Why have AMD APUs failed on the market?

[cbn]

AMD should be more competitive on the desktop side once Intel release their next chips

Why do you say that?

I've been thinking we should see a decent IPC increase from Skylake and probably a speed bump across the board on the Celeron and Pentium lines. (Not sure if we will see unlocked Pentium or Core i3, but it seems rather likely to me these will come eventually.)

 

[ElFenix]

They have been selling SFFs since the C2D days and before, its nothing new and nothing BIG.

The strange thing there is way more reviews on the regular desktop cases than in SFF and AIOs...
In any event, a SFF is still a pc that can be upgraded, builded, change parts, etc. So they really does not change anything.

i bet you dell sells more SFF than minitowers.

 

[Blitzvogel]

I still like the stacked APU idea.

It would allow for alot of product customization with nothing but literally stacking IC dies on top of each other depending on what was needed.

1x SoC = Tablet, low end laptops
1x SoC + GPU + HBM = Scientific computing, custom applications
2x SoC = Mainstream laptops, low end desktops, low end servers
2x SoC + GPU + HBM = high end laptops, mainstream media, low end gaming)
3x SoC = High end desktop, mainstream server
4x SoC = Ultra High end desktop, upper end server

All these products involve a combination of two dies (4 core, 128 GCN APU SoC + 1280 GCN GPU w/ HBM). The GPU could be a product that can be sold as a stand alone graphics card as well as in an APU stack.

 

[Shivansps]

i bet you dell sells more SFF than minitowers.

It depends in what market, because if we are talking about the low end market it does not change anything at all.

as i say before, we sell a lot of Semprons 2650 just because they are the cheaper option, it will make a difference to sell them in a minitower or in a SFF? no, they are still the cheaper option and still running in matx mbs in a case that a dgpu could be added. Dell probably get those small cases cheaper.
So its not even a big deal.

NOW if we talk about ITX (things gets really bad for FM2 kinda killing one of its potential usage), AIOs, and the small boxes like the Zotac ones or NUCs, things gets really different in every aspect.

 

[Abwx]

Why do you say that?

I've been thinking we should see a decent IPC increase from Skylake and probably a speed bump across the board on the Celeron and Pentium lines. (Not sure if we will see unlocked Pentium or Core i3, but it seems rather likely to me these will come eventually.)

Looks like all thoses chips will have modest frequencies at launch and perf/watt worse, or not better at best, than the current line, IPC is not free and the process will be the same as for Core M.

 

[cbn]

i bet you dell sells more SFF than minitowers.

Those can still be upgraded with a low profile video card (or full size card if the SFF desktop has a riser).

So instead of AMD selling the OEMs on the premium priced large iGPU APUs, I would like to see something less expensive/smaller die size (in hex and quad core variants, rather than the proposed Bristol Ridge which should come in quad and dual core variants) and then make additional GPU optional via add in card.

Additional note: Then, of course, any future premium priced large iGPU APU is also going to need dual channel DDR4 3200 to make better use of the silicon, whereas as a future hexcore variant with small iGPU should be able to get by with a single DDR4 3200 stick. (Dual channel further increases the total system cost price delta on premium priced large iGPU APU vs. hexcore small iGPU APU if 1.) the user only wanted to use 4GB or 2.) the price on a single 8GB DDR4 3200 stick is lower than 2 x 4GB DDR4 3200 sticks.)

 

[Ramses]

If I were Dell or such, I'd be as, if not more, concerned with low $$ PC sales not generating me service/warranty calls than how fast they are since the performance is pretty much all in the same ballpark these days. Wonder how one figures that out on a large scale.

 

[cbn]

If I were Dell or such, I'd be as, if not more, concerned with low $$ PC sales not generating me service/warranty calls than how fast they are since the performance is pretty much all in the same ballpark these days.

What do you mean by that?

P.S. There have been numerous threads like this one with complaints of OEMs releasing desktops that are too slow.

 

[Ramses]

What do you mean by that?

P.S. There have been numerous threads like this one with complaints of OEMs releasing desktops that are too slow.

I was thinking that support after the sale costs money, and that has to be factored in when deciding what components go in a given computer for mass replication and sale. I would hope anyway. Be it hardware longevity (fans?) or software/driver compatibility. It's gotta be part of the equation. As a guy that sells stuff for a living, I am WAY more apt to make someone a deal if I know I'll not have to hear about it again later if you know what I mean.

Those prebuilt box computers/laptops are always slow far as far as I can tell, always have been, BS software, the original "bloatware". "Clean Install" isn't a mantra for nothing. I guess if you throw enough ram cpu and ssd at them it'll chew through whatever crap macaffee or whoever manages to bundle in these days but still. My most recent experience was an a8-6410 laptop, was a dog with Toshiba BS out of the box, clean install and it did ok, hard drive was draggy but it was as expected minus all the crap software and shoddy setup. Add 16gb ram and SSD and it was great performance wise. You can only put but so much lipstick on a pig though re: that other thread so you have to draw a line somewhere and say ok below this price/spec is just going to be slow period. I'm thinking above that line (since below it really isn't even remotely interesting in a lap/desktop). Some folks are also going to have unrealistic expectations or be used to a cheap smartphone that responds instantly, who knows. I'm pretty confident after twenty years of jerking around with PC's in my ability to discern when one is "fast enough" for normal folks use though. That AMD lappy I had was.

Speaking of which, that a8 Toshiba was $400ish plus tax, 17", 6gb ram, 750gb or so HD. Other than for economies that really need something cheaper to join the world online (with a chromebook) I don't personally think they should be bothering with anything cheaper or slower than that these days, but that's just me. And not that I have a lot of experience with APU's and I've tried to keep my mouth shut about it because of that, but what little gaming I did on the AMD lappy before I returned it was worlds better than this i7-4510u HP I replaced it with (for 3x the price) if you discount/deactivate the 840m GPU or whatever it is on the HP. Battery life was about the same, heat output and fan noise was about the same, CPU voltage doing non-GPU stuff was about the same via HWinfo64 fwiw, 15-18 watts(which is really neat for the performance they have). The i7 has more ass when push comes to shove no doubt, but it very seldom does come to that on a secondary system/laptop for me. I'd really have rather paid 2x for that AMD stuff in a better chassis with a decent keyboard and trackpad than 3x for the Intel HP.
Nothing against Intel or HP, it was just overkill to get what should have been basic. Note that I specifically wanted a 17" model, and specifically wanted to buy it in store and in person, so there may well be exactly what I wanted out there somewhere. My last lappy was a TK-57 AMD chip, I plan for this one to stay in use just as long so I wanted to have hands on with it. I learned from the Toshiba to spend more time on the keyboard and trackpad (and to look up spare battery availability online ahead of time, but that's another story). I still can't freaking believe big name companies can make absolute trash for keyboards and trackpads in 2015. Amazing. Anyway..

Other than the AMD laptop stuff seem to be put in crappy housings with associated crappy parts, I'm really not sure why they didn't sell better based on my experience with one of each recently. I can't speak as to anything slower than that a8 or faster than my little i7 though. Neither are enough for "serious" gaming obviously but I thought the Radeon on the A8 was a great compromise. I get it why people say an i3 or i5 is faster, and the onboard video isn't fast enough to be concerned with either way. But I also get that the A8 and I can assume the A10 are "fast enough" and the onboard video is worlds better than the current Intel HD stuff for gaming. My experience has been when a choice has to be made, go over GPU and under CPU for gaming.

If they'd both put their dicks away and put a radeon on an Intel chip we could just be done and happy.

 

[Erenhardt]

oh i didn't see this:

for an OEM box selling somewhere south of $400, that $27 is your profit. it doesn't matter that there's no discrete gpu that you as an OEM could pair with the pentium to get the A8-7600 performance, because you're not putting one in there.

I dont know... pentium is a sidegrade on cpu front. Faster in single threaded, slow in multithreaded apps.

No one will be running single threaded rendering on these machines. 65W Kaveri is plenty fast for a desktop.

But in a GPU front its in another league:
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1270?vs=1265
It is about 2 times faster. In game system performance is double that of an pentium.
Huge, so huge it shouldn't be even compared. Does anyone compare gtx960 to gtx980 and claim a 960 one-side winner because it is 30% ($60 vs $90) cheaper (actual difference between 960 and 980 is like 60%)?
The difference in performance between those two pairs is the same, the difference in pricing is clearly not.

The cost of 2 sticks of 4 GB ram is the same as 1 8GB stick.

Kaveri system as a whole is a better deal than any pentium given the pricing in this thread.

Yes, you can upgrade to a dGPU, but then you enter this territory, it's a stairway up to R9 290...

 

[cbn]

The cost of 2 sticks of 4 GB ram is the same as 1 8GB stick.

Today that is true for both DDR3 and DDR4, but in 1.5 years from now I would expect a single 8GB DDR4 stick to be less expensive than a 2 x 4 GB DDR4 kit. (In the same way we see a single 4GB DDR3 stick cheaper than a 2 x 2 GB DDR3 kit today)

 

[cbn]

I dont know... pentium is a sidegrade on cpu front. Faster in single threaded, slow in multithreaded apps.

No one will be running single threaded rendering on these machines. 65W Kaveri is plenty fast for a desktop.

But in a GPU front its in another league:
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1270?vs=1265
It is about 2 times faster. In game system performance is double that of an pentium.
Huge, so huge it shouldn't be even compared. Does anyone compare gtx960 to gtx980 and claim a 960 one-side winner because it is 30% ($60 vs $90) cheaper (actual difference between 960 and 980 is like 60%)?

Trouble is I expect Celeron/Pentium will do well in games against a slow clocked AMD quad core like A8-7600 and the Celeron/Pentium is cheaper.

The fact the Celeron/Pentium is cheaper means more room for dGPU. That and the Celeron/Pentium doesn't need dual channel DDR3 2133 or 2400 (which adds $10 to $14 compared to a 2 x 4 GB DDR3 1600 kit.)

 

[AtenRa]

Trouble is I expect Celeron/Pentium will do well in games against a slow clocked AMD quad core like A8-7600 and the Celeron/Pentium is cheaper.

The fact the Celeron/Pentium is cheaper means more room for dGPU. That and the Celeron/Pentium doesn't need dual channel DDR3 2133 or 2400 (which adds $10 to $14 compared to a 2 x 4 GB DDR3 1600 kit.)

The A8-7600 even with a single 8GB 1600MHz ram will be more than 50% faster in games than the Pentium.

 

[cbn]

Kaveri system as a whole is a better deal than any pentium given the pricing in this thread.

Unfortunately the OEM APU boxes I have seen tend to be priced higher than what I would expect given the relatively small price difference in between A8-7600 and Pentium in DIY:

Some examples at Newegg:

A8-7600: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...page=1&bop=And (New starts @ $449.99 with 6GB RAM and 1TB)

Pentium (Core Series): http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...%20&IsNodeId=1 (New starts @ $299.99 for G3240 with 4GB and 1TB)

P.S. Here is the A8-7800: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...bop=And&page=1 (New starts at $469.99 with 8GB and 1TB)

 

[cbn]

The A8-7600 even with a single 8GB 1600MHz ram will be more than 50% faster in games than the Pentium.

Do you have any specific comparison numbers on this?

P.S. If you have Dirt 3, I am up for running the built-in benchmark (which uses four cpu cores IIRC and is an AMD gaming evolved title) with my G3258 downclocked to 3.0 Ghz and iGPU at stock speed using a single 4GB stick of DDR3 1600. However, I insist the settings chosen actually result in playable frame rates (ie, 30 FPS or greater). Often times I see unrealistic iGPU comparisons where AMD beats Intel, but the settings are so brutal the game is unplayable for both processors.

 

[AtenRa]

Do you have any specific comparison numbers on this?

P.S. If you have Dirt 3, I am up for running the built-in benchmark (which uses four cpu cores IIRC and is an AMD gaming evolved title) with my G3258 downclocked to 3.0 Ghz and iGPU at stock speed using a single 4GB stick of DDR3 1600. However, I insist the settings chosen actually result in playable frame rates (ie, 30 FPS or greater). Often times I see unrealistic iGPU comparisons where AMD beats Intel, but the settings are so brutal the game is unplayable for both processors.

Tell me what settings you want me to run it

edit: give me until tomorrow because i have to download it through steam tonight

 

[cbn]

Tell me what settings you want me to run it

edit: give me until tomorrow because i have to download it through steam tonight

I plan on just re-running the settings reported in this post:

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=36730608&postcount=133

(Except instead of dual channel DDR3 1333, I will run single channel DDR3 1333....and maybe single channel DDR3 1600 as well. Just realize Pentium doesn't support DDR3 1600 on Non-Z boards, but I have a Z97 so I can do it for academic reasons).

 

[AtenRa]

I plan on just re-running the settings reported in this post:

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=36730608&postcount=133

(Except instead of dual channel DDR3 1333, I will run single channel DDR3 1333....and maybe single channel DDR3 1600 as well. Just realize Pentium doesn't support DDR3 1600 on Non-Z boards, but I have a Z97 so I can do it for academic reasons).

If you have steam, download Warthunder (it is free) and run the build in benchmark (Eastern Front) . Choose a preset IQ setting like High or anything else and resolution and tell me to run the same.

Personally i use 900p with High preset and 1080p Medium preset but those will be too high for the pentium so try anything you will get 30fps min and tell me to run the same.

 

[MisterLilBig]

For me, spending $100 more over an APU for like double to triple the FPS is a no-brainer.

Stick with the thought, now, pay less. That's why an AMD APU > Intel APU.


The reason there is so many Intel machines being sold is because the same reason Coca-Cola, Pepsi and McDonald's sell so much, its everywhere, its marketing and what happened? Obesity crisis and health crisis. "Single threaded is fine.", "Less iGPU is better." Slap thy fools!

I'd rather have twice the graphics performance than installing a program 30 seconds faster, I can live with that.

 

[mrmt]

The reason there is so many Intel machines being sold is because the same reason Coca-Cola, Pepsi and McDonald's sell so much, its everywhere, its marketing and what happened? Obesity crisis and health crisis. "Single threaded is fine.", "Less iGPU is better." Slap thy fools!

Do you imagine OEMs like Dell, Lenovo, HP, Apple and others buying Intel marketing at face value like that?

 

[ShintaiDK]

CPU performance between the A10-7700K and Core i3 Haswell(same price) is almost the same. I will just give the win to Core i3 for its higher single thread performance in order to please the crowd but people buying those CPUs will not understand the difference.

So what next ??

95W vs 54W.

 

[MisterLilBig]

Do you imagine OEMs like Dell, Lenovo, HP, Apple and others buying Intel marketing at face value like that?

No, customers, yes.

People here push so much for "cpu performance" and its importance, yet don't give real examples of its importance.

The reality is that AMD should had been the market share leader, it has the best product, for the majority of people. Meaning, not the 15-25% of people that buy dGPU's every 3 darn years, *cough* or 5-8% that buy them yearly.

Those are the people that care about "performance", those are the people that makes sense to pay more then twice for less than twice the performance of the competing product.

 

[AtenRa]

95W vs 54W.

This is the entire package iGPU included, but let me tell you that A8-7600 at 55w TDP has almost the same performance in Pov-Ray as Core i3 4330

Core i3 4330 = 800pps or 10mins

A8-7600 45W TDP = 738pps or 10min 50 secs
A8-7600 55W TDP = 779pps or 10min 15sec
A8-7600 65W TDP = 793pps or 10min 5sec
A10-7770K 95W TDP = 854pps or 9min 22sec
A10-7850K 95W TDP = 898pps or 8min 54sec

 

[mrmt]

The reality is that AMD should had been the market share leader, it has the best product, for the majority of people. Meaning, not the 15-25% of people that buy dGPU's every 3 darn years, *cough* or 5-8% that buy them yearly.

Better chips for consumers mean more profits for OEMs bu yet they decided to NOT to buy AMD and buy Intel. Now we have two plausible choices:

1) OEM product guys are Intel fanboys converted by Intel marketing department.

2) Intel offers them a better business proposition, and that is the objective reality you should deal with despite your GPU tastes.

The reality is there isn't much use for AMD extra performance except for gaming. The rest of the other cases where the GPU shines are niche smaller than gaming, and AMD APU isn't the best hardware choice for gaming.

Intel just offers a more cost effective solution for OEMs.

 

[ShintaiDK]

This is the entire package iGPU included, but let me tell you that A8-7600 at 55w TDP has almost the same performance in Pov-Ray as Core i3 4330

Core i3 4330 = 800pps or 10mins

A8-7600 45W TDP = 738pps or 10min 50 secs
A8-7600 55W TDP = 779pps or 10min 15sec
A8-7600 65W TDP = 793pps or 10min 5sec
A10-7770K 95W TDP = 854pps or 9min 22sec
A10-7850K 95W TDP = 898pps or 8min 54sec

OEMs dont sell products based on cherry picked benchmarks.