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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."
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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 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.