Friday, December 2nd 2011
AMD Bulldozer A Surprisingly Sell-Out Sales Success. Victims: Phenom II & Athlon II
AMD's new Bulldozer "FX" series of processors may be very lacklustre performers in reviewer's benchmarks and have garnered considerable scorn in enthusiast circles, but they're a very good performer for AMD's bottom line. Incredibly, they are selling out as soon as shops get them in stock - and they are not even priced very competitively against Intel's offerings, so perhaps the "It's an 8 core CPU!!" marketing is working well on the uninformed "enthusiast" after all? Mind you, what enthusiast, however uninformed, wouldn't know exactly how these products perform? Every tech website and computer magazine has covered these chips by now. The mind boggles.
Unfortunately, the victims of this unwarranted success are the decent Phenom II & Athlon II processors, which have always been priced very well, giving good value for money and are good sellers. The reason is that the manufacturing plants share equipment between these old 45 nm products and the new 32 nm ones, creating a conflict between them, so one must go. It therefore makes sound business sense for AMD to discontinue selling the old product in favour of the new, expensive one which is flying off the shelves. AMD will stop shipping all Athlon II's and Phenom II's to distributors, but with one exception. The "Zosma" 6 core Phenom II X4 960T will continue to be available until stocks run dry. This has two cores disabled, making it a "quad" core CPU, but with luck they might be unlockable. To state the obvious, if one is considering buying one of these discontinued chips, then they'd better not wait long.
Source:
Nordic Hardware
175 Comments on AMD Bulldozer A Surprisingly Sell-Out Sales Success. Victims: Phenom II & Athlon II
Socket A - Athlon XP
Socket 754 - Skipped
Socket 939 - Athlon 64
Socket 940 - Skipped
Socket AM2 - Skipped
Socket F - Skipped
Socket AM2+ - Phenom II x4
Socket AM3 - Skipped
Socket AM3+ - AMD FX-8120
Socket FM2 - Future Piledriver?
Socket A - Athlon XP
Socket 478 - ALL
Socket 754 - ALL
Socket 939 - ALL
LGA 775 - ALL
Socket 940 - FX51
Socket AM2 - ALL
Socket F - Opteron X2/X4
Socket AM2+ - ALL
Socket AM3 - ALL
LGA 1366 - several i7 920
LGA 1156 - Xeon X3440, ES chips
Socket AM3+ - waiting
Socket FM2 - waiting
I might have missed some. I want to see something happen with these new chips before I snag one. I am tired of guinea pigging BIOS's. I had my foot in with Asus on the Crosshair II, III, IV boards and major BIOS fuck ups not doing that again someone else can figure out all the mess ups.
Ultimately, if the product makes you happy, that's much more important than whether it wins benchmarks or is "rated" by the world at large.
So what's more worth it, having something that costs about the same and usually performs better 6+ months earlier, or supporting the underdog who refused to release any benchmarks before launch and used misleading marketing tactics? I know I won't be able to convince people who are devout AMD fans that BD isn't that great, but as someone who has used products from both companies and spend a lot of time researching my purchases, BD was a disappointment.
And I don't want to hear the same silly things that I read in the forums 'that competition doesn't drive Intel's effort' of course it does..... What do you think that Intel is a charitable institute??? Intel has learned its lesson with the previous AMD FX range. They now know that the game can change overnight in the next quarter or within the next year that's why it is trying so hard....
It has not been such a successful year for Intel either - don't forget the 6-series motherboard disaster early this year - it cost them over a billion.....
....and they see that the industry is slowly pulling away from them. Windows for ARM, Apple is rumored that will switch to ARM for laptops.... etc
Lastly this is for the gamers.... whether you have an i5 an i7 an 8120 or an 8150 most of the games today are console ports.. The processor doesn't matter. High end PC games like BF3 rely almost solely on the graphics cards.... So don't go mad about the people that choose AMD.... in any case the overall windows experience will be pretty much the same....
PS....I have an Intel CPU
Now... the retailers have the image created for AMD about "Bulldozer", and the best recomendation that they give are the Buldozer (i guess).
But, in the end, if you want/need a FX, buy it. If you want/need a Intel.. buy it!.
Clock it up ppl and enjoy :D
But the power consumption of this stepping is 'socket melting', especially under load. I leave my system ON 24/7 and this simply won't do. Also after an accident with watercooling in the past, I can't see myself having a system on water 24/7 without developing an obsessive compulsion to constantly check if anything is leaking :D:D
Maybe the next stepping will be more efficient, and hopefully it will support PCIe 3.0.....
Then I might reconsider :toast:
Ask youselfs this, if Phenom didn't exist, would Bulldozer have been a success? For me I wait for Piledriver, my current PII is clocking away just fine at the moment.
but besides that id agree with you if i got what you mean"if phenom didnt exist,would,ve bulldozer have been a success" ,yes as amd seems to price their skus accordingly at all times to keep them selling well as would i but i agree you get what you pay for except when your swapping with each next step up as then the 10-20% performance increase cant offset the cost relative to value(use made theroff) imho irregular step ups net smiles is my experience