The rise and fall of AMD

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AnandThenMan

Diamond Member
Nov 11, 2004
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To be perfectly honest, I like AMD (at least, what it used to be) -- it's the company's dishonest supporters that make me feel like they deserve what they have coming (and it is coming, have no doubt.)
You think because I bought a couple of FX processors from AMD and some Radeon graphics cards I'm a "dishonest supporter"? And let's be clear, people that actually buy said companies products are the supporters, anyone can talk smack about this or that but they don't factor into the actual market unless they put their money where their mouth is.

I find your attitude is highly unprofessional and strikes of out and out hate for AMD. Now if you will really get satisfaction if AMD stops fielding competitive products to Intel just to spite anonymous people on the Internet, that speaks for itself.
 

Maximilian

Lifer
Feb 8, 2004
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A lot of gamers have been swearing to jump ship every new generation of windows, then find out how suckholish it is to game on linux (this is what hear, just as you've heard that gamers in droves are swearing off winders).

Ah buts its getting better and better, could be viable one day.
 

Charles Kozierok

Elite Member
May 14, 2012
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You think because I bought a couple of FX processors from AMD and some Radeon graphics cards I'm a "dishonest supporter"?

No, I do not. I wasn't referring to you. Sorry if that was unclear -- I didn't say that specifically because I didn't imagine you would think so.

I was referring to others in this thread who play games like posting old articles, ignoring facts they find inconvenient, conflating profit margins with market share, use pointless benchmarks, and in general demonstrating that they are only interested in propping up "their side" regardless of what the facts illustrate.

I can say quite honestly that I would be thrilled if tomorrow AMD announced a chip that could beat the pants off of Intel's best. I just don't think it's ever going to happen at this point -- AMD is, at best, going to survive by avoiding Intel, not taking Intel head on.
 

Phynaz

Lifer
Mar 13, 2006
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So back to the article....

I find it interesting how fast fortunes can change. AMD announced the building of the New York fab on June 24th 2006.

In October of 2008 is when they announced Asset Smart. In a mere year and a half the entire manufacturing strategy of the company did a 180.

It almost seems like Ruiz and the BOD had zero visibility into their fab costs.
 

R0H1T

Platinum Member
Jan 12, 2013
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I wish you and galago would stop misusing this damn phrase.
How do you propose I go about it ?

When I say win8 is better than win7 its ~ metro is cr@p, MS burn in hell, I'll go linux next round !

Then I say Linux is a better platform for overall benchmarks not just synthetics, its not like people don't do real work on it, but its ~ who uses that 1% OS anyway ?

Lets say if XP was giving, & yes it does minus DX10/11 & some other features, better overall results than win7 it'll be ~ its dated, old school !

I'm not sure what you're implication was but I don't hesitate to call people wrong when the hypocrisy is more than obvious so look in the mirror before pointing fingers at others !
 

AnandThenMan

Diamond Member
Nov 11, 2004
3,991
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I can say quite honestly that I would be thrilled if tomorrow AMD announced a chip that could beat the pants off of Intel's best. I just don't think it's ever going to happen at this point -- AMD is, at best, going to survive by avoiding Intel, not taking Intel head on.
Never say never. I remember very clearly discussions revolving around ATI and how they would never ever again hold the performance crown. I get that you're thoroughly convinced that Intel will crush AMD using their upcoming process advantage, this argument is nothing new I've heard it for a decade or more.

I will say this, AMD's disadvantage in processors is highly exaggerated. You'd think by reading the general attitude on this forum that any AMD processor is utterly worthless, even though often it's a 10-15% performance delta, and heck in some workloads the AMD CPU is actually much faster. It gets really interesting when people talk about the graphics side, apparently Intel is soon going to catch up to AMD, or at least get into the same ballpark. So let me get this straight, if Intel gets into the same performance envelop in graphics as AMD, it is hailed as some great achievement. But when AMD is currently in the same performance envelop as Intel in processors, they are going out of business, and screw the AMD fanboys in the process for thinking otherwise.

It's a matter of perception isn't it, which is why I really don't understand your vitriol to people that try and put some perspective by posting various benches. Maybe there is some truth to what they are saying, and they are simply not rabid, blind supporters that need to have the whole thing thrown in their faces by having AMD go out of business.
 

NTMBK

Lifer
Nov 14, 2011
10,448
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How do you propose I go about it ?

When I say win8 is better than win7 its ~ metro is cr@p, MS burn in hell, I'll go linux next round !

Then I say Linux is a better platform for overall benchmarks not just synthetics, its not like people don't do real work on it, but its ~ who uses that 1% OS anyway ?

Lets say if XP was giving, & yes it does minus DX10/11 & some other features, better overall results than win7 it'll be ~ its dated, old school !

I'm not sure what you're implication was but I don't hesitate to call people wrong when the hypocrisy is more than obvious so look in the mirror before pointing fingers at others !

"Shoot the messenger" is when people make personal attacks on the person delivering a fact. What people are doing is making (non-personal) counter-arguments against your argument. That is called "having a debate".
 

R0H1T

Platinum Member
Jan 12, 2013
2,583
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"Shoot the messenger" is when people make personal attacks on the person delivering a fact. What people are doing is making (non-personal) counter-arguments against your argument. That is called "having a debate".
Oh so would you like me to quote those personal attacks for you ?
 

Charles Kozierok

Elite Member
May 14, 2012
6,762
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Never say never. I remember very clearly discussions revolving around ATI and how they would never ever again hold the performance crown. I get that you're thoroughly convinced that Intel will crush AMD using their upcoming process advantage, this argument is nothing new I've heard it for a decade or more.

Not just process advantage. R&D advantage. Capital advantage. Fab advantage. Management advantage. Server market position advantage (a very big issue not discussed often enough, and IMO, one of the real reasons AMD has gotten in so much financial trouble.)

I for one never said boo about ATI; I've always viewed GPUs as being a leapfrog market. This one never has been. AMD took advantage of a few bad moves by Intel and capitalized on a good design, but that's basically been their only real win against Intel going back now about 30 years. Once Intel got its act together, it's been pretty one-sided, and I see nothing to suggest that will change.

It's very hard even in the best of times to go up against the market leader, and these are not the best of times. AMD's has only two possible ways to ever seriously competing with Intel again: a major design win that they are currently developing in secret; or being bought by a larger company with deep pockets that wants to take a run at Intel.

I will say this, AMD's disadvantage in processors is highly exaggerated.

I don't agree. I actually think the degree to which AMD is being led has been masked both by the general stagnation in improvement rates over the last few generations, and by Intel's change of focus to the mobile space and power efficiency. If anything, I think Intel has now fishtailed too much away from the P4 era and is not putting out enough parts that emphasize performance over "performance per watt", and that is part of why their lead over AMD isn't as evident.

It's a matter of perception isn't it, which is why I really don't understand your vitriol to people that try and put some perspective by posting various benches.

I express no vitriol to people who honestly present benchmarks. I have a big problem with people who use intellectually dishonest tactics, like ignoring a 2013 market share report and constantly repeating a link to a 2012 report. Or constantly trying to claim that I should care about how well AMD does in benchmarks that have nothing to do with real world use.

People like that are not honestly discussing a subject with a different viewpoint. They are pushing an agenda.
 

Enigmoid

Platinum Member
Sep 27, 2012
2,907
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I love AMD and support them buts its painful to watch them go around blundering into walls.

Bulldozer was a mess. Piledriver is not much better.

http://techreport.com/r.x/amd-fx-8350/x264-power-task-energy.gif

http://media.bestofmicro.com/Y/0/357624/original/energy used.png

We are barely better than a phenom x6 in terms of efficiency here. Going from 45 nm to 32 nm (2nd revision) should have seen a substantial efficiency gain. We got a little more efficient and the a series is less efficient that the phenom x6 or the phenom x4 (non igp). AMD would probably have done better from a perf watt here just shrinking the chips and making a few improvements. So much R&D for this. Bulldozer should have been canned from the beginning and amd started from scratch on something that would work. Its like they deliberately launched a P4. And at the price that Bulldozer launched at?

GCN is great and I would have bought a laptop with a 7870m in a heartbeat but they could not be found. The only two chips with gcn that you really see (disregarding solar system) is the 7730m (fairly weak--weaker than the 640m) and the 7970m (which is decidedly not mainstream). Now amd is launching solar system a year late and even the high end cards (the 384 shader models not the 88xx series) are generally weaker than or equal to the 650m (which is being replaced by the much more powerful 750m). The 8870m or 7870m were perfect for laptops, using less power for impressive performance (which amd again didn't execute well as the notebookcheck reviews of the samsung series 7 chronos (15 and 17 inch) show the 8870m doing generally worse than the 660m despite much better performance in synthetics (3dmark, unigine)). Only now are we really seeing gcn in laptops. And where is the mid-high end? We go from 640 shaders to 1280?

AMD somehow lost the momentum with the 7000 series. The 6770m was the best mainstream (and most common of their chips) gpu last generation, getting much better performance than the 540m (which most mainstream nvidia laptops had) in a similar thermal envelope. This generation nvidia launched the 650m and amd have nothing that really competes in that segment of the market, losing tons of market share. The 7670m is WORSE than the 6770m, running at a lower core clock with DDR3 vs GDDR5. WHY AMD? What happened?

AMD failed to put their money where it needed to go. The 7970m got a tremendously bad rap among gamers because of enduro issues which took almost a year to fix (initially the problem was so bad that in certain games the 7970m performed worse than the 6990m). Enduro still has problems with determining which gpu to use (not really a problem for anyone who knows how to go to the catalyst control panel and set the game exe to use the 'high performance' option but a problem for the average joe who just wants to play games). AMD should have no problem doing this. They have substantial experience dealing with both GPUs AND CPUs (which nvidia does not) and should be able to do more with graphics switching than nvidia. Buying ATI years ago they should have been able to see this and should have been out with this technology first. This driver failure continues with hybrid crossfire (which is even worse than regular crossfire [which isn't as bad as all the review sites are making it out to be, just stick vsync on and half the problems are gone; or frame limited]) which often is WORSE than just using the discrete card. WORSE THAN THE DISCRETE card sometimes. Even when its better the effect is marginal and the stuttering is horrendous (asymetrical crossfire between VLIW4 7660G and VLIW5 7670m with different shader counts is difficult to do--hopefully richland and solar system with the same number of shaders can fix this).

Hybrid crossfire was a great idea but they did not throw enough resources at the problem to get a good result. The other problem for amd is pricing. When you can get an i5 + 730m system (730m is almost as good as a 650m with 8GB ram and 750 GB HDD) for $630 a lot of trinity becomes irrelevant. This makes it *really* hard to recommend a trinity system to someone on a $600 budget (for $30 more they get a tremendous increase).

http://www.amazon.com/Acer-Aspire-V3...cer+v3+i5+730m

I don't hate AMD but its really painful to watch them. They are actually doing quite a good job against a giant like intel the problem is that they need to do a better job. Asking for that better job though, is really asking a lot given their size and resources.

Intel, however, is guilty of nickle and diming their customers (socket changes, selectively disabled features, etc). However, they can get away with it simply because they hold the performance crown. You can't deny that intel has been relentless in improving efficiency and their igp (which is quite amazing considering they have had to develop all the IP on their own). Besides price (and nickle and diming and naming games) its harder to criticize intel. They haven't made any real blunders that have really hurt them in the past couple years (though they get -10 points for having a haswell chipset issue two years after they had an issues with sandy bridge sata). Their execution has been much better and much more consistent over the past 5 years or so. They have been giving AMD the death of a thousand cuts (improving igp on mobile, power efficiency), slowing and relentlessly overpowering AMD.

People are going to complain that intel is not pushing performance (and that they suck because they are not getting 15% performance improvement on haswell over ivy). This is very true and while I agree that its bad you have to look at it from a non-consumer perspective. Intel simply can't improve performance by leaps and bounds over AMD because then AMD would go out of business and they would become a monopoly. What Intel has to do is simply wait for AMD to catch up. Also from an economic perspective its not worth it for intel to spend a ton of money pushing performance and taking another 5% marketshare from AMD if the cost of that R&D is more than the profits from the increased marketshare. Intel is playing it smart right now. They are pushing efficiency because their biggest threat is ARM (cortex A-15 is uncomfortably close to the low end in performance and much better in terms of eficiency--see the 3dmark for android on this website) and mobile is the future, smaller profit margins or not. This also allows them to, if AMD pulls a core 2 duo miracle move, simply add more cores in their chips and retake the crown.
 
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galego

Golden Member
Apr 10, 2013
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Yes, that would be impressive. Maybe someday they'll actually do that.

You miss that the phrase used present tense.

There are only three reasons why the FX-8350 is even remotely competitive:

1. AMD pushes the crap out of their silicon and Intel doesn't. If Intel wanted to put out a space heater of its own, it would blow anything AMD has on the market straight out of the water.

Space heater? This is a typical Intel fanboys claim. AMD fanboys have a typical answer for that as well. Do you know?

2. AMD prices its CPUs cheaply.

And I believing that Intel is overpricing theirs... thanks to excellent marketing manoeuvres.

3. Intel doesn't see AMD as a threat, largely because AMD has put itself at the bottom of the market, and is now mostly viewed as an option for the "budget conscious".

Cannot do other thing more than agree with you once again. The most powerful supercomputers in the world (Jaguar and now Titan) use AMD chips because they were in a "budget". Superior performance and scaling of AMD chips had nothing nothing to do with the choice.

And of course 99% of supercomputers use linux because it is "free" and saved some $ on MS licenses? :biggrin:

I know people who has purchased a FX-8350 over an i7-3770k because of a "budget"... no wait they say me that was not the true reason.

I know people who has purchased a E-350 over an ATOM because of a "budget"... no wait they say me that was not the true reason.

For all of the bluster and hackery, I still have yet to see a compelling argument for why, as a consumer, I would want to buy an AMD-based machine over an Intel one. The only argument in AMD's favor is saving a few bucks, some percentage of which is given back because of AMD's horrendous power consumption figures.

I don't need to convince you.

Anyway, enjoy your delusions. 14nm will be here soon, and that will put AMD's high-end CPU business six feet under for good.

As said before in the thread AMD has been killed many times before. We will see them being killed again soon...
 

guskline

Diamond Member
Apr 17, 2006
5,338
476
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So back to the article....

I find it interesting how fast fortunes can change. AMD announced the building of the New York fab on June 24th 2006.

In October of 2008 is when they announced Asset Smart. In a mere year and a half the entire manufacturing strategy of the company did a 180.

It almost seems like Ruiz and the BOD had zero visibility into their fab costs.
Is the New York fab producing chips?
 
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SocketF

Senior member
Jun 2, 2006
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Is the New York fab pruducing chips?
Nothing officially, there were just some rumours that it is fabbing a "multimedia chip", so some people think that the PS4 might be fabbed there, even thought Kabini is fabbed at TSMC.

But TSMC is probably fully booked at 28nm, so maybe it is really true.
 

Exophase

Diamond Member
Apr 19, 2012
4,439
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Space heater? This is a typical Intel fanboys claim. AMD fanboys have a typical answer for that as well. Do you know?

He used a euphemism. No one literally thinks a stock FX-8350 would be useful as a space heater. You can get caught up in the language if you want, but it doesn't change his underlying point - if Intel made 4-core i7s that used up to 125W (or 140W really) under normal stock conditions instead of 77W (especially if they also got rid of the IGP) then they'd greatly reduce what wins FX-8350 has.

AMD is simply eating up more of its clock headroom and using a much bigger TDP budget than Intel is willing to for this segment. They're also selling at a much lower area to $ ratio.

Intel could respond with more cores and/or higher clocks in this price bracket but they don't because for what most people currently do it just isn't worth it.
 

galego

Golden Member
Apr 10, 2013
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Nobody cares about excuses. They care about performance.

It was all about info and context.

Assuming you aren't lying (I'm being generous here), that might make a difference to the 1% or so of people running Linux.

That 1% is the estimation of clients given by Net Market Share. W3Counter gives 2% and (43% for W7). Both underestimate worldwide linux desktop installs, as is discussed in several places.

Other sources give estimations of 5%, 8%, 10% on the desktop...

If you count devices with linux installed (this includes android) then linux has twice more market share than windows

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/linux-windows-microsoft-android-ios,20220.html

But that was not my point (I never mentioned share you do). I dont' care if the real linux share is 2% or 12%. My point is that if can see Anandtech/Toms giving benchmarks using W8 when it has a 3% share. Then I can give linux benchmarks (2% share).


Based on factS.

Unfounded speculation.

Meaningless anecdotal evidence.

Well founded. Read the Eurogamer article, the advice and the quotes.
 

galego

Golden Member
Apr 10, 2013
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You know, I tried to be objective, and even gave a best case scenario for AMD under the OS which the vast, vast majority of users are using. Instead of acknowledging that, you reiterate the same unsupported statements you have been repeating over and over again in multiple threads and switched the topic to linux and the Wintel conspiracy theory.

Conspiracy theory? No! Just facts. It is well-known that AMD chips tend to behave better under linux than under windows.

You explicitly mentioned "tests in anands bench" and I simply add the fact that those are only windows bench. Linux benchs say otherwise.
 

guskline

Diamond Member
Apr 17, 2006
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Nothing officially, there were just some rumours that it is fabbing a "multimedia chip", so some people think that the PS4 might be fabbed there, even thought Kabini is fabbed at TSMC.

But TSMC is probably fully booked at 28nm, so maybe it is really true.

Living in PA, I hope you are correct that the NY plant will fab the new chips. It would be a good shot in the arm for the economy!
 

galego

Golden Member
Apr 10, 2013
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Well how many games are there running on Linux? It just gets interesting now, since Steam announced their SteamBox.

Games are still being ported to linux, but some game developers have announced that they abandon the windows platform.

Just a note. For each 10 Windows 8 users gaming on Steam you find about 2 gamers using linux.
 

galego

Golden Member
Apr 10, 2013
1,091
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Because that isn't the most common. Windows 7 is most common, and DX9 and DX11 are equally used according to Steam.

Then why are reviewers running lots and lots of benchmarks on Windows 8 which has only about a 3% of worldwide share?
 

galego

Golden Member
Apr 10, 2013
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But the purpose of benchmarking is to help people make purchasing decisions, and people are not buying computers running XP. So that's why it isn't tested.

Does this mean that you will delete all the benchmarks on anadtech running W7? I mean how nobody is buying computers running W7 are all those benchmarks useless?

I don't use Linux, so I really don't care how well AMD does on Linux. Same applies to 99% of other PC users.

There are about 2 linux users for each 3 users of W8. Why linux users would care about how well your favourite intel chip performs under W8?

Talking about performance is only meaningful in terms of how it affects real world use. If you want to make yourself feel good about your favorite hardware because of how it does in artificial scenarios, feel free, but it's little more than mental masturbation.

That is why SysMark, PassMark, Sandra, Cinebench... are useless.
 

ShintaiDK

Lifer
Apr 22, 2012
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If you wish to segregate Windows versions. Perhaps you should do it with Linux too.

But thats another thing that utterly destroy your hopeless argumentation again and your rapid change to a new subject.
 
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