CPU Whiz Jim Keller Leaves AMD

[rtwjunkie]

@john_ Nope. Re-read sir. I said you attribute the ACTIONS of major companies with stockholders to acting like children.

Sometimes I wonder why I bother posting anything on this site...so many people seem to be hoping to be offended that they jump at the chance to claim they were insulted.

 

[OneMoar]

AMD is past the point of no-return baring a transfusion they will bleed out.. slowly

 

[john_]

@john_ Nope. Re-read sir. I said you attribute the ACTIONS of major companies with stockholders to acting like children.

Maybe my English are the problem here. If this is the case, my apologies.

Anyway, I wasn't talking about companies. Companies will go for the better deal. The end. Some might care about the brand that sells better to a specific part of the public(Alienware), but companies like HP for example, will just go with what looks a better deal.

As for individuals, I don't know how much of a minority they are, but I don't think that the situation today is the same as it was 5 years ago. I think with only 9.4 millions cards sold in the last quarter, the average Joe is a bigger part of the pie compared to 5 years ago, and if AMD is selling less than 2 millions cards, that part of the pie is really significant for them. And while 2 months ago it was really difficult to advice someone to choose a Radeon over a GTX, today is pretty easy. We can keep saying that this is insignificant, but without specific numbers how can we know?

Sometimes I wonder why I bother posting anything on this site...so many people seem to be hoping to be offended that they jump at the chance to claim they were insulted.

I have news to you. Everyone feels the same sometimes in forums. You think I saw smoke's posts, differently? "I will bookmark this post and remind it to you in the future". WTF?...

 

[rtwjunkie]

You do make some good points.

As to the misunderstanding, it is likely a language thing. Apology accepted, as I was not attacking you.

 

[HumanSmoke]

You can keep asking from AMD to become Intel or Nvidia overnight

No I am not. What I am writing is FACT borne out of 40 years of history. Who in their right mind expects AMD to morph into Nvidia or Intel - let alone overnight? I think you'll find all I did was offer a realistic counterpoint to your own vision on the future (in post #39 since you seem to have forgotten) that takes into account historical precedent and a fairly realistic view of how the industry operates. I certainly don't expect AMD to become either of those two companies. AMD has neither the resources, nor the managerial mindset for that. At Nvidia and Intel, engineering seems to operate within the strategic long term goals defined by management. AMD's engineers seem to have a free rein to explore and produce great hardware whilst their management indulges in some headless chicken interpretive dance routine that undermines their own engineers efforts.

only so you can come to easy conclusions.

The conclusions are self explanatory. The company is in a slow decline, and has a minimal grasp of marketing their brand.

but it is really easy to hit someone who is down.

No, I think you'll find that I'm doing no more than stating the obvious for most people with an understanding of the semicon industry and business in general. If that constitutes "hitting them when they are down", you can add me to tech sites, business publications like Forbes and Fortune, market analysis firms like Mercury Research and JPR, and AMD's own accountants. If anyone is hitting them "when they are down" it is AMD themselves and the apologists and conspiracy theorists that excuse the company, and would rather just hush the whole situation up whilst simultaneously trumpeting their vision of AMD's rise from the ashes.

Now if you want to make this personal

No, I'll leave that to you. I'll concern myself with the industry. If you take a critique of a company that you're guerrilla marketing for personally, then that is your problem.

I'd have to disagree. The public is unimportant, as they are not the major purchasers of PC hardware. Business is, and brand recognition is not as important in the corporate contracting world. For public purchases, sure, I'd agree with you, but discrete graphics cards sales by the public are a small part of the market, and that is really why cards that cost $100 are so popular. People aren't really broke so much as such data would like to represent. I kind of read that as John_'s point... What businesses look for and what you and I look for and what the general public look for are all completely different things.

But they do feed into each other as a Catch-22 situation. AMD aren't viewed as a first tier option by OEMs, thus OEMs downgrade the feature set and options of products using AMD hardware to have them fit into "the value option" - a marketing aspect AMD themselves foster. When (mostly) only lower feature sets are available to the consumer, the brand is then reinforced as the budget buy in the minds of those consumers. Look at any OEM dominated market and you will see AMD either disregarded entirely, or entrenched at the budget end of the product stack. The laptop market is exclusively OEM - How many top spec machines ( screen resolution, installed RAM, SSD options, high end components such as dual/multi-GPU options with the higher associated power and cooling BoM) are on the market featuring AMD hardware as opposed to Intel and Intel+Nvidia ?

We saw Nvidia's brand recognition in the ARM platform. They failed miserably. They managed to find place for their Tegras in cars and a couple of their own products. We saw Intel's brand recognition also in tablets and smartphones, where they had to throw billions just so manufacturers use their chips.

All those markets negate Nvidia and Intel's brand, since they are OEM product based. Smartphone and automobile makers don't feature anything other than their own brand in marketing for the most part. No one is going to base buying an Audi on what SoC powers their in-car infotainment centre, or the dashboard display, or GPS, or fuel and brake management system. All you've done is provide a very good example of the power of brand awareness. Where the brand is visible it sells, where it isn't visible the playing field is level and the consumer makes a value judgement solely upon the user experience and any brand visibility owned by the OEM.

 

[john_]

No I am not. What I am writing is FACT borne out of 40 years of history. Who in their right mind expects AMD to morph into Nvidia or Intel - let alone overnight? I think you'll find all I did was offer a realistic counterpoint to your own vision on the future (in post #39 since you seem to have forgotten) that takes into account historical precedent and a fairly realistic view of how the industry operates. I certainly don't expect AMD to become either of those two companies. AMD has neither the resources, nor the managerial mindset for that. At Nvidia and Intel, engineering seems to operate within the strategic long term goals defined by management. AMD's engineers seem to have a free rein to explore and produce great hardware whilst their management indulges in some headless chicken interpretive dance routine that undermines their own engineers efforts.

The conclusions are self explanatory. The company is in a slow decline, and has a minimal grasp of marketing their brand.

No, I think you'll find that I'm doing no more than stating the obvious for most people with an understanding of the semicon industry and business in general. If that constitutes "hitting them when they are down", you can add me to tech sites, business publications like Forbes and Fortune, market analysis firms like Mercury Research and JPR, and AMD's own accountants. If anyone is hitting them "when they are down" it is AMD themselves and the apologists and conspiracy theorists that excuse the company, and would rather just hush the whole situation up whilst simultaneously trumpeting their vision of AMD's rise from the ashes.

No, I'll leave that to you. I'll concern myself with the industry. If you take a critique of a company that you're guerrilla marketing for personally, then that is your problem.

But they do feed into each other as a Catch-22 situation. AMD aren't viewed as a first tier option by OEMs, thus OEMs downgrade the feature set and options of products using AMD hardware to have them fit into "the value option" - a marketing aspect AMD themselves foster. When (mostly) only lower feature sets are available to the consumer, the brand is then reinforced as the budget buy in the minds of those consumers. Look at any OEM dominated market and you will see AMD either disregarded entirely, or entrenched at the budget end of the product stack. The laptop market is exclusively OEM - How many top spec machines ( screen resolution, installed RAM, SSD options, high end components such as dual/multi-GPU options with the higher associated power and cooling BoM) are on the market featuring AMD hardware as opposed to Intel and Intel+Nvidia ?

All those markets negate Nvidia and Intel's brand, since they are OEM product based. Smartphone and automobile makers don't feature anything other than their own brand in marketing for the most part. No one is going to base buying an Audi on what SoC powers their in-car infotainment centre, or the dashboard display, or GPS, or fuel and brake management system. All you've done is provide a very good example of the power of brand awareness. Where the brand is visible it sells, where it isn't visible the playing field is level and the consumer makes a value judgement solely upon the user experience and any brand visibility owned by the OEM.

Wow. So many things and in the end, nothing.

I will only comment one part of your post

I'll leave that to you.

I DON'T GIVE A BEEP ABOUT YOU. You are not the center of my world. I don't bookmark your posts. I didn't added in my calendar a reminder to update my post to inform you about anything. You started it, remember? YOU are posting a huge pile of nothing. Not me.

Have a nice day. And... get a life.

 

[64K]

Consider where john_ lives and their economics of rampant Socialism and you wouldn't be surprised about his perspective. Greece is utterly bankrupt and is being propped up by Germany and France with Euros that Greece can never repay. Citizens in Greece expect that they can work for 30 years and retire on the government dole at 50 years old when people are living into their 80's. If Germany and France cut off the welfare handout then Greece's economy will utterly collapse and still they won't change their ways. That's not a personal attack against you john_ but your perspective is skewed by a failed political ideology.

 

[john_]

Consider where john_ lives and their economics of rampant Socialism and you wouldn't be surprised about his perspective. Greece is utterly bankrupt and is being propped up by Germany and France with Euros that Greece can never repay. Citizens in Greece expect that they can work for 30 years and retire on the government dole at 50 years old when people are living into their 80's. If Germany and France cut off the welfare handout then Greece's economy will utterly collapse. That's not a personal attack against you john_ but your perspective is skewed by a failed political ideology.

I wish this was socialism. It's more like "Let's try this and see what happens". Many countries are bankrupt. It's just that we are in the mercy of stronger countries/economies. Japan has a bigger debt that we do, I think China literally owns USA. Greece haven't taken advantages yet of it's gas and oil that is located in it's territory and the islands here are not just a goldmine for those who want to do business with tourism, but also the perfect place to put wind turbines and probably a few solar panels. So what do you do when you want to take advantage of all these in 10-20-30 years. You just take that country's economy and totally destroy it. All programs from IMF that where applied here had the opposite results than those advertised. IMF says "Yes we where wrong" and in the next minute "Please continue that wrong plan". And please try not to confuse my perspective with my country's problems. Show a little respect for my opinion, even if you don't agree and my country, even if you don't live here.

 

[RealNeil]

Let's get back on topic.

I think that one of AMD's biggest problems is their marketing people. They keep making promises that AMD products aren't good enough to keep.
Bulldozer was a good example, and Fury was hyped far too much.
Combine that with unrealistic pricing of new AMD products, and you alienate your customers.
They're drilling more holes in their boat when they should be rowing for shore.

 

[john_]

Prices usually are good. But they do make promises that they don't keep. They are doing it not only recently, but many years ago. Who can forget 2900XT?

 

[HumanSmoke]

I think that one of AMD's biggest problems is their marketing people. They keep making promises that AMD products aren't good enough to keep.

Ironic then that AMD was one of the few tech companies that were founded in the wake of the Fairchild disintegration that was founded and steered by marketing men (Jerry Sanders and Ed Turney). The problem has seemingly always been AMD's lack of long term focus - as many ex-officers and industry types have noted

Ruiz found that "Sanders had unconsciously imbued AMD with a 'second-best' mentality." As Ruiz put it in his book, "Sanders was something of a paradox. On the one hand, he was full of energy and would never accept that AMD could fail. But on the other hand, he never seemed willing to put the long-term effort into developing a strategic plan. As a result we had a mediocre customer plan, a hit-or-miss reputation, and no global strategy at all... Simply put, no one inside AMD believed AMD could beat Intel in the marketplace or even mount a serious threat—not even the head of the company". - Hector Ruiz

...and interesting that you used the holed boat metaphor. Atiq Raza (AMD's ex-president), used the same analogy in describing the company in the same article:

There's no control on spending—even now, one of the problems is if you take a look at the salary structure," said Atiq Raza, the company's former president, chief technical officer, and chief operating officer, in a conversation with Ars. "[AMD is] a sinking ship, fundamentally. I really am sorry for [current CEO Rory Read]. He's a well-intentioned person but the ship has a huge hole in it. That $164 million [from selling its Texas facility] is going to go in no time.

 

[RealNeil]

Ironic then that AMD was one of the few tech companies that were founded in the wake of the Fairchild disintegration that was founded and steered by marketing men (Jerry Sanders and Ed Turney). The problem has seemingly always been AMD's lack of long-term focus - as many ex-officers and industry types have noted

Yes, past history can develop a little irony, but looking at the past, we see that AMD's Bulldozer claims before its release were shooting the moon. What we ended up with was underwhelming at best.
Pre-release AMD Fury claims were quite spectacular, but the same day as Fury release of the GTX-980Ti really trimmed their sails. (Fury being a little underwhelming for brand new technology)

The Ti card should have trimmed AMD's prices,.....but it didn't. (they're hell bent on profits and to hell with sales)

I have an FX-9590 system that performs pretty good. I like it enough to keep it here along with my 4790K and 4770K boxes.
I would like to buy a Fury GPU, (or two) but they want too much for them. I will not until the prices come down.

 

[HumanSmoke]

Yes, past history can develop a little irony, but looking at the past, we see that AMD's Bulldozer claims before its release were shooting the moon. What we ended up with was underwhelming at best.

Things might have been better had John Fruehe not gone on a one man crusade to indoctrinate the enthusiast site forums, but I suspect that AMD's AIB's needed the hyperbole to pre-sell the 990X/FX/970 series of boards before BD launched. While Bulldozer was an unknown quantity whose performance figures were carefully controlled via Fruehe and sites like Donanimhaber, AIBs Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI accumulated vital sales in what was becoming a stagnant market (AM3/AM3+) for them. It did cost Fruehe his job and leave a bad taste in the mouths of many, but it did accomplish what it set out to do - sell a shitload of 900-series chipset boards and lock a lot of people into buying BD (or at least sticking with their Phenom II's and not moving over to Intel's Sandy/Ivy Bridge. I actually donated my 1055T based system to charity (hospice) rather than keep seperate Intel+Nvidia and AMD+AMD boxes going as I had done for years.
While the disappointment of the enthusiasts is understandable, the impact I suspect pales in comparison to some of the spinning AMD has done to OEM's. Fantastical AMD claims regarding grabbing 25% (presently <1%) of the server market when attempting to court the enterprise OEM's, all the while cutting features out of designs, seems to have left a very bad situation.

Pre-release AMD Fury claims were quite spectacular, but the same day as Fury release of the GTX-980Ti really trimmed their sails. (Fury being a little underwhelming for brand new technology)

It's all about the short term gain rather than the long term outlook. Intel has it's own skeletons in the closet (Itanium, Larrabee), but at least multiple steams of research going concurrently tends to mitigate the issues- as does Nvidia whose non-x86 forays (Shield, Tegra) have been considerably less than stellar, but tend not to be deal breakers because it isn't their core business.

The Ti card should have trimmed AMD's prices,.....but it didn't. (they're hell bent on profits and to hell with sales)

AMD looked at Nvidia and saw what the company had done by separating a product from the number series naming convention with Titan - introducing a (mostly fictional) elite product line outside of the 700 and 900 series. Consumers lapped it up - much to the consternation of AMD ( I don't know why it should, both companies have done the same in the past with the 6800 Ultra Extreme and XT Platinum Edition cards for example). AMD was merely copying Nvidia's example - but lacked a couple of key ingredients (four if you count availability, and the fact that it wasn't the fastest single GPU card at launch as the Titan's have been) - the brand awareness of Nvidia, and a lack of record breaking by the Fury X. Dominating the HWBot leaderboard brings its own kudos and PR bonanza even if the records are achieved with sub-zero cooling. EVGA's 980 Ti Classified Kingpin sold out in minutes not because it is appreciably faster than any other air cooled 980 Ti, but because of the nameplate it possesses.

AMD are in mostly uncharted territory by pricing the Fury X (and Nano) so high. Nvidia has a record of pricing high, so those buying their cards have been hardened to the cost reality. AMD on the other hand are still measured as the value option, so I suspect that shelling out $650 in the context of its abilities isn't so much an issue as past history. High end graphics buyers also generally realize that AMD institute heavy price cutting in the face of bad market share numbers, so there is definitely a case to be made for playing the waiting game. Personally neither vendor is exciting me this round. I did have a 980 Ti (Giga G1) briefly, but decided to sell while the market was still high. I'll wait for Pascal and Arctic Islands unless I find a deal that is too good to pass up.

 

[RealNeil]

I decided to skip both of them this time as well. I bought three R9-290 TriX cards instead. I'm good for now.

 

[john_]

Three? I bet you found a really nice deal for those cards.

 

[medi01]

And tell me, how has that panned out from a profit perspective?

My main and only point is the company is sinking. I know they are better off alive but something needs to change to acomplish that.

It is one of the few things that keeps AMD afloat and Intel is again just catching up.

No, your main point is they suck as long term planning. Which they apparently don't.
You can have poor profits and great product and the opposite, sucky expensive products that still outsell the competitor, as we've seen with Intel's Prescott or nVidia's Fermi.

 

[RealNeil]

Three? I bet you found a really nice deal for those cards.

$600.00 for them all. I'm using two in one system, and the other one is paired with an MSI Gaming R9-290X.

 

[john_]

$600.00 for them all. I'm using two in one system, and the other one is paired with an MSI Gaming R9-290X.

That thought passed my mind, that you found them in a price that was looking like "I get three for the price of one 980Ti/Fury X". Really nice deal. Hope you enjoy them

 

[RealNeil]

That thought passed my mind, that you found them in a price that was looking like "I get three for the price of one 980Ti/Fury X". Really nice deal. Hope you enjoy them

I am enjoying them. Gaming performance is good with crossfire and eventually I'll have all three of them running in my X99 build.