sigh good bye cheap processors

[frozentundra123456]

I call bluff. There's no way AMD can't be at least somewhat competitive with Intel CPUs in order to sell their own. This is a comparative process, right? Choice laptop #1 is Intel, while choice laptop #2 is AMD. If AMD's CPU performance is so behind Intel's, regardless of their graphics performance, no one with any right mind is going to go with AMD if it's slower and uses more power (speaking laptops here).

So I'm afraid I have to call bluff on this one. I bet internally AMD is still fiercely competitive with Intel in the CPU department. I think it's nothing more than AMD trying to get Intel to get lazy.

Wow, AMD fans wont accept that their CPU performance is non-competitive even when the CEO of the company admits it publicly.

 

[sandorski]

This is the right move for AMD.

 

[ViRGE]

This is the right move for AMD.

More like it's the only move. Their days of challenging Intel at the high-end are over; it was this or continue to flounder in Intel's shadow. That doesn't mean this will work, but I can tell you what won't work.

 

[sandorski]

More like it's the only move. Their days of challenging Intel at the high-end are over; it was this or continue to flounder in Intel's shadow. That doesn't mean this will work, but I can tell you what won't work.

Indeed. However, the Market is moving away from Intel, or more accurately, away from simply having the "Fastest". Which is also why Intel is also moving in the same direction as AMD.

 

[beginner99]

"Fast enough", I don't believe in it. I myself can think of tons of amazing stuff one could do if you had the processing power.

The problem is the software. If no (consumer) software uses all that processing power, well yes then it is fast enough for the currently available software. If your content on playing pacman, your 286 was fast enough too, actually too fast. (This is one of my childhood memories were you had to disable turbo to be able to play pacman). However if you want to play BF3 on a holodeck, well...

 

[mikeymikec]

“That era is done,” Rory Read said in an interview and added, “There’s enough processing power on every laptop on the planet today.” Uh oh. Those quotes leave room for speculation that is significant enough to upset an entire loyal customer base of enthusiast users and may not have been the smartest choice of words.

Well AMD, if that's true, then concentrate on greater energy efficiency for at least the same performance. For example, I'd like to see an equivalent to the Phenom II X4 but passively-cooled. Bowing out altogether is not an innovative approach, and is only going to make your products less relevant. Unless you're going to throw all your weight behind SSD or something.

I think once SSD goes mainstream (ie. computers typically are sold with them rather than HDDs), and the fact that Internet connection speeds are increasing, a lot more is going to become practically possible and high performance processors will be in demand.

 

[Ancalagon44]

Well when the results of a 3-5 year CPU development process is a CPU that is both slower and more power hungry than its predecessor, it sounds like AMD had little choice. They had blown their budget on BD, when they should have pulled the plug 3 years ago. Trinity didnt add much to CPU performance, mostly just power consumption, which is still not enough. And AMD is not about to admit BD was a mistake in the first place. So what to do? Focus in the one area where AMD is actually competitive right now - the mobile space.

 

[gevorg]

AMD is not going anywhere. The new biggest playing field for both Intel and AMD is in mobile devices, from laptops to smartphones. This is where new innovations need to be done, and this is where most consumers are willing to spend the biggest buck. More and more people prefer laptops over desktop PCs. Its just a matter of time, if not already, that the mainstream consumer PC will be a laptop and not a desktop. High power desktops will be limited to workstations and niche users. Heck, even gaming industry has shifted their focus away from PCs by creating games for consoles, and then porting to PC.

 

[Magic Carpet]

"Fast enough", I don't believe in it. I myself can think of tons of amazing stuff one could do if you had the processing power.

The problem is the software. If no (consumer) software uses all that processing power, well yes then it is fast enough for the currently available software. If your content on playing pacman, your 286 was fast enough too, actually too fast. (This is one of my childhood memories were you had to disable turbo to be able to play pacman). However if you want to play BF3 on a holodeck, well...

+1. True.

Software drives the hardware sales, always has.

 

[podspi]

Eh, assuming we're talking about more or less the same order of magnitude, produce a CPU with high performance per watt -- and you'll be fine in the low and high-end.


I don't think it makes sense to focus on having 'the fastest' CPU. It makes sense to focus as much on perf/watt as possible. That will help with mobile applications, and then to make a higher-end CPU you just boost the power

 

[n0x1ous]

Rory does a nice job trying to make it sound like this is a choice. They simply can't compete with intel and have no other choice.

 

[coldpower27]

No since you already have the 3570K/2600K on the market right now. If Intel makes a new CPU they have to beat the old standard that they have set prior not make things worse... no one is going to buy a more expensive CPU that gives less.

 

[Olikan]

The problem is the software. If no (consumer) software uses all that processing power, well yes then it is fast enough for the currently available software. If your content on playing pacman, your 286 was fast enough too, actually too fast. (This is one of my childhood memories were you had to disable turbo to be able to play pacman). However if you want to play BF3 on a holodeck, well...

but that's the problem...internet doesn't go faster from i3 to i7

 

[sm625]

Uhh, I couldn't disagree more. I use a dual-core i5 Dell every day for work and it's a POS. I can't stand using it.

HDD or SSD? Mentor Graphics, Solid Edge, most of the Office apps, most every piece of software in the corporate world is still single threaded. What would an i7 get you? Are you compiling FPGA code?

 

[BenchPress]

The problem is the software.

The problem is the hardware.

AMD gave us 8-core without hardware transactional memory to make it manageable to synchronize that many threads. Intel will give us fabulous TSX!

AMD gives us APUs and expects developers to spend lots of time and money rewriting and tuning code. Intel gives us AVX2 instead which allows compilers to easily auto-vectorize code loops in an SPMD fashion with minimal effort from application developers and no heterogeneous computing gotcha's.

So again, the problem isn't software. There's not a lack of trying. The problem is AMD is failing to deliver hardware that is efficient in various practical use cases, not just in theory.

 

[Vic Vega]

...

 

[Vic Vega]

...

 

[Idontcare]

The problem is the hardware.

AMD gave us 8-core without hardware transactional memory to make it manageable to synchronize that many threads. Intel will give us fabulous TSX!

AMD gives us APUs and expects developers to spend lots of time and money rewriting and tuning code. Intel gives us AVX2 instead which allows compilers to easily auto-vectorize code loops in an SPMD fashion with minimal effort from application developers and no heterogeneous computing gotcha's.

So again, the problem isn't software. There's not a lack of trying. The problem is AMD is failing to deliver hardware that is efficient in various practical use cases, not just in theory.

It is true, and there is irony here.

The irony is that AMD's engineers are immersed in an engineering culture that lives and breathes "Design For Manufacturing" in which they intentionally take tradeoffs in their product design (layout design rules, etc) to enhance the yields at the fab...they do this because they know they must optimize their products for the real-world of manufacturing and not some hypothetical best-case scenario that "by the book" should work out flawlessly.

And yet when it comes to what they actually design the product to accomplish in the real-world they failed to "design for real-life usage". They delivered a product that goes nowhere unless the other side of the equation (software) equally and simultaneously stepped up to the market with an offering that plays exactly to the strengths designed into bulldozer.

OCZ did this with their initial SSD offerings, and Intel took the total opposite approach, and OCZ whined about it then too. Intel said "we aren't going to leave the performance of our product up to the whims of the OS writers, we'll internalize the process of trim commands and so on and make this thing just work".

Intel designs their CPU's like they designed their SSD's, they design them to be as insulated from the nuances of the real-world as possible. Same reason we have DFM in manufacturing, chip design requires DFU (design for use) and AMD failed in that dept with both Fusion/OpenCL and Bulldozer.

They built a strategy that would fail if the software team did not pull their own weight, and guess what, the software team did not pull their own weight, because they don't have to. Why bother optimizing software for bulldozer which is at most only going to represent 20% of the market share in 5 yrs time when Intel will do what it does and make sure your software just runs faster anyways with little to no more effort on your part? Intel makes it a no-brainer from the software project managers point of view.

 

[Bman123]

Amd just needs to focus on mobile because intel is killing them at every price point in desktop processors

 

[pelov]

Intel designs their CPU's like they designed their SSD's

For laptop and enterprise markets?

No matter how dated or "forward looking" the architecture is, you can always optimize code for it and make it look amazing. The biggest challenge comes in attempting to fill the voids in the market today and enough forward thinking in your design to be able to fill the gaps of tomorrow. Bulldozer did neither very well.

 

[Bman123]

If it wasn't for the apu Amd would be screwed because they really don't have anything in any price point that competes with intel

 

[Don Karnage]

Amd hasn't competed with intel for years.

 

[podspi]

I wonder if Steamroller will be able to support AVX2? If not, things could get even uglier on the CPU-side...

 

[Charles Kozierok]

Well AMD, if that's true, then concentrate on greater energy efficiency for at least the same performance.

The problem is that these are two sides of the same coin. Modern processors aren't designed to maximize performance, but to do so for a given thermal envelope. The reason AMD can't compete with Intel isn't that they can't crank out as much performance, but that they can't crank it out as efficiently as Intel can.

 

[Smartazz]

Intel may not have AMD to worry about, but they really need to get some ultra low power chips out for the smartphone and tablet markets. If we truly are heading for a post-PC world, both Intel and AMD better get on top of this, partly because I despise the low performance of ARM chips and I own Intel stock.