[What If] AMD going out of business?

[tommo123]

wouldn't intel be under even more scrutiny without amd? and more likely to be split in 2?

 

[JimmiG]

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.

That's because AMD hasn't come out with anything new in nearly 5 years. Sure, BD might flop, but at least it has a better chance to succeed.

 

[Dribble]

AMD's key market (x86) has probably already peaked, there was tons of money to be made (look at Intel). They have come out of that having sold off all their manufacturing assets and still have 2 billion debt. So what happens when there's no longer so much money in the x86 market? That is likely to be happening with the rise of google/apple arm powered phones/tablets. With those debts how do they invest for the future while still keeping their core business of x86 going?

 

[Arkadrel]

*if* AMD goes under,.... Intel prices sky rocket.

/thread.

 

[pantsaregood]

AMD's key market (x86) has probably already peaked, there was tons of money to be made (look at Intel). They have come out of that having sold off all their manufacturing assets and still have 2 billion debt. So what happens when there's no longer so much money in the x86 market? That is likely to be happening with the rise of google/apple arm powered phones/tablets. With those debts how do they invest for the future while still keeping their core business of x86 going?

I don't see x86 dying off. It isn't peaking anymore, but it should be relatively stable. Smartphones just don't have the functionality of laptops, and tablets are most likely a trend-based form factor.

 

[Dribble]

I don't see x86 dying off. It isn't peaking anymore, but it should be relatively stable. Smartphones just don't have the functionality of laptops, and tablets are most likely a trend-based form factor.

I agree it won't die - just as mainframes didn't die with the rise of the micro in the 80's, but there is likely to be less money to be made - a contraction in the market. Traditionally in these situations the strong survive and adapt, the weak go under. That's not to say AMD can't survive - look at apple - they nearly went bust a few years ago (incidentally they were partly saved by selling a load of ARM shares). AMD are starting off from a pretty weak position, it's not going to be easy for them.

 

[podspi]

*if* AMD goes under,.... Intel prices sky rocket.

/thread.

Maybe in the past, but I think Intel's pricing will be somewhat constrained (at least on the lower end) by ARM now. I have had multiple people tell me (after getting an iPhone) that they "no longer needed a computer". Most of those people were exaggerating, but even if Intel was a monopoly in x86 processors, they would still need to ensure computers were cheap enough that people still bought them.

 

[JimKiler]

AMD will not go bankrupt. I am sure someone will buy them out before that happens. The real question is who would buy them, Samsung?

 

[drizek]

IBM maybe...

or *shudder* nVidia

 

[exar333]

Do you think intel's monopoly would survive another round of more compelling products from AMD? i don't. intel was able to keep AMD suppressed with the help of OEM's and motherboard manufacturers during K8's hayday, but that is definitely not the case this go around. intel no longer has the luxury of everyone involved turning a blind eye, as there are a lot of legal bodies around the world making sure that won't happen. unless intel has another way of bribing the industry undetected, AMD is sure to take marketshare; more capacity and fair access to the free market.

even if AMD doesn't have the highest perfroming processors on the market, i have no idea, they will have a much easier time breaking the monopoly. Fusion looks like a very attractive ecosystem for consumers and developers, and if Brazos is any indication, consumers are quite interested in the entire thing.

*eyeroll*

Because 2011 is NOT anything like 2004? Same world buddy, sorry to break it to you.

 

[sonoran]

AMD's key market (x86) has probably already peaked

You seem to be overlooking a few billion people in asia who don't yet have computers, and are very focused on their kids' education and educational tools like computers.

 

[drizek]

You seem to be overlooking a few billion people in asia who don't yet have computers, and are very focused on their kids' education and educational tools like computers.

And with $100 android tablets getting faster and faster, x86 gets harder to justify.

 

[GFORCE100]

AMD won't go out of business in as far as if things were really to undermine for them then rest assured someone would buy them out and likely still use the AMD brand.

AMD's problem is first and foremost limited cash flow.

 

[JimKiler]

IBM maybe...

or *shudder* nVidia

nVidia would not buy them, too much animosity between the two.

 

[Infrnl]

I do not think AMD would go out of business; they currently offer pretty good performance for the price.
Most avg consumers look for the cheapest they can get...usually being AMD. There is no difference in performance between Intel/AMD for the avg consumer.

For AMD's sake; I wish they would hurry up and get back in the game. My first systems were AMD when they were in the lead. For my current needs, I have to go with Intel.

 

[HW2050Plus]

Some comments on this:

First AMD has TWO Fabs in Dresden not one (by Global Foundries). And they are building another one in New York (by Global Foundries). In addition they use e.g. TMSC.

AMD is now again profitable, they recovered from the heavy losses they had by buying ATI.

Next the APU market is really of minor importance if we talk about the small APUs of Atom and Brazzos. But the Fusion market will be big and will earn good money (Llano). Really lot of money can be earned in desktop, mobile and server market. And also there AMD is operating. They are not doing well at the moment in this business that is right.

Further more if AMD would go under Chapter 11 they would attract lots of investors. Especially because they are nearly Fabless.

And a word about ARM: Forget it. ARM has the power niche. So they are low power, low capability, low performance. With the Atom and Bobcat available that is more a threat to ARM than ARM is to them. ARM is for embedded products that is their market and what the CPU is designed for. There had been unbelievable more powerful CPUs which couldn't break x86 dominance. The only reason why ARM is successful at all even in the embedded market is that you can buy the architecture cheaply and put the CPU together with your own stuff on the same chip.

And finally breaking up Intel into two companies would be nonsense. That would result in two Intels producing exactly the same products. Or they split it into units/markets: Server / Desktop / Mobile / APU. In any case I cannot see how there should be competition by that.

So I just deny the initial proposal.

 

[acx]

Some comments on this:

First AMD has TWO Fabs in Dresden not one (by Global Foundries). And they are building another one in New York (by Global Foundries). In addition they use e.g. TMSC.

AMD is now again profitable, they recovered from the heavy losses they had by buying ATI.

Next the APU market is really of minor importance if we talk about the small APUs of Atom and Brazzos. But the Fusion market will be big and will earn good money (Llano). Really lot of money can be earned in desktop, mobile and server market. And also there AMD is operating. They are not doing well at the moment in this business that is right.

Further more if AMD would go under Chapter 11 they would attract lots of investors. Especially because they are nearly Fabless.

And a word about ARM: Forget it. ARM has the power niche. So they are low power, low capability, low performance. With the Atom and Bobcat available that is more a threat to ARM than ARM is to them. ARM is for embedded products that is their market and what the CPU is designed for. There had been unbelievable more powerful CPUs which couldn't break x86 dominance. The only reason why ARM is successful at all even in the embedded market is that you can buy the architecture cheaply and put the CPU together with your own stuff on the same chip.

And finally breaking up Intel into two companies would be nonsense. That would result in two Intels producing exactly the same products. Or they split it into units/markets: Server / Desktop / Mobile / APU. In any case I cannot see how there should be competition by that.

So I just deny the initial proposal.

If Intel were to be broken up it would make the most sense to split into a pure foundry company and a fabless semiconductor company.

 

[Dribble]

But the Fusion market will be big and will earn good money (Llano). Really lot of money can be earned in desktop, mobile and server market. And also there AMD is operating. They are not doing well at the moment in this business that is right.

There is no such thing as a "fusion" market. It's a just a cpu where the graphics are on the cpu not the motherboard. All it is is a cost saving (over sticking graphics on the motherboard). It allows them to stay in the race with Intel but no more.
For this generation llano is so far behind cpu wise I don't suppose it'll be great shakes - it's no different to the past when both had graphics on the motherboard and Intel's sucked more then AMD's - it's not like AMD was wiping the floor with Intel then because of it, and I don't suppose they will now either..

 

[Arkadrel]

There is no such thing as a "fusion" market. It's a just a cpu where the graphics are on the cpu not the motherboard. All it is is a cost saving (over sticking graphics on the motherboard). It allows them to stay in the race with Intel but no more.
For this generation llano is so far behind cpu wise I don't suppose it'll be great shakes - it's no different to the past when both had graphics on the motherboard and Intel's sucked more then AMD's - it's not like AMD was wiping the floor with Intel then because of it, and I don't suppose they will now either..

One Key differnce is that the GPU can now do workloads that the CPU used to do, via GPGPU. This key differnce means that even a large GPU ondie isnt wasted because it ll go towards that sort. the CPU performance isnt as important anymore, due to this, the gpu can help offload alot of work from the cpu.

The idea is to have a ballanced chip, that deserns how much performance it needs in CPU performance vs how much form the GPU, and have it power up/down to stay within TPD limits, to get optimal performance for any given application.

Its not just a "cpu+gpu" slapped together, they can work together on compute loads.

Also another differance is the fact that its directx11... Intel wont have that until Ivy Bridge, and even then maybe not fully, but via emulations and weird workarounds to get it working.

People dont care about performance, its meaningless without context.

Now if you say performance/$, you should understand the Llano.

It ll go into laptops, have enough cpu performance, and better gpu performance than the sandy bridge, and for alot of applications offer much better performance/$ (mostly ones with graphics or gpgpu use).

 

[Blitzvogel]

I wish Via would go after AMD and Intel. T'would be nice to have 3 real players in the game. The quad core Nano is a start at least. It's just unfortunate that their are so few products with Nanos in them. I don't think anything even had dual core Nanos.

 

[mosox]

The world is not limited to USA/Western Europe/Japan. The PC market is almost stationary in there, there's a huge increase in China, India, etc instead.

I live in E Europe, there's as many Sandy Bridge buyers in here as Ferrari and Porsche buyers in the USA. The Athlon II X3/X4 sell like hotcakes. AMD doesn't make much money on them but they capture the markets - and the expanding ones, only they need time.

No wonder:
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_alltime.html
http://paulisageek.com/compare/cpu/

Ever heard of Delux? They're famous around here.

Each month, we produce up to 300,000 notebook computers and netbooks, 300,000 multimedia speakers, 800,000 PC cases, 800,000 power supply units, 1 million keyboards and 1 million mice.

http://delux.manufacturer.globalsources.com/si/6008800789169/Homepage.htm

And that's just ONE Chinese PC parts company, there's hundreds of them.


The world is big, can't judge a global company on how it fares in a small portion of it.

 

[Dribble]

One Key differnce is that the GPU can now do workloads that the CPU used to do, via GPGPU. This key differnce means that even a large GPU ondie isnt wasted because it ll go towards that sort. the CPU performance isnt as important anymore, due to this, the gpu can help offload alot of work from the cpu.

The idea is to have a ballanced chip, that deserns how much performance it needs in CPU performance vs how much form the GPU, and have it power up/down to stay within TPD limits, to get optimal performance for any given application.

Its not just a "cpu+gpu" slapped together, they can work together on compute loads.

Also another differance is the fact that its directx11... Intel wont have that until Ivy Bridge, and even then maybe not fully, but via emulations and weird workarounds to get it working.

People dont care about performance, its meaningless without context.

Now if you say performance/$, you should understand the Llano.

It ll go into laptops, have enough cpu performance, and better gpu performance than the sandy bridge, and for alot of applications offer much better performance/$ (mostly ones with graphics or gpgpu use).

gpu compute (i.e open cl) doesn't just *work* with existing programmes - it requires people doing fairly complex re-writes of their software. Being as it's not supported by Intel dev's won't bother as most of the market can't use the code. AMD are notoriously weak at actively encouraging devs. Chances are beyond some video encode apps nothing will happen for the next year or two, and Intel has already countered that particular use with quick sync.

DX11 is a marketing slogan no more - DX11 games settings are the most advanced, these low powered gpu's are never going to be able to turn them on.

This talk of "balanced" is marketing rubbish. AMD would have produced a cpu as fast as Intel's if they could, just like Intel would have produced a gpu as powerful as AMD's. It's not balanced it's just weak vs the opposition.

Like I said this is nothing new, for the last few years it's always being Intel leading the way on cpu power, and AMD on integrated gpu's. With llano vs sandy bridge it's just more of the same.

 

[HW2050Plus]

Like I said this is nothing new, for the last few years it's always being Intel leading the way on cpu power, and AMD on integrated gpu's. With llano vs sandy bridge it's just more of the same.

Llano is much more powerful than Sandy Bridge. Intel has simply no offering to be able to compete with Llano at the moment. And we all know that Intel is since a long time lacking extremly in graphics market.

On the other side AMD had even less chances than Intel to break into this market. But then they wanted to buy NVidia. However NVidia refused that in a fusioned company they will retreat from the lead and that is why AMD bought the competitor ATi. Now they have incredible graphics department in AMD at the cost of immense debts however. But Llano is an important part where both is joined. And the Llano market are business PCs and mobile PCs.

Especially in the Notebook market Llano can shine because of the high graphics power. That the CPU part of the Llano is slower than Sandy Bridge isn't the key in that market. Graphics and power consumption is however. As we know so far graphics power of Llano will easily superceed that of Intel (not really difficult). Regarding power consumption we have to see.

As I said AMD is doing well in APU (Bobcat) and integrated (Llano) but they are lacking in traditional CPU business. Of course in the long term they need to stay strong in the trational CPU business to be able to earn money and get good performing cores for their integrated parts.

 

[Dribble]

Llano is much more powerful than Sandy Bridge. Intel has simply no offering to be able to compete with Llano at the moment. And we all know that Intel is since a long time lacking extremly in graphics market.

Intel never did have anything that competed with the gpu's any of AMD's integrated chipsets - 700, 800 all blew the intel opposition at the time away with performance and driver stability. Like I say AMD having better graphics is not new - if anything Intel has got a little closer because the HD3000 is almost usable sometimes.

Anyway bottom line is the balance hasn't really changed, so it seems somewhat unlikely that the sales will change that much either.

Now if AMD could produce a cpu that was equal/better to the Intel opposition that might really change things (like they did with the E-350 vs atom in netbooks) ... but llano isn't that cpu.

 

[mosox]

Lately AMD held the performance crown for every price point under $200. Intel had the performance crown only for the mid high and high end CPUs.

The Wolkswagen group makes the Bugatti Veyron who is faster than any Porsche but that doesn't mean the cars made by Wolkswagen are faster than the Porsches.