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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."
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).
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.
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.
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.
...can be answered with a "no"
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.
Split the company in two. Mandatory patent cross licensing between the two plus mandatory licensing to any 3rd party that asks.
FTA:
.
General purpose processors are a sideline for Qualcomm.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
It's actually due to the way carriers operate within the US.
The summaries are complete turd of late, never mind the articles. Sort something out.
Do you see what I did there?
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).
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.
Not a fair comparison. AMD design their CPU's in-house. Qualcomm licence theirs from ARM.
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.)
Samsung's latest Galaxy S3 now comes with Exynos quad core with LTE, so your information is outdated.
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
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.
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?
AnimePapers.org: Anime Wallpapers Handled With Care
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.
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...
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.
http://saveie6.com/
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.
Ah, so you're in the CORPORATIONS = PEOPLE camp. Or maybe CORPORATIONS > PEOPLE camp.
No, no corporation should ever be allowed to stay a monopoly.
Ah, good 'ol Anonymous Coward. Gotta hide to speak your fascist, corporate supremacist Ayn Randian garbage, right?
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.
Israel and Ireland aren't overseas?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Actually what destroyed AMD was Hector Ruiz as CEO. The Intel interference cost AMD a lot but it wasn't crippling like Ruiz.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
Please help metamoderate.
That's one helluva commute, I tell you.
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
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.
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.
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
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 ;)
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.
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.
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.
Your own link shows a 22nm fab in Israel, so all current-generation Intel fabs are not in the US.
The Israeli team may not manufacture the current parts themselves, but the 22nm Intel fab in Israel certainly does.
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.
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.
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
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
Has worked fine for IBM. Soon HR will get their wish and IBM will be a company with zero employees.
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.)
Samsungs parts business wants to stay in business. And apple is one of their biggest customers for foundry and screen parts.
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.)
Boohoo, your life is so hard.
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
The Sandy Bridge architecture was developed in Israel.
Really? https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=intel+bangalore+cpu+design
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.)