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
I also dont believe the fact that because of AMD fanboys that AMD is still afloat. The only reason they are still afloat is because they bought out ATI so they have some money to fall back on. Their CPU's become worse and worse and i dont see a fix with that anytime soon. They keep making CPU's because thats what they do and will continue to do so until they are bankrupt and I honestly think that if it wasnt because of the buyout of ATI a few years back, they would be filing Chapter 11 pretty soon.
Im not Intel fanboy because Ive owned both sides of the fence. I just go were the performance is better.
The person was showing examples of bulldozer on different mobo's and they were performing a hell of a lot better than the supplied review hardware or something.
If I can find the link I'll post it.
here is something for the AMD fanboys
Also some of them unlock the two additional cores, definitely a bargain!
Don't build something that doesn't perform properly out of the box, then point fingers at others as to causes for the lackluster performance.
NOBODY at AMD laised with Microsoft on this issue before BD was released??!? This should have been solved on launch day.
That could affect bench mark performance quite the fair bit I imagine!
By the way if anyone wants any specific bench marks done ( including disabling one module per core and doing benchmarks) send me a message, I'm unemployed so have the time.
I won't go over 1.4v though other wise my psu will probably kill me.
It's not a huge upgrade but it definitely is an upgrade.
as ive said before if you upgrade less often and skip generations etc and are not a yearly spec jumper the leaps in performance actually happen, neither companys making it very easy these days for me to favour in either performance or value as my q6600 once did but ill get the best i can with my meager resources and its going to be AMD if i had 1500-2000 id go intel but ive not ,many havent and hence AMD will do well with its FX chips i cant wait for the retrospective reviews in 2 years sayin they wernt as bad as all that when optimised for tho