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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."
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.
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.
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.
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
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