blackened23
Diamond Member
- Jul 26, 2011
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Why? Kabini is faster than Atom, at comparable TDP.
If only that were true. Seems to me that Kabini is a 25W TDP desktop LGA part while the Bay Trail is being used in 2-4W devices. Where are the Kabini chips in 2-4W devices? The mobile Kabini chips are so heavily castrated in terms of performance and turbo that they're essentially far underperforming the intel mobile parts. Yes, you could mention the Bay Trail desktop embedded parts but that is not the primary design of BT. BT was and is designed as a MOBILE soc. Not a desktop part. And that is where it shines, and that is where Kabini falls flat on its face.
Beema and Mullins you say. All we have now is AMD marketing with their AMD "reference" design. Lemme know when an actual end user device produced by a manufacturer is a 7 to 9 inch tablet, then we can go from there. I'm pretty sure that Beema and Mullins have no such devices. They're only going to be in large sub notebooks that are 11 inches or higher, if history is any indication.
When AMD is in 7 inch tablets with any mobile SOC they have, lemme know, and tell me what the design win is. That's what BT was designed for first and foremost: not for desktop, but for 7 to 9 inch tablets. It has sold a ton of chips in that form factor. Granted, intel isn't making much money there due to heavy R+D investments (which is a necessary evil [R+D]) however, AMD has yet to make anything appreciable for 7 to 9 inch tablets using 2-6W TDP. AMD is still, to date, only selling an appreciable amount of chips for desktop LGA. Which, in the long run, is a losing proposition.
It's pretty obvious that AMD is trying very hard to break into the mobile market. Intel has had their own setbacks there, but AMD is not doing nearly as well as intel is with mobile SoCs. Hell, there are full blown core Haswell Y chips that are 12W TDP. HASWELL chips. And then you look at the AMD side with their Kabini chips trying to compete with that...yeah....to complicate matters more, AMD still does not have any proper answer for android compatibility. They only have bluestacks emulation which is a joke in and of itself, because it doesn't work for most applications and has all sorts of quirks.
But this is a sidestep to the main point. AMD is merely a blip on intel's radar. The bigger picture is not x86, but all computing devices, of which x86 means exactly jack. x86 means nothing now because computing is far more vast than it was 15 years ago: so intel is more or less eyeing qualcomm, nvidia, samsung, and all others that are players in the mobile SoC market. 15 years ago, 99% of consumer computing devices was microsoft and x86. Now? That has changed. Microsoft and x86 does not dominate computing devices.
Because computing is not x86 and microsoft dominated, it wouldn't really matter if AMD disappeared. Intel still has better PPW and android compatibility which is critical for that market segment. And for the "high performance" mobile segment, intel basically owns everything there with their mobile core i5/i7 SKUs being used in tons of ultrabooks and macbook pro type devices. So, essentially, intel has work to do in the low end mobile SOC (and making good headway with Bay trail) while intel owns the high performance mobile market with the core line of chips. AMD? Well, they're still fighting as the "low priced alternative". I would love for AMD to be a meaningful competitor here. I really would. But they haven't shown anything interesting in actual end user devices, ever, for mobile. So I just look at AMD as a discrete graphics company first and foremost, which I appreciate them keeping GPU competition in check for.
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