AMD CPU's biz has gone into a death spiral...

[Evil Lurker]

Looks like AMD's bullflopper architechture... err I mean bulldozer is a giant failure. Depending on how you look at things, bullflopper either a year or more too late or a year or two too early. Windows 7 does not properly support how threads are scheduled resulting in a 20% or so performance penalty and proper support under Windows 8 is still off on the horizon. Intel is already gearing up for Ivy Bridge early next year which I imagine will smoke AMD's Fusion platform for HTPC enthusiasts.

I don't see how AMD can keep up... I hate to say it but I think my next system is probably going to be an intel box unless they drop the prices some more on their APU lineup.

[Uranium-235]

Re: AMD CPU's biz has gone into a death spiral...

all my gaming boxes are intel, intel beats amd in performance on the top of the line

now for general web surfing/email/office. you can't beat amd's price/performance

an athlon II x2 is so much more then nesseccary to run win7 with areo (amd integrated graphics). You can't beat $50 for a processor-and intels cheaper offers suck

[Topcat]

Re: AMD CPU's biz has gone into a death spiral...

I like both processors a lot. both have their strong point and weaknesses. It's been a slugfest between AMD and intel since the socket 7 days, where Intel was dominant....then came the K7, which was AMD's start to glory... IMO, they peaked at the s940 Opteron and 939 dual core athlons which stomped Intel at the time.....but intel came back and AMD has struggled since...

I just hope that AMD can get back in the game....no pun intended. For you old warhorses, do you remember how Intel operates when theres no competition? They rape for processors and upgrades/new technology doesn't come fast and doesn't come cheap.....like back in the socket 7 days when Intel wanted $400.00 for a 233MMX?? Then came the Athlon shortly thereafter, and all the way through the P4 days, Intel's prices were very much on par with AMD's, which was very reasonable. AMD was able to force Intel to be competitive....if AMD dies, get ready for Intel hell!

[Uranium-235]

Re: AMD CPU's biz has gone into a death spiral...

how disturbingly true, but if amd dies, intel would literally be a monopoly overnight, which is kinda illegal

then again, amd also has other markets, graphics, chipsets. A LOT of people will still buy amd cause they're considered the 'underdog'

if amd developed something a little cooler then the athlon s462 days they might of had more success, but a LOT of amd chips overheated and died, as with the caps on the boards they were on

K8 architecture was excellent-cool and quiet, but amd got a lot of flack for the nvidia chipset failures

now a days with triple+ phase power vrms and solid cap vrms-and everyone focusing on power efficient chips, the games have changed

[mockingbird]

Re: AMD CPU's biz has gone into a death spiral...

Bulldozer isn't a failure...

It's basically the same as Barcelona but with the new SSE instructions licensed from Intel...

They will preform on-par with at least the older Core 2 Quad Q9xxx... Pretty decent for what they will cost (The Core 2 Quad 9xxx still go for a fortune, even used)...

The AMD subsystem is OLD! That's the problem! The southbridge hasn't been updated in 5 years. For heavens sake, AMD should put it's driver team on the southbridge or else no one who uses an SSD will want to touch an AMD chipset...

Another problem is their yields with Bulldozer... as I predicted on xtremesystems, they are having poor yields. Of course, all the AMD fanboys and whores attacked me back then...

Why the hardware sites have to prostitute themselves on a daily basis (Like anyone cares about Llano - the sites were bombarding us with "news bits" about Llano for months) for AMD I don't know. Enough of the mass advertising AMD. If you release a good product, people will buy it. But no noe wants to buy your lousy Phenom II X6 which performs slower than a Sandy Bridge Core i3.

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: AMD CPU's biz has gone into a death spiral...

But no noe wants to buy your lousy Phenom II X6 which performs slower than a Sandy Bridge Core i3.

I am going to buy it... For the simple reason that i won't need a new motherboard when the next chip comes out. For me this is the reason to go away from intel: i3, i5, i7 all have different motherboards. I love my C2D but screw this.

As for intel integrated graphics ever beating ATI? You wish. Intel graphics have gotten better only because the CPUs are very fast and do most of the work of the GPU. Fusion will still be the best choice for HTPC and low powered systems.

[Mad_Professor]

Re: AMD CPU's biz has gone into a death spiral...

AMD is cheap compared to intel.

You can give me 6 cores and for $300 less than intel i7? WOWZERS!

I jumped ship when amd was lagging behind and intel gave us powerful core 2 duos then the quad core chips, It was really two dual cores stuck on a chip. But still, it was fast and smoked AMD and it could overclock like a mofo and they were cheap; still more expensive then AMD but cheap enough that the general audience could buy it.

When the i3, i5, i7 came out, I really didn't see the benefits of upgrading to something that only gave 20-30% performance increase, and cost triple what my 775 system gave me. I've been happy with my intel setup but when it's time to build a new one I'm switching back to AMD.

Sorry...
and the i7 hasn't been all that great. AMD's doing good tho. It understands it's customers base. No one wants to spend $500 on a processor unless it can suck your dick. Nor do people want to buy a new motherboard every time a new processor with a different socket setup comes out.

AMD's got the upper hand in this market.
When it comes down to it the price vs performance comes into play, which means most of us lower middle class and poor folk can afford a powerful system.
Not to mention I bet motherboard manufacturers love them because it means lower overhead cost on component stocks.

[UraBahn]

Re: AMD CPU's biz has gone into a death spiral...

I just use whatever I can afford. :P
The last processor I bought brand new for myself was a Phenom X3 8250e, which was a very fine chip even for 2010 IMO. Strapped a decent videocard to it (GF 9600), and I was playing Star Trek Online very well with only minor occasional slowdown in very intensive scenes. I had also built two Athlon II X2 based systems earlier, both are more than adequate for their tasks.

I've been using mostly AMD chips these days, but I still have some Intels lying about in various places. My laptop runs off an Intel Pentium M which I think is one of Intel's best processors ever (it's a Pentium III Tualatin with the Pentium 4's bus unit and SSE2 added, can't beat that, especially for the price I got it at!) My guest room box is also currently chugging along with a Willamette Pentium 4 1.6GHz. I don't believe I've seen an i3/5/7 in action recently simply because they're WAY out of my price range, and I have yet to see any i3/5/7 stuff in the scrap boxes at my favorite haunts.

[hardwareguy]

Re: AMD CPU's biz has gone into a death spiral...

Death spiral? Don't bet on it! AMD has had far rougher times in regard to being behind Intel technology wise....the AM386DX-40 and the 5x86 come to mind.

The AM386DX40 was a 40MHz 386, no more, no less. Now these old parts were not clock doubled so the FSB and RAM ran at 40MHz as well and this made them good performers. They were extremely cheap. You could have a nasty 486SX-25 with 4MB of RAM or one of these DX40s with 8MB of RAM for about the same price. You tell me which one was quicker in most applications!

Since there was no VESA Local Bus on these systems and the ISA still ran at 8MHz they were very stable. VLB was finicky at 40MHz and damn near impossible at 50MHz and nobody in the low end was using VLB at this time anyway so it didn't matter. (indeed, many of the first 486 boards had no VLB slots!)

AMD later brought out 486 parts and all seemed well until Intel brought out the Pentium on Socket 5. (Socket 4 Pentiums were exotic parts and *very* expensive. Not many were sold compared to Socket 5 and 7)

AMD was having vast problems bringing their 586 class CPU, the K5 to market in time and the Pentium was on everyone's " its gotta have it" list (kinda like the i7 is today).

Now with no 586 class CPU, AMD was desperate. The 486 they made was good, but the 486 was becoming long in the tooth, it was a very low end part at this time. So what did AMD do? They made a faster 486 and called it the 5x86. It ran at 133MHz and it did indeed have 586 class performance but retained the 486 instruction set. Sure, it couldn't touch a Pentium 133 but it was a match for the Pentium 75 and less expensive. Keep in mind that 99% of software out at this time did NOT need the Pentium instruction set. They ran Duke Nukem 3D and just about any game you wanted just fine and Windows 95 ran great.

Then there was the K6...always slower than a Pentium II but LOTS cheaper.

Now the K6 days are back and AMD is playing in the dirt again....and not exactly playing nice!

Bobcat kills Atom hands down. I have a netbook with a C50 1.0GHz APU and this thing eats Atom netbooks for lunch, especially if you use Aero on a large external display. Im starting to see more and more AMD netbooks and they are flying off the shelf faster than you can buy them in stores that have them. Performance is so superior with 3D and video that this is one of the few cases where the AMD machine costs more than the similarly equipped Intel machine and its due to demand.

The A series APUs are amazing. While they cannot match Intel on the CPU front, the integrated graphics is *several times* faster. These things can actually play Crysis WITHOUT a video card! Granted, you'll be playing at a low resolution (1440x1900 ish) and without all the eye candy turned up but it is playable. Better still is the cost....about as much as an i3 but with twice the cores and a much better GPU. If you don't have really hungry single threaded apps, the APU will be a better match for you than the i3.

Bulldozer SUCKS BALLS on the desktop but Interlagos, which is Bulldozer architecture in Opteron flavor is a virtualization beast. I'm not trading my i7 950 for one but then again, I run just 2-3 heavy threads when gaming, something Nehalem and Sandy Bridge are awesome at. Also, keep in mind, on the server side, Interlagos is a *drop in replacement* for most machines using Magny Cours core CPUs on socket G34. It instantly doubles the core count on these boxes without increasing power dissipation or requiring a motherboard change. No doubt this made upgrades to many supercomputers financially feasible. Speaking of supercomputers, Interlagos is going in the Cray XK6. Oak Ridge is getting 20PFLOPs soon.

AMD is not dead at all...which is good, because I like my cheap Intel CPUs

[severach]

Re: AMD CPU's biz has gone into a death spiral...

IMHO pen and paper is faster than an Atom. The few I've used are misery. That and the Tom's Hardware article showing that for all but doing nothing a Core 2 beats it.

Tom's Hardware Efficiency: Core 2 Nukes Atom On The Desktop

[hardwareguy]

Re: AMD CPU's biz has gone into a death spiral...

A good Pentium 4 can beat an Atom.....and a modern Celeron will smash it.

[ratdude747]

Re: AMD CPU's biz has gone into a death spiral...

A good Pentium 4 can beat an Atom.....and a modern Celeron will smash it.

not in the performace vs watt competition. when you are talking netbooks and laptops, that is what 90% of the time defines good and better.

[lti]

Re: AMD CPU's biz has gone into a death spiral...

IMHO pen and paper is faster than an Atom. The few I've used are misery.

It can't be as bad as an Athlon XP-M 1400+. A PIII running at half the clock speed can handle higher resolution video and will play games at a higher framerate.

[NxB]

Re: AMD CPU's biz has gone into a death spiral...

Enjoy the increasing hardware DRM from intel.

It all really depends on what you need and what it costs.

GPUs will smash i7 at many tasks.

ARM > Atom on small devices

[lti]

Re: AMD CPU's biz has gone into a death spiral...

Are there any tasks other than watching movies and playing games that will perform better on a GPU?

[Evil Lurker]

Re: AMD CPU's biz has gone into a death spiral...

It appears faildozer has broken a new world speed record of 8.58GHz according to tomshardware.com.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/fx-...eed,13903.html

Later on that day, faildozer broke another record for the least number of people to actually give a damn.

[ben7]

Re: AMD CPU's biz has gone into a death spiral...

I have an AMD Phenom-II P820 3-core processor (1.8GHz),
and ATI radeon HD-4250 graphics, and 4GB of ram on my laptop here, bought the whole laptop new for only around $500!

Just incase anybody was curious

-Ben

[shovenose]

Re: AMD CPU's biz has gone into a death spiral...

my core i5 2.9ghz, 6gb ram, 640gb hdd, intel gfx, Lenovo laptop was $600 :P

[lti]

Re: AMD CPU's biz has gone into a death spiral...

Those cheap laptops only have Microsoft Office Starter on them. I had to spend an extra $120 to get a real version of Office because I need it for college. OpenOffice sucks.

Yes, I'm finally replacing my old HP laptop.

[Evil Lurker]

Re: AMD CPU's biz has gone into a death spiral...

my core i5 2.9ghz, 6gb ram, 640gb hdd, intel gfx, Lenovo laptop was $600 :P

Got a Lenovo Edge 15 with core i3-390M, 6gb ram, 250gb hd, so on and so forth.

It is pretty darn nice, although I wish it was sandy bridge. The hard drive is slooow though, has a 5400rpm WD Scorpio Blue in it.

I want to boost the ram to 8gb, set up a ramdrive, start using firefox and cache all my temp files in ram, and finally switch over to a SSD drive.

Figure that ought to make it fairly decent.

And oh yeah, I got about $150 in my laptop since I bought it off a methhead looking to get high (needed a charger, let walmart rip me a new one).