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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.
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"
Split the company in two. Mandatory patent cross licensing between the two plus mandatory licensing to any 3rd party that asks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
Your own link shows a 22nm fab in Israel, so all current-generation Intel fabs are not in the US.
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.
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