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AMD Launches New Richland APUs For the Desktop, Speeds Up To 4.4GHz
MojoKid writes "AMD recently unveiled a handful of mobile Elite A-Series APUs, formerly codenamed Richland. Those products built upon the company's existing Trinity-based products but offered additional power and frequency optimizations designed to enhance overall performance and increase battery life. Today AMD is launching a handful of new Richland APUs for desktops and small form factor PCs. The additional power and thermal headroom afforded by desktop form factors has allowed AMD to crank things up a few notches further on both the CPU and GPU sides. The highest-end parts feature quad-CPU cores with 384 Radeon cores and 4MB of total cache. The top end APUs have GPU cores clocked at 844MHz (a 44MHz increase over Trinity) with CPU core boost clocks that top out at lofty 4.4GHz. In addition, AMD's top-end part, the A10-6800K, has been validated for use with DDR3-2133MHz memory. The rest of the APUs max out at with a 1866MHz DDR memory interface."
As with the last few APUs, the conclusion is that the new A10 chips beat Intel's Haswell graphics solidly, but lag a bit in CPU performance and power consumption.
I thought I'm computer literate but this summary is so full of acronyms that I understand nada. Are we talking about discrete graphics cards here or what?
Is Windows 8 the only (Microsoft) desktop OS that will be able to use PC's built with this?
but will it run 4 instances of crysis 3 running at 1080p on a single 4k monitor?
4.4 GHz? Oddly not mentioned in TFA....
See page 2
I applaud the advancement of integrated graphics but I think Intel will beat AMD in this generation.
Intel will soon be launching Haswell parts with significantly improved integrated graphics. GPUs need access to very fast memory, and that's not something that can be provided on memory modules. The signaling tolerances mean the chip and memory have to be soldered on to the motherboard.(Eg - I'm not talking about the socket 1550 parts they launced earlier this week. Those have similar performance to the last gen.)
Intel has coming soldered-on-motherboard desktop parts and laptop parts that have access to high speed GDDR memory, and that alone will make them faster than any current AMD APU. Intel even has a high-end product that will have 128MB of very fast chip-on-package edram.
Funilly enough this is a similar solution to the AMD chip that will be in the xbox one (Chip on package edram).. When will AMD bring that tech to their PC part line?
P.S. --> the score in question from my previous post was for Cinebench 11.5, but there are many many others like it. And don't think that OpenCL holds any miracles for Trinity either, the 4600 is actually a better OpenCL part than it is a GPU.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Bulldozer 8150. It rocks the house. Headroom still for a 8350 without having to change platforms- thanks AMD ! 189 bucks. Can't touch it for the price. Highly recommended.
I'm trying to figure out right now whether office PCs will see the difference between AMD and Intel. It seems like as long as you install plenty of RAM, pretty much anything should handle a moderately multitasking business PC for at least a few years. I keep seeing posts of Intel vs AMD benchmarks, but even with the benchmarks being what they are, how much difference will a nontechnical end user really notice in an office environment? I run an AMD A8 quad core laptop at home, but it runs Linux and does just fine. I don't want to judge Windows performance based on my experience with Linux though.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Within about a month or so I'll be building a PC- initially when I started the process of selecting parts I was happy to go with an i5 from the last series, but now AMD and Intel both release their new guns...
I'm not sure which to go with any more- still leaning towards Intel since I'll be getting a separate graphics card and I like their raw power, but at the same time, it's hard to beat the price on AMD.
Good thing I've still got a month to mull it over.
Yeah you're right. Fuck AMD. Let's support Intel, the anti-competitive market-abusing cocksuckers who had to secretly pay off Michael Dell to use their chips. That's a company I want to support with my money.
If I buy $350 cpu and a discrete GPU it will beat the hell out of 150 cpu, did I get your logic right?
Your comment about overclocking the Richland and not the haswell is great and all, except for the fact that the haswell chip is defective by design as far as thermal transfer is concerned. Haswell still uses the same heat spreader design as Ivy bridge, so you have raw silicon - thermal paste - heat spreader - thermal paste - heatsink, instead of raw silicon - welded head spreader - thermal paste - heatsink.
What does this mean? It means that you CANNOT efficiently overclock desktop haswell processors, and that intel specifically designed it so that you cant. If anything when comparing Richland and Haswell components this should be taken into consideration from the start.
Here is an article that discussed the problems facing Ivy Bridge, Haswell's predecessor:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ivy-bridge-overclocking-high-temp,15512.html
And here is what you have to do to get reasonable temperatures out of these chips:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXs0I5kuoX4
Who in their right mind would intentionally buy a cpu that uses thermal paste under the heatspreader?
A10-6800K GPU Cores..384
Xbox One GPU Cores....768
PS4 GPU Cores...........1152
Huh? The front-side bus hasn't existed in years. AMD abolished it way back in 2003 when they moved the Athlon 64's memory controller on-die. Intel did the same thing with Nehalem in 2008.
Perhaps you just meant that there isn't enough memory bandwidth to use the GPU to its full potential with games? The good news is that AMD's upcoming Kaveri will have GDDR5 support, with a homogenous memory architecture similar to the new consoles.
P.S. --> the score in question from my previous post was for Cinebench 11.5, but there are many many others like it. And don't think that OpenCL holds any miracles for Trinity either, the 4600 is actually a better OpenCL part than it is a GPU.
Really? Because the one OpenCL benchmark I can find in TFA pegs the new chips at 2.5 times faster than the 4600 that comes with the i5-4670k. I wouldn't consider a part that is less than half as fast to be "better." Maybe that's just me? Could be. Also, I wouldn't say "at best" 20% faster when several benchmarks peg it at 30% or more. The Enemy Territory: Quake Wars high-res benchmark, in particular, is... hilariously one sided (and since most people are going to be playing at high-res settings, it's a benchmark that actually matters). Actually, all the high-res gaming tests are, with the new chips often coming in close to twice the Haswell chips. In fact, the Cinebench 11.5 tests peg the Richland at 60% faster than the i5-4670k, so I'm not sure where the hell you got any of your numbers from.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Richland's GPU is at best about 20% faster than the intentionally-midrange HD-4600 GPU in Haswell. Add in any form of desktop GPU, including midrange models from 2011, and Haswell wins by a landslide.
Yes, if you buy a $250-$350 CPU and then add a $100 video card, it will outperform a $150 all-in-one unit. No shit.
At CPU, I recall seeing delightfully hilarious graph where a 6800K overclocked to 5GHz had exactly half the score of the (stock clocked) 4770K. Before we get to the usual "But AMD is cheap!" argument, when you take into account the $150 price of the 6800K and the $350 price of the 4770K, AMD only wins on price/performance if you intentionally buy the most expensive Haswell model available and intentionally don't overclock it while also overclocking the crap out of the 6800K.
You're looking at this from an enthusiast perspective. But if I'm building a system for someone who mostly does web surfing, Office, and occasionally some light gaming like WoW and The Sims, then an AMD APU starts to look a lot better from a price/performance perspective. You assume that as long as the performance per dollar stays high, the buyer is willing to spend as much as necessary, but that's simply not true for most users. Probably 90% of users will never even hit the maximum limit of an A10-6800K, so for these people, Haswell is overkill.
Just point out: "Add in any form of desktop GPU" ... The point of the APUs is that you don't. These are "regular-user parts" meant for things like tablets, laptops, and budget computers.
Also, you claim yourself that Richland gets 20% better performance than midrange Haswell. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't midrange Haswell = Richland prices? Aren't you getting 20% better performance per dollar then?
Richland's GPU is at best about 20% faster than the intentionally-midrange HD-4600 GPU in Haswell.
Yes, but what OpenGL features does the Haswell APU have compared to the full GL 4.3 found in the AMD version? How good are the Intel drivers? How many textures can I bind at once? What anti-aliasing modes does it support? What are the max number of shader varying/uniform attribs? How many shader instructions can I fit within my shaders? Back in 1999, comparing raw polygon speed may have meant something, but these days it's not really as interesting as the rest of the details....
If I buy $350 cpu and a discrete GPU it will beat the hell out of 150 cpu, did I get your logic right?
I think the point is that regardless of whether you buy Intel or AMD, you'll still probably be playing new games on the lowest graphics settings available. If you actually bought a PC to play games, you'll be buying a discrete graphics card, so the on-chip GPU is just a waste of space unless the OS is able to switch back to it for the desktop to save power when you're not running games.
...is how fast each family of integrated graphics is improving. This chip is a nice little linear bump in AMD's APU power. Intel's iGPU power is increasing exponentially, and their lithography advantage is about to widen even more with Broadwell, 16nm seems to have three times the transistors per die area of 28nm, which AMD will be moving to soon. Intel is still figuring out graphics, and scaling them up, but if they throw in three times the transistors, and they could, I think it's fair to say Broadwell's iGPU will outclass this easily, as well as AMD's future offerings. Hell, I think the Intel Iris Pro 5200 will at least match it within a few months.
Who in their right mind would intentionally buy a cpu that uses thermal paste under the heatspreader?
The 99.9% of PC users who don't overclock them?
Gee, if only AMD had a line of chips that didn't have the graphics unit in them...
Where or where are my mods points when I need them? Intel is a dirty filthy company who plays dirty filthy pool debasing the whole idea of a free market and undermining the progress of CPUs in the process.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/184882/A_History_of_Intels_Antitrust_Woes.html
http://www.osnews.com/story/21468/Source_Intel_To_Be_Found_Guilty_of_Monopoly_Abuse
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=7574976&page=1#.Ua94NkDrz4M
and plays hardball against even the smallest of critics-
http://www.faceintel.com/kenwonintellost2.htm
All the while sucking as hard as any monopoly at the public teat:
http://www.faceintel.com/tax$subsidizeintel.htm
Intel is a dirty, disgusting company that debases the whole idea of a free market.
In a world were heat and power are becoming REALLY important, AMD is lagging behind.
Good-bye
solder in kills MB choice so you may not be able to get a board with what you need.
Say you need a board with lots of slots but so much in the cpu sorry the broads with lot slots only come with the high end cpus.
Need a lot of cpu power but not all kinds of OC and other stuff found in higher end MB no we don't have the mid range or lower boards with fast cpus.
Yeah but it's only 128bit and it's mutually exclusive with DDR3 so you cap out at 4GB with yet-unreleased high density GDDR chips, not exactly useful for a general purpose computer.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I'm not going to reward AMD for turning out substandard products and their poor business practice.
Intel cpus are faster. Full stop. The fastest AMD CPUs can't compete with mid-grade i3s. (And any graphics edge evaporates int the face of a 75 dollar video card)
AMD is behind because they got some hot shit CEO a years back that decided the best way to make money was "fire all the engineers" The're just cost centers, after all. AMD has been behind ever since.
Intel has the advantage that most of their fab plants are in the United States.
On the other hand, I'm not an American. So fuck you, Intel!
The market for both series of products, is that you don't add anything. Use the on-CPU graphics. If you are using a graphics card instead of the integrated graphics, then neither Haswell or Richland is of interest to you. You have a Sandy Bridge-E or a non-APU AMD equivalent, which you're using along with the graphics card.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Intel provides rather extensive technical documentation of all their products. http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/core/CoreTechnicalResources.html is the page with basic datasheets (basic in this case meaning a couple hundred pages, their more detailed ones are a thousand). If you truly are as interested in the technical details as you pretend, then go look them up.
However if you are just throwing out technical shit in an attempt to deflect the argument then knock it off. Particularly since much of what you are asking for are the kind of the things that would be of concern for high end dedicated GPUs for particular applications, not for an integrated controller for general use.
For most people, what matters is how fast it is at running the programs they want to use, like games. All the other stuff is for, as Tam McGleish would say "Specy wanks who get excited about fuckin' GPU clock speeds and hardware tessellation and all that shite folk who are actually interested in playing games dunnie give a stuff about." It's all well and good, and matters for certain markets and applications, but those markets are generally not the ones using an integrated GPU. Most people just care how fast it runs their stuff.
Intel also spends more on R&D than AMD has revenue. Intel was the only chip company that didn't scale back R&D during the economic down-turn.
They provide GL 4.3 support in the APU driver? Nice, I might buy one now.
Piledriver is not the only CPU core they have. The Jaguar core (to be used in the PS4 and XBox One) is low power and has better performance than the Intel Atom cores.
It's the same story every generation.
CPUs: AMD wins in the $/performance category but loses in terms of pure performance. For 2 generations AMD won the pure performance crown as well.
Onboard (or on-die) GPUs: Intel's implementation will get you moderate FPS on games released in [PurchaseYear - 1] at a sub-native resolution. AMD's implementation will at least run medium settings around 30 fps at native resolution. AMD wins in the $/performance category AND the pure performance category.
Discrete GPUs: AMD wins in the $/performance category but loses in terms of pure performance. If you want the top of the line, you spend big money on two of Nvidia's top-end cards every year.
CPU performance has been good enough for the vast majority of tasks that it's taking a back seat for me. I still need it for video encoding since the x264 kids don't want to do an OpenCL version.
If the DivX can get their HEVC encoder running on OpenCL (or if the x264 team does the same), then I'll see no reason to go with Intel in the near future. I'd rather spend the $ difference on more SSDs.
I'm not sure where the hell you got any of your numbers from.
It's CajunArson, he's a known fanboi/troll, and he loves to reply to himself with additional info to whore +1 Informative mods.
128bit GDDR5 is still twice the bandwidth of 128bit DDR3 (quad-pumped, not double-pumped). And won't they have banked memory, so you can have more DIMMs than channels (just like you can have four DIMMs in a dual-channel DDR3 system)?
Even if you're not overclocking, you can expect a shorter service from the parts.
Funny thing about the overclockers - they're good at showing up design flaws that can affect the rest of us. The on-the-fly overclocking most modern CPUs do on thier own now (intel 'turbo speed' is just a situationally triggered overclock) just makes it more relevant.
Also, consider things like smaller form factor cases, or even laptops. In many cases where space in a concern, a decent mobile APU is better than a CPU+GPU.
In other situations, well, good enough is good enough. I'm building a small luggable (basically suitcase-PC) for LAN parties, to replace a shuttle which I previously used to drag around.
Some people show up with *huge* Antec cases and dual CPU,capable of playing [latest shooter] resolution at >1080P at superhigh detail, and then we end up playing Starcraft 2, DOTA, and Left 4 Dead 2, possible BF3... which worked just as well on an older dual/quad-core AMD with a cheap GPU.
An upgrade to a APU would be more than enough for most of our needs.
The whole heat spreader design is so stupid. Instead of a thin aluminum (or whatever) cap, why not make it a thick copper block with fins and fan mounting points, and attach that directly to the core right at the factory? You'd get much better results.
Yeah, then you have a larger and less flexible design that OEMs have to deal with. I say fuck em.
You're looking at this from an enthusiast perspective. But if I'm building a system for someone who mostly does web surfing, Office, and occasionally some light gaming like WoW and The Sims, then an AMD APU starts to look a lot better from a price/performance perspective. You assume that as long as the performance per dollar stays high, the buyer is willing to spend as much as necessary, but that's simply not true for most users. Probably 90% of users will never even hit the maximum limit of an A10-6800K, so for these people, Haswell is overkill.
For gaming the graphics part is most important, but otherwise as a general rule light usage is poorly threaded and heavy usage well threaded. Often the "snappiness" of the computer is based on the performance of a single thread. So for the non-gamer I'd go with high single thread performance, for the gamer I'd suggest a discrete card but for the right level of casual gamer I guess an APU is what serves them best.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
This is a little disengenuous. A $65 Pentium G2020 + a $50-60 Radeon 6670 will outperform a $130 A10 6800 in nearly everything (some highly threaded CPU workloads might slightly favor the 6800).
The space advantages of no PCIe cards, on the other hand, is indeed unbeatable by AMD, and they should trumpet it more with ITX builds.
It's the same story every generation.
CPUs:
CPUs: The low price AMD units win the performance/purchase price competition. Low price Intel units win the performance/(purchase + operating costs) competition, at least they do if your computer is on very much and you pay for your own electricity.
Considering the ARM Cortex-A15 has better performance than the Atom, that's not saying much. Intel's been pretty neglectful of the Atom line.
for desktops, that is.
Gee, if only AMD had a line of chips that didn't have the graphics unit in them...
If only AMD had a line of chips which didn't have the graphics unit in them and were actually competitive with anything other than Intel's low-end parts....
i've heard of a CPU, GPU and FPU, but not an APU. had to search for APU - Accelerated Processing Unit
What Is An APU? [Technology Explained], http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/apu-technology-explained/
wonder what kind of heatsink the 4.4 gigahertz process would need.
With the GDDR5 version memory will be soldered onto the mobo, along with the APU. No DIMMs. Though it isn't clear to me if it maxes out at 4GB or 8GB - might well be 4GB which makes it useful for gaming but sucks if you want to do crazy hungry web browsing or something else on the side.
I have a 2yr old core i3 laptop that runs office apps just fine. It'll do high def streaming just fine too. "Regular" office stuff just isn't all that strenuous.
There are scenarios where you would see a difference, but they tend to be more technical users...video editing or transcoding, source code compilation, database indexing, numerical simulation, etc.
Here, have some more facts:
Radeon 7870GE GPU Cores: 1280
Radeon 7950 GPU Cores: 1792
Radeon 7970GE GPU Cores: 2048
Radeon 7990 GPU Cores: 4096
Oh, and don't forget the clock speeds. The A10 and PS4 (and probably the Xb1) run at 800MHz, while many of the discrete cards run at 1GHz (only the 7950 runs at less, at 850MHz).
My understanding is that while copper has higher contact heat conductance than aluminum, aluminum has higher conductance with air. Hence (in addition to how much lighter aluminum is), the large number of heatsinks that have a copper core and aluminum fins.
(no sig)
Also, P.S.
APU is taken. They need to come up with a different acronym. They can't toss the "well that's not computing!" card either, because it's still taken.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I'll support the company that develops the best technology. When AMD build their own fab again and develop 22nm process technology I'll support them.
Might be never because if they did they would probably spin it off again.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
If only people would stop measuring their penis sizes and focus on what it's used for. Can the CPU play games? without even breaking a sweat. If you need a CPU that is 75% idle while playing a game then that's your preference though.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
According to pretty much every benchmarks available, it's still barely an upgrade over the previous gen from AMD and still barely arrives to the knees of Intel.
Only good thing about it is the integrated GPU.
But whatever.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
Intel's been pretty neglectful of the Atom line.
They haven't been "neglectful"... they just want Atoms to suck so you will buy something more expensive.
AMD is desperate for your business so they just make the best chips they can. Intel is fat and sassy, and they make an intricate web of interlocking features and prices. "Oh, you wanted ECC RAM *and* virtualization instructions? You'll be wanting our server Xeon chips."
Well seeing as the only chips in the wild at the moment all have 8 gigs sodered on (ps4 and xbone) I'd have to guess that the limit is at least 8 gigs.
I'm not going to reward AMD for turning out substandard products and their poor business practice.
So your going to reward Intel for their predatory and immoral shenanigans?
They can't just make a compiler, they have to make it sabotage the competition. That's beyond the pale.
http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49
I'm voting with my dollars and I'm voting for the underdog. Yeah AMD screwed the pooch but Intel wants to screw all of us.
Why don't you try and see things objectively instead of being brobro dickriders for either company. Competition is good, but trying to say that your apple is better than my orange is totally fucking asinine.
This is what pisses me off: Video card designers release a dual gpu videocard that over saturates the pci 3.0 bus, charges 1000 bucks for it, even though they know that you can't use all of it. So now the CPU guys are doing this too? Maybe we should try and come up another architecture for sending these massive chunks of information instead of sending small pieces of it down a small tube really really quickly, why not build a wider lane.......
Even if you're not overclocking, you can expect a shorter service from the parts.
It's very unlikely that you would ever experience this in practice.
Funny thing about the overclockers - they're good at showing up design flaws that can affect the rest of us.
Funny thing about the overclockers -- they have a vastly overinflated sense of their expertise and relevance.
The on-the-fly overclocking most modern CPUs do on thier own now (intel 'turbo speed' is just a situationally triggered overclock) just makes it more relevant.
Turbo is not an overclock. Intel closes timing over all turbo boost clock speeds (as well as other parameters like the classic trio of process variation, voltage, and temperature). Overclocking is when you operate a chip at some combination of PVT and frequency where the manufacturer didn't close timing.
Intel's turbo is really about keeping power under control. The chip's internal power control unit (PCU) senses how much power the processor cores (and also the uncore portions of the chip) are using, and adjusts clock speeds and voltage to keep total chip power at or under the thermal design power (TDP) rating. This is done because these days an active core can have quite large swings in power use based on the software it's running. When you're running particularly power-intensive code it may be necessary to clock down to keep actual power use under TDP. Turbo also permits treating the TDP as a total budget -- when some cores are idle, their portion of the TDP budget can be shifted to active cores to permit those cores to run faster than normal.
AMD does really well on multi-threaded performance as well.. I went with the 8-core AMD for my development workstation, as it handles the background services during development (webserver, sql database, no-sql database) etc better... at the same price AMD spanks Intel for my use case, and would have to spend a lot more to get the same level of performance (more expensive MB and CPU).. Of course most people would be happy with any >= $150 CPU combined with enough ram and an SSD these days.
Lately I've suggested people get the cheapest laptop they can find (mostly in the $300-450 range) and max out the RAM and put in an SSD. Generally a better experience than more expensive laptops... unless you need a high end display.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
Depends on your workload... for a developer workstation, AMD is much better for the price... I'd have to pay twice as much from Intel to get equivalent performance as AMD for multiple threads (and background services). For gaming, a $200 AMD combined with a $400 GPU does well enough for me... but I don't game much.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
Exactly. In reality 99% of people don't actually need raw performance. And 90% of the 1% are idiots.
My current computer is a AMD Phenom II X4 (well actually a X3 but Asus kindly allows me to unlock the extra core for free). Its been serving me nicely for the last 4 years.
I went with it because of the good performance/price point. I still don't actually have any plans to replace it.
The target of the APU is exactly like my computer. Work machines and everything from a casual gamer down.
Thats a pretty massive market and price is a decent concern for that market. Performance is stunning for all those uses as well - probably excessive actually.
having a beowulf cluster of these suckers!
AMD does really well on multi-threaded performance as well.. I went with the 8-core AMD for my development workstation, as it handles the background services during development (webserver, sql database, no-sql database) etc better... at the same price AMD spanks Intel for my use case, and would have to spend a lot more to get the same level of performance (more expensive MB and CPU).. Of course most people would be happy with any >= $150 CPU combined with enough ram and an SSD these days.
Lately I've suggested people get the cheapest laptop they can find (mostly in the $300-450 range) and max out the RAM and put in an SSD. Generally a better experience than more expensive laptops... unless you need a high end display.
Oh absolutely. Everyone who considers Bulldozer a failure is obviously not doing any heavily-multi threaded work.
We recently bought a new server (ESXi host) and we went with AMD because of the cost and scalability.
We ended up spending the $3000 difference (had we gone with Intel) on SSDs (vs. 15k SCSI drives).
"But if I'm building a system for someone who mostly does web surfing, Office, and occasionally some light gaming like WoW and The Sims, ..."
Then who cares about the "price/performance perspective" either? When performance doesn't really matter, there's no reason to consider it in the equation at all.
I got an overclocked A10 Trinity original to 4.3GHz stable at a mere 127 Fahrenheit after 1 hour of 100% usage using an aftermarket $20 cooler. The GPU registered a 6.4 graphics rating with 1600 MHz memory and 6.9 with 1866MHz memory. So the more you make it look like a graphics card with GDDR5, the more performance you got out of the graphics. So cue the angry rantings over bad graphics performance from the Kingston value line 1333 CL10 RAM users on forums.
Anyway, that gaming grade computer was $575 retail at my shop and ran most modern games at medium to high settings. It blows away a GT430 and most GT440's so that's nice. Now if someone wants a doable graphics card with good video encoding speed to boot, boom, APU. These are amazing for that! Usually you're talking about a $500 computer going to $650 minimum to bump up the power supply to support a GTX640 or 650 minimum to even call it a gaming computer. Now you just swap an i3 out for a 4-core APU and tada, basic gaming computer.
How so? If Intel is providing the best product out there, then most people will buy it and ignore their underhanded dealings since its the outcome they're interested in. I'm not screwed in any way because of how Intel has behaved. If AMD dies and Intel raise their prices due to a lack of competition, big deal. AMD would do EXACTLY the same thing if the roles were reversed. No-one is innocent here.
Intel could only afford to do that due to their market dominance, and their market dominance comes from the anti-competitive tricks they pulled (see http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3825865&cid=43916359 ).
AMD would do EXACTLY the same thing if the roles were reversed. No-one is innocent here..
And as soon as AMD started abusing a position of power, I would switch to buying Intel or products from some other competing vendor. Until that time, I'm going to give AMD the benefit of the doubt.
don't sweat it, that idiot is why wages are depressed, the middle class is shrinking, and collectively we're the poorest we've been in a generation. He wants a race to the bottom at all costs and evidently a complete lack of ethics is no obstacle.
Don't get me started. :) We can't tax the wealthy, that would be unfair. We can't raise minimum wages or strengthen unions, that would hurt the economy. Pay not attention to the GDP and corporate profits, if we dared to share even a tiny percentage of them with the proletariat, the world would end.
Don't forget ECC/REG memory. That only seems to be available if you buy Xeons. And the new i7 4770K doesn't even have VT-x enabled. (GAH!)