When WIll AMD win ????

[clarkey01]

Things at the moment look good, but how many times have AMD been here? Where it looks like Intel is back peddling with trouble with the presscott heat /xeon servers getting slashed by opertons? A64 out performing p4?s. IM not fan a boy by any account, I only buy AMD due to the fact I can only have so much to spend on my upgrades and the price/performance ratio kills any thought of buying Intel CPU?S. I started off with a p 233 MMX and switched to AMD when the 1ghz tbird ripped a 1.5ghz p4.

For a company with like an 10th of Intel?s money, a 5th of Intel market share, AMD have work hard and have my full respect, all you Intel fans that moan, you forget that if it wasn?t for AMD Intel would rip you off even more and monopolise the market. When will the tables turn ? Im open to your opinions, I just want to see what other people think.

 

[Unforgiven]

i was a loyal amd user a few years back but all that changed when my entire opinion of amd was ruined by the via chipset! the via 4 in 1 drivers at the time were absolute $hit and soured my opinion on amd. when the time for an upgrade from my amd t-bird 800 i decided to try on the intel p4 line on for size to rid myself of anything to do with via. i got myself a 2.26 ghz P4 and a mobo with an intel chipset and there is no turning back. the only use i have for anything to do with amd is for use as a seti cruncher, other than that for me they have no practical uses in my life. i have not tried out the amd 64 bit line but i would be more than open to it. just right now, it would have to make a HUGE impression on my to want to steer away from the hyperthreading ability of the p4's that are out. in my experiences my intel chips have done nothing but exceed expectations for me. from my early celeron 300a that overclocked without issues to 450 mhz to the current 3.0c im running at work, intel has been good to me and caused me 1/100th of the headaches that amd has. for me, less time messing around troubleshooting and stability make intel the choice for me now and until something comes out and blows me away, i see me being intel for a long time. i dont care how much the cost difference is, for me, i need stability and something i know is going to work solid that i can be hands off with!

 

[AWhackWhiteBoy]

AMD will never win unless they steer away from x86 and having to pay Intel for technology they didn't invent. And I can't say i see this ever happening.

 

[Delorian]

AMD is an excellent company with a whole lot more common sense than Intel. Intel is all about marketing their products to people who only recognize larger numbers. My athlons I've had are well above what their current competitor's claims would be. Even running with a smaller frequency AMD proved that a good processor is not just about how many more Mhz they can pump. Even with a "dual-pumped" FSB instead of a "quad-pumped" FSB AMD proves that Intel's more Mhz, larger Bus gimmick doesn't add up to real performance. As for the 64-bit processors, AMD has the bag on the 64-bit gaming market. The P4 EE is junk compared to paying half the price for a faster processor. If you ask me AMD will continue to survive as long as people do thier research and buy machines based on performance and efficiency not inefficient brute force and numbers.

 

[zephyrprime]

AMD will never win unless they steer away from x86 and having to pay Intel for technology they didn't invent. And I can't say i see this ever happening.

AMD doesn't have to pay intel license fees (does it)?

I figure AMD can only win if it can get enough market share. Especially in the business segment of the market and doing that would be tough without Dell as a reseller. Maybe the European and Asian markets would be easier to gain market share in? Or maybe not.

 

[AWhackWhiteBoy]

AMD didn't invent x86 nor much of any extensions to it. Intel has been doing that with their power. Since AMD doesn't own it, they have to license it from Intel, and Intel has to continue licensing otherwise they would be considered a monopoly. thats why AMD is always a small step behind as far as instruction aditions. Intel releases one, then AMD has to wait a bit before they can incorperate it into their next generation processors. thats how its been thus far at least.

 

[StageLeft]

No time soon. They have a lot of ground to try and make up, and they are no smarter than intel (meaning, their execs are no more capable). I have no loyalty. I'm on my first AMD cpu in almost 6 years. The first one was sh*t, and then I went through 3 intels and recently bought a barton, which I'm super-happy with, but if AMD ever ups their price to intel's level I'll flip a coin for either one.

 

[Jeff7181]

When's the race? Is it like a charity event thing? I've seen the President of their Marketing department, or whatever he's called, and he looks to be in good shape so he could probably do pretty good... assuming Intel doesn't hire an olympic runner.

 

[Zebo]

Never. They both have excellent workers and engineers so might as well assume they will maintain performance parity... but one got in early and dominated early for a very long time and ripped thier customers a new one while building a massive war chest this is why they can out advertise AMD and continue building brand loyalty while AMD stuggles to turn a profit with even moderate advertising. Image is everything. Intel inside. (to the general public) BTW what's AMD's slogan...anyone know

 

[RadBrad]

(And the gavel drops with this most excellent post.)

I can read between the lines in the original post, and my opinion is that

1.) Amd and Intel suck equally


2.) Intel and Amd suck equally


3.) Economically, there is no other choice


4.) Pick one and be happy or start a new thread


on the art of starting flame war's.

 

[BD231]

Not a great post clarkey, if a company can mass produce a competitive CPU you pretty much break even with "the other guy". After that all you've got to grow with is advertising, and Intel simply dominates in this area.

You can't really beat the massive head start Intel had over AMD. Hopefully with time people will see AMD as mainstream like they do Intel.

 

[apoppin]

Never.

And you can hope AMD stays the underdog - but "healthy". AMD helps keep Intel "honest" and "competitive".

If the situation were reversed, AMD would be the "greedy giant" and Intel would be the underdog . . . but its never gonna happen
(in your lifetime)

ever.

If one company ever put the other out of business we'd see ridiculously high CPU prices.

I wish both companies well.

 

[newb54]

Never. At least as long as Dell and Gateway continue to just sell Intel.

 

[eelw]

OEM sales - this is the biggest reason why Intel will always dominate the CPU wars.

AMD has the fan base from home consumers, but has yet to even scratch the surface in the corporate world. As an IT manager, would you trust your enterprise server with an Opteron? Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Opteron's are not stable. It's just that any server downtime can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. I'm not willing to take the chance on at this point unproven technology. It's like NASA, they're using 386s on their shuttles and on the ISS.

 

[chsh1ca]

Originally posted by: eelw
AMD has the fan base from home consumers, but has yet to even scratch the surface in the corporate world. As an IT manager, would you trust your enterprise server with an Opteron? Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Opteron's are not stable. It's just that any server downtime can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. I'm not willing to take the chance on at this point unproven technology. It's like NASA, they're using 386s on their shuttles and on the ISS.

You've obviously never adminned a network of Intel server boxes. Those 4- and 8-processor systems are very finicky, and if you don't go with a company with assloads of experience (say, IBM for example), good luck to you. If IBM supports it, business managers will adopt it. The idea that "you can't go wrong buying IBM" hasn't exactly disappeared in corporations, it's just been expanded to include a couple other companies (notably post-merger HP/Compaq). I would say based on my prior experience with them that Dell has no place in an enterprise-class server environment.

 

[DarkMadMax]

AMD may start getting a bigger share when they start using black PR and aggressive marketing -same thing intel been using for years. Marketing in AMD is sh!t. While intel capitalized on it (black PR for AMD in times of intels own trouble ("hot" "unreliable" AMD ,to shadow intels own probems with slow ,expesnive willammet+rambus combo) and flashy advertising "MhZ for da win" ,"internet accelerating processor" -nothing more than marketing lies ,but practice proves it is very effective. AMD basically failed to push 64 to ppl - no one but enthusiasts know about it, failed to capitalize on intel own problems ( prescotts are probably biggest piece of crap since willamette) . Payed "reviews" (such as tomshardware).

Agressive OEM politics ( intels pusehs company out of the market who use amd processors in their computers)

AMD lawyers sucks : amd pays pays licensing fee to intel for each x86 processors they make, for using sse,sse2 and soon sse3 ,while intel may use AMD64 extension for free. -Basically amd are brilliant engineers and technologists , while intel has better marketign and lawyers. Sadly its not as important to have a superior product , but having better marketing and lawyers .-As long as consumer stays a stupid ingorant pig things will be like that.

- History will repeat itself ,while prescott is awfully bad it will sell good nevertheless ( OEM makes most slaes anyway ,and average jow blow buys "A DELL"). Then intel will roll out amd64 compatible (in 1-2 years) and push amd out of profit again.

Also AMD is not very concerned about getting devs using their technology -intel provides good tools for devs to use HT ,SSE in their programs - in the end it pays of in some performance tests. 3d now! extensions are much better than SSE ,but you saw many programs making a good use of them? - but this is a minor factor mostly.

 

[clarkey01]

Granted not the best post but its my first , Iv juts like to clear up a few points, see if anyone agrees

Opertons from 2 to 8 way and upwards kills xeon?s ? (even the new beefy ones with extra cache)

Athlon 64 3400+ beats a P4 Northwood 3.4ghz ?

Don?t make me mention Itanium:disgust:

Intel tries to give the impression its Celeron range is identical to lower xp?s performance e.g 1900+xp, Celeron 1.9.

Is it because FAB 30 doesn?t have the capacity ? There not enough money in the company to market like Intel ? are yields crap that it takes them ages to go up another 200 Mhz ? is switching to 0-.9 micron is going crap ?.

AMD should be gaining market share, and more revenue, but there not & wont, why?

 

[caz67]

healthy competition, is good for everyone all round..!!

 

[Gravity]

Personally, I could never get over the cost difference.

 

[bunnyfubbles]

If Athlon 64 came a year or so earlier AMD might have had a chance to gain some serious ground. Nobody expected nVidia to lose ground to ATI but the R300's insane performance with nothing from nVidia that could come close for several months allowed ATI to gain grounds amongst high end users and their reputation then helped for their slower/cheapers products (where the real money is made).

Right now the P4 still has performance advantages in some areas over AMD's Athlon XP or A64 (or even FX/Opteron). Even though AMD can offer some highly tempting solutions, they still don't have a product that dominates pretty much across the board. If anything their K8 line only allowed for them to "catch up" after their K7 line had started to fall badly behind.

 

[sandorski]

The only way for AMD to "win" is for it to have the Production capacity to do so. You can't "win" if you can only Supply 30ish% of the Market.

 

[slag]

Originally posted by: chsh1ca

Originally posted by: eelw
AMD has the fan base from home consumers, but has yet to even scratch the surface in the corporate world. As an IT manager, would you trust your enterprise server with an Opteron? Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Opteron's are not stable. It's just that any server downtime can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. I'm not willing to take the chance on at this point unproven technology. It's like NASA, they're using 386s on their shuttles and on the ISS.

You've obviously never adminned a network of Intel server boxes. Those 4- and 8-processor systems are very finicky, and if you don't go with a company with assloads of experience (say, IBM for example), good luck to you. If IBM supports it, business managers will adopt it. The idea that "you can't go wrong buying IBM" hasn't exactly disappeared in corporations, it's just been expanded to include a couple other companies (notably post-merger HP/Compaq). I would say based on my prior experience with them that Dell has no place in an enterprise-class server environment.

I would respectfully disagree.

As a previous admin and now someone who supports third party apps on dell servers in an enterprise environment for a large telecom company, I believe Dell has a place for 2 reasons

Cost: Wintel servers or intel/linux servers can do the same as solaris boxes for much cheaper

Availability and support. Dell has contracts with excellent response times and very good uptime as well.

 

[Aegion]

Originally posted by: sandorski
The only way for AMD to "win" is for it to have the Production capacity to do so. You can't "win" if you can only Supply 30ish% of the Market.

That's why AMD is going to start putting some serious hurt to Intel starting in the 3rd and 4th quarters of this year. As AMD transitions to a 90nm process, the die shrink is going to allow them to stick on more processors per wafer, and allow them to get a higher market share. AMD can also potentially use IBM's fabs to produce more processors. While this would cost abit more, it would get around AMD's current production capacity.

 

[zerodeefex]

AMD is finally rectifiying a lot of their problems, but they still have a whole lot of crap to deal with. Jerry Sanders was an egotistical a-hole who wasted away the companies money on expensive parties (hiring performers like faith hill and stuff) and his "office" in hollywood so he could work his one week out of the year even during the worst of times. But, they still are saturated with upper management. Can you believe a year ago when my mom was still working for AMD (she worked there for 15+ years), they had over 75 VPs? That is more than any company even 10x their size should have. It is ridiculous. Sanders' sychophants keep the company from really making the profit it should and their recent years policy of laying off 500 workers and keeping on all the management every quarter isn't helping any. Too many chiefs and not enough indians in this case as well as structural problems that go quite deep are the major cause of hurt. They have some BRILLIANT engineers and ruiz is 100x better as CEO and chairman of the board, but there is a lot to be done still.

 

[smahoney]

To: chsh1ca

I think you might want to rethink your comments - from someone who works with several thousand server from Dell, IBM and Compaq/HP. Enterpirise support is getting better with Dell and IBM and worse with Compaq/HP. This is across nearly all product lines outside of printing and imaging and don't even mention storage. Actual TCO on Compaq/HP has actually increased recently on a per cpu and per GB managed basis.