Tuesday, November 29th 2011
AMD To Give Up Competing With Intel On x86? CPU Prices Already Shooting Up
It looks like the Bulldozer disaster might have been too much of a setback for AMD to recover from. After 30 years of competing with Intel in the x86 processor market, AMD is about to give up, even with the 2009 1.25bn antitrust settlement they extracted from them. Mike Silverman, AMD company spokesman said, "We're at an inflection point. We will all need to let go of the old 'AMD versus Intel' mind-set, because it won't be about that anymore." He was vague on the exact strategy that AMD intends to pursue from now on, though. However, the company is widely expected to make a concerted effort to break into the smartphones and tablets market. The big problem with this strategy unfortunately, is that this arena is currently dominated by many other competitors. On top of that, their arch enemy Intel is also trying to muscle in on this space, hence AMD could find themselves back at square one, or likely even further back. AMD's graphics cards are doing well at the moment though and are quite competitive, so it looks like their expensive purchase of ATI back in 2006, might yet save the company from extinction. If they become primarily a graphics card company, they will inevitably end up a lot smaller than they are now though and that's a lot of lost jobs and personal hardship, along with a monopoly x86 market remaining and all of its negative effects on the market.
The current predicament that AMD find themselves in can only be due to bad management, especially with that massive injection of over a billion dollars. Surely they must have seen the way Bulldozer performance was going years ago? Ultimately, it doesn't matter if they would have scrapped Bulldozer as a bad job and tweaked up the reasonable Phenom 2 instead and called it Phenom 3. It doesn't matter a jot what's actually under the hood, what clock speed it runs at and what you call it. Ultimately, it's comparative real-world performance and price that matters, nothing else. Nothing at all. Back in October, we reported on AMD's projection of a 50% CPU performance improvement by 2014. It was clear as day that this was a non-starter against the high performance competition from Intel, who's products are already 50% faster and more right now, so today's announcement that AMD is giving up isn't really all that surprising, although depressing.
AMD's move is bad news for PC enthusiasts everywhere as Intel will now be left with no competition in the x86 market and be an effective monopoly. We're already seeing the effects of this with Intel processors trending upwards in price and Intel's Sandy Bridge replacements, Sandy Bridge-E and Ivy Bridge, which essentially give the same per core performance as SB, with just a few tweaks to make them "new" products. With more and more computing power being crammed into an ever smaller space, could it be that high powered PCs will become a very small niche market, having been replaced by laptops, very small form factor, low power computers - and games consoles? And what will happen to AMD and NVIDIA when they can't sell high-powered graphics cards in sufficient quantities to be profitable any more? Doesn't bear thinking about, does it?
There's more info, analysis and quotes on this grim situation over at Mercury News.
AMD's move is bad news for PC enthusiasts everywhere as Intel will now be left with no competition in the x86 market and be an effective monopoly. We're already seeing the effects of this with Intel processors trending upwards in price and Intel's Sandy Bridge replacements, Sandy Bridge-E and Ivy Bridge, which essentially give the same per core performance as SB, with just a few tweaks to make them "new" products. With more and more computing power being crammed into an ever smaller space, could it be that high powered PCs will become a very small niche market, having been replaced by laptops, very small form factor, low power computers - and games consoles? And what will happen to AMD and NVIDIA when they can't sell high-powered graphics cards in sufficient quantities to be profitable any more? Doesn't bear thinking about, does it?
There's more info, analysis and quotes on this grim situation over at Mercury News.
156 Comments on AMD To Give Up Competing With Intel On x86? CPU Prices Already Shooting Up
Can't really do that against a business.
* In theory because the government never listens to people :laugh:
Also as they were government owned they would of been seen as a necessary service I.E they can't over charge for it because people required it. (Governments supposed to provide after all, supposed to distrubute the money we give them in a sensible way and invest in things that are good, again obviously doesn't actually happen lol but it's how it should be)
All you guys worrying about amd should worry about what the U.S. govt will do to intel if it has a monopoly. Case and point. At&t had a nice monopoly on the phone markets years and years ago. They had excellent service, phone costs were low, and advancements were happening right and left.
Sombody cries to the govt. "At&t has a monopoly and we can't enter the market"
At&t gets chopped up. Phone service goes down the tube, customer service goes down the tube, and phone costs tripled.
Years later we now all pay hundreds a month for our mobile phone bills because some asshat in the U.S. govt thought their monopoly was bad. They created a dark age of phone advancement and service by breaking up a monopoly.
That's exactly what will happen to intel if amd leaves pc market.
That said. AMD isn't leaving the pc market. They're merely focusing more on mobile (ie laptops, tablets, phones) and less on desktops/workstations/servers. Looking at the market it makes sense to shift to mobile. This is especially true with the all on one chip apu style that seems to be decently successful for amd.
AMD can meet that market segmanet, and they already do. It's worth noting that AMD did ship Bulldozer as a server chip first, so there's no question, really, where the priorities are. Marketing simply goofed hardcore with Bulldozer, and that is all. To me, Bulldozer is exciting, contrary to the opinion of most reviewers.
here
They fired the old marketing people.
The new CEO comes in a month before BD release and realizes 'heads need to roll' and 'plans need to change', but still has to release BD in order to create some cash flow and recoup expenses.
Voila, hints of restructuring. Re-jigging of roadmaps.
No surprises really.
Had to be done by someone eventually.
So now they've come out and said it officially,
"hey stop hoping for the old days of the original FX processors, we don't give a shit about that anymore"
"we're selling to our core market, and you ain't it Mr/Ms High End Enthusiast"
So much whining, unnecessary garbage, overreaction, trolling, and ego stroking going on; there's a few dozen useless posts in this thread. :shadedshu
Some os the best minds in the world have come from AMD and they will tell you straight up that they would still be there if upper management would fix the shortcomings of their company.
Plain and simple--fix it from the top down and you might have a better company
Mercury News' report is false. Which makes this news report false as well.
It wont stop me from wanting a big desktop pc for doing REAL work on. ;)
64bit Processing is now and 128bit or more is the future
Chips that handle 128 bit or higher processing on multiple cores are no doubt in development ( with or without onboard gpu) and as such will be as far in advance of current 32bit chips as the x86 is over the ancient 8bit processors
"" Progress marches on (in the developers fabs ) and SKYNET grows nearer to reality""
There's money in processors. It is AMD's fault it went this badly. Cutting ties and running off to the waves of money created by mobile devices is the mother of all epic fails. In fact, I would argue that band wagon companies, while cleverly greedy, are their own worst enemies. It's band wagon thinking and planning that all be ensures their existence is limited.
I noticed a comment on whether or not power consumption was important. It is more important to enterprise than it is to consumers. Consumers would quickly accept a small 10 watt increase just to get the performance.