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AMD's Project Quantum Gaming PC Contains Intel CPU

Posted by timothy on from the pride-of-place dept.

nateman1352 links to an article at Tom's Hardware which makes the interesting point that chip-maker AMD will offer Intel -- rather than AMD -- CPUs in their upcoming high-end gaming PC. (High-end for being based on integrated components, at least.) From the article: Recently, AMD showed off its plans for its Fiji based graphics products, among which was Project Quantum – a small form factor PC that packs not one, but two Fiji graphics processors. Since the announcement, KitGuru picked up on something, noticing that the system packs an Intel Core i7-4790K "Devil's Canyon" CPU. We hardly need to point out that it is rather intriguing to see AMD use its largest competitor's CPU in its own product, when AMD is a CPU maker itself.

28 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. The answer's simple... by beelsebob · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The i7 4790k is faster than any CPU AMD make, by quite a wide margin. They're trying to sell this as the ultimate graphics crunching box... That needs a faster CPU than they can produce.

    1. Re:The answer's simple... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The answer is even simpler than that.. They are offering a both, because they know the customer base is fickle and brand loyal.

      You'll probably see a lower priced version with an AMD CPU and a much higher priced Intel based model for the kids who want bragging rights. They win either way.

      They designed the product to actually compete in the market, not to show off their CPUs.

    2. Re:The answer's simple... by binarylarry · · Score: 4, Funny

      No, but my sources tell me they're planning an Intel+Nvidia second generation product that will totally blow this rig out the water!

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    3. Re:The answer's simple... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      So AMD goes away and intel prices the new CPUs even higher in the sky? Are you a retard? Besides, i'm buying AMD any day.

    4. Re:The answer's simple... by hairyfeet · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Exactly, why leave money on the table when you don't have to? Those that are care about gaming (instead of bragging rights) will pick up the AMD version and use the savings for increased RAM and SSD space which will make for a faster system overall (since games haven't been CPU bound in years) and those that want to brag "I got teh fastest of teh fastest!" can grab the Intel...and AMD gets paid either way, smart move.

      Just remember boys and girls do NOT buy your CPUs based on the benchmarks because Intel came right out and admitted they rigged them (which just shows you how toothless the DoJ is these days, I have zero doubt the CEO of Intel could walk out on stage and drop his drawers and tell the DoJ to kiss his ass and the only response would be the DoJ asking what color lipstick he preferred) and this is backed up by Phoronix which shows that with GCC you "magically" get a 30%+ performance boost and their numbers match up almost perfectly with Tek Syndicate who has the $140 FX8350 trading blows with Intel chips costing more than twice the price.

      I know I've got to try just about every Intel and AMD chip at the shop and using real world applications side by side and testing them? Yeah....you'll be lucky to get 8% difference in real world uses, sorry. Now sure if you buy a $1000 Intel chip you might get 20% higher....for an increased cost of 600%+, in my book that math don't work so good. I can say I was impressed enough with the FX chips I grabbed the FX8320E and I'm loving every minute of it, its a multitasking beast and even after 6 hours of transcodes I have yet to be able to break above 118F and paired with an R9 280 I can play all the latest games with all the purty and never have a skip nor shudder. If you want to build a badass gaming rig cheap? Go with the FX chips, you will NOT regret it!

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    5. Re:The answer's simple... by Billly+Gates · · Score: 2

      I interpret this differently.

      AMD cpu division has been losing money hands over fists since the first i series for quite some time. It doesn't matter if it fits your needs. It only matters if they can compete with Intel. They can't.

      ATI however brings in some money I guess. So this is a test to see if the intel version sells 4x more. If it does perhaps it is time for AMD to leave Intel to the x86 to remain solvent? It pains me to type this as I went AMD since the athlonXP days to the phenom II I just retired last summer.

      Sorry Hairy but in Star Wars the OLD republic where I got 20 FPS I now get 40 fps iwth the same video card since I went from a 2.6 ghz 6 core phenom II to a 3.5 ghz i7 which is only 4 core. If I wasn't so cheap ... or I should say ex would allow me to spend $150 for a 2010 i5 when I bought my phenom I would not have had this problem.

      Also AMD really does suck with power management. You won't see my MS Surface carrying an AMD anytime soon. My coworker like you is an AMD fanboy but he admits for a notebook he won't touch AMD.

      As tablets take over as the Surface and WIndows 10 with universal metro apps and 2 SDK's to port IOS and Android apps with 85% of the original code to IWndows Phone/Windows 10 take off in the coming years this will be ever so important. True WIndows 8.1 was frustrating and both of us hated it with a passion, but I concede it rocks on a surface and Windows 10 is what 8 should have been.

      So I could be wrong but a test to dip the waters is my 1st guess. Second AMD could be preparing to leave the cpu market entirely since Intel is about to embark .14 nm skylake. What is AMD .28??? Slower performance, more heat, and more power sadly since they sold of global foundaries. Global foundaries are reserving .14 nm chips for phones. AMD is too small of a market to give a crap about. Ouch ...

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    6. Re:The answer's simple... by n3r0.m4dski11z · · Score: 2

      "(since games haven't been CPU bound in years)"

      You obviously haven't played any system stressing games... Most games are not multiuthreaded, so do not benefit from AMD's main competitive edge. Not to mention AMD chips run hotter and use more power than a comparable intel. Never a good sign of good design .

      Then you imply that intel rigged ALL the benchmarks they are in because there is a conspiracy and the US DOJ should get involved....

      Like this right, this is rigged by intel?
      http://www.cpubenchmark.net/hi...
      (The first AMD cpu ranks in at 59th... with double the cores of the nearest i7)

      The pendulum switches back and forth all the time, no point in being a fanboy for either franchise. Intel has been dominating since core 2 duo / core 2 quad and they continue to do so. I had dual opterons before that. Brand loyal is stupid, benchmarks cant all lie.

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    7. Re:The answer's simple... by serviscope_minor · · Score: 2

      I don't think he's an intel fanboi as much as an Intel hater, which is fine, because they're pretty despicable. They're crooks but the legal system seems to love large companies so, for example when they dealt an illegal yet crippling blow, they got away with a $1bn payoff which is certainly less than they've made from their illegal activities.

      When fines for bad behaviour have a strongly positive ROI, then there's something deeply broken with the system.

      It's also funny that on Linux, with fully open benchmarks on phoronix, the AMD chips trade blows with the Intel ones and the top end ones of each are actually pretty close, with AMD being a bit slower on average than the top intel ones, but not far off. You don't have to be a fanboi to read the benchmark results.

      These days I buy AMD if at all possible because they're fast in most cases and I'd rather not give my money to a crook if I can avoid it.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    8. Re:The answer's simple... by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      You obviously haven't played any system stressing games... Most games are not multiuthreaded,

      Who told you that? Maybe you should try firing up some thread monitors before you talk this bullshit. Most games of any complexity, and even many games of virtually none, are multithreaded. This was mostly true even before the advent of the Xbox 360, but after that just about every cross-platform game became multithreaded, with at least three threads. Since Microsoft and Sony have both gone to consoles with eight cores, multithreaded games are even more ubiquitous.

      So no, you're full of crap right there.

      Intel has been dominating since core 2 duo / core 2 quad and they continue to do so.

      No. Phenom II is faster than Core 2. After that, though...

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  2. Strange by ArcadeMan · · Score: 2

    AMD knows their CPU dissipates too much heat for the SFF PC?

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  3. What a fucking stupid submission. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What a goddamn stupid submission.

    Yes, companies that make one product do use products from competitors in some situations. Microsoft is a great example of this. Yes, they provide Windows, but you can also use Linux with Azure. There's nothing wrong with that. They're using a product that competes with Windows because that's what the Azure users want and need. It's the smart thing to do, for crying out loud.

    A much bigger problem is when an open source project like, say, Debian, ends up having to support systemd thanks to political skullduggery, even though systemd is not what Debian's users want, it is not good for the Debian project's quality, it causes many problems, and causes many Debian users to lose trust in the project and its software. That's a real problem. This AMD-using-Intel-CPU shit is totally a non-issue.

  4. AMD takes care of its customers? by Iamthecheese · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That's what I'm reading. That AMD is willing to go the extra mile to offer what its customers are looking for.

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    If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
  5. Not surprising by kuzb · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The only reason to buy AMD these days is if you're on a budget, and you're OK with middling performance.

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    BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
    1. Re:Not surprising by Tapewolf · · Score: 2

      The only reason to buy AMD these days is if you're on a budget, and you're OK with middling performance.

      Or you want ECC memory...

  6. Yes by goldcd · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What's refreshing is that they've recognized this. I'm reasonably sure this choice was the output of some rather heated meetings - but so.. 'refreshing' to see that the correct decision was made, for those people wanting to purchase the product.
    Also gives a pretty good internal target for AMD - v2 of this box WILL have an AMD CPU in it (or else we're getting out of the CPU market).

    1. Re:Yes by AK+Marc · · Score: 3, Insightful

      They've always recognized this. If you want 80% of the best for the lowest price, you want AMD. If you want the top 20% at any price, go Intel. I remember the marketing from 5, 10 and 15 years ago, and it seems to me that AMD always knew that. They may not like it, but they knew it.

      --
      Learn to love Alaska
    2. Re:Yes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      no, thats not true.

      amd pioneered the modern architectural shift towards cpu/memory/io/cache complexes being switched networks

      for a brief period of time they totally outshone intel which was still culturally crippled by the concept of
      a parallel 'front end bus'

      the truth is, that in the 'free markets', players tend to snowball and take the whole pie. thats just happens.
      cisco, microsoft, google, intel, apple.

      sorry legitimate competion

    3. Re:Yes by Kjella · · Score: 2, Insightful

      What's refreshing is that they've recognized this. I'm reasonably sure this choice was the output of some rather heated meetings

      I guess nobody here at /. took the Nokia lesson. No matter how badly your product sucks, you never, ever admit that to the market. It doesn't matter if you got less credibility than the Iraqi information minister, it's still better than the alternative. Do you know how much ridicule they're going to get for this with funny fake ads with the "Intel inside" logo and jingle? It's brand suicide. The only plausible explanation is that AMD is in "screw tomorrow, we need sales NOW" mode. It's not a shocker if the market pairs an Intel CPU with an AMD dGPU if that makes sense, but if I was head of marketing at AMD I'd rather resign than have this to my name.

      --
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    4. Re:Yes by viperidaenz · · Score: 2

      Perhaps they don't want to sell an ultimate gaming machine powered by the best GPU's AMD has to offer being crippled by the CPU and risk getting beaten by nVidia.
      That would make both their CPU's and GPU's look bad.

      Their CPU's are already in the "best bang per buck" category and I'm guess have thin margins because of that as well.

    5. Re:Yes by beelsebob · · Score: 2

      The problem with "SMT on top" of their current design is that their current design is SMT. They're just marketing it as true 8 cores, not SMT.

      The current piledriver design doesn't have 8 separate floating point units, or 8 separate instruction decode units. It has 4 of each. They just have 8 ALUs - 2 to each decode unit. It's ALU/ALU SMT, when Intel has ALU/FP SMT.

    6. Re:Yes by serviscope_minor · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Um, that's utter crap.

      No it ain't. AMD at that point had an actually scalable architecture using hyper transport and could scale in multi socket boxes way, way better than Intel. It made a huge difference.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    7. Re:Yes by Mike+Frett · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's not crap. The Athlons crushed the Pentium 4's. I remember that very clearly. Slashdot people should know this unless you were born yesterday.

    8. Re:Yes by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      'AMD rulez because no FSB' was just AMD fanboy claptrap, like 'AMD rulez because Intel put two chips in one package for a quad-core, but AMD puts four on one chip.' None of those things made any significant difference to performance in that era.

      What? Yes they did. The AMD chips had substantially more memory bandwidth at the time, which was readily discoverable, and they had a far superior NUMA interconnect technology which permitted them to do many more cores in a single machine without nearly as much contention as the crossbar architecture intel was using. Intel has since come around to a more modern bus and has a faster on-board memory controller than AMD, which just proves how wrong you are; if it's the inferior approach, intel wouldn't have adopted it after AMD.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    9. Re:Yes by cinky · · Score: 2

      Intel has a quarterly budget for R&D of $3.5B. Intel is one of the biggest spenders on R&D in tech. AMD has quarterly budget for R&D of around $250M...

  7. Precisely. by goldcd · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This decision underlines that AMD wanted to make something great, that people would want and would buy - rather than being a vanity project for the company.
    Been with nVidia for the last batch of GPUs and for last few CPUs - but I'm still rooting for them. The plucky, power-guzzling underdog :)
    Maybe my next upgrade will switch me back to them, maybe it won't - but this decision at least shows me they've not lost their minds, and should still be considered.

    1. Re:Precisely. by spire3661 · · Score: 2

      The problem is, following this logic they should have used Nvidia GPU parts as well. This showcases AMD's weaknesses more than anything else. Its confirmation of what everyone already knows, AMD cant make low heat parts.

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      Good-bye
  8. Wait, AMD is selling a Computer? by WilCompute · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I am still waiting to see the part were this was anything more than a promotional and inspiration design from AMD. Nowhere has AMD said they are going to sell this, or any, boxed PC.

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    NDxTreme Content on the Edge.
  9. Re:Not just a CPU company anymore by dbIII · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Actually their multicore server CPUs are somewhat awesome and vastly cheaper than the Intel ones at this point, so mediocre doesn't fit.