[Serious] If AMD went bankrupt tomorrow... what would happen to x86 CPUs?

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blackened23

Diamond Member
Jul 26, 2011
8,548
2
0
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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jhu

Lifer
Oct 10, 1999
11,918
9
81
I hope people remember there was a time when a Celeron was $1500. 1999 was a bad year.

Obv I'm talking whole machine.

Back then you could spec out a >$1000 Celeron machine. But Celerons were usually put into the < $1000 machines. Back then it was eMachines bringing prices down. $500 computers that were actually usable? Almost unheard of until they came along. My roommate got one from Costco, and it wasn't too bad of a computer.
 

Idontcare

Elite Member
Oct 10, 1999
21,118
59
91
I hope people remember there was a time when a Celeron was $1500. 1999 was a bad year.

Obv I'm talking whole machine.

Back then you could spec out a >$1000 Celeron machine. But Celerons were usually put into the < $1000 machines. Back then it was eMachines bringing prices down. $500 computers that were actually usable? Almost unheard of until they came along. My roommate got one from Costco, and it wasn't too bad of a computer.

Hold on now, 1999 was when I bought not just one, but two Cele 300A's and enjoyed some delicious 450MHz OC'ing with oodle's of ram and drive space (at the time) all on a silly budget of just $500 per machine...something isn't passing the sniff test here.

1999 was also the same year that for a mere $700 I bought myself a celeron-powered duallie with the famous BP6 mobo. That $700 included two 333MHz celerons (OC'ed to 533Mhz no prob), all the ram the mobo could take, etc.

I am sure there were people at the time who were willing to take $1500 from you in exchange for selling you a celeron system that might have only costed them $500 to build...but that is just your garden variety "a fool and his money are soon parted" situation and had nothing to do with Intel or celerons.
 

TreVader

Platinum Member
Oct 28, 2013
2,057
2
0
Hold on now, 1999 was when I bought not just one, but two Cele 300A's and enjoyed some delicious 450MHz OC'ing with oodle's of ram and drive space (at the time) all on a silly budget of just $500 per machine...something isn't passing the sniff test here.



1999 was also the same year that for a mere $700 I bought myself a celeron-powered duallie with the famous BP6 mobo. That $700 included two 333MHz celerons (OC'ed to 533Mhz no prob), all the ram the mobo could take, etc.



I am sure there were people at the time who were willing to take $1500 from you in exchange for selling you a celeron system that might have only costed them $500 to build...but that is just your garden variety "a fool and his money are soon parted" situation and had nothing to do with Intel or celerons.


It was either 98 or 99 when a full Celeron machine (base spec) was 999 on emachines and that was as cheap as you got.


Totally calling bs on the $500 Celeron system let's see some receipts!
 

blackened23

Diamond Member
Jul 26, 2011
8,548
2
0
Hold on now, 1999 was when I bought not just one, but two Cele 300A's and enjoyed some delicious 450MHz OC'ing with oodle's of ram and drive space (at the time) all on a silly budget of just $500 per machine...something isn't passing the sniff test here.

1999 was also the same year that for a mere $700 I bought myself a celeron-powered duallie with the famous BP6 mobo. That $700 included two 333MHz celerons (OC'ed to 533Mhz no prob), all the ram the mobo could take, etc.

I am sure there were people at the time who were willing to take $1500 from you in exchange for selling you a celeron system that might have only costed them $500 to build...but that is just your garden variety "a fool and his money are soon parted" situation and had nothing to do with Intel or celerons.


Who else had an Abit BH6 and a 300a OC'ed to 450? This guy did. That CPU was legendary and ridiculously affordable.... That's probably one of my all-time favorite systems, lasted quite a long time. Matched the performance of the much more expensive Pentium II at the time in PC games. IIRC it was like 140 bucks and matched the top of the line p2 basically. Loved it.

Although it seems that celeron has gone back and forth between being a viable purchase for enthusiasts to the extreme low end (as it is now).
 
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aigomorla

CPU, Cases&Cooling Mod PC Gaming Mod Elite Member
Super Moderator
Sep 28, 2005
20,881
3,230
126
Who else had an Abit BH6 and a 300a OC'ed to 450? This guy did. .

oh ur making me feel really old..

i had one of those...

I also had a 486DX33 where ur turbo button switch made it go from 25->33.
 

Homeles

Platinum Member
Dec 9, 2011
2,580
0
0
Hold on now, 1999 was when I bought not just one, but two Cele 300A's and enjoyed some delicious 450MHz OC'ing with oodle's of ram and drive space (at the time) all on a silly budget of just $500 per machine...something isn't passing the sniff test here.

1999 was also the same year that for a mere $700 I bought myself a celeron-powered duallie with the famous BP6 mobo. That $700 included two 333MHz celerons (OC'ed to 533Mhz no prob), all the ram the mobo could take, etc.

I am sure there were people at the time who were willing to take $1500 from you in exchange for selling you a celeron system that might have only costed them $500 to build...but that is just your garden variety "a fool and his money are soon parted" situation and had nothing to do with Intel or celerons.
Yeah, CPU-World says the Celerons from that era sold at $200 or less.
 

Bateluer

Lifer
Jun 23, 2001
27,730
8
0
Yeah, CPU-World says the Celerons from that era sold at $200 or less.

One should point out that today, 200 dollars buys you an upper end model i5. Big difference than 200 dollars for a bottom rung CPU.

Edit - AFAIK, Intel has publicly stated that they consider Qualcomm their major competitor in the CPU business. AMD isn't even on their radar at the moment, which is good for AMD as they start getting their CPU product lines into an attractive state again. Their GPUs have always been desirable.
 

bononos

Diamond Member
Aug 21, 2011
3,894
162
106
Who else had an Abit BH6 and a 300a OC'ed to 450? This guy did. That CPU was legendary and ridiculously affordable.... That's probably one of my all-time favorite systems, lasted quite a long time. Matched the performance of the much more expensive Pentium II at the time in PC games. IIRC it was like 140 bucks and matched the top of the line p2 basically. Loved it.
.....
Only for the malay chips, I wasn't successful with a costa rican one.
 

Homeles

Platinum Member
Dec 9, 2011
2,580
0
0
One should point out that today, 200 dollars buys you an upper end model i5. Big difference than 200 dollars for a bottom rung CPU.

Edit - AFAIK, Intel has publicly stated that they consider Qualcomm their major competitor in the CPU business. AMD isn't even on their radar at the moment, which is good for AMD as they start getting their CPU product lines into an attractive state again. Their GPUs have always been desirable.
Well, they were selling more around the $175 mark or less; I was just trying to point out that they weren't $400 or something that would result in a $1000 machine.
 

VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Aug 25, 2001
56,449
10,119
126
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.
http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=36330893&postcount=256

What about this measured data? Under 5W.
 

AtenRa

Lifer
Feb 2, 2009
14,003
3,361
136
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.

There are more than one different dies of BayTrail, one for Tablets BT-T (Z3000 series) and one for Desktop/Embedded BT-D (I dont know what mask BayTrail-M uses but i believe is the same as BT-D).
The biggest difference is that BT-T is designed for Tablets. This die has an integrated Camera but it doesnt have any PCI-e lanes and the package(not the die) is smaller than BT-D.

Same with AMD, Kabini is made for Desktop/AIO/Laptops where Beema is designed for Mobile and Mullins for Tablets.
 

Third_Eye

Member
Jan 25, 2013
37
0
0
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.
WTF? Kabini is not and never the tablet part. It is the mobile/laptop part of Jaguar architecture. Temash is the tablet component.
Heck! even 2 years back we had Ontario and Zacate for netbooks while Hondo was the design for tablets.

Anytime now

Beema will replace Kabini
Mullins will replace Temash (windows tablets)

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.

Here I do nod in total agreement. AMD's OEMs have really treated AMD very unkindly all along not giving the best components or even choice.
Heck Toshiba released in Sep 2013, its "Click" on a AMD reference design that was showed in Jan 2013 after downgrading screen size from 1080p to 738p and SSD with a 5400 Mechanical HDD and asked >600$ for it.

As I have said in multiple forums, "With friends like these, who needs enemies"....

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.
Intel is just throwing money into mobile designs and losing spectacularly. The Executive in charge of the profitability of the data center group would be spectacularly stressed to get his/her profits go to the pit.

And all along BT was only running Windows. Only now it has got Android compatibility. All those Intel Android tablets released till now only use the (relatively) crappy Clovertrail.

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.
See I had thought the same last year was disappointed and finally a little less upset with Rory and team for their rarest of faults.
http://semiaccurate.com/forums/showpost.php?p=177170&postcount=44
http://semiaccurate.com/forums/showpost.php?p=208133&postcount=8

http://semiaccurate.com/forums/showpost.php?p=185416&postcount=25
with the quote section also by me from another post..

But then a little thought in the below post as I lashed the Bluestack gimmicks AMD is promoting, I speculated why AMD is not investing more on Android.
http://semiaccurate.com/forums/showpost.php?p=208133&postcount=8

Unless AMD has a cunning plan to usurp us with a ARM processor for consumer market in which case, it can use the existing Google Android eco-system, I would say it is severely bone headed.
What I thought on 27Feb I will illustrate as a reply to the second point
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.

AMD is not wedded to x86/x64. It started by accident when it became a x86 licensee. While the current x64 is AMD64 that was licensed to Intel, Intel has a huge NIH syndrome. It is true that both Ruiz and Meyer wanted "x86 everywhere" and "x86 anywhere" and took decisions to hive off all non x86 divisions like the ARM division they sold to QCOM and the MIPS division they sold to Broadcom.

Similarly Intel too went x86 only by selling StrongARM to Marvell. Prior to Rory, AMD was busy fighting Intel in the x86/x64 turf. And Intel was gradually winning and AMD was on the ropes since the days of early Core series.

Due to the issues with Microsoft (NOKIA, Intel, Meego anyone), Intel decided against pursuing the mobile world with MS and instead chose Android. The problem is that Google developed Android with ARM in mind. It was up to Intel to validate and take it to the next level Android + x86. And officially Intel called it "Android on Intel" not "Android on x86". Tag line- AMD cannot expect the eco-system improvements to flow automatically because it too has x86/x64 compatibility with Intel.

So AMD had to have
a) a relationship with Google to develop Android for it
b) have a 3rd party do that
c) have its own internal team do that.

Three options that are expensive for AMD but not guaranteed to produce any results. Also AMD was also hoping that Win8 would be a huge trendsetter. Even it was stating that BD would magically perform better in Win8 because the latter schedules the threads appropriately compared to Win 7. Well we know how both turned out....

Now AMD is a full fledged ARM licensee. If it wants to do Android, it has a ARM Cortex A57/A53 rights as well as a ISA license to do custom ARM cores in the future. It will just have the eco-system to fall back on like it did during the x86 days. Either would be more of a natural fit to Android than Androidx86 can ever be.
 
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Homeles

Platinum Member
Dec 9, 2011
2,580
0
0
Well, they were selling more around the $175 mark or less; I was just trying to point out that they weren't $400 or something that would result in a $1000 machine.
Well, looks like I was wrong. Median desktop prices were north of $1000.

 

jhu

Lifer
Oct 10, 1999
11,918
9
81
Well, looks like I was wrong. Median desktop prices were north of $1000.


Damn. $4500 median price in 1989/1990??? I remember my dad bought us 486 DX2/66 at CompUSA for about $1000. He never bought a computer anywhere close to that median price. Even the the IBM PC he bought in 1984 wasn't close to that.
 

Homeles

Platinum Member
Dec 9, 2011
2,580
0
0
Damn. $4500 median price in 1989/1990??? I remember my dad bought us 486 DX2/66 at CompUSA for about $1000. He never bought a computer anywhere close to that median price. Even the the IBM PC he bought in 1984 wasn't close to that.
Trying to find the original source... probably adjusted for inflation or something.
 

Idontcare

Elite Member
Oct 10, 1999
21,118
59
91
Damn. $4500 median price in 1989/1990??? I remember my dad bought us 486 DX2/66 at CompUSA for about $1000. He never bought a computer anywhere close to that median price. Even the the IBM PC he bought in 1984 wasn't close to that.

I bought a desktop at that time and I sure as heck didn't have that kind of cash to splash out for a computer.

To recollection I spent maybe $1200. The numbers seem questionable, of course we don't know what peripherals are included in those prices. Did it include an $800 HP inkjet printer and $2000 15" colored CRT?
 

Homeles

Platinum Member
Dec 9, 2011
2,580
0
0
I bought a desktop at that time and I sure as heck didn't have that kind of cash to splash out for a computer.

To recollection I spent maybe $1200. The numbers seem questionable, of course we don't know what peripherals are included in those prices. Did it include an $800 HP inkjet printer and $2000 15" colored CRT?
It's the quality adjusted price... they got those numbers based on clock speed, memory size, and hard drive size, threw in the selling price, and got some mashed-up gobbledygook. The guy that made that chart wasn't very clear with his labeling.

Off to more reading
 
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jhu

Lifer
Oct 10, 1999
11,918
9
81
It's the quality adjusted price... they got those numbers based on clock speed, memory size, and hard drive size, threw in the selling price, and got some mashed-up gobbledygook. The guy that made that chart wasn't very clear with his labeling.

Off to more reading

I remember seeing in Computer Shopper in the late '80s, an 8088/8086 computer was < $500. The 386 computers were way north of $1000 though. I have some old PC World magazines I can take pictures of later.
 

Fox5

Diamond Member
Jan 31, 2005
5,957
7
81
Back then you could spec out a >$1000 Celeron machine. But Celerons were usually put into the < $1000 machines. Back then it was eMachines bringing prices down. $500 computers that were actually usable? Almost unheard of until they came along. My roommate got one from Costco, and it wasn't too bad of a computer.

Back in the day, buying AMD and building it yourself could yield huge savings for the performance. Unfortunately, most AMD chipsets were rubbish.

I remember the first time I thought a computer was fast though, and that was getting an original (Tbird) Athlon with a Voodoo 3. Before that, a computer worked and did cool things (looking at you, AMD K6-2), but it struggling to do things was still kind of a standard function of a computer.
 

Lepton87

Platinum Member
Jul 28, 2009
2,544
9
81
One should point out that today, 200 dollars buys you an upper end model i5. Big difference than 200 dollars for a bottom rung CPU.

Edit - AFAIK, Intel has publicly stated that they consider Qualcomm their major competitor in the CPU business. AMD isn't even on their radar at the moment, which is good for AMD as they start getting their CPU product lines into an attractive state again. Their GPUs have always been desirable.

That bottom rung CPU after OC was as fast as their top model also after OC or even faster sometimes due to full speed cache vs larger half-speed cache. 1999 was also the year when AMD finally took the performance crown with its Athlon 500MHz.
 

moonbogg

Lifer
Jan 8, 2011
10,637
3,095
136
i5's for $400.00, i7's for $550, 6 cores for $750 & $1,200.00, & 8 cores for $1,750.00.

Also, you need a new mobo for EVERY new CPU release, period. No forward or backward compatibility at all.

Also, GPU market would get trashed even worse, but that's another topic.
 

ShintaiDK

Lifer
Apr 22, 2012
20,378
145
106
i5's for $400.00, i7's for $550, 6 cores for $750 & $1,200.00, & 8 cores for $1,750.00.

Also, you need a new mobo for EVERY new CPU release, period. No forward or backward compatibility at all.

Also, GPU market would get trashed even worse, but that's another topic.

You couldnt be more wrong.
 

Lonyo

Lifer
Aug 10, 2002
21,939
6
81
i5's for $400.00, i7's for $550, 6 cores for $750 & $1,200.00, & 8 cores for $1,750.00.

Also, you need a new mobo for EVERY new CPU release, period. No forward or backward compatibility at all.

Also, GPU market would get trashed even worse, but that's another topic.

And then Samsung, Apple and Google spend billions on ARM development and Intel dies a fast death from trying to abused its weak market position where most CPUs are already ARM based.

GG no re.
 
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