand new CPU that is actually slower than your old one (clock for clock, in absolute terms, etc.) and the tech press pounced on them for it. But AMD *could* have and should have made the argument probably correctly that you're better off with an AMD Fusion product than an Intel i5 with on chip piece of shit HD graphics 3000 from intel. Granted intel has improved a lot now that they've given up on Larrabee but their HD graphics chips are still horrible compared to what AMD (ATI) can bring to the table.

      I will point out that it was AMD's ARM SoC lineup (which they Acquired from ATI) that Qualcomm is actually doing this with, because Qualcomm bought the whole ARM SoC business from AMD where they were leading the competition. So sure, they aren't doing anything the other guys aren't but they were at the forefront with SoC when they still had the ARM business.

    7. Re:Qualcomm is but a shadow of AMD by Kjella · · Score: 1

      From all the reports coming out of AMD, they're doing no more than what every ARM SoC vendor is doing and including GPU cores on the CPU die, which they were doing well before AMD released the Fusion line.

      Their goal is far more than that, it's not just about the die but integrating CPU and GPU cores into what they call a Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) where they live in the same address space and you can alternate between CPU and GPU processing with extremely little overhead. It's a huge change in the way you think of computing. The downside is that nothing changes without software support, your regular CPU or GPU-based code will take no advantage of it and in practice AMD doesn't have the weight to throw around to make people write for HSA, not to mention you're locking yourself into an AMD solution. In short, it's a bit too niche and they haven't really gotten much synergy from it.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    8. Re:Qualcomm is but a shadow of AMD by petermgreen · · Score: 1

      Because they think (rightly or wrongly) that they can do better than the designs arm supplies and hence get an edge on their competitors.

      --
      note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
    9. Re:Qualcomm is but a shadow of AMD by petermgreen · · Score: 1

      They did not license the Cortex A-x designs and glue them together (like every other ARM SoC vendor, including Samsung.)

      Afaict marvell also have their own implementations of the arm instruction set. I dunno if they are putting it in phone-targetted products or not though.

      --
      note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
    10. Re:Qualcomm is but a shadow of AMD by notdotcom.com · · Score: 1

      In AMD's defence - CPU speed doesn't actually matter that much. This is one of those odd quirks of where we are in the software - hardware cycles. A good GPU will likely have *much* more impact on your noticeable computer performance than a 10% faster CPU. It's really bad form to release a brand new CPU that is actually slower than your old one (clock for clock, in absolute terms, etc.) and the tech press pounced on them for it. But AMD *could* have and should have made the argument probably correctly that you're better off with an AMD Fusion product than an Intel i5 with on chip piece of shit HD graphics 3000 from intel. Granted intel has improved a lot now that they've given up on Larrabee but their HD graphics chips are still horrible compared to what AMD (ATI) can bring to the table.

      Well, the benefit to using Intel for "everything" is that at least their drivers are open source. I have a brand new i5 laptop for work. While they are handed out with windows, they do allow you to use any OS that you'd like (unsupported). Using Linux with the i5 machine showed intel for Proc, Wireless, and graphics, and I didn't have to mess with or agree to use "non-free" drivers to operate the machine's wireless or to run dual 24-inch 1920x1200 monitors with no problems.

      Of course, I'm a 2D kind of guy for work, but when the machine "just works" with almost any OS that you can throw at it, I'm happy.

      --
      Grandpa: My Homer is not a communist. He may be a liar, a pig, an idiot, a communist, but he is not a porn star.
    11. Re:Qualcomm is but a shadow of AMD by Almost-Retired · · Score: 1

      AMD are doing real long term innovation with integrating CPU and GPU.

      No shit sherlock. AMD buying ATI was the dumbest thing they ever did. Its likely, and I'm guessing here, that the ATI division has eaten their profits from the cpu business because somebody convinced AMD that ATI was the Next Big Thing.

      I have purchased, and thrown out, 3 fairly top of the line ATI video cards over the last decade because I always wanted to support the underdog. And every time I have been burned because their drivers are such crap and unstable. Each time, before I purchased, I was in contact with one of their software honcho's, who each time proclaimed this time it would be different, but it never was right. Their linux drivers were faster than the linux drivers but not by day & night diffs, both used a lot of cpu & theirs tore up the machines latency where the vesa driver didn't. The linux drivers were slower often displaying what my machine was doing a second or more after the machine had done it, but were stable. But they were always very careful about throwing code over the fence to the linux folks, and they always did it 6 months after the card the code was for was out of the supply pipeline. Couple that with changing the card so it wasn't compatible with even the commercially available drivers I ordered specifically for that card, at $50, and when it arrived, it wouldn't run the card, ATI had changed the card in the box without changing the color of a single dot above an i on the box, or on any of the enclosures. No refunds available, and no, we don't have a driver for that card yet. The situation did improve slightly with the next 2 cards, at least linux could run them in the vesa mode, at limited resolution of course.

      Nvidia is finally getting religion, throwing usable code over the fence for the neauvou driver while the cards are still on the dealers shelves, so while I might not be able to do 500 fps on this linux box, it is now my connection when a video I'm watching stutters. Running the neauvou driver. Dead stable too.

      After a while, its so nice to quit hammering yourself in the head, trying to support a company that refuses to support the customer. This nvidia card is now getting long in the tooth, I finally had to replace that puny bushing grade fan a few months ago, but it still Just Works. That is all I ever asked.

      Cheers, Gene

    12. Re:Qualcomm is but a shadow of AMD by Sir_Sri · · Score: 1

      GPU acceleration is a lot more than just games.

      Also, linux is about 1.5% of the market for desktops, so I don't see that as a huge market shaper.

      Even if you want something like a full speed SATAIII setup (which you will definitely notice on linux) it's cheaper to get an AMD system that can do that than an Intel one.

    13. Re:Qualcomm is but a shadow of AMD by bemymonkey · · Score: 1

      LOL what??? Intel integrated graphics have pretty much ALWAYS been enough for basic office and internet stuff... hell, I have an Intel 945 something or other Pentium M based notebook that runs Windows 7 just fine with Aero turned off.

      The only place you're going to see a difference is in games or other similarly graphics-heavy applications... and the world isn't filled with only 1. kids who can't afford proper graphics cards and 2. people using serious graphical applications. For the bulk of computer users, if it can play Youtube 1080p and Blu-Ray (rips), the GPU is more than fast enough.

      Now if you'd replaced GPU with SSD in your post, I might be more inclined to agree with you...

    14. Re:Qualcomm is but a shadow of AMD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They have an ARM license, one of the more expensive ones that allows them to do more custom stuff.

    15. Re:Qualcomm is but a shadow of AMD by Svartalf · · Score: 1

      1) They've got a design license like Marvell has.
      2) You can optimize the design around the instruction set arch and gain power-management stuff that the straight-up Cortex A8/A9/A15 won't do for you.

      --
      I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
    16. Re:Qualcomm is but a shadow of AMD by Sir_Sri · · Score: 1

      I have an Intel 945 something or other Pentium M based notebook that runs Windows 7 just fine with Aero turned off.

      I think you contradicted your own argument. You would (to reiterate my own words) likely notice aero being turned on a lot more than you would notice a 10% faster CPU.

      The only place you're going to see a difference is in games or other similarly graphics-heavy applications.

      Youtube 1080p and Blu-Ray (rips), the GPU is more than fast enough.

      Again, the difference between an Intel HD graphics whatever and a Radeon 6000 series integrated chips are actually noticeable on these applications...

      1. kids who can't afford proper graphics cards

      or anyone who decides they want to try and particular game before spending a couple of hundred bucks on hardware to play it properly. I make games for a living and Intel graphics cards have been fucking the PC gaming industry for years.

      Now if you'd replaced GPU with SSD in your post, I might be more inclined to agree with you...

      SSD is a more complicated argument. The Core 2 (nehalem) processors, that are i5's i7's etc. don't support full SSD speeds, but are much older, the newer Sandy Bridge do, but an i3 sandy bridge or ivy bridge is usually more expensive than a comparable amd system, but not by much etc. etc. And the Intel parts have much better battery life. If you have a nehalem or older board and want cheap - AMD makes a compelling product, but if you have a little bit more money to spend the waters are muddied considerably, and both platforms support SSD's at full speed these days.

      Also, Windows 8, much as I hate it, uses GPU acceleration by default (which does actually make it pretty snappy, which is about the only good thing you can say about it). And that behaves better on AMD than Intel parts.

    17. Re:Qualcomm is but a shadow of AMD by bemymonkey · · Score: 1

      "I think you contradicted your own argument. You would (to reiterate my own words) likely notice aero being turned on a lot more than you would notice a 10% faster CPU."

      You do realize I was referring to an 8+ years old mobile chipset-integrated GPU, right? Even many dedicated cards from that era won't run Aero...

      "Again, the difference between an Intel HD graphics whatever and a Radeon 6000 series integrated chips are actually noticeable on these applications..."

      I have both here (a Radeon HD6670 in a desktop and an Intel HD3000 in a laptop, to be exact), as well as a laptop with the 4500MHD and another older desktop with an HD5450... none of them show ANY performance difference whatsoever when putting out HD video. Even Youtube 1080p is accelerated perfectly on the multiple generations old 4500MHD.

      "or anyone who decides they want to try and particular game before spending a couple of hundred bucks on hardware to play it properly. I make games for a living and Intel graphics cards have been fucking the PC gaming industry for years."

      Let's see... the ability to *maybe* try a game that I might want to play some day, or two to three times as much battery life with the same battery capacity? Sounds like a no-brainer to me... and sub-50W desktop systems? Thank you Intel!

      "SSD is a more complicated argument. The Core 2 (nehalem) processors, that are i5's i7's etc. don't support full SSD speeds, but are much older, the newer Sandy Bridge do, but an i3 sandy bridge or ivy bridge is usually more expensive than a comparable amd system, but not by much etc. etc. And the Intel parts have much better battery life. If you have a nehalem or older board and want cheap - AMD makes a compelling product, but if you have a little bit more money to spend the waters are muddied considerably, and both platforms support SSD's at full speed these days."

      You're not making a lot of sense. Any old processor "supports full SSD speeds"... if you're talking about certain boards/chipsets being limited to, say, SATA or SATA II, then yes, some SSDs may not be utilized to their full extent, in that you may not reach the advertized sequential read/write speeds - but the important part that makes your system seem more snappy is still there: Reduced access times.

      As for Windows 8 being faster (or "behaving better") on AMD parts: Do you have anything to back up that claim with?

    18. Re:Qualcomm is but a shadow of AMD by Sir_Sri · · Score: 1

      You do realize I was referring to an 8+ years old mobile chipset-integrated GPU, right? Even many dedicated cards from that era won't run Aero...

      not relevant that it is 8 years old.

      Seriously. I've got two machines that are from 2003 that both worth reasonably well with decent GPU's in them.

      I have both here (a Radeon HD6670 in a desktop and an Intel HD3000 in a laptop, to be exact), as well as a laptop with the 4500MHD and another older desktop with an HD5450... none of them show ANY performance difference whatsoever when putting out HD video. Even Youtube 1080p is accelerated perfectly on the multiple generations old 4500MHD.

      Interesting, because I see a significant difference between my AMD with 3200 and an Intel with an HD 3000... and AMD wins hands down. Then again, I'm running windows8 on that laptop now. I didn't benchmark it before 'upgrading'.

      Let's see... the ability to *maybe* try a game that I might want to play some day, or two to three times as much battery life with the same battery capacity? Sounds like a no-brainer to me... and sub-50W desktop systems? Thank you Intel!

      sure. If battery life matters to you more than performance intel has a huge leg up. I never said it didn't. AMD is grasping at straws, they should at least grasp at sensible ones. If you're happy with a laptop with 3 hours of battery life, or don't care about battery life, AMD has a compelling offering say in a desktop in the 150-250 dollar price bracket (bit more on laptops), much beyond that and you're better off with an intel part and a dedicated GPU.

      You're not making a lot of sense. Any old processor "supports full SSD speeds"... if you're talking about certain boards/chipsets being limited to, say, SATA or SATA II, then yes, some SSDs may not be utilized to their full extent, in that you may not reach the advertized sequential read/write speeds - but the important part that makes your system seem more snappy is still there: Reduced access times.

      Ok, you can't put a nehalem processor on a motherboard that supports full SATAIII speeds, if you want to be precise about it. The marvel controllers that claim to support it are on a single pcix lane so cap out in practice around 450 MB/s and don't work worth shit half the time (as in half the time the machine won't detect a drive on the controller etc., and thats on all of our test machines). Dollar for dollar new AMD parts are about equivalent to nehalem parts, because that's where they line up in performance. In that segment AMD processors at least support a full speed SSD at the same time.

      As for Windows 8 being faster (or "behaving better") on AMD parts: Do you have anything to back up that claim with?

      the aforementioned windows 8 laptop and our testing lab.

      Please don't confuse my statement to be something that it isn't. If you're buying cheap AMD has a competitive offering to intel, even if they haven't really pitched it well, if you want good you don't want AMD and haven't for the last 4 or 5 years at least.

    19. Re:Qualcomm is but a shadow of AMD by bemymonkey · · Score: 1

      "Interesting, because I see a significant difference between my AMD with 3200 and an Intel with an HD 3000... and AMD wins hands down. Then again, I'm running windows8 on that laptop now. I didn't benchmark it before 'upgrading'."

      In *video*? How do you tell the difference between smooth-as-butter and smooth-as-butter? :p

      What I really don't understand is: Why is AMD, with an (unfortunately) inferior product, trying to compete with Intel? They should be undercutting them at every turn instead of putting similar-performance products on the same price level... to my eyes, AMD has a clusterfuck of different platforms, high power consumption and even a bit of a history of instability (OK, that's a bit of personal bias from my own days with AMD machines... i.e. my teens and early twenties) - in order to present a good value, they'd need to offer the same performance at half the price. Otherwise I'll stick with cooler, more efficient, faster and more hassle-free Intel parts, even if I get less cores or less MHz.

    20. Re:Qualcomm is but a shadow of AMD by unixisc · · Score: 1

      Except for all the innovation and patents that they developed around cellular technology? Just about any cellphone technology these days involves QCOM patents - can one say that about any item & AMD?

  9. $la$hdot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Ofc...

  10. The reason Samsung is using Qualcomm stuff... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ...is simple. They simply can't produce enough Exynos chips to put in all the mobile phones they are selling right now.

    1. Re:The reason Samsung is using Qualcomm stuff... by Buminatrain · · Score: 1

      It's actually due to the way carriers operate within the US.

    2. Re:The reason Samsung is using Qualcomm stuff... by Btarlinian · · Score: 2, Informative

      No it's because Qualcomm owns the LTE market. In order to sell a phone with LTE you have to buy a baseband from Qualcomm since they make the only capable LTE chips on the market. Qualcomm (i.e., it's foundries) have been capacity constrained for at least a year now so they can insist you buy their entire SoC with integrate LTE baseband if you want an LTE chip. (That's ignoring the fact that you usually have less power consumption if your baseband and SoC are on the same die.)

    3. Re:The reason Samsung is using Qualcomm stuff... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Samsung's latest Galaxy S3 now comes with Exynos quad core with LTE, so your information is outdated.

    4. Re:The reason Samsung is using Qualcomm stuff... by Svartalf · · Score: 1

      The question would be...is the LTE part of the SOC or on a differing part?

      --
      I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
    5. Re:The reason Samsung is using Qualcomm stuff... by Btarlinian · · Score: 1

      As I said, nearly everyone uses Qualcomm's SoCs for their high end phones if they want LTE because Qualcomm has a near monopoly on LTE basebands. (Even the new Exynos based SIII's with LTE use a separate Qualcomm baseband.) It's almost always better for power efficiency if you have an integrated baseband. Until recently, Qualcomm would not sell you a separate LTE baseband, so if you wanted LTE you had to buy their SoC as well. (This was likely due to dedicating their stand-alone baseband supply to the iPhone5 ramp.)

    6. Re:The reason Samsung is using Qualcomm stuff... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Counterpoint:

      http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone+5+Teardown/10525/2#s38298

      Qualcomm LTE Modem.

      Apple Apps Processor.

      No Snapdragon.

    7. Re:The reason Samsung is using Qualcomm stuff... by Btarlinian · · Score: 1

      Apple was pretty much the only company that could demand decoupled basebands at that time. As others have mentioned, there are other phones coming out know with standalone Qualcomm basebands. And that still doesn't account for the fact that baseband integration improves power efficiency (assuming everything else is equal, which is not always the case.)

  11. Re:anti competitive? by Microlith · · Score: 2

    Split the company in two. Mandatory patent cross licensing between the two plus mandatory licensing to any 3rd party that asks.

  12. Re:anti competitive? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Split Intel in two companies.

  13. Sideshow by rssrss · · Score: 1

    FTA:

    Qualcomm started life in 1985 as a maker of cellular communications semiconductors, and it hasn't strayed far from that formula. It's pretty much the go-to company for CDMA chips and is now taking a lead in 4G LTE as well.

    .

    General purpose processors are a sideline for Qualcomm.

    --
    In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
  14. In related news /. signal-to-noise at all time low by BumpyCarrot · · Score: 1

    The summaries are complete turd of late, never mind the articles. Sort something out.

    --
    Do you see what I did there?
  15. AMD ~= Qualcomm by ThePeices · · Score: 2

    Not a fair comparison. AMD design their CPU's in-house. Qualcomm licence theirs from ARM.

    1. Re:AMD ~= Qualcomm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And AMD will be doing both (more x86, add ARM) in the near future. If they can manage to stay afloat for the next 12-24 months, AMD will emerge a strong competitor (albeit with a pretty late start) in the ARM-licensee space.

    2. Re:AMD ~= Qualcomm by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 2

      My impression is that what ARM licenses out is the high-level architecture - instruction set, external hardware interface, that kind of thing. But not low-level hardware design that implements all that stuff, so every vendor really does their own thing there. In which case it wouldn't be all that different from AMD, since they also license a lot of the architecture from Intel, and then implement it differently.

    3. Re:AMD ~= Qualcomm by Guy+Harris · · Score: 2

      My impression is that what ARM licenses out is the high-level architecture - instruction set, external hardware interface, that kind of thing. But not low-level hardware design that implements all that stuff, so every vendor really does their own thing there.

      My impression is that ARM licenses both - you can design your own ARM processor core and license only, for example, the instruction set, or you can license one of ARM's core designs to, for example, include in a system-on-a-chip along with your own designs or other licensed designs.

    4. Re:AMD ~= Qualcomm by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 1

      I admit I don't really know the details, so thanks for clarifying.

      Do you know which one of those two Qualcomm does?

    5. Re:AMD ~= Qualcomm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I've done ARM SoCs (arm7 though) what you get from ARM is either a hard macro or a synthesisable RTL CPU core and you just "wire" it all up,with the
      stuff needed around it like memory controllers peripherals etc. you can also get alot of that that from ARM or you build that yourself

    6. Re:AMD ~= Qualcomm by Guy+Harris · · Score: 1

      Do you know which one of those two Qualcomm does?

      I don't know for certain, but, from Qualcomm's Snapdragon page, the reference to "ARM Cortex A5" in the description of the Snapdragon S4 Play, I infer that they licensed a core from ARM.

      The other Snapdragons have a "Krait" processor, and, from this Qualcomm press release, which speaks of another Snapdragon "[featuring] a 1.5GHz quad-core CPU—based on Qualcomm’s Krait micro-architecture", I infer that Krait may be a Qualcomm design rather than an ARM design. Qualcomm's Snapdragon S4 white paper also seems to suggest that it's an ARM processor core designed by Qualcomm.

      So I think the one-word answer is "both".

    7. Re:AMD ~= Qualcomm by phoenix_rizzen · · Score: 1

      Uhm, not even close.

      There are two type of ARM licenses: CPU architecture license, and CPU 'hardware' license.

      Samsung and TI license hardware IP from ARM, basically using ARM's 'building blocks' to build SoCs. Thier current SoCs are basically bog-standard Cortex-A9s.

      Qualcomm and Apple license the architecture and instruction set from ARM but build their own custom CPUs and SoCs. Thier CPUs are better than Cortex-A9s, but slightly less than Cortex-A15s.

    8. Re:AMD ~= Qualcomm by hazydave · · Score: 1

      Nope. In fact, it's usually the opposite. Most companies just license cores from ARM. That'll be in the form of a high level, synthesizable processor, GPU, etc. but they're pretty much locked down as-is, few or no modification rights.

      Others have the full "Architecture" license, that allows them to make changes to existing ARM cores, or design their own from scratch. Some companies have only done a little with this... Samsung, for example, was one of the companies that made a 1GHz+ ARM Cortex A8 design (the "Hummingbird" core use in the S1 and the Apple A4 chip)... you had to make changes to the original design to run much about 600MHz. Other companies, like Qualcomm, have done much more aggressive in-house designs. They have to be verified as compliant by ARM, it's more work for them, thus this is a higher-priced option.

      A bunch of architecture licensees haven't done much obvious with it yet. Samsung did the Hummingbird, but then moved back to bog standard A9 cores for most of their more recent processors. nVidia has an Architecture License, and they're reportedly doing their own ARM V8 processor (64-bit), but their current Tegras are all using standard ARM cores. Microsoft even has an architecture license, but has yet to make any chip -- though given their custom work on the X-Box 360, they certainly have the expertise, even being seen largely as a software company. And of course, Apple not only has an Architecture License, they bought Intrinsity, a company that worked with Samsung on speeding up the A8 (that's kind of their thing, using odd transistor choices, dynamic latches, etc. to speed up chip designs without requiring a die shrink), but it took the iPhone 5 for them to deliver a chip with any custom CPU work.

      --
      -Dave Haynie
    9. Re:AMD ~= Qualcomm by hazydave · · Score: 1

      All of the Qualcomm cores are custom in-house designs. The Scorpion core was fairly similar to the A8, but it ran really fast, so it was sold for these last several years as an A9 alternative. The A9 is about 20% faster than an A8 at the same clock speed, which is why most Qualcomm phones were running at 1.5GHz or so.

      The latest Krait design is theirs as well -- that's an "A15 class" core, like the core Apple used in the A6, but not based on the A15. Qualcomm claims about 30% speed improvement over the A9 at the same clock speed, the A15 is expected to run about 35% faster. The Krait is fully ARM compliant, of course, and designed under the Architecture license.

      --
      -Dave Haynie
    10. Re:AMD ~= Qualcomm by hazydave · · Score: 1

      Samsung clearly has or had an Architectural licence as well... their Hummingbird core was a modified A8, tweaked to run at 1GHz+. This was used in various Samsung SOCs, including the A4 they made for Apple and the chip used in the Galaxy S1. Sure, they used the A9 in recent designs -- so did Apple, until last month. nVidia as well -- they're a known Architecture licensee, and also known to be working on a next generation custom design, but they're using the A9 right now.

      Basically, ARM did a much better job on the A9 design, thus, not too many custom versions (the Scorpion from Qualcomm is an A8-class core that runs really fast, not quite an A9).

      TI has yet to build their own core -- they've spent most of their efforts on the rest of the SOC. And they're in trouble, at least according to the rumor mill, even looking to sell off their OMAP division.

      --
      -Dave Haynie
  16. Semi-Accurate on why AMD is cratering by steveha · · Score: 5, Interesting

    AMD management made some bad decisions, then got rid of all the people who argued against those decisions. Now they are going to cut costs by firing the engineers who could develop new products. It is now inevitable: AMD is doomed.

    "Unless the entire board and their puppets are removed in the next week or two, the little chance AMD has now will vanish. There is no up side here."

    AMD's layoffs target engineering -- Board incompetence dooms the company

    "AMD senior management, or (mis)management, as we are now calling them, have delayed the roadmap past the critical point. Project Win was survivable, barely. The churn of technical talent made things worse, far worse, and put the company at the breaking point. Layoffs sapped confidence, and senior management was negligent in not messaging a damn thing to those who mattered internally and externally. The cuts that will follow ensure that the plans in place are not achievable, and SemiAccurate can not see AMD surviving at this point."

    AMD is imploding because management doesn't understand semiconductors -- Analysis: You can't Win by ignoring fundamentals

    --
    lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
    1. Re:Semi-Accurate on why AMD is cratering by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not quite different of what happened at HP. The difference lies in the amount of cash they have to slow down the sinking.

    2. Re:Semi-Accurate on why AMD is cratering by Gothmolly · · Score: 1

      You realize that AMD management doesn't care if they succeed right? They're just riding the wave as long as they can, before they switch to other jobs.

      --
      I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
    3. Re:Semi-Accurate on why AMD is cratering by Pulzar · · Score: 1

      Charlie is an armchair CEO of AMD, and his analysis is about as accurate as the name of his website suggests. He has a handful of insiders at mid-level positions and his views of what's going in the company are heavily skewed by those people's opinions.

      --
      Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
    4. Re:Semi-Accurate on why AMD is cratering by steveha · · Score: 2

      Charlie is an armchair CEO of AMD, and his analysis is about as accurate as the name of his website suggests.

      He is an analyst; his job is to write analyses. He has been rather harsh on AMD, but then he has been harsh on Intel and harsh on nVidia also.

      His predictions about Ultrabooks from a year ago were accurate. (He said they were overpriced and wouldn't sell well.)

      I'm actually hoping that his current predictions of doom for AMD won't come true. What he wrote was "if the planned layoffs happen, AMD is doomed"; there is at least a tiny chance that maybe the planned layoffs won't actually happen.

      If the layoffs are as he describes, then I'll join him in predicting doom for AMD. AMD has no future without its engineers. The plan to outsource engineering for the video cards strikes me as insane; there is an old saying, "You can't outsource your core competency." AMD right now is a design house that hires out the actual fabbing of its processors. If it hires out design and fabbing, what is left for AMD to do that really adds value?

      If AMD hires out the engineering on video cards, either they will end up spending more on quality engineering, in which case they didn't save any money (or their costs actually go up!); or they will spend less on middle-of-the-road engineering, in which case they won't be able to compete with nVidia.

      Maybe, just maybe, the hot light of publicity before the planned round of layoffs will make AMD management think twice. If not, a few years from now, Qualcomm will be buying up AMD intellectual property at fire-sale prices when AMD goes under. (Or maybe Intel will buy it all and just shred it.)

      --
      lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
    5. Re:Semi-Accurate on why AMD is cratering by Pulzar · · Score: 2

      He is an analyst; his job is to write analyses. He has been rather harsh on AMD, but then he has been harsh on Intel and harsh on nVidia also.

      I didn't disagree that that's his job, I'm just saying that he does it poorly. He has a sprinkle of insider information, and paints a very inaccurate picture around it. He probably heard that AMD is planning on licensing out its graphics cores, and misunderstood it as outsourcing. Or, he heard that Markham location will be hit hard and he thinks graphics cores are done there, but they haven't been for many years.

      The graphics cores are one thing where AMD is still near the leading edge, and Rory Read has repeatedly said that he wants to restructure the company to use its strengths better. If they start outsourcing things, graphics will be the last one to go, when they sell of the company and shut the doors.

      It's one thing to be harsh, AMD deserves it, it's another to be completely inaccurate.

      --
      Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
    6. Re:Semi-Accurate on why AMD is cratering by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I would be more impressed with your comments if you would provide specific examples. What has Charlie said that was inaccurate?

      He probably heard that AMD is planning on licensing out its graphics cores, and misunderstood it as outsourcing.

      Your thoughts on what he "probably" heard do not impress me. Please provide examples of past predictions that have been proven to be wrong.

      Since you are raising doubts, I decided to do a check. I remembered that AMD had layoffs in 2011. Did Charlie accurately report on those?

      2011-11-02 Semi-Accurate: Rumors of AMD Executive Layoff Pick Up Steam

      2011-11-03 CNN Money: AMD cuts 10% of its workforce

      So, chalk one up for Charlie.

      I'm not, necessarily, saying you are wrong. I'm saying you need to give examples to back up what you are saying.

      Rory Read has repeatedly said that he wants to restructure the company to use its strengths better. If they start outsourcing things, graphics will be the last one to go, when they sell of the company and shut the doors.

      Charlie agrees with you that it would be insane to outsource the graphics. Quote:

      Sources tell SemiAccurate that the one division of AMD that is making money, graphics, is going to have a lot of the engineering outsourced. The new crop of senior managers doesn't seem to like the Canadian outpost much, and the result is going to be seen in the layoffs. Far from their being any logic to this move, it seems to be more borne out of personal fiefdoms than sanity, and will sink the company. There are a lot of names bandied about with Emile Ianni being named more often than others. We shall see who gets the bonuses soon enough.

      The date SemiAccurate hears is October 25th, conveniently after the company's quarterly conference call. If these layoffs happen as deeply as we hear, and more problematically where we hear, we can not see AMD surviving.

      October 25? Less than a week away. I'll watch for AMD news.

      By the way, Charlie posts on Slashdot sometimes. What you write here, he might see and even respond.

    7. Re:Semi-Accurate on why AMD is cratering by bingoUV · · Score: 1

      If the layoffs are as he describes, then I'll join him in predicting doom for AMD. AMD has no future without its engineers.

      Problem is, for quality employees, announcement of layoffs is a sign to move on. If you have brains, you would work at a company that respects you. Public announcement of layoffs is NOT respecting your employees. So even cancelling the layoffs is not a complete remedy.

      --
      Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
    8. Re:Semi-Accurate on why AMD is cratering by Pulzar · · Score: 1

      Since you are raising doubts, I decided to do a check. I remembered that AMD had layoffs in 2011. Did Charlie accurately report on those?

      Again, the facts that he repeats from his sources are fine, it's the outlandish analysis that I have the problem with. Everybody and their dog in the industry knows about October 25th AMD layoffs, and that they are going to hit Markham hard. But he then takes those two (accurate) facts, and makes a crazy story about how AMD is going to outsource graphics because of "personal fiefdoms" that target the "Canadian outpost".

      It's the same as the post you quote about the last round... He was told about the layoffs, but decided to add a bit of flair by saying they'll be wiping out executives, even though it ended being the usual "bottom 10%" cleanup.

      --
      Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
  17. Re:What is Samsung licensing the competing CPUs fo by Sir_Sri · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Samsung has to run its parts and products business independently, otherwise their parts business would lose Apple as a customer, and loathe as anyone is to admit it, Apple is a customer you'd rather not lose.

  18. Is this article the next worst article ever? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Only in a metaphorical sense could an ARM chipmaker, competing in the mobile space, be "the next AMD", when AMD barely touched mobile and hasn't touched ARM, nor has Qualcomm touched x86. A less disingenuous way of putting the question is "is Qualcomm Intel's main rival now?" due to the shift in the marketplace toward mobiles. If anything, "Is Qualcomm the next ARM?" would have correctly represented their argument, but would not be so sensational.

    The article also doesn't reconcile the supposition with its own timing, now that AMD looks to collapse in on itself (which they acknowledge). So saying that Qualcomm is the next AMD is equivalent to saying that Qualcomm is the next Intel rival likely to fail, but that's not what they were saying at all.

    In short, article sucks, is badly written, why is it on front page, etc.

    1. Re:Is this article the next worst article ever? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      AMD is planning on integrating an ARM core in their future chips. Which is going to be awesome. Although they run a similar risk to what Intel had with Merced wherein they add the core and the costs associated with it, and then hope that people produce software that makes use of it.

  19. Qualcomm powers no GS2 and few GS3 variants by Kotoku · · Score: 1

    Article is wildly inaccurate. Worldwide, all GS2 phones have exynos processors from Samsung. GS3 all have exynos except for LTE capable variants made for the U.S. and those have Krait series qualcomm processors, not snapdragon. The Note2 is launching with the new LTE capable exynos everywhere, further cutting qualcomm from the largest android manufacturer. If the author can't even get the details right, why would I trust their conclusion?

    1. Re:Qualcomm powers no GS2 and few GS3 variants by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Actually, the LTE version of the G2 has a snapdragon SoC in it. The US LTE G3 also has a snapdragon, not a krait as you suggested.

    2. Re:Qualcomm powers no GS2 and few GS3 variants by whoever57 · · Score: 1

      Parent post is inaccurate. GS2 variant SGH-T989 has a Qualcomm processor.

      --
      The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
    3. Re:Qualcomm powers no GS2 and few GS3 variants by Kotoku · · Score: 1

      One, LTE variant as well I believe, which accounted for the tiniest fraction of GS2 deployments. Exynos incompatibility with wifi was already mentioned and the reason was essentially why Verizon held off on the GS2 but made a deal for early Gnexus exclusivity.

  20. Re:In related news /. signal-to-noise at all time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    At the bottom of every page is a "submit story" link. You fix it.

  21. Re:anti competitive? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Someone should split your head in two.

  22. Re:anti competitive? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    And you want them to triple their CPU prices? That would affect the entire world. Of course it would mean that others would try harder to compete but it would take ten or twenty years.

  23. my wife USED to work for these jerks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    this company hasnt been the same since the doctor retired.
    the son hasnt been able to fill his fathers shoes at all
    without this chip you wouldnt hear of them at all
    id give them 5 years MAX
    posting as AC because i know stuff

  24. Intel and Qualcomm by ChefJeff789 · · Score: 1

    Intel has been riding the high-margin wagon for too long, though I suspect that may begin to change very soon. I am really looking forward to the next few years with new tablet, phone,and computer technologies rising up and trying to be the perfect product for everyone. While I doubt that any one product can be the 'one and only,' this focus on totally disparate form factors from what Intel has been working with for so long should bring some serious power consumption and heat reduction research from Intel. We've already seen a peak of this with Haswell, and I believe that if Intel doesn't get a better foot in the door with smart phones and tablets soon (Core iX's in tablets don't count for me, they don't match the performance-per-watt of ARM chips), they might eventually find themselves playing catch-up with Qualcomm, Samsung, Nvidia, and maybe even Apple if they begin producing processors for the MacBook. Frankly, I would be perfectly ok with that. They couldn't sit on their haunches and watch other companies take their market share, because that would be, you know, bad...

  25. They sold their founderies by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

    But hey their shareprice didn't go down as much and that was the most important thing right? Investors rewarded them for selling all their assets to make money ... then act all shocked the following quarter later they lost money!

    As it was it is unfair as they had to make a better chip than intel just to break even speed wise as they were always 1-2 generations behind fabrication wise. Intel as the best foundries so they simple can make their transistors and wires smaller. It was rigged against AMD from the beginning.

    Now they have to outsource them and pay someone else a hefty margin while intel doesn't and can just make the same chips faster and it even has a better architecture to boot too!

    If the phenom II had the same size circuits and wires it could have been competitive with the core2's easily.

    1. Re:They sold their founderies by dbIII · · Score: 1

      If the phenom II had the same size circuits and wires it could have been competitive with the core2's easily.
      saveie6

      So, how's 2012 treating you so far and can I get a ride with you in your time machine when you go back home?

  26. Re:anti competitive? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So if you ever create anything of your own (not that it would ever accur, you have zero potential, I can tell, hence you are nothing but a parasite...), it's ok if as soon as you reach some level of success, it should be ok for me to come in, and break your company into bits. Do tell, what exactly is then the motivation to create and innovate, after all, as soon as I reach success after years of strugle, the governtment and garbage like you would then simply show up and break up my company.

    After reading your bullshit, I'm actually quiet happy that wealthy and rich are taking their companies out of nations where parasites like you exist. I say good for them for outsourcing, so that garbage like you can't get jobs. It's parasitic shit like you why as soon as we become successfull, we leave your shitty nation and take our wealth with us, and feel zero remorse for your struggles.

    I can't believe that garbage like you which itself can not innovate, beleives it has the right to break apart companies built by superior men that take the world higher.

    For a coward with an inferiority complex you sure have inferior spelling.

  27. Re:anti competitive? by Microlith · · Score: 2

    You want to punish them for being superior?

    Punish? No, punishment would be a fine or confiscation of assets or something. Dividing the company into two would simply mean that shareholders would have a stake in each company until they sorted things out.

    We, the buying public, would have two companies with top-end technical capabilities, duking it out in the market. Unless you want to assert that corporations in ultra-powerful positions should be left alone even when it goes against the interests of, well, everyone but the company in question.

    I wish when the first genetic mutation that lead to modern humans arised, the inferior/earlier specie, split the head of that mutant, so that no human would ever arise.

    Ah, so you're in the CORPORATIONS = PEOPLE camp. Or maybe CORPORATIONS > PEOPLE camp.

    So any innovation, anyone that shows promise, must be squashed and split! that will teach the innovators.

    No, no corporation should ever be allowed to stay a monopoly.

    So listen up all you people who want to create their own companies! If your company is successful, 1. Microlith will want you to start paying at least 80% in taxes to support garbage like him. 2. If you don't like it, he will ensure that you will not be able to leave the country, or transfer your corporation to another nation. and 2. If you're really successfull, Microlith will want the government to split and destroy your country, and maybe give me some part of it too!! that will teach you. Next time, you'll think twice before being more ambitious than those who are either too stupid to start their own companies, or those who lack all ambition and prefer to live with their parents and get fat while eating twinkies!

    Ah, good 'ol Anonymous Coward. Gotta hide to speak your fascist, corporate supremacist Ayn Randian garbage, right?

  28. stealing broadcomm technolgy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    gulity of infringment
    LMAO

  29. Re:anti competitive? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You mean superiority complex, it's "superiority complex" when someone thinks they are better than everyone else.

  30. Re:What is Samsung licensing the competing CPUs fo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Why? The amount that Samsung makes from Apple is a drop in the bucket. Samsung has like 3 times the amount of money that Apple has.

  31. Re:anti competitive? by dbIII · · Score: 2

    Not superior everywhere. AMD have a 16 core 2GHz chip thta you can put in 8 sockets and the closest thing Intel has is a 10 core Xeon that is no faster and a lot more expensive. You can put together a 64 core AMD machine with 128GB of ram for $9000, with Intel you just about have to add another zero for anything similar and it's no faster.
    As a poster above is pointing out Intel's newer and faster stuff is only for the desktop and hasn't made it into their server chips, and for more then 2 sockets the speed hasn't improved in a couple of years. To get 3GHz and a lot of cores I had to go for a two socket system.

  32. Re:anti competitive? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You do understand that Speed =/= Performance right? It's IPC/CPU that measures performance. Where IPC is based on architecture, branch predictors, ISA... And Intel's IPC has been steadily improving. That's why Intel's CPUs are getting better and better, even though the speed stays the same.

  33. How AMD/ATI could stay alive by JustNiz · · Score: 0

    Maybe AMD/ATI could get really profitable by stopping making actual product and becoming consultants to other companies for their one actual competency: Marketing.
    They are the only company I've ever seen that can somehow cultivate herds of fanbois that are so rabidly committed to the brand name that they still live in denial and buy the product even though it has been blatantly inferior to the competition for years. Thats a marketable (and valuable) skill right there.
    AMD/ATI fanbois are even more rabid than Apple fanbois, and Apple (arguably) even have fairly innovative products.
    Even Microsoft could only force crap products on people by building a monopoly first. AMD/ATI somehow found a way to not even need that.

  34. Re:anti competitive? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Allow me to counter your drivel: people like you should be dragged out into the street, kicking and screeming, then hanged from the nearest light-post.

    You sing the praises of paying virtually no taxes, while benefiting from the wonderful things those taxes provide: a stable economy, powerful defensive force, extensive critical infrastructure, political influence in international dealings, etc. You go on to further sing the laurels of leaving the country to avoid tax hikes in the form of loophole elimination, effectively scamming your fellow countrymen into picking up the tab for services that you have far-and-above benefited from orders of magnitude more than others. And to top it all off, you have the gall to label other people "parasites", emphasizing your lack of remorse for the struggles of those less fortunate.

    You are human trash. You are the worst possible kind of pond scum, and you will eventually be served your comeuppance. Wherever you go, you'll create the very same problems and eventually cultivate the very same kind of social upheaval. One day, you'll run out of places to hide, or you'll pick the wrong haven, and then you'll be the one singing a different tune. I hope I'm there to see it.

  35. Re:parent is WRONG! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    May be you should read this website: http://www.zdnet.com/israel-inside-a-history-of-intels-r-and-d-in-israel-7000003122/
    >There are dozens of multinationals with development centres in Israel, but no company has embraced the idea of Israeli-based R&D more than Intel.
    \>And of course, there are the current Intel stars: the Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge family of processors, all designed, manufactured, and managed by the Israel team.

    Unless you think Israel is in the U.S or chip design has nothing to do with R&D.

  36. Maybe Qualcomm is the new Intel (not AMD) by slew · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Contrary to multiple postings on this thread, Qualcomm designs it's own ARM compatible CPUs (they call the latest version Krait) via an architecture licence from ARM. That's pretty make Qualcomm somewhat like the old-AMD designed it's own x86 compatible CPUs via an architecture license from Intel. However, the new-AMD licences their x86-64 architecture to Intel which designs it's own CPUs (arguably better than AMD).

    On the other hand, Qualcomm acts alot like Intel in the cell-phone space. They use their patents on CDMA and other wireless communications and their first generation 4G-LTE modem/radio to bully cell-phone manufactuers into using Qualcomm SOC chipsets very similar to they way that Intel uses their CPUs to bully computer manufacturers into using Intel chipsets. They have been known to threaten to use bundling, bulk pricing, and even limited availability tricks on other low-end high-volume phone product lines to convince cell phone designers to use their chipsets. Thus you see even Samsung is forced to use Qualcomm SOC chipsets even though they make their own Exynos SOC. This makes them definitey not-like the new AMD in this sense.

    1. Re:Maybe Qualcomm is the new Intel (not AMD) by phoenix_rizzen · · Score: 1

      Samsung uses Qualcomm SoCs in North America because Qualcomm's the only one that has a single-chip SoC with LTE integrated.

      Nobody else has a 1-chip SoC including LTE. nVidia is close to integrating Icera radios into a Tegra SoC, but it's not commercially available yet.

      Next year will be interesting as several LTE-solutions are coming.

  37. Re:anti competitive? by siddesu · · Score: 3

    I have my own company, make innovative products with innovative process, and I sing the same tune. Monopoly is bad for everybody, except for the monopolist. It is bad for the economy, it is bad for the democratic political process, it is bad for capitalism.

    There is a solid, peer-reviewed theoretical foundation behind the idea that monopolies should be regulated, backed by a mountain of empirical evidence. There is no case for unregulated monopoly regardless of the market it operates in.

  38. Re:anti competitive? by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 1

    Even Adam Smith, clear back in his book "Wealth of Nations", recognized that monopoly is inherently harmful and must be regulated, if we are to have a free market at all.

  39. Re:anti competitive? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    There are no 8-socket G34 motherboards, 4 is the max. Other than that, your post is correct. I work with virtualization, and AMD is quite popular there on larger systems.

  40. Err... by Nemyst · · Score: 1

    To be honest, I'm a lot more worried about the prospect of losing what used to be ATI. ARM is bringing healthy competition to the processor market and Intel is forced to dramatically reorient its business if it wants to keep its edge.

    But who's really competent in the GPU market? PowerVR? Give me a break. It's a duel between AMD and Nvidia, and if AMD disappears Nvidia will jack up their prices even more than they used to. They've got extensive contact with developers and industries reliant on graphics hardware, and they've made large progress in the mobile GPU market with Tegra.

    There'll always be competition in the general purpose processor market, as that's too big a market for a single player to completely control. Graphics processors, however, risk a lot were Nvidia (or any other company, for that matter) left with no sizable competitors.

    1. Re:Err... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      But Tegra's OpenGL ES support is not what I'd call good compared to the PowerVR chips. Graphic issues.

  41. Re:anti competitive? by Shippu · · Score: 5, Informative

    Superior now. But when amd were ahead intel bribed the major pc makers not to use amd chips. During that time most of dell's income came from intel payments, for example. This is what destroyed amd since they could and can no longer afford r&d.

    http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2009/tc2009114_975298.htm

    The solution would have been for them to pay amd at least 10 billion in damages instead of 1, but that ship has sailed.

  42. AMD's Downfall by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Their problem is that they're keeping the executives and firing the engineers.

    According to a recent study by the Harvard Business Review, the average company has 1.8 employees per manager/executive, and 4.1 layers of management.

    My current company has first line managers, second line managers, directors, VPs, Presidents, and C-level execs - fully SIX layers of management for ONE layer of working employees.

    1. Re:AMD's Downfall by cheesybagel · · Score: 1

      Actually a lot of managers at AMD either left or got sacked. I don't know the ratios but Rory Read purged the old management pretty much. Which is not entirely a bad thing considering a lot of them were Ruiz's cronies. It is a shame Dirk Meyer had to leave though. Despite what people may think the Bulldozer line is the only viable core design AMD has at the moment and a lot of the credit towards K7, K8 and K10 goes towards him. He was a great CTO. Unfortunately he wasn't able to kick out the Ruiz's pals so he didn't have the chops to succeed at AMD as a CEO.

    2. Re:AMD's Downfall by tulcod · · Score: 1

      Boohoo, your life is so hard.

  43. Re:parent is WRONG! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The original Pentium M was designed in Israel. Most of the chip design is still done in the US. The Israeli team does not manufacture the current parts. That is probably just a misstatement by the reporter. They are an important part of the Intel chip design team that much is very true. Oddly enough, it seems like an Israeli investment isn't quite as off shore as China and India. ;-)

  44. Re:anti competitive? by cheesybagel · · Score: 1

    Actually what destroyed AMD was Hector Ruiz as CEO. The Intel interference cost AMD a lot but it wasn't crippling like Ruiz.

  45. ARM v8 by hedley · · Score: 1

    Sure and when Qualcomm and Apple get a hold of the 64bit ARM rtl, once they hand tune it (as they have done already with v7 cores), I don't think intel will have a lot of leeway to gouge since low cost alternatives will be available.

    Arm played this really well. Start from embedded and then move up to workstation silicon vs Mips who did the opposite.

    H.

    1. Re:ARM v8 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ARM started at the personal computer level with the Acorn Archimedes, but then lost that market to Intel, which could push performance more aggressively. Now they're making a comeback in the (more general purpose) personal computer area with Samsung's new Chromebook.

  46. "Is Qualcomm the New AMD?" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    That title suggests Qualcomm is going down the drain too.

  47. Re:anti competitive? by Chris+Burke · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I disagree. Without Intel's backroom dealings AMD would have made enough money to weather the idiocy of Hector the Sector Wrecker (as muh ex-Motorolla buddies call him).

    The whole reason that GloFo had to be spun off is because AMD invested in huge new fabs because they were fab-limited, but then found out they were Intel-limited, their marketshare didn't increase and their fab capacity was unusued. That's crippling for a silicon manufacturing company, so AMD had to stop being one.

    Hector was no help, that's for sure, but I really think it was Intel that crippled AMD at the worst/best time.

    --

    The enemies of Democracy are
  48. Re:anti competitive? by Chris+Burke · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I guess you're just unaware of when AMD had the superior product, but couldn't get OEMs to sell products at the volumes such price and performance superiority would have suggested, because Intel, still the dominant player, had made deals with them not to sell AMD parts. Their market share was growing, necessitating a new fab, but then they hit the artificial limits defined by Intel, a crippling blow after investing billions in a new fab.

    There's only been several verdicts against them by the regulatory authorities of multiple governments, and a lawsuit settled between Intel and AMD in AMD's favor with a 1.75 (iirc) billion payout. A pittance compared to what was lost, of course, but still heavily in the news.

    I suppose it would have been easy to miss if you only just started following the CPU industry.

    --

    The enemies of Democracy are
  49. wrong SoC for half the phones listed by SuperBanana · · Score: 2

    Asus Transformer Pad Infinity

    The entire Transformer line is Tegra2 & Tegra3 based, not Snapdragon.

    The Galaxy S3 is only Snapdragon in the US and Japan market; only one of the S2 flavors has the Snapdragon. The Galaxy Note has two flavors, one with the Snapdragon, one without.

    Iif you're going to post an article hemming and hawing about the state of affairs in the mobile phone chipset market, at least get the chipset right when speaking about the most popular phone in the world right now (the S3), else you'll look like a complete idiot.

    1. Re:wrong SoC for half the phones listed by damnbunni · · Score: 1

      For the Transformer Pad Infinity, it depends on the model. WiFi-only Transformers use the Tegra3, and the 3G Infinity uses a Snapdragon.

    2. Re:wrong SoC for half the phones listed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Your virginity is showing...

  50. I haven't used AMD in forever but I don't dislike by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It's not that I dislike AMD, it's more that I get benchmark tests from say -- tom's hardware and tend to find that intel dominates from what I see. It may be more expensive but I'm slightly enthusiastic hehehe. But it's good that Intel has competition, otherwise we'd get screwed over hard. I also don't give 2-cents about these low-end processors. Until Quantum processors are made available, these things are just a joke :P

  51. Re:anti competitive? by Doctor_Jest · · Score: 1

    I love to hear this argument about taxation, at least you didn't say "fair share"....
    Here you go, for the cheap seats:

    http://www.ntu.org/tax-basics/who-pays-income-taxes.html

    Do check that out before you engage in class warfare. It doesn't become you. And parasites aren't less fortunate, they're people who make their living off of others' work. A prime example of that is Government itself. It doesn't create, it takes. It doesn't play fair, it rewards those who feed it the most campaign money. So, I am singing a very different tune than you are, because in the United States, we have a founding princple to distrust and de-fang our government. It never is, nor never will be, benevolent.

    --
    It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
  52. already out of options by nten · · Score: 1

    If you want all the horsepower you can get your hands on, you are already stuck with intel if the software you use isn't many-core or gpu friendly. Audio and video work is notably quite amenable to gpu acceleration, so in five years a brand new video card for that time with your current processor may hold you over until the die shrink race has ended 5 to 10 years later and processors begin to commoditize, which I would guess will bring in more players.

    --
    refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
  53. Re:anti competitive? by ChrisMaple · · Score: 1

    So, let's say an artist, a painter, incorporates to protect herself. She's the only one who can legally sign her name to her paintings, so she must be an evil monopolist. She must be chained with regulations and oversight, heavily fined, or divided into sections to satisfy your ideas of efficiency, economics, democracy and capitalism.

    IDIOT

    --
    Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
  54. Re:anti competitive? by siddesu · · Score: 1

    Let's say you don't understand economics at all.

    As long as the painter is in the market for art, where she commands a small share alongside a million other artists, there is no need to chain her with regulations and oversight. A true proponent of the laissez-faire approach would probably argue that there is not even need for that government rape of freedom of economic initiative known as "copyright".

    Now, if you have a company that controls over 85% of the world market, is entrenched with all kinds of government regulations that prevent easy entrance in the market, and operates in conditions that allow it to play all kinds of price and quantity games on the competition, its supply chain, its dealers and customers, the situation is significantly different.

    Of course, to understand the difference you need to learn some basic economics. Alas, bad science fiction is easier to master. But you compensate your lack of understanding with insults and CAPS LOCK very well ;)

  55. Re:anti competitive? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Get this Ayn Rand Objectivism crap outta my face! Social Darwinism indeed. So, you think that YOU are one of the sainted producers? Guess what? It takes a COMPLETE society for individuals create corporations that eventually make money. It takes infrastructure for those corporations to conduct business. Those corporations need competent workers who can perform the tasks that make that company money. None of this happens without investment in this infrastructure. And while corporations do some of this investment, the majority of it happens because government forces them to do so through taxation. You may want to label government as a parasite, but if government did not exist, then neither would nay of the things corporations need to conduct business. Regulation came about not because government wanted to find some way to fleece corporations of their wealth, but because corporations found new and inventive ways to screw over their customers or their competition, and had to be reigned in before they ended up destroying the economy, or worse, killing people.

    Why don't large multinational corporation thrive in most of Africa? You would think they would, since Africa is rich in natural resources and has some of the cheapest labor available on earth. But at the same time, a large number of African governments are rife with corruption and instability, so most large multinational corporations stay out of Africa because the infrastructure investments they would have to make would put any operation into the red and they would lose their collective shirts every time a government shifted hands.

    Objectivism is so far to the right that it makes Hitler and Mussolini look like bleeding liberals. Get your head outta your ass and realize that the reality is that we are all interdependent, and stop thinking your part in all this is more important than anyone else's. It's a sure way to get people to stop working with or for you.

  56. The Ivy Bridge processors are not a good example by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The pricing is, but not the CPUs. The problem is there is a finite amount of 22nm capacity. Right now Intel has only one 22nm fab online. They are in the process of converting their fab in Israel to 22nm, but right now the one in Chandler is it.

    That being the case, there is only so much they can choose to produce on that process, and what they are choosing to do is mainstream desktop and laptop processors. They've changed their strategy from using the newest process to the highest end parts first to using it for more mainstream parts, and then moving it in to high end.

    You also can't just say "Well build more capacity!" as not only are they doing that, but it takes a long time (you don't order this stuff online and install it in a day) and costs a ton of money.

    I fully agree that Intel reams people on prices because they can. I mean their low end i5 is as good as AMD's top end Bulldozer for most things. However supply issues are something else. They have to choose what chips to produce in their fabs, and only certain fabs are at certain levels.

    You also can't hate on Intel for their fab investment. They pump more money in to fab technology than anyone else (hence are nearly always a node ahead) and they build most of them in the US. They are really big on R&D and it pays off.

  57. But they didn't have the superior product by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 4, Informative

    They had a faster processor, but that is only one part of the equation. They had two major problems:

    1) They didn't offer a CPU/chipset/mobo solution. Intel does it all for customers, they make the entire core if you want. This is useful to OEMs because there's no finger pointing when there's problems. Doesn't matter which of those components is broken, same company is responsible, they need to find and implement the fix. With the Athlons you could have a 3 way pointing match between AMD, VIA, and whoever made the board all claiming the other guy was responsible for a problem.

    2) No good chipset. The processor was all kinds of fast but woe betide you if you wanted to use it with, say a GeForce DDR. The VIA chipset that was the "premier" solution for it implemented the AGP spec improperly and wouldn't work with the GeForce card since the AGP slot wasn't really AGP, basically just a fast PCI slot. This wasn't the only problem, just one of the most major ones.

    So it is no surprise that some OEMs shied away from them. I built an Athlon system and it was a couple weeks of hell trying to make it work before I found out that no, there was just no way my GeForce would work with it. Back the parts went and in came Intel parts that functioned without error.

    Likewise at work we did have some Athlon systems, Gateway I believe, and they were far more trouble than the Intel systems as a whole.

    Intel isn't just popular because of the power, but their stability. It matters in business. AMD never really had a competitive solution in that regard.

    I'm not saying Intel didn't also try to squash AMD (IA64 was another attempt, since there is no cross licensing for that instruction set) but AMD did little to help themselves. They produced a good processor without the hardware to support it.

    Then they caught another break, with the fuckup that was the P4, but they rested on their laurels and didn't really do much in the way of architecture updates. Intel hit back with the Core 2, then Core i, then Sandy Bridge all of which are stellar performers per clock and there was just nothing new from AMD, until now Bulldozer which is pathetic, worse than their old chips at times.

    Intel is not blameless, but AMD has done themselves few favours.

    1. Re:But they didn't have the superior product by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And then there was them buying ATI and suddenly if I wanted to keep using Nvidia cards I had no choice but to return to Intel. I always hated ATI (especially their abysmal driver support) so there wasn't much hesitation at all.

    2. Re:But they didn't have the superior product by Chris+Burke · · Score: 1

      And then there was them buying ATI and suddenly if I wanted to keep using Nvidia cards I had no choice but to return to Intel.

      Whoever told you that lied. There's no problem with Nvidia cards in AMD systems; that's what I've been doing for years (because the ATI drivers are even worse under Linux, there's been essencially no choice).

      --

      The enemies of Democracy are
    3. Re:But they didn't have the superior product by ShakaUVM · · Score: 1

      I never really had too many problems with my AMD boxes. Bad drivers for the mobos being the most common one, but Intel mobos have the same problems. So with the exception of the very overclockable Celeron 300A back in the day, I've been a non-Intel customer since the early 90s.

      But when we got to the Sandy Bridge generation, I just couldn't justify being an AMD customer any more. Intel completely cleaned their clock, and AMD has done nothing since then to answer it.

    4. Re:But they didn't have the superior product by CAIMLAS · · Score: 1

      You're about two or three CPU generations and 5? years off there, bubby.

      --
      ~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
  58. No, not at all by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 1

    For one, licensing agreements are something that once done are done. They are not written with a "But we can take it back if we want," clause. So Intel has the rights to x64 once and for all time. What's more, it comes from older cross licensing with x86 that AMD has. More or less the situation is that both companies have to share with each other, by contract. Intel can't keep AMD from using x86, including new features (which is why they tried for IA64) but the reverse is AMD can't keep Intel from using x86 stuff they develop.

    Now if you are talking about back in the day, well had AMD been able to keep Intel form using x64 (they couldn't but let's just say) then all that likely would have happened is x64 would have died off. Its success is because it is easily compatible with old programs and because new CPUs from both the firms worked with it. If Intel CPUs couldn't support it, there would have been much less interest.

  59. Re:parent is WRONG! by Guspaz · · Score: 1

    The Israeli team may not manufacture the current parts themselves, but the 22nm Intel fab in Israel certainly does.

  60. So then - what's 4 x 16? by dbIII · · Score: 0

    So much for your "correction" and your attempt to pretend to be some sort of authority. If you really do "work with virtualisation" you must have been asleep for a couple of years.

    1. Re:So then - what's 4 x 16? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      4 x 16, yeah, that's 4 socket motherboard, using 16 module CPUs. So it is indeed 4-socket G34, not 8 socket. Though you can get an extension board, but that's not the same thing.

  61. Another fool trying to "correct" by dbIII · · Score: 1

    Performance is of course how well something performs at the task you obtained it for - thus something that can run a lot of threads can be better at some tasks than something that can't even if it gets through each thread more quickly. That's why I have both AMD systems with a lot of cores and Intel systems with a few less.

  62. Re:anti competitive? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    No, there are enough other artists; there is no monopoly here. That's like saying Coca-Cola has a monopoly in making Coca-Cola, and Pepsi a monopoly in making Pepsi. An artist is just a "brand" (of art).

  63. Re:The Ivy Bridge processors are not a good exampl by thaddeusthudpucker · · Score: 0

    Isnt the new D1X building in Oregon going to be a 22nm fab? I'm pretty sure it is, but I cant remember

  64. Except they did at the time where it mattered. by Chris+Burke · · Score: 2

    As demonstrated by their marketshare and margins increasing rapidly until they hit the artificial barriers created by Intel. Whatever problems you believe they had were demonstrably not sufficient to limit AMD. Only Intel was.

    1) They didn't offer a CPU/chipset/mobo solution.
    2) No good chipset.

    OEMs might have preferred and AMD-sourced mobo (and they did exist), but it didn't stop them from using AMD parts in either desktop or server markets.

    Also, you seem to be talking about the early to mid K7 days when 1) chipsets were relevant and 2) the VIA chipset was the best performing one for AMD. Later in the K7 lifetime it was the NVidia chipset that ruled the roost. The K7 was the arguably superior solution, but not the product of interest at the time of interest.

    It's the K8 -- the Opteron and Athlon64 -- that were the obviously superior products. At this point the chipsets were in fact AMD-sourced silicon of little practical relevance since they were just bridges between HT and AGP/PCI-e. The actual performance-relevant parts of the chipset were all on the CPU now.

    And this solution was so much better that it took AMD from 'arguably' to 'obviously' superior, first causing AMD's server share to jump up to double-digit numbers for the first time ever in addition to cratering Intel's asking price for Xeons, plus causing their desktop share to grow so rapidly they knew they'd only be able to meet demand with new fab capacity.

    Whatever imperfections in their own product portfolio weren't actually that big a deal, obviously, and it was Intel's backroom dealings that were the problem, as shown in a multitude of court documents.

    I'm not saying Intel didn't also try to squash AMD

    But you are saying that AMD not making it's own mobo, and relying on the VIA266 in the early K7 days when it's the K8 days that matter, had a greater effect on AMD's inability to continue on their marketshare trajectory to it's natural conclusion and fill their fabs than Intel's backroom dealings.

    That's simply a-historical rubbish.

    --

    The enemies of Democracy are
  65. Saving their way to prosperity by gelfling · · Score: 1

    Has worked fine for IBM. Soon HR will get their wish and IBM will be a company with zero employees.

  66. Re:parent is WRONG! by Btarlinian · · Score: 1

    Intel has some of it's processor design team in Israel. However, all their manufacturing R&D is done in Portland. All of their other fabs just duplicate the setup they create for each node in Portland. However, I don't think that Intel is in any danger of losing IP in Israel, (unlike the similar dangers that exist when manufacturing in east Asia.)

  67. Re:What is Samsung licensing the competing CPUs fo by Sir_Sri · · Score: 1

    Samsungs parts business wants to stay in business. And apple is one of their biggest customers for foundry and screen parts.

  68. Re:anti competitive? by shiftless · · Score: 0

    Allow me to counter your drivel: people like you should be dragged out into the street, kicking and screeming, then hanged from the nearest light-post.

    Try it. Just try it, I dare you. I fucking dare you to take up arms against me or someone I know. I'll cut your balls off and smirk as you bleed out.

    You sing the praises of paying virtually no taxes, while benefiting from the wonderful things those taxes provide: a stable economy, powerful defensive force, extensive critical infrastructure, political influence in international dealings, etc.

    Also: oppression, fascism, prisons, Guantanamo Bay, Iraq wars, etc.

    You go on to further sing the laurels of leaving the country to avoid tax hikes in the form of loophole elimination, effectively scamming your fellow countrymen into picking up the tab for services that you have far-and-above benefited from orders of magnitude more than others

    Nobody is entitled to shit. I didn't ask to come here, and I didn't ask for your fucking "services" or taxes or any of that bullshit. If you don't like ME taking MY property and leaving, then I guess you can just sit in a puddle of warm piss and stew about it.

    And to top it all off, you have the gall to label other people "parasites", emphasizing your lack of remorse for the struggles of those less fortunate.

    How old are you...17?

    You are human trash. You are the worst possible kind of pond scum, and you will eventually be served your comeuppance. Wherever you go, you'll create the very same problems and eventually cultivate the very same kind of social upheaval. One day, you'll run out of places to hide, or you'll pick the wrong haven, and then you'll be the one singing a different tune. I hope I'm there to see it.

    I hope you are too...and I hope you get exactly what you're praying for. Come at me mother fucker. I will take pleasure in ending your life.

  69. Re:anti competitive? by shiftless · · Score: 0

    You're a fucking moron with no clue. That's OK though....one day you'll make it into your 20s.

  70. Re:anti competitive? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Try it. Just try it, I dare you. I fucking dare you to take up arms against me or someone I know. I'll cut your balls off and smirk as you bleed out.

    oooh, e-tough! such a manly man. i'm sure to lose a ton of sleep over these e-threats. LOL!

  71. Sad AMDer is sad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I have been at AMD for the past few years and I must say that it has been the most satisfying experience in my 20+ year career. Even if I don't get the axe this week I will be moving on anyway, you can only run uphill against the wind for so long, but I wouldn't trade the experience I've gained at AMD for love nor money. Hopefully I will leave on good terms and be able to come back if they find the white knight they so desperately need. AMD didn't buy my loyalty, they earned it.

  72. What Hole You Wanna Fill Here? by hazydave · · Score: 1

    What's the point of this. Is Qualcomm the next AMD, in terms of ... what? They're certainly not the next x86-drop-in-replacement chip company, if that's what you're looking for. If, instead, you're looking for a new "chimpzilla" to Intel's "chipzilla", Qualcomm has been larger than AMD for years now, particularly made clear now that they're both on equal footing (AMD split off their IC business as Global Foundries, so now, like Qualcomm, they're fabless). And let's not forget Samsung, who's actually beating Intel in IC sales, if not yet market cap.

    --
    -Dave Haynie
  73. AMD Intel by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Most of the comments I saw where in favor of Intel. I have been using/building computers for over 30 years and I recently built my first AMD system in over 5 years. Anyway it is by far the most stable system I've ever made. I can't say that about any of my Intel systems. It's hard at work 24/7 and has been running smoothly without a hitch for almost a year now. Maybe it has nothing to do with the CPU but as a former fan of Intel I'm now a firm supporter of AMD.