What happened to AMD high end perfomance?

[mdzapeer]

My first build with my own money was a AMD build, it gave me very good performance ( at the time) compared to Intel within a small budget.

Always felt AMD cared about its customers, and Intel comes across as more corporate. Just a personal feeling. Maybe its just a case of rooting for the underdog compared to the Giant Intel.

 

[sm625]

Yet MediaTEK still has nearly a 3x mobile marketshare of Intel. Without gift wrapping with cash to use their chips. Profitable? Gaining marketshare? Putting up a fight against the big players?

That is because the mobile sector is debt subsidized. People regularly finance their phones as part of their overpriced 2 year contracts. AMD doesnt have access to that debt splurge.

 

[Arachnotronic]

My first build with my own money was a AMD build, it gave me very good performance ( at the time) compared to Intel within a small budget.

Always felt AMD cared about its customers, and Intel comes across as more corporate. Just a personal feeling. Maybe its just a case of rooting for the underdog compared to the Giant Intel.

They're both "for profit" corporations and the ultimate goal for both companies is to make as much money as possible for their shareholders.

The only difference between them is that Intel is good at its job, while AMD is not.

 

[MiddleOfTheRoad]

My first build with my own money was a AMD build, it gave me very good performance ( at the time) compared to Intel within a small budget.

AMD still does provide very good performance for the small budget builds. If you compare the Athlon X4 860k or A8 7600 to the dual core Celerons or Pentiums around that same price point -- they are neck and neck.

Once you get up to building machines with a Core i5 budget and higher, that's where AMD really doesn't even field modern, competitive hardware. Let's face it, Vishera is nearly 3 years old and shows it age. Only FM2 has been getting the investment.

 

[JDG1980]

At a time they were the best during the Athlon? So why don't they make chart topping stuff???

There are three primary reasons, which can be summed up quickly in the following bullet points:

• Intel stopped handicapping their performance with poorly designed experimental architectures (NetBurst, Itanium) and went "back to basics" with the P6-derived Conroe.
• Under the reign of Hector Ruiz, AMD bought ATi at a highly inflated price, which resulted in less money for R&D. It also meant that AMD had to spin off its fabs. Worse, the so-called Wafer Supply Agreement (WSA) with the newly formed Global Foundries meant that AMD got all of the disadvantages of being a fabless company and hardly any of the advantages. These were not the only poor decisions made by Ruiz.
• When AMD did come out with an entirely new architecture (Bulldozer) in 2011, they inexplicably made many of the same errors that Intel did with NetBurst and Itanium: most notably an extreme focus on future workloads while neglecting performance in existing code, and a focus on high clock speeds (which proved to cap out far lower than the designers wanted) to the detriment of IPC. The difference is that AMD, with their limited budget, was far less able than Intel to shake off these mistakes. (Intel was fortunate in that the P6 design had continued to be worked on during the NetBurst era, when it was used in portable devices. It was already pretty competitive, and once Intel started putting their focus on improving it, it was unbeatable.)