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AMD Next-Gen Kaveri APU Shipments Slip To 2014
MojoKid writes "The story around AMD's upcoming Kaveri continues to evolve, but it's increasingly clear that AMD's 3rd generation APU won't be available for retail purchase this year. If you recall, AMD initially promised that Kaveri would be available during 2013 and even published roadmaps earlier in May that show the chip shipping in the beginning of the fourth quarter. What the company is saying now is that while Kaveri will ship to manufacturers in late 2013, it won't actually hit shelves until 2014. The reason Kaveri was late taping out, according to sources, was that AMD kept the chip back to put some additional polish on its performance. Unlike Piledriver, which we knew would be a minor tweak to the core Bulldozer architecture, Steamroller, Kaveri's core architecture, is the first serious overhaul to that hardware. That means it's AMD's first chance to really fix things. Piledriver delivered improved clock speeds and power consumption, but CPU efficiency barely budged compared to 'Dozer. Steamroller needs to deliver on that front."
I don't like Intel lack of PCI-e in the i5 and lower range i7.
also where are the nexgen higher end i7's with QPI?
That four months is four months of lost revenue for AMD. Back when I worked in the chip business we typically had about six months after release where we could charge a premium for the new chips before the competition released something better. Unless they slipped too, every day we slipped was a day of premium, high-margin sales lost.
Yeah, we'd probably still be selling those chips two years later, but they'd then be at bargain basement prices with tiny margins.
I know Intel can do it, but they simply don't want to cannibalize their sales of power inefficient high-end chips.
Missed the newest Haswell line, eh?
The thing is, nobody is buying AMD because they are the best of the best. Their most expensive (non-server) chip is only $200. People buying their stuff aren't looking for the latest greatest thing. They just want a computer that performs reasonably well, without breaking the bank. The fact that you can get an 8 core, 4 GHz CPU for $200 is a big plus for some people. Plus AMD motherboards seem to have more features for less money. And they have a better track record for not switching sockets every time they change something, which leaves more room for upgrading your machine later.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
AMD and to a lesser extent, Intel, are misreading the mass market. What everybody else except those hardcore GamerZ (rhymes with lamers) want isn't more "powerful" desktop systems that consume enough watts to power a third world household with room to spare but more power efficient APUs, aka SoCs or systems on a chip. I know Intel can do it, but they simply don't want to cannibalize their sales of power inefficient high-end chips.
How has Intel misread the market? Ivy Bridge was Sandy Bridge with much lower load power. Haswell is Ivy Bridge with much lower idle power. True, Intel is still struggling to compete in the smartphone/tablet segment that is dominated by ARM, but Haswell is far superior to past Intel chips when it comes to power consumption.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The AMD APUs really are a great melding of price vs performance. Sure Intel has faster CPUs, but they're also more than twice as much! The highest end APU is $150, and the highest i7 is $340. The i7 will have higher CPU performance, but most games aren't CPU bound, they're GPU bound. The AMD APUs have decent GPUs. They won't replace your high end GPU if you're playing Battlefield at 1080p, but if you're a mid-level gamer they perform great. Plus you can always add a decent GPU for $150 and you're still less than that 4700 i7!
The fact that you can get an 8 core, 4 GHz CPU for $200 is a big plus for some people.
I guess, for the people who like big numbers never mind that it's usually just breaking even with competing quad-cores with lower frequency but higher IPC. The FX-8350 has a single threaded performance equal to the Phenom II X6 1100T and Intel Pentium G840, it can win some multi-threaded tests because price wise it competes against Intel's hyperthreading-crippled processors but it's no impressive chip. But at least it sucks less than the FX-8150 , which really was the worst of Bulldozer.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I would love to see what these chips do for engineering simulations. In simulation software there is a lot of back and forth between parts that can be done on a gpu for a huge performance gain to parts that work best on a cpu. The problem is that mostly you end up running them pure cpu only because the overhead of handing off to the gpu and getting a result back is so high. Kaveri is the first chip I know of that can do a zero copy transfer between the gpu and cpu. It may not be great for all apps but it should be AMAZING for engineering sims if they are modified to take advantage of it.
Some of the papers I read found that on simulations large enough for the gpu to make a difference you could get a 50x performance increase and theoretically it should have been around 200x or so but the overhead of loading and retrieving the data was still very large.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
This has been known for a couple months or three months, and even then was not a big surprise as the original target was "H2 2013" with no commitment.
never mind that it's usually just breaking even with competing quad-cores with lower frequency but higher IPC.
AMD has clearly lost the performance war. But I'm still hoping the brand sticks around because I believe it's the only thing keeping Intel CPU prices low.
But in any event, I think the really important point is in the end of this article - http://hothardware.com/News/Praying-For-Consoles-AMD-Details-2013-Game-Plan-Offers-Updates-on-New-APU-Performance/ - AMD is banking its future on the APUs in embedded applications, low end laptops, and consoles. Unless they get into tablets and mobile devices in big ways, I think they're planning to grow their share of a market that's shrinking rapidly. "King of console processors" is meaningless if 90% of the demographic that played Xbox360 in 2005 is playing on an iPad in 2020.
Better then that. My ivy bridge i7 2,6 Ghz Mac Mini (the entire computer, not just the CPU) idles at below 15w and maxes out below 60w at max load.
So basically, you havent looked at Intel CPUs of the past 2 years at all, right?
AMD has clearly lost the performance war. But I'm still hoping the brand sticks around because I believe it's the only thing keeping Intel CPU prices low.
Intel CPU prices were higher when AMD was competitive with them.
ARM are Intel's real competitor at the moment, not AMD.
I imagine the next-gen consoles being all AMD has something to do with that.
Aren't the new consoles the first time in decades that a console is much less powerful than a typical gaming PC at release? The original Xbox, for example, was a PC with a decent CPU for that era and a faster GPU than you could buy for a PC, and only really limited in RAM.
Comparing most expensive chips isn't fair or useful. Intel's most expensive chips can cost a lot more because AMD doesn't have anything competitive.
A AMD FX-8350 costs $200. In Intel land, a i5-3750 is the right cost equal, at about $215. Intel's lead is so large that even a previous generation unit from their line up is approximately equal performance to AMD's current models. Which of those two is faster depends on the benchmark.
At the $100 end of the market, there are a few really cheap models where AMD has a price performance lead over Intel. But the minute you get to even $200, they are at best evenly matched. And Intel's built in HD graphics chips are getting better fast enough that even the AMD APU models won't have a lead at any price level for much longer.
I'd consider an ARM desktop if there actually were motherboards to buy!
I only know of one, it's 349 euros and has a Tegra 3 which is outdated but has PCIe. Tegra 4 is a better fit for a desktop, CPU wise, but doesn't have PCIe.
http://shop.seco.com/gpudevkit/gpudevkit-detail.html
What you would need is a Tegra 5 which will just come with desktop graphics, so the feature level and driver support will both be easier. Just use nvidia driver or nouveau, presumably, and have real OpenGL not OpenGL ES. But we don't know if it will be available with PCIe. Funny that the "fuck you!" company is the only one that is building the chip you wish for.
As you can see ARM desktop is just a specialty item with a price that makes it useless. And when it becomes fast (e.g. Cortex A15 cores and not throttled down when it's put to use) ARM goes into 5W to 10W territory, meeting with the x86 guys (Atom, Jaguar, even Haswell/Ivy Bridge!)
ISA doesn't matter that much, low power x86 gives you a desktop. The current problem is Atom 32nm has no GPU drivers other than giving you raw X11 at correct res (given the GPU is a PowerVR, which is maybe the major brand of GPU for ARM SoCs, we can see that indeed the GPU support is indeed non existant in ARM land). And Kabini has been paper launched but we're waiting for the motherboards.
Kabini/New Atom mostly solve your desktop needs and even then Celeron 847 and Intel NUC have been available too.
The AMD APUs really are a great melding of price vs performance....
Even though I loath the 70% gross margin that Intel insists on. They have http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTI5MTI 20-30 people working on Linux Drivers vs 5 from AMD. There is more than one way to measure bang for buck. That said when I buy a separate graphics card it will be AMD.
How about a decent Linux driver for once.
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AMD has clearly lost the performance war. But I'm still hoping the brand sticks around because I believe it's the only thing keeping Intel CPU prices low.
A while back their CEO fired most of their processor design team during lean times, apparently thinking they could re-hire them when fat times arrived again. Alas, firing your core talent during lean times means you will never have fat times ever again. I'm rather doubtful AMD will ever come anywhere near the pinnacles of the past and in fact wondering whether I should permanently write them off.
ARM is a threat to Intel in the near future and indirectly. People are gravitating towards tablets and smartphones instead of buying deaktops. However, those of us that actually need desktops today have only Intel and AMD to turn to, and Intel's margins are too high and their products are too artificially crippled for my tastes, which is why I sincerely root for AMD's success.
But, as I said, Intel CPU prices were higher when AMD's high-end was competitive with Intel's high-end.
Intel has no competition for their high-end desktop CPUs. So why don't they push prices up much higher? It's not because you can turn around and buy a similar performance CPU from AMD.
I went to go upgrade my quad core FX last year, in order to get the 8 core I needed a new fan (cause the ones amd ship are a joke ... they keep it cool, running at 6k rpm and loud as a jet) and a new power supply
by the time I bought those two things I was at the price of a 3770k and still didnt get close to performance .. bought intel
until AMD can get their power to power ratio in line they are just not worth looking at in the mid to upper end, and no one cares about the low end, go get yourself a 99$ off lease core2 duo, why not, its got about the same power consumption and is still slightly faster chip than what AMD has in the low end market
You ask why they don't keep pushing prices up(could ask that until infinity dollars) as if you think Intel's pricing is reasonable for their top end CPUs and you think they are doing consumers a favor for not asking more.
Comparing to top end graphics cards (Nvidia Titan, for example), the top end Intel chips (3970x) are relatively unsophisticated compared to their cheaper line ($300). That is, they are already inflating their margins by astronomical amounts because they have no competition at the top end.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
FX-8350 is 180$, I just bought one. That is, the price difference is 20%, but the comparable motherboard was about 40$ cheaper with AMD. In the 180-220$ range of processors, 75$ is nothing to sneeze at.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
No. That's four months without the increased sales that new feature may inspire (they hope), but in the meantime their current stuff is still selling. It should be obvious. Please sober up before posting again.
Xeons are that far behind the desktop chips anyway :(
AMD has clearly lost the performance war. But I'm still hoping the brand sticks around because I believe it's the only thing keeping Intel CPU prices low.
I'm not so sure, actually. I think a big part of today's relatively low prices is Intel competing with itself.
We're well and truly into the age of 'good enough' computing. You don't need a new computer to run the latest Windows or Office version or even most games. Unless you're transcoding hours of video or playing today's games on high detail mode that four year old Core 2 Duo is fine, and will be for a while yet.
If Intel raise their prices, the risk isn't that their customers will flock to AMD. The risk is that their customers will say, "Screw it, my old computer still works fine." Intel have to put out faster chips each year at around the same prices to convince people to actually buy and not just sit on what they already have.
An unnecessarily overpowered chip will be delayed, so more of the hardware features no one asked for will be delivered to a market that usually works in symbiosis with the Microsoft inefficiency treadmill but is now being destroyed entirely by that same company.
Why don't you wait for it to come out before criticizing it. AMD is in trouble and it would hurt us all including the intel fan boys who are reading these comments if AMD is gone.
I noticed Intel is already raising prices on the newer I7s for no other reason that they think there is no competition as everyone bashes them in every tech website.
Steamroller is actually slower than the older Phenom II per clock cycle and is a crappy chip. That is true. I still own a phenom II but my crappy mobo is showing its age as it is downclocked to only 2.6 ghz. But it runs VMWare Workstation with its x6 core processor very competitively! I mean it can trounce a x4 icore7 easily from the same time period 2010ish in parrallel processing!
Want hardware virtualization iwth that intel processor? Oh, you need a special bios unlocked for $$$ more money (as much as my whole machine at $599!) AMD would never do this.
Remember Intel fanboys that even Intel had crappy chips out there such as 486sx, buggy pentiums, and of course the Pentium IV. The mistake for Steamroller were :-( FYI they are not true cores like Intels or the older Phenom IIs.
1. Everyone would be using a tablet by now and would like smooth graphics like the Iphone has had for 5 years in which PCs still do not do right with smooth scroll thanks to XP support and crappy integrated chipsets
2. The APU would be faster than any 7990 as the ram controller would be on the card with instant low latency! Turns out that wasn't true as complications got in the way of that
3. AMD had done right iwth the Phenom II was great multicore and parrallel performance. SteamRoller has all its cores share cache and a central FPU
I was hoping these last 2 issues would be fixed in Kaveri. AMD is in trouble and its ATI cards can't keep them afloat forever. Nvidia is being very aggressive with Kepler in that department.
http://saveie6.com/
According to Tomshardware an Icore3 can fucking beat that 8 core. Especially in Skyrim and Crysis.
FYI I am typing this on an AMD phenom II sadly as I am not an intel troll. The FX really is a crappy chip and there is no sense trying to defend it as the people who play games or do any graphics work use dedicated graphics anyway. The intel integrated crap is fine for Office work and web browsing in this day and age.
Here is hoping this next generation one fixes the problems.
http://saveie6.com/
You ask why they don't keep pushing prices up(could ask that until infinity dollars) as if you think Intel's pricing is reasonable for their top end CPUs and you think they are doing consumers a favor for not asking more.
Comparing to top end graphics cards (Nvidia Titan, for example), the top end Intel chips (3970x) are relatively unsophisticated compared to their cheaper line ($300). That is, they are already inflating their margins by astronomical amounts because they have no competition at the top end.
And just wait to think what will happen if AMD liquidates and closes it doors if it can't get a competitive CPU? We most certainly will accelerate into a post PC world as the costs of all notebooks and desktops at the low end will double very quickly.
Please AMD do not mess this one up. My phenom II is begining to show its age and in 2 years I am planning on replacing it perhaps with this new chip?
http://saveie6.com/
They wont flock to AMD.
Most sales are from big name OEMs these days like HP and Dell. They only have intel lines as customers see the stickers and it is a name they are familiar with. Worse, geeks who go to slashdot or its Redmond fanboy version aka neowin.net have been warning them of AMD for a few years now if they users ask them for advice.
There are still some who homebrew systems but they are almost all performance oriented folks who buy Intel anyway. Even a cheap i3 build will cost $200 more than buying one from Dell where you can turn it on and get to work right away due to volume discounts. $350 vs $550 is a big difference from an identical computer spec wise. If HP or Dell make any and I mean any non intel units let me know and I will retract. It is 2am and I am too lazy to look it up now.
http://saveie6.com/
See: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kaveri
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
There are image processing techniques that are still too compute-intensive for routine use. Linear motion blur correction for a 4000x3000 image can run several minutes on a state-of-the-art processor. Now upgrade that to an algorithm that searches for the sharpest possible image from a set of nonlinear multi-direction blurs: come back tomorrow, and if the CPU hasn't fried itself it still won't be done.
The ability to use CPU power far exceeds any likely improvement in the foreseeable future.
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I kinda like the AMD Backhoe.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
I guess, for the people who like big numbers never mind that it's usually just breaking even with competing quad-cores with lower frequency but higher IPC.
If by "breaking even" you mean pretty much beating the similarly priced intel processor on every multithreaded task, and even beating the $$$ top end intel i7 on some then yes.
A good fraction of what I do requires more than one core these days. In things like parallel compiling, I believe that the top AMD one was, in fact, king of the hill. That's a big plus for me for sure. The AMD ones also tend to be very competitive in scientific type software, another big plus.
The new APU should be a game changer. GPU like performance without the wretched CPU-GPU latency that kills GPUs for most applications because GPUs suck at many things.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Actually, this is the first generation that has similar memory to a PC. The PS3 launched with 256MB of RAM when a low-end PC might have 2GB, i.e. only 1/8th of the memory. The new consoles have 8GB when a typical gaming PC might have 9-10GB.
Although they've still found a way to ruin that with bloated operating systems taking up nearly half the memory.
The CPU prices were higher because it was more expensive to make CPUs back then. With the past technology you couldn't put as many dies on the wafer.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Throw in motherboard and ram and possibly graphics card in that mix and picking that CPU vs the Intel one make less of a difference.
For me personally I need to get a new HDD, PSU, want to get a case and need a new monitor to.
Reason to pick AMD? None.
Are there really that many people playing Skyrim and Crysis? Particularly playing those games with low graphic settings in order to not be GPU limited? A lot of my clients still have Core 2 duo or Phenom II and don't need more power. Even worst, a lot of their employees still have P4 at home and see no reason to upgrade. Also, considering the Xbox One and the PS4 both have an AMD processor (and not a fast one), it's kind of obvious there is very little use of a Core i7 for most people, even for gaming.
Personally, I think it's a shame we can't buy something like a 70$ Athlon II X3 anymore, because with its ECC memory support, it was is the perfect desktop machine for regular people. I did buy a Xeon e3-1230 for myself, but it's a waste of money for most people. I'd say it was even a waste of money for myself.
The only place where I clearly recommend Intel is for laptops, where heat and power consumption is important.
The original Xbox had a REALLY SLOW CPU for a new piece of hardware from that era. NV2A is in between NV20 and NV25, though, so the GPU was actually competitive when it came out.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Indeed, for the first time Intel is the clear winner in power consumption. Until Haswell, the intel CPU+chipset would always consume more power than the AMD CPU+chipset. To me, that is the real story of the modern CPU, not whose CPU is fastest.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Looks like the developers you work with haven't discovered asynchronous operation and the principle of overlapping communication and computation.
And yet my $400 HP Llano notbook has made me more satisfied than any laptop I've had in the past :)
Low end PC's at the time shipped with 512MB, not 2GB. If they shipped with 2GB Vista might have faired better.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
Intel used-to have a monopoly grip on the workstation and server markets. Intel's P4 debacle greatly loosened Intel's grip, and Opteron leap-frogged Intel, and the demand was such that even the most dedicated Intel OEMs started offering Opteron servers and workstations, and AMD isn't gone from that market by any means, so if Intel slips up just a bit, AMD will be there to take up the slack. So Intel has good reason to be much more careful about pricing than they were a decade ago.
No. ARM is trying to kill both Intel and AMD, eventually, but for the forseeable future, ARM and Intel/AMD just don't compete in the same space...
Intel/AMD never made any headway into extremely low power, where ARM has a stronghold (rumors are that MIPS might come back to form in the near future as well, and compete with ARM), but in the high-power market, ARM has zero market, where Intel/AMD have a stronghold (after the faltering of all the single-source proprietary (-Unix) architectures.
If you want a workstation that runs Windows, Intel/AMD can do it for you, while ARM has NOTHING to offer you, and doesn't seem to be trying. If you want a phone with good battery life, Intel has one mediocre product offering, trying to threaten ARM more than actually compete, but really there's no question where to go.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
It's the economy[, stupid]. People won't pay a thousand dollars for a magic CPU right now. Intel is already charging what the market will bear. AMD is chasing the budget segment right now because it's large and growing, and there's no way they can compete with intel for the high end. Intel can just ratchet down their prices until they're only making a reasonable amount of profit. Instead they're taking over the market where Intel is not competitive, which is the only thing that makes sense. The Intel-based Xbox took too long to become profitable, probably in no small part because it had to have a separate GPU. The AMD-based game consoles are going to be simpler because they don't need a second big chip with a fat interconnect. Intel still doesn't have a credible GPU to pack in with its CPU, not for the quality demanded by a console anyway. Right now you can get a laptop for $200 with an AMD APU that will play most games. What can you get with Intel inside for two clams?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
> Haswell is far superior to past Intel chips when it comes to power consumption.
Only the laptop chips. The desktop chips are actually more power hungry. On top of that the laptop chips are only more power effient when doing light work, when fully loaded they have no advantage over Ivy Bridge.
Temash has 3.5W to 5.9W TDP, that's the max power use for a CPU+GPU+southbridge. Low end Kabini is 9W. Haswell at 10W.
So yes I say fast ARM and slow x86 meet at a similar point, a few years ago you had an Atom smartphone which was fast and worked. You have a Toshiba tablet with Tegra 4 that overheats, though it's bad design and that ARM SoC is a semi-failure.
Note that "idle" on a modern desktop is not so much 0 to 1% CPU use, I have firefox using 30 to 50% of one CPU core right now doing who knows what. To idle my desktop I have to shut it down, stand by or close firefox.
I used to think so, until this month when I got the latest Samsung tablet running an Intel x86 chip. It ran my ARM native code so flawlessly I didn't even notice it until I ran into some obscure DLL that couldn't load. And that was with the current generation, 32 nanometer, I believe. Apparently these chips are already competitive on power efficiency and performance.
By the end of the year, Intel will be making these at 22nm, and by 2015 they'll be down to 16nm. I don't think there's anyone planning to manufacture ARM chips at that size, so with their emulation tech, Intel has a huge potential here to take the market from ARM.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
In a simulation there are a lot of steps where you have some linear calculations and then some other calculations that can be thousands run in parallel but the next linear calculation depends on the parallel calculation. Async makes no sense for that. The next linear calculation can't be run until the previous parallel calculation has finished. Think of some steps as simple linear equations and the next step as a set of codependent equations that need to be converged. Doing that in parallel is vastly faster but once you have your converged solution your next step is then another linear step.
What you end up with is a lot of back and forth from parallel to linear parts and the back and force kills your performance if you try to run it on a current cpu/gpu setup.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
you will have to spend that extra 75 bucks on cooling and a power supply though so you really end up spending about the same for a lower performing chip
that's what kind of happened to me, havent had an intel system since the pentium 1, went to go upgrade / make a new box, so getting a new mb and video card anyway, both the AMD and INTEL gigabyte brand motherboards were 80ish bucks, the 8 core AMD was cheaper, but knowing from my quad core I instantly needed a 40$ fan cause the OEM fans work, but sound like a jet engine under the slightest load (clocked it at 6,000 rpm, little 60mm thing) and my 600 watt corsair was about 120 watts underpowered to sustain the cpu and video card.
so boom instantly my cpu costs were the same as a i7 3770K, which is faster than the 8 core 4ghz FX, and leaves almost 100 watts of breathing room on my 600 watt supply.
intel won that battle hands down
the FX is pretty garbage, I have a FX4170, and its noticeably better than my old phenom II 720, it can outrun an i5 in daily operations, it cant hold a candle to the i7
most disappointing AMD chip I have ever bought
Lemme guess, native English-speaker on ibogaine with too much crank and Jack on the side? Awesome, man. First belly laugh of the day.
The boxed processor I bought (FX4300, quad @ 3.8ghz OC'd to 4.1ghz) is using the stock AMD HSF that it came with. It usually runs around 42C and gets up to maybe 53-54C under a load that pegs all 4 cores (movie encoding, which I often do).
At no point is the CPU fan ever even audible. The only thing I can hear other than some HDD whine is the PSU fan on my Antec Neo Eco 520.
And how are you getting that the AMD processor uses 220w more than the Intel? The Bulldozer TDP is 125w (AMD FX-8350 Vishera 4.0GHz). The i7 3770K is 77W. And AMD rates at peak while Intel rates at average.
Even with the beast of an nVidia card I have in there the 520w PSU is more than enough. Sounds like you just want there to be price parity for some reason. AMD is cheap, they do it well, it's their niche.
The AMD branded cooler master that came with mine in the amd box never had a problem keeping things cool, but it was so damn loud my wife complained about it from across the apartment 2 rooms down the hall
TDP has little to do with how much power a CPU sucks out of the supply, the 8 core 4.2 ghz under full load will suck almost 300 watts of power
my 4170 quad sucks down 198 watts and my old ATI6870 sucks 247 under full load so without thinking about motherboard, fans, optical disk's, shit plugged into the ports, hard drive or goofy lights I am at 445, so just plopping in a new CPU breaks my power budget
sounds like you just dont know what your doing
The AMD APUs really are a great melding of price vs performance. Sure Intel has faster CPUs, but they're also more than twice as much! The highest end APU is $150, and the highest i7 is $340. The i7 will have higher CPU performance, but most games aren't CPU bound, they're GPU bound. The AMD APUs have decent GPUs. They won't replace your high end GPU if you're playing Battlefield at 1080p, but if you're a mid-level gamer they perform great. Plus you can always add a decent GPU for $150 and you're still less than that 4700 i7!
This is why my next machine will be an AMD APU. While I have a standalone card now, if it dies I'd likely just move to using the APU alone. I don't think it'd present a major problem, especially whenever it is I upgrade. They're only getting better.
http://www.accountkiller.com/en/delete-slashdot-account Stop visiting Slashdot.
HP: DM1Z Notebook - AMD APU models only
HP: Walmart Pavillions - AMD AM3 Athlon x2-x3-x4s (Phenom's also) Complete Desktops
HP: Walmart Laptops - AMD models, walk in and smell the chips
Acer: Walmart Laptops/Desktops - almost exclusively AMD systems
These are In stock and what many people buy everyday for home and small business use.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
Agreed.
To be fair, AMD has always been in a fundamentally tough position - for many years Intel has been able to spend more on research and development (R&D) than AMD made as gross income for the year. That's a David-And-Goliath position, except this Goliath is wearing a kick-ass helmet. I don't know if it was ever feasible for AMD to eat a big chunk of Intel's market.
Slashdot has linked articles discussing the events you mentioned. AMD's best products came when they used software to design CPUs, and then had their best engineers optimize and enhance those designs by hand. Now AMD is just using software, and judging by the performance of Bulldozer and Piledriver, the lack of the extra optimization step by their former team of engineers is killing them.
Consoles still have better games, in my humble opinion. But tablets are portable, convenient, and many of the best games are $10 or less, or free.
A great tablet (Current generation iPad, Google Nexus 10, Asus Transformer Pad Infinity) and twenty of the best games and hundreds of other useful apps and a decent and very easy to use web browser and all sorts of video streaming services might cost you $600 total. A console and ten of the best games and few other apps and a web browser that's a pain to use and the same set of video streaming services might run $900. And you can take the tablet to Starbucks or your friend's house or on vacation.
Good point. My wife's computer has an AMD X2 processor that was first on sale in 2005. Mine has an AMD 1090t six core AMD process from 2010 or so. Her computer is faster, because I put an SSD in it. All of the time I'm not gaming and 90% of the time I am gaming, I don't even have one core running at 100% utilization - the computer spends most of its life waiting for IO.
So maybe that will keep Intel's prices low no matter what happens to AMD. If the latest and greatest Intel Core iWhatever costs too much, I can just get a used Intel chip that meets my needs.
Something's wrong with your wattage figures, like you're taking the whole system's power use when stressing the CPU with a burn program, likewise with the GPU (with something like Furmark)
The point still stands, but to me the more annoying point is paying for the electrical utility bill.
To min/max the game what you need to do is build an Intel system with a lowest end mobo (around $50), Intel 3770 or 4770 or 4570, a good 300W or 350W PSU, stock cooler, max it out at 16GB. You can't run your 4170 on a low end mobo (or you suffer throttling, or are stuck at 800MHz), while the Intel system will be 100% stable due to not using much power.
dunno what your needs really are but if you want a crapload of connectors you can look like at a 990FX chipset mobo like the Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3, you can plug in lots of PCIe 4x or 8x or 1x cards in that, ergo additional SATA and LAN controllers. Drop an old 1MB or 2MB vid card in the PCI slot if all you want is a display for installing it, else a radeon 5450 or geforce 6200 or 210 in a PCIe 16x slot will do.
for a relatively low power CPU, well lol you can go with an Athlon II X2, even though that's a 2009 CPU, else a FX 6300 has more threads and has AES NI for crypto acceleration - which Intel cripples away unless you get a high end i5 or i7.
agreed, that's why my most recent build was an i7 3770K, in the middle high end AMD just cant wrangle the numbers, and in the low end no one cares whats in their 299 walmart machine
I don't think you can be power efficient when using max power for gaming, editing, etc
The boxed processor I bought (FX4300, quad @ 3.8ghz OC'd to 4.1ghz) is using the stock AMD HSF that it came with. It usually runs around 42C and gets up to maybe 53-54C under a load that pegs all 4 cores (movie encoding, which I often do).
Here's a dirty little secret about the "temperatures" that are reported by AMD (and probably Intel) processors. They are *not* calibrated against anything. You can't say that the processor runs at 53-54C with any certainty (it can be +/- 10% or more when compared to a calibrated sensor), all you can say is that it runs about 11-12C warmer under load then idle.
Very few temperature sensors inside of PCs are calibrated. You can have multiple sensors, all within an inch of each other, all taking the same airflow, and one will report a 5C difference.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
1) AMD highest end APU is not 150$, it's 330$. With tiers all the way down.
2) If GPU bound, you can get an i5 for 100$ less or an i3 for even less, and put that towards a GPU.
3) Games are also mostly limited to 1 core more or less. Making about 7 of AMD's cores more less useless in this regard.
AMD are not great price vs performance. AMD ARE good at price at the low end. If you are building a basic machine on the cheap, AMD is your chip right now (or a business server). However if you wish to use it for any gaming, don't waste your time.
Actually more relevant to this conversation, are the integrated graphics on each offering for entry level laptops without a dedicated video card. Both have made big (well relatively speaking) improvements to integrated graphics. Since MOST laptops fall within this category, and the popularity to which laptops seem to be happening over desktops, this metric is one that won't be trivial for very much longer.
I think a FX6300 is half decent, esp. if you want to play with virtualisation with Vt-d. You had the worst of the bunch with that FX 4100.