[What If] AMD going out of business?

[Lepton87]

I've just had a thought that it might benefit consumers if AMD went out of business.
It's been abundantly clear for the past 5 years that AMD just cannot compete with Intel performance-wise and the gap is only getting larger. If Intel got split into two companies we could at last see real competition again. Any thoughts?

Edited the title to clear up any confusion and to keep anyone from thinking AMD had actually gone out of business
-ViRGE

 

[-Slacker-]

I can see how lack of competition is very beneficial to the consumers.

 

[pantsaregood]

AMD began crapping on Intel in 1999 when the original Athlon was released. It only got worse from there. Willamette couldn't keep up with any of the Athlon XP cores. Northwood was generally on par with later Athlon XPs.

K8 came out and made a complete joke out of Intel in the budget, consumer, and workstation markets. Athlon 64s were miles ahead of Pentium 4s in 90% of benchmarks. Even the "emergency edition" Pentium 4s were unable to keep up with low end Athlon 64s at times.

Athlon 64 X2 was, likewise, completely superior to Pentium D. Pentium D was known to be "taping two Prescotts together" for the entirety of its life.

This describes 1999-2006. During this period, AMD's products were superior to Intel's in every performance niche with the exception of the mobile sector. Ironically, Intel's clock speed-based marketing probably hurt Pentium M's sales more than anything else.

From 2006-present, Intel has had a pretty performance lead over AMD. Benchmarks AMD can compete in are few and far between, and could be described as little more than flukes. The same thing happened to Intel, and it managed to last longer than AMD's slump so far.

 

[Borealis7]

first thought: your headline is pure flamebait. you might want to reword it.

second thought, no it would not benefit anyone. we already had an Intel "monopoly" market in the past and we paid hundreds of dollars for mainstream CPUs. competition drives innovation, even if one side seems to have a big lead over the other.

 

[M0RPH]

I'm sorry i clicked on this... your subject line is pure crap

 

[dma0991]

Should AMD go out of business you will come to expect to use your current Intel powered PC till you pass it to your grandchildren.

 

[videoclone]

if you are trying to buy a new car and you go to two separate dealers to haggle the best price.

You will buy from the dealer that ends up giving you the lowest price.

If you have one dealer with two locations ( intel spit up ) they will both have the same price and guess what ..... it will be sky high because if you dont buy a car from them.. well umm you WALK! because there is no other option.

WHAT A SILLY IDEA!

 

[n7]

*logic in OP causes head to explode*

 

[Lepton87]

It's been my understanding that Intel does not want AMD out of business. They need AMD to keep antitrust officials from pestering them, so they can keep their lion's share of the market and leave crumbs for AMD.

 

[Soleron]

You ask this only a month before their first new architecture since 2006 comes out? If AMD is still this far behind after BD launches there is a chance. But they won't be, just from the fact that AMD will be ahead in core count on the desktop for the first time.

AMD is profitable right now despite being very behind. Being at parity or ahead would increase their profits further, but isn't needed to save them from going out of business.

 

[wahdangun]

what a dumb idea, so you are ok with intel annual socket change ? And force you to buy motherboard every year, and we will have an expensive cpu and gpu,

 

[pantsaregood]

You ask this only a month before their first new architecture since 2006 comes out? If AMD is still this far behind after BD launches there is a chance. But they won't be, just from the fact that AMD will be ahead in core count on the desktop for the first time.

AMD is profitable right now despite being very behind. Being at parity or ahead would increase their profits further, but isn't needed to save them from going out of business.

AMD hasn't really changed their architecture significantly since 2003. You may even argue that it hasn't changed significantly since 1999.

K8, along iwth some miscellaneous improvements, was quite similar to K7 with an integrated memory controller and x86-64 intstructions. K10 takes K8 and heavily modifies the manner in which the IMC functions. Later iterations of K10 added in some things like turbo core, but it is still overwhelming similar.

 

[dma0991]

Intel does not need AMD to keep antitrust laws at bay. If the trend of mobile computing keeps on increasing, ARM will be an even bigger threat to Intel than AMD will ever be.

Even if AMD were to close to bankruptcy I would think by then they would ditch x86 and go full on ARM. AMD has also acquired ATI and should their CPU business dies they would still produce GPUs.

Your logic does not make any sense, no competition and monopoly will just make every consumer, Intel or AMD suffer.

 

[Anarchist420]

If BD isn't very fast, then they could go out of business. I was always thinking BD would either be their savior or destroyer, but I could be wrong about that.

 

[tweakboy]

There is no way their going out of business.

Too many vendors use their stuff. MAC desktops use ATI. As long as they get their 30 percent share,, their happy. Im shure the founder is a billionaire wow,, ,gg

 

[Dravic]

Your threat meter is lagging..

There was a chance AMD could have gone out of business 3-4 years ago, but now they are profitable (even if its just the GF spin off cash), diversified (ATI), and their first major core revision is about to launch.

Even if they had to, they could find a cash infusion to last until they see BD's real return. That's pretty much what they did once already with the Dubai investors.

 

[ikachu]

I think since we are enthusiasts we tend to focus on BD and overlook Llano. Although it's obviously critical for BD to be a success in the server market, I think for AMD, Llano is probably the more important chip for the desktop/notebook market.

 

[ncalipari]

AMD hasn't a solid balance sheet, it's always with a step in the grave.

But I think that x86 is so important that they will always be able to find some big investor to keep the company afloat...

 

[Tuna-Fish]

People seem to think that bankruptcy means that the company will shut down.

If AMD had been forced into bankruptcy when things were going worse for them, the most likely result would be that the common stock would become worthless, and all the debtholders would become the new stockholders. Without it's expensive debts, AMD would have made a reasonably healthy profit even with the piss-poor product line it held the past 3 years, and other than the customary change of management, I doubt there would have been major changes in the day-to-day operation of AMD.

 

[sonoran]

>>If Intel got split into two companies we could at last see real competition again.

What makes you think Intel would be automatically split into two companies if AMD went belly up? There's no such law or rule. Being a monopoly isn't illegal - only certain anti-competitive practices are.

Anyhow, from the Intel perspective, it'd be quite a shame if AMD closed up shop (not that I expect that to happen any time soon). It's always interesting to see how our products compare to theirs. And the competition helps keep us both pushing the envelope of what's possible. And the fanboy wars are always a good source of amusement.

* Not speaking for Intel Corp *

 

[Idontcare]

People seem to think that bankruptcy means that the company will shut down.

If AMD had been forced into bankruptcy when things were going worse for them, the most likely result would be that the common stock would become worthless, and all the debtholders would become the new stockholders. Without it's expensive debts, AMD would have made a reasonably healthy profit even with the piss-poor product line it held the past 3 years, and other than the customary change of management, I doubt there would have been major changes in the day-to-day operation of AMD.

Exactly. Just look at the US Airline industry. United, Delta, Northwest, etc. All went bankrupt and then came back to fight another day.

Hynix yes. Qimonda not so much.

 

[Tuna-Fish]

Qimonda stayed dead because DRAM was too competed -- there was little chance anything that came out of it's corpse would have been profitable until some other memory giant folded.

 

[mosox]

It's been abundantly clear for the past 5 years that AMD just cannot compete with Intel performance-wise and the gap is only getting larger. If Intel got split into two companies we could at last see real competition again. Any thoughts?

And Ford can't compete with Ferrari or Bugatti performance-wise. Who cares?

Check out the price-performance:

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_alltime.html

 

[Idontcare]

Qimonda stayed dead because DRAM was too competed -- there was little chance anything that came out of it's corpse would have been profitable until some other memory giant folded.

You know the story about Hynix?

 

[Joseph F]

If AMD went belly-up and closed its doors how would Intel still produce x64 processors? Aren't they licensing it from AMD?