amd completely missed the boat by not getting into mobile market

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Mar 10, 2006
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In a recent Interview Lisa Su seemed to be absurdly confident about the future...and since I like fierce women...I'll blindly trust her :p

Of course she's going to act like that. What other choice does she have but to put on a straight face and tell the world that AMD's going to be all right?
 
Aug 11, 2008
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That's a fail argument, it simply means that Intel couldn't compete on price & basically gave their chips away for free, which is what they actually did. If anyone with a semblance of reason argues that this is fair & in the interest of consumers, long term, then I question their sanity & also this keeps AMD, a very viable alternative to Intel, out of the mobile/tablet market !

I dont buy into the theory that AMD has this great tablet chip that would have dominated the market except for dirty tricks by the evil Intel. AMD faces the same BOM disadvantages as intel, so without contra revenue, we would not have seen a flood of AMD tablets, just no x86 tablets at all in the budget category.
 

OBLAMA2009

Diamond Member
Apr 17, 2008
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look how hot their desktop chips run, does that really look like a company that is capable of making mobile chips?
 

R0H1T

Platinum Member
Jan 12, 2013
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I dont buy into the theory that AMD has this great tablet chip that would have dominated the market except for dirty tricks by the evil Intel. AMD faces the same BOM disadvantages as intel, so without contra revenue, we would not have seen a flood of AMD tablets, just no x86 tablets at all in the budget category.
Not a world beater but a seriously competitive SoC for sure.
look how hot their desktop chips run, does that really look like a company that is capable of making mobile chips?
Seriously :rolleyes:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7974/...hitecture-a10-micro-6700t-performance-preview
 

SlowSpyder

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Jan 12, 2005
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AMD did miss the boat. But so did Intel and Nvidia, and aren't they both losing money hand over fist in that market vs. AMD that just doesn't have a presence? It may work out for Intel at a great cost up front in the long run, it might be billions poured down the drain. But so far of the three, I'm not sure AMD is the biggest loser.
 

Dribble

Platinum Member
Aug 9, 2005
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That's a fail argument, it simply means that Intel couldn't compete on price & basically gave their chips away for free, which is what they actually did. If anyone with a semblance of reason argues that this is fair & in the interest of consumers, long term, then I question their sanity & also this keeps AMD, a very viable alternative to Intel, out of the mobile/tablet market !

If Intel was using this to crush a competitor out of existence I'd be all upset too, but tbh they barely dented the tablet market, a market that Intel can't hope to out-price competitors in with all the Chinese manufacturers happy to exist on a small fraction of the profit margin Intel required. As a consumer I got a really really cheap 8 inch tablet with near all the bells and whistles of a top end one so I'm not complaining.

If you think that contra-revenue is all that's holding AMD back then I think you are dreaming. How much do you think Intel invested in R&D for these low power chips, AMD has no money and can't do that. After all that and their process node advantage Intel is still struggling to produce anything competitive (I suspect mostly because x86 is a massive drag). AMD would have no hope producing an x86 tablet.

A simpler solution would be what nvidia did - use ARM cpu's (which are just much better for tablets) and radeon graphics. That's a lot easier although probably still requires more investment then AMD possess, and like I said in a previous post probably required software skills AMD the company don't have.

Hence perhaps their best bet would have been to keep doing what they were doing originally - developing mobile graphics and licensing it out to anyone who wanted it. That would have kept them in the market for minimal cost, and all that work developing efficient mobile graphics would have greatly benefited their notebook and desktop gpu's.
 

IlllI

Diamond Member
Feb 12, 2002
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AMD did miss the boat. But so did Intel and Nvidia, and aren't they both losing money hand over fist in that market vs. AMD that just doesn't have a presence? It may work out for Intel at a great cost up front in the long run, it might be billions poured down the drain. But so far of the three, I'm not sure AMD is the biggest loser.


is nvidia really losing money though? i thought they were making strides. I don't have hard numbers to work with, but I think they have a bigger tablet presence than intel does.

Out of these 3, intel is trying and might get some market due to deep pockets, nvidia has started to get some market (not sure if it is profitable yet though), and amd...has completely missed the opportunity. I still feel it goes back to when they sold their mobile division back in 2000-whenver. If they had kept it....who knows how the landscape would look like today. Just take a look at how many tablets and phones have qualcom hardware in them?
 

SlowSpyder

Lifer
Jan 12, 2005
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is nvidia really losing money though? i thought they were making strides. I don't have hard numbers to work with, but I think they have a bigger tablet presence than intel does.

Out of these 3, intel is trying and might get some market due to deep pockets, nvidia has started to get some market (not sure if it is profitable yet though), and amd...has completely missed the opportunity. I still feel it goes back to when they sold their mobile division back in 2000-whenver. If they had kept it....who knows how the landscape would look like today. Just take a look at how many tablets and phones have qualcom hardware in them?


Any of the three could of had their hardware in these devices. Intel has to give away their parts, and I thought Nvidia was struggling as well (I thought they had given up on phones completely now, just in cars and the occasional tablet). AMD simply doesn't exist in any meaningful way in that market. How much have Intel and Nvidia spent so far? I don't stay completely up to date on all of this, maybe things have changed, but AMD missing the boat may be a better outcome than spending billions trying to swim out to the boat and never get there.