If desktop CPUs are already fast enough, why doesn't AMD CPUs sell?

[Fjodor2001]

Hi,

A lot of people claim that the current desktop CPUs are already "fast enough" for the average user. This is also said to be the reason that focus instead lately has been on e.g. improving the iGPU, integrating VRM and Memory Controller, and lowering power consumption instead.

But if that is true, then how come AMD desktop CPUs are not selling so well? After all they should be fast enough for the average user too, since they are not that much slower than the corresponding Intel CPUs, right? And since the AMD CPUs are cheaper too, it should be a better option for a lot of consumers. But for some reason most people still buy Intel CPUs. How come?

 

[inf64]

From where do you get that AMD's desktop CPUs are not selling well? And what constitutes "selling well" exactly?
Trinity and Vishera are good products in their own segments,that's a fact. Also they are more than fast enough for 90% of the buyers in their respected segments.

 

[Fjodor2001]

What I mean is that they do not sell as well as Intel desktop CPUs.

But after just having checked, the difference was not as big as expected, see e.g. for 2011 Q4:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-intel-cpu-processor,15041.html

"In desktop processors, Intel came in at 73.8 percent (+1.7 points), while AMD was down 1.6 points to 26.0 percent."

Based on that you'd imagine AMD should make more money than they do?

 

[AtenRa]

I believe this is relevant with the topic,

Ex-Nvidia and Rightware Exec Roy Taylor Joins AMD's Dream Team

Knowing that he has to build the team of most competent people that need to tackle Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm and others in the field of desktop, mobile and enterprise - only the best sales experts come to mind. Thus, we were not surprised when we received the news that Roy Taylor decided to leave the role of Chief Sales Officer at Rightware and take on the role of Head of AMD WW Channels Sales, position previously held by John Byrne.

 

[mrmt]

From where do you get that AMD's desktop CPUs are not selling well? And what constitutes "selling well" exactly?

Well, an increase in units shipped or growth in market share can be called selling well. AMD ships didn't do either.

Only 127.000 8 core chips in Q3, the shrinking market share this year, the fact that Bulldozer and Trinity aren't replacing Llano and Phenom sales 1:1, yes, I think it is fair to say that AMD chips aren't selling.

 

[DominionSeraph]

From where do you get that AMD's desktop CPUs are not selling well?

The fact that they just paid GloFo $320 million for nothing rather than buy $385 million in product might be a hint.

 

[zebrax2]

Because you don't usually buy a product that is good enough when there is a better product for the same price. Their marketing department isn't helping either.

 

[inf64]

The market has slowed down and that's why AMD didn't order wafers from GloFo. And yes when you are a dominant player on the market(like intel) you are bound to sell more,even if/when you have a subpar product(Which is now not the case though).

 

[mrmt]

Because you don't usually buy a product that is good enough when there is a better product for the same price. Their marketing department isn't helping either.

What marketing can do when your 315mm^2 125W monster cannot compete with the 160mm^2 77W chip from your competitor? And what market can do when you need 246mm^2 chips to compete against 115mm^2 chips from your competitor?

While AMD marketing department isn't anything stellar, they cannot be held as a scapegoat for the engineering failures AMD has been delivering in the last few years.

 

[mrmt]

The market has slowed down and that's why AMD didn't order wafers from GloFo

Yes yes, the market goes down 1.2% and AMD cuts 75% of its purchase commitments. :whiste:

 

[inf64]

Give AMD the state of the art process intel has and give them intel's R&D,what do you think would be the result of that? I'd say the result would not be the same as now.

 

[BrightCandle]

I don't accept that modern processors are fast enough. Sure if all you do is web browse and watch video then you really don't need anything high performance at all. But just today I managed to make Libre Office calc lockup for a minute calculating a graph with 28,000 points in it as a line chart. That isn't a lot of points when we are talking about frame time captures from Fraps.

I have compilations that take 10's of minutes to complete where realistically I want them to take less than a second. I have games that are still CPU limited and delivering less than 60 fps. Coding might be specialist but playing an MMO or plotting a graph is not, its basic stuff and my monster rig can't cope with these simple tasks. I haven't even got to the point of video encoding, or the oddness in playing back videos in VLC with blocks appearing to try and optimise seeking so that its quick enough to be useful rather than producing a decent image. Even some web pages take multiple seconds for the CPU to render in chrome.

I simply don't accept the premise that CPUs are fast enough, I have lots of programs I want to write but which I can't validate they are correct because you can't buy a CPU that can run the program.

AMD doesn't sell as well because its not as good a CPU. What they are currently doing is selling CPUs with a cupholder (the GPU) which is fine if you want a bundled GPU but it doesn't make the CPU any more competitive in its main function, it actually makes it worse.

 

[mrmt]

Give AMD the state of the art process intel has and give them intel's R&D,what do you think would be the result of that? I'd say the result would not be the same as now.

Give AMD a competent management, not a Rory Read & Co. and the result wouldn't be the same as now. Give AMD a better foundry partner, not a loan shark that is sucking whatever cash they have and the result wouldn't be the same as now. Those discussions are way off topic to what you posted here.

Even if the 1.2% reduction was exclusively from AMD market share, a highly improbable scenario their sales wouldn't have taken the hit they took. What is hurting them more than anything is the market share loss they have been experiencing since the arrival of IVB and SNB-EP.

Your affirmation that the reduction is due to the marketing slow down is plainly wrong.

 

[inf64]

It's a fact they were/are suffering from always-trailing-behind process nodes and in this business process node is vital for success. AMD's designs were more or less fine,but when you have subpar foundry partner you are limited no matter what you do. And it's a fact that market has slowed down and inventory is high. Logical thing to do is to not order more wafers and make things even worse.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Because of vocal Intel fanboys on sites like this one, that reverberate around the Internet echo chamber, thanks to Google.

 

[ShintaiDK]

To the OP, not sure why it needs to be repeated for the n'th time (Besides so you can keep complain and now dragged AMD into it to flamebait.). But Haswell can give over 100% improvement in speed. The entire core is doubled in bandwidth and execution width plus 2 extra issue ports. But no, you still only get 4 cores on the mainstream. Putting some kind of Intel vs AMD case up doesnt help.

Performance is never enough. But performance aint translated into moar cores! either. Performance/watt is a key factor as well.

 

[mrmt]

It's a fact they were/are suffering from always-trailing-behind process nodes and in this business process node is vital for success. AMD's designs were more or less fine,but when you have subpar foundry partner you are limited no matter what you do.

It is easy to blame the foundry but is the foundry the only problem?

Bulldozer was a 45nm product. The 45nm SOI node was already very mature and did yield descent clocks and still they could not compete with Intel designs with the time, and it is safe to say that they could not compete with AMD designs of the time.

Have a look at the HEDT and server market. AMD is in the same node as Intel but still they cannot be competitive at all with Intel offers. Mobile, same thing. They trail Intel despite devoting more CPU area than Intel to their chips.

In the three cases here we had situations where AMD designs, the ones you say are fine, could not compete with Intel designs at the same node or even with AMD own designs, and in the case of the 45nm Bulldozer there wasn't a foundry partner to blame. Designs *are* a problem for AMD.

I think it is fair to say that there is a subpar design being manufactured in a subpar foundry.

And it's a fact that market has slowed down and inventory is high. Logical thing to do is to not order more wafers and make things even worse.

How do you explain a 75% slump in purchase commitments and inventory ballooning with the market falling just 1.2%? Care to show the math here?

 

[Smoblikat]

The fact that they just paid GloFo $320 million for nothing rather than buy $385 million in product might be a hint.

This, that, and the other thing.

 

[ShadowVVL]

Bulldozer is 32 nm not 45nm.

 

[mrmt]

bulldozer is 32 nm not 45nm?

The first Bulldozer was a 45nm 6 core product, it was canned by Dirk Meyer in 2009, and now the reasons are clear. If a 32nm 8 core could barely keep up with Thuban, what would a 6 core at 45nm do? Probably wouldn't even keep up with Athlon X4.

 

[KingFatty]

Yeah I would agree it's a false premise that they are fast enough.

Any analogy proves this. And it's not just about achieving a level of performance.

This is about human psychology. If you make a car that goes 1000 mph people will want the model that does 1100 mph, because that one goes to 11.

 

[zebrax2]

What marketing can do when your 315mm^2 125W monster cannot compete with the 160mm^2 77W chip from your competitor? And what market can do when you need 246mm^2 chips to compete against 115mm^2 chips from your competitor?

While AMD marketing department isn't anything stellar, they cannot be held as a scapegoat for the engineering failures AMD has been delivering in the last few years.

I didn't blame the engineering failures to the marketing dept. all I'm saying is that a little bit more brand recognition could help them. Intel managed to sell a whole lot of Pentium 4s even when they were behind AMD in performance through brand recognition.

 

[mrmt]

I didn't blame the engineering failures to the marketing dept. all I'm saying is that a little bit more brand recognition could help them. Intel managed to sell a whole lot of Pentium 4s even when they were behind AMD in performance through brand recognition.

Not really. AMD did dominate desktops and only with Willamette and Prescott, northwood was a match for the Athlon. Intel also provided server and notebook chips, which AMD didn't.

But there is another bigger issue here. Intel and AMD were never in the same league. Never. Intel had always much more fab capacity than AMD. AMD was always supply constrained on that time, so no matter what OEMs thought of Intel chips, they *had* to turn to Intel to buy and sell P4. OTOH Intel-only OEMs could live without AMD without much problems.

A bit more of brand recognition wouldn't hurt but they first must stop destroying their very credibility. Release accurate benchmark data to customers and consumers, stop spreading FUD at tech forums and stop lying to shareholders would be a good start, but maybe this is too much for a company which has lie and deception in their corporate DNA.

 

[frozentundra123456]

Hi,

A lot of people claim that the current desktop CPUs are already "fast enough" for the average user. This is also said to be the reason that focus instead lately has been on e.g. improving the iGPU, integrating VRM and Memory Controller, and lowering power consumption instead.

But if that is true, then how come AMD desktop CPUs are not selling so well? After all they should be fast enough for the average user too, since they are not that much slower than the corresponding Intel CPUs, right? And since the AMD CPUs are cheaper too, it should be a better option for a lot of consumers. But for some reason most people still buy Intel CPUs. How come?

Ok, I will take the bait. First of all a bit of a philosophical opinion. Granted it is less applicable to computers, but in our society in general, I just dont believe people are satisfied with "good enough". If we were everyone would be driving subcompact cars and watching 19 in TVs. New England Patriots fans would be saying we had a great season, we got to the Super Bowl. Being second best is just not good enough in our society. Especially if you are already the underdog, and the only marketing ploy you have is that we are "good enough" you are in trouble.

But aside from that, everything one buys is a compromise. You give up one thing to get something better in another area. The problem for amd is that they have poorer cpu performance and dont make up for it in any other area except the igp, where again intel is also good enough. If they used less power, I could see a better case for them, but they dont. If you buy the chips, you might get better performance in certain selected apps for the same price, but in general in big box stores where most people buy their computers, low end intel systems are VERY price competitive. The only place I see a compelling reason to buy AMD is in laptops where it is a legitimate compromise to give up some cpu performance in exchange for better igp performance. But again, in most laptops, the OEMs dont make a particularly attractive package for AMD on a quality or price basis.

 

[zebrax2]

.....
A bit more of brand recognition wouldn't hurt but they first must stop destroying their very credibility.

That's all I'm saying no need for an argument