Did Bulldozer Damage the AMD brand?

[Ancalagon44]

I know, I know, we have lots of Bulldozer threads.

But this is not really about BD, its about whether the reception of BD in any way (positive or negative) impacted your perception of AMD as a brand. Please lets try to ignore whether BD was actually a good product or not - how good it actually was or was not is not as relevant to my question as how it was perceived.

And WHY did it influence your perception of AMD that way?

EDIT:

I'll go first.

BD negatively affected my opinion of AMD in a big way. It just screamed terrible project and product management, and made me doubt they could execute well at all. Now everytime there is news about an AMD product release, if its not about the graphics division, I'm uninterested.

Why? Even quite early during the development of BD, it should have been apparent that even the old Thuban is beating BD. If your old product beats your new product, especially on power consumption and performance at the same time, you have screwed something up badly and its time to go back to the drawing board. Given that BD was in development for what, 5 years, they should have known pretty soon how bad the whole idea was, and scrapped it.

But they persisted, and the result is a CPU that only performs well in embarrassingly parallel programs. In everything else, Thuban is a better choice! It took Trinity to get some of the worse aspects of BD under control, and now Steamroller is going to undo some of the changes that BD made! Like the shared instruction decoders.

I think the other thing that got me was the AMD marketing - how John Fruehe claimed repeatedly that IPC had improved. Granted someone else fed him information, no doubt, but why feed your marketing guy information that is a A) a blatant lie, B) something very easy to discover post release? And they named it FX after their best Athlon 64 processors, and claimed they were the fastest gaming CPUs in the world or some other rubbish. I think under marketing them would have been a better idea!

The disaster of BD makes me hesitant to consider any AMD product that is not a graphics card.

 

[Durvelle27]

don't think it affected AMD at all

 

[CHADBOGA]

Yes it made me think less of AMD.

They allowed one of their representatives to go onto multiple forums(with the oh so clever caveat of "I'm not representing the company here" or "even though I am inserting myself into a conversation about desktop products, hey, I'm only talking about server products" ), and spread misinformation that was obviously false to anyone paying attention, thus getting many less knowledgeable people to buy AM3+ motherboards BEFORE Bulldozer came out.

 

[Phynaz]

See sig.

Funny thing is JF used to work for Randy Allen.

 

[CHADBOGA]

Funny thing is JF used to work for Randy Allen.

The Master and The Apprentice.

 

[Maximilian]

Slightly negatively, their initial attempts to paint BD in a good light by comparing it to the 990x and totally ignoring any comparison with SB left a bit of a sour taste. I personally would have focused on how every chip is unlocked, low idle power, fair price and more threads than the average intel chip rather than drawing crazy comparisons to a stupidly priced chip.

Plus im 95% sure they gave some raving lunatics a free bulldozer along with instructions to go hype it up on forums.

 

[ShintaiDK]

BD is basicly just another top of the iceberg. AMD got hugely arrogant in 2005 and started to lie back there. Then it continued with the "Phenom is 50% faster than Core 2" and removed slides from AMDs own site. AMD havent learned anything yet and I doubt they will anytime soon.

Here is an example of hybris and nemesis for AMD.
http://shintai.ambition.cz/amd-arrogance.pdf

 

[Idontcare]

Given that AMD absolutely had the benefit of hindsight after witnessing Intel's failure with the the "more gigahertz, less IPC" mentality, yeah the fact they went ahead and built bulldozer really diminished my esteem for their prowess in creating products that customers are going to want to buy.

They even managed to herpa-derp their one good foot forward (bobcat) by cancelling the 28nm shrink.

So now the world waits for AMD to get their crap together, both in terms of Steamroller and Jaguar. Someday we may even get to buy one versus just reading about their performance expectations based solely on simulations (yet another one of AMD's strengths) :|

 

[Ancalagon44]

They even managed to herpa-derp their one good foot forward (bobcat) by cancelling the 28nm shrink.

That was the other thing I didnt get. Bobcat was well received - why not concentrate on it? Why was Brazo 2.0 not a 28 or 32nm part?

Jaguar does sound like quite an improvement, I just hope it comes out soon enough.

More and more I'm realizing that management is 100% responsible for any mishaps at a company. It is never the employees. Witness Nokia's fall from grace. There is a 10 page article on what happened with the MeeGo development and how it was politics that got Nokia into the state its in. Politics! So pathetic.

Anyway, point is, some exec with a big ego probably decided that BD was his pet project, even though all reports were that it was a bad idea, and pushed ahead with it.

 

[Ventanni]

I think the Bulldozer design is excellent in theory, but was far more difficult in practice to actually design and implement, and we can all probably agree that Piledriver is likely the level of performance-per-watt that we were all realistically expecting when Bulldozer was first introduced. I don't think we'll start to see AMD's module design really spread its wings until Steamroller is introduced, but I'm really curious what Excavator is promising since its focus is to be performance.

And ironically, despite AMD saying that they're not focusing on being competitive with Intel anymore, I think they're more competitive now than they ever have been.

 

[Ancalagon44]

And ironically, despite AMD saying that they're not focusing on being competitive with Intel anymore, I think they're more competitive now than they ever have been.

What about the Athlon 64 days?

 

[thilanliyan]

No, Conroe did. And also Hector Ruiz did.

 

[Yuriman]

I had almost forgotten AMD for a while (at least in the CPU industry) and Bulldozer brought them publicity. A few years back I built my sister a system with an Athlon x3 because the price was right, but outside of extreme budget builds, I haven't seriously thought about AMD since around 2005.

In a way, Bulldozer has been good for them, at least in my eyes.

 

[KompuKare]

More and more I'm realizing that management is 100% responsible for any mishaps at a company. It is never the employees. Witness Nokia's fall from grace. There is a 10 page article on what happened with the MeeGo development and how it was politics that got Nokia into the state its in. Politics! So pathetic.

Well that's the thing isn't it? In these forums we have people who lament the competition AMD used to bring vs people who are in love with Intel and various shades in between.

But compared to the train wrecks which are Nokia or HP, the mistakes AMD made are nothing. Those two (Elop and Carly) were/are more like Trojan horses out to gut a place from the inside.

 

[boxleitnerb]

It made me think more negatively of AMD for a number of reasons:

• gets beaten by its predecessor in some scenarios, especially single-threaded
• uses way too much power
• moar coars & moar MHz seems like a brute force approach which I personally find dumb. The design is not very balanced in regard to singlethread/multithread
• AMDs pathetic attempts to downplay the weaknesses (good enough, GPU limited benchmarks). I don't like to be taken for a fool and I believe many people feel that way.

 

[Ancalagon44]

Yeah look AMD is not done yet, and they are not in as bad a state as Nokia was just a few months ago (personally I dont think Nokia is out of the woods yet).

Still, AMD screwed up bad with BD on multiple levels. Its affected my confidence in them, and I type this using my 5th AMD CPU. Technically 6th if you count the Athlon II X4 620 that I bent the pins on.

 

[BrightCandle]

Amd has been a budget low cost low performance alternative for a long time. It acquires the cheaper brand GPU maker to compliment its outlook. Bulldozer/any other product that is rubbish at its primary purpose is AMDs normal delivery. Perception remains unchanged.

 

[happysmiles]

Bulldozer to AMD was Pentium 4 to Intel

I care more about a company improving than their failures

Their marketing team are balls and the only good piece of marketing ive seen was the Hondo faux-teaser.

and I've liked AMD since 2003. 9 years of ass marketing

 

[moonbogg]

BD was just about the last nail in the coffin for me. It was their big chance to make a come back and people were speculating that BD would pull through, but it was nothing more than a botched punchline to a bad joke.

 

[meloz]

Anytime you hype-up a product or service....and then it fails to live up to the consumer expectation (for whatever reason), you end up doing damage to the company and the brand.

So yes, Bulldozer really hurt AMD.

 

[Ajay]

I like AMD because I had allot of fun with several K7s, plus, I like rooting for the underdog. I know that they are in a really bad place, especially since BD s*cked (it needed to be what Steamroller will probably be), I had hoped that with four modules it would have bested Phenom x6 by a fair margin - that turned out to be a disaster. But since the company was already in trouble, my opinion didn't change much.

 

[Genx87]

It didnt change my opinion of the company. I expected failure, it delivered perfectly. AMD has been a mess since conroe showed up. Going on 7 years of garbage and false hopes.

 

[Ajay]

Given that AMD absolutely had the benefit of hindsight after witnessing Intel's failure with the the "more gigahertz, less IPC" mentality, yeah the fact they went ahead and built bulldozer really diminished my esteem for their prowess in creating products that customers are going to want to buy.

Yeah, that still boggles my mind, especially since it happened under Dirk Meyer's watch. The postmortem sounds like there was a major design change mid way through development and the resultant product was shaping up something awful, at least to some engineers and executives (who were already shopping themselves around b/4 the shat hit the fan). It's all anecdotal, but I love to hear the real story someday.

 

[boxleitnerb]

Who was the one whose perception of AMD improved? Come forth to be stoned
No honestly, how could anyone select that option and be serious?

 

[sefsefsefsef]

The more the message gets out to the average consumer that "Bulldozer" is bad, the more the AMD brand is hurt in the eyes of the public. It didn't affect my opinion of AMD though.