Why have AMD APUs failed on the market?

[DrMrLordX]

Canadian $ of course. There used to be a flag by my username. $100 was ncix's price over xmas.

Oops! So much for me noticing your location. Okay, $100 CAD is actually a good buy. That's ~$81 USD.

 

[AtenRa]

No sure because the IGP on the 7300 its worse than the one on 5600K, and the turbo freq of the 7300 is superior to the 5600K.

So im not sure really. a 4ghz the 7300 has a real chance of matching the Celeron in cpu, and the igp of the 7300 its no more than the same present on AM1 with the additional of DC, we know that the celeron can beat the AM1 igp, but with DC? we could be in a case with 2 cpus exactly equal in everything, with the 7300 rig being a bit cheaper.

A4-7300 has an iGPU of 192 Cores at 800MHz and it only support 1600MHz memory

A4-5600k has an iGPU of 192 Cores at 760MHz with support of 1866MHz memory.

Kabini has an iGPU of 128 Cores at 600MHz (Athlon 5150/5350) with support of 1600MHz memory (Single channel)

CPU and iGPU performance between the 7300 and 5400K will be very close, both are PileDrivers and non GCN.

iGPU perf will be higher than Kabini. CPU perf in MT may even be the same vs Kabini 4 Core at 2GHz.

 

[Shivansps]

Unless there are 2 versions of the A4-7300, its 128, in fact the igp its called HD8470D.

There is a Kaveri and a Richland A4-7300 or wth is going on?

http://products.amd.com/en-us/DesktopAPUDetail.aspx?id=129

 

[AtenRa]

HD8470D is the same the A6-6400K has, 192 Cores at 800MHz.

The A4-7300 is a Richland APU like the A6-6400K(Single Module dual Core + 192 core iGPU) but it is locked and only supports 1600MHz Memory.

http://www.amd.com/en-us/products/processors/desktop/a-series-apu#

 

[Dribble]

As long as dual channel memory has been around, it's nobodies fault but whoever spec'd the system if performance is lower due to a lack of it at this point. Not AMD's fault, not Intel's fault. Ten or twelve years that stuff has been around at least on consumer PC's. Intel and AMD should both require it and make the damn things not function at all without.

Single ram chips in budget OEM systems are to be expected. The whole point is saving money, they aren't going to put a cheap AMD APU in there and then blow the savings on a second ram chip. In that way it is AMD's fault - if you sell to that budget market then you know you won't get fancy memory so have to build a chip that works well anyway.

 

[mrmt]

In that way it is AMD's fault - if you sell to that budget market then you know you won't get fancy memory so have to build a chip that works well anyway.

Worse, they couldn't reach the intended market bracket with the product and now have to sell it elsewhere, where the product is not a good option. Execution failure.

 

[BigDaveX]

To your "Secondly", AMD's APU are cheaper, use around the same power(currently) and perform way better in games at same and above resolutions and more compatible with DirectX/OpenGL versions, and the great majority of customers won't upgrade unless a few years passed.

See, this is the problem; people carry out these analyses under the assumption that a significant number of PC users not only play games, but care enough about performance to just the right extent where an Intel iGPU is not adequate for their needs, but a discrete GPU (of the mobile or desktop variety) is overkill. You can't just start out with an assumption like that and then use it to prove that AMD's products are better than Intel's for most people.

To your "thirdly", most don't until they try to play a game and realise it just wont run at all because of lack of the feature to run, mainly DirectX/OpenGL version or because the framerate is a horrible slideshow, literally.

I think your impressions of Intel's iGPUs and graphics drivers are several years out of date. Not that I can entirely blame you, since it's something that even most Intel enthusiasts don't care about, but the last time Intel was at a major disadvantage in terms of DirectX feature set was back with Sandy Bridge, which was a DX generation behind Llano. Since Ivy Bridge, Intel's iGPUs have have feature sets comparable with AMD's. And Intel's drivers, while not as good as AMD's or nVidia's, are far from the broken, bug-filled mess they were back in the 2000s.

And I know Intel has the majority share in graphics, that's the point of the topic.

Intel also had the majority share of the graphics market back in the days when their Extreme Graphics chipset didn't run with half of the games out there, and the ones that did work could barely manage 20fps with nearest-neighbour filtering at 640x480, while the nForce 2 could run them silky-smooth with AF filtering at 1024x768. That should tell you how many users out there just don't give a damn about PC gaming, and never have.

The topic is about why AMD APU's failed. This isn't about high-end users or even mid-end users, I have a dGPU in my system after all, an AMD APU can do a more important thing than what an Intel APU does and that is, if the user would like to play a game, and most users do

Most users like playing the type of games at the sort of settings that would render an Intel iGPU inadequate? Not in my experience.

Is installing a program 5-50% faster better than playing any game 2-3 times faster and with better quality, more important to 80% of users?

That might be a valid argument if the products we were comparing were Sandy Bridge and Llano. With Haswell and Kaveri however, it's more like a 30-40% difference with largely equivalent image quality. And considering how many PCs sold nowadays are notebooks with crappy 1366x768 screens, Haswell's iGPU is pretty much adequate for those low standards.

Most people don't install that many large programs, most people will play some form of video game. faster and better video, faster and better gaming

Some form of video game, yes. Unfortunately for AMD, they're not the type of game that will significantly benefit from a better iGPU. They're Flash games which, thanks to Adobe's genius programming skills, will benefit more than anything from the strong single-thread performance of Intel's line up (though in practice, will perform about the same on both company's chips).

AMD had the upper hand in that for years and it failed in the market. It was not because of a bad product, it was because of bad marketing and Intel being a genius at marketing.

That's half correct. AMD haven't failed because they have an entirely bad product per se... they failed because their product, for most people's purposes, wasn't appreciably any better than Intel's, while having several major disadvantages in weaker single-thread performance, higher power consumption and not being able to directly upgrade to the Phenom II or FX line. Intel's marketing and better OEM deals just helped further seal the deal.

 

[MisterLilBig]

See, this is the problem; people carry out these analyses under the assumption that a significant number of PC users not only play games, but care enough about performance to just the right extent where an Intel iGPU is not adequate for their needs, but a discrete GPU (of the mobile or desktop variety) is overkill. You can't just start out with an assumption like that and then use it to prove that AMD's products are better than Intel's for most people.

I think having the capability to do something and do it faster is more important than installing a program a few % faster. I know your stand, you know mine.

I think your impressions of Intel's iGPUs and graphics drivers are several years out of date.

I didn't mention graphics drivers, so, erm, yeah. On the iGPU's, they aren't much out of date anymore, each generation Intel has improved on the features of their drivers, but when released they where even farther behind, even Haswell, around June of 2014 finally surpassed Llano its in API feature set. And then, you know, slideshow framerates. Horrible min FPS.

Intel also had the majority share of the graphics market back in the days when their Extreme Graphics chipset didn't run with half of the games out there, and the ones that did work could barely manage 20fps with nearest-neighbour filtering at 640x480, while the nForce 2 could run them silky-smooth with AF filtering at 1024x768. That should tell you how many users out there just don't give a damn about PC gaming, and never have.

And things haven't changed on the Desktop because of it. If there are good experiences to be had, people will go for them. Just look at all the other devices. Gaming matters.

Most users like playing the type of games at the sort of settings that would render an Intel iGPU inadequate? Not in my experience.

Depends on the game. Thing is, why pay more for a less adequate solution? If a consumer is not interested in having a mdGPU, buying Intel is a waste of money.

That might be a valid argument if the products we were comparing were Sandy Bridge and Llano. With Haswell and Kaveri however, it's more like a 30-40% difference with largely equivalent image quality. And considering how many PCs sold nowadays are notebooks with crappy 1366x768 screens, Haswell's iGPU is pretty much adequate for those low standards.

I agree at those resolutions. But the price difference...why pay more for minimal gains? People will just go for what's marketed the most.

Some form of video game, yes. Unfortunately for AMD, they're not the type of game that will significantly benefit from a better iGPU. They're Flash games which, thanks to Adobe's genius programming skills, will benefit more than anything from the strong single-thread performance of Intel's line up (though in practice, will perform about the same on both company's chips).

Yeah, funny tho, at the moment, single-threaded performance is what should matter to me the most, technically, but, I just can't support stagnation of somethings and the push of power efficiency to the detriment of performance. (Which is why I think that Intel has a high TDP on the "Enthusiast" Quad Skylake, which is good, hopefully they decided on not pushing the watts down by so much? Tho still a Quad...)

That's half correct. AMD haven't failed because they have an entirely bad product per se... they failed because their product, for most people's purposes, wasn't appreciably any better than Intel's, while having several major disadvantages in weaker single-thread performance, higher power consumption and not being able to directly upgrade to the Phenom II or FX line. Intel's marketing and better OEM deals just helped further seal the deal.

Most people wouldn't notice the difference on the metrics that Intel is better at. All the rest has been answered many times over.

 

[cbn]

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.

I am still running my Dirt 3 single channel DDR3 benchmarks, but I was able to do some Warthunder runs using the eastern front benchmark.

Pentium @ 3 Ghz
4GB RAM @ 1333 Mhz (single channel) with 512 MB RAM dedicated to iGPU

1080p (Full screen ) low preset: 31.0 avg fps, 23.0 min FPS
1366 x 768 (Full screen) low preset: 54.2 avg FPS, 39.2 min FPS
1024 x 768 (Full screen) low preset: 70.9 avg FPS, 52.0 min FPS

I tried running 1366 x 768 at medium but I got a message (after the restart) saying I didn't have enough video RAM and that my settings were adjust accordingly (or something along those lines). When I checked graphics War thunder had moved medium setting to a custom setting that was slightly less demanding but not the true medium preset. Therefore I did not run at this custom preset.

 

[BSim500]

I have a dGPU in my system after all

I knew it...

 

[cbn]

Furthermore, the AM1 stuff should be Athlon quad cores 2GHz and above. But if you have a dual core at 1.3GHz for cheaper, the OEM will take it. Shady28 and other have already touched this point.

Yes, I've been hoping AMD re-thinks how they position those desktop cat cores.

Instead of having the AM1 quad cores downclocked so much (possibly so as to not overlap too much with the FM2 dual cores), I wish AMD would just make the FM3 die a hexcore (yielding only hexcore and quad core small iGPU APUs). Then there would no longer by any potential FM2/low end FM2+ dual core/cat quad core overlap and/or conflict. Then AM1 could push the cat core desktops much harder and make them a better value.

 

[MisterLilBig]

I knew it...

Well if I was trying to hide it, I wouldn't have said it. =P
And really, the only reason I got it was for Mantle and TrueAudio, its a 260X.

 

[Ramses]

Single ram chips in budget OEM systems are to be expected. The whole point is saving money, they aren't going to put a cheap AMD APU in there and then blow the savings on a second ram chip. In that way it is AMD's fault - if you sell to that budget market then you know you won't get fancy memory so have to build a chip that works well anyway.

I disagree. Maybe ddr4 will be fast enough to have a single stick solution that performs well enough, but ddr3 as far as I can tell just isn't. If it takes two sticks of ram, it takes two sticks of ram. Period. If they'd designed the damn thing without dual channel, and it still would have been slower, everyone would be crying about that. So they are screwed either way. Other than when a factory burns down or washes away or such, RAM isn't that expensive and there should be 8gb minimum of it in anything running windows in 2014/15 to start with.

I'd like to point out how weird I still think it is that a bunch of PC enthusiasts are debating the merits of integrated (shitty) graphics and how little memory you should be able to get away with. Far as I can tell our computers are basically all so fast we're bored, so we're reduced to this.

 

[AtenRa]

I am still running my Dirt 3 single channel DDR3 benchmarks, but I was able to do some Warthunder runs using the eastern front benchmark.

Pentium @ 3 Ghz
4GB RAM @ 1333 Mhz (single channel) with 512 MB RAM dedicated to iGPU

1080p (Full screen ) low preset: 31.0 avg fps, 23.0 min FPS
1366 x 768 (Full screen) low preset: 54.2 avg FPS, 39.2 min FPS
1024 x 768 (Full screen) low preset: 70.9 avg FPS, 52.0 min FPS

Ok just started WarThunder and there was a small upgrade to version 1.45.11.86. So my numbers are with this version.

A8-7600 at 45W TDP
1x 4GB 1600MHz 9-9-9
1GB iGPU Buffer

Catalyst 14:12 Omega
Win 8.1 64Bit



1080p (Full screen ) low preset: 55,8 avg fps, 38,7 min FPS
1366 x 768 (Full screen) low preset: 93,9 avg FPS, 70,5 min FPS
1024 x 768 (Full screen) low preset: 116,1 avg FPS, 81,6 min FPS

1080p (Full screen ) Medium preset: 40,8 avg fps, 23,5 min FPS
1366 x 768 (Full screen) Medium preset: 70,6 avg FPS, 45,4 min FPS
1024 x 768 (Full screen) Medium preset: 89,6 avg FPS, 47,2 min FPS

1600x900 (Full screen ) Medium preset: 53,3 avg fps, 30 min fps

I tried running 1366 x 768 at medium but I got a message (after the restart) saying I didn't have enough video RAM and that my settings were adjust accordingly (or something along those lines). When I checked graphics War thunder had moved medium setting to a custom setting that was slightly less demanding but not the true medium preset. Therefore I did not run at this custom preset.

Yes you should raise the iGPU Memory to 1GB at least. Same happens to my Core i3 4330 at Maximum and High preset settings because those need 2GB memory buffer for the Texture Quality and the max setting in BIOS is 1GB. So it just put the Texture Quality setting to a lower preset.
Just try to put 1GB iGPU memory and run again the Medium preset. Also try with Dual Memory.

When you have the settings for DIRT 3 tell me, i have downloaded.

 

[ElFenix]

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...

OEMs trying to meet a price point are going to go with the less expensive processor. they don't give a rat's behind about the graphics performance when stocking walmart and staples with $400 boxes. does intel integrated bog down when running multiple video streams? yes. does your average corporate buyer care about that? no. does your average home buyer who just sees a price on a box care about that? no. quit living in the computer-savvy forum bubble.

just look at the benchmark you posted. in the web browsing and general usage it's the pentium winning. in most benchmarks other than gaming they're either tied or both effectively worthless (i'm not doing video encoding on either). so the only thing the AMD part has going for it is low-res AAA gaming. most people buying computers with that sort of spec are going to be AAA gaming in their living room on their xbox or playstation. they're not pc gaming master race and pc gaming master race isn't settling for low-res AAA gaming anyway.

and if you step up to $500 you're contending with a dell with an i3 and some maxwell flavor for graphics. that's a really narrow market AMD has to fit into.

again, as i expressed yesterday, AMD really only has one big market where its product is a clear winner: F2P gaming. most of those are intentionally built to run well on really bad hardware. AMD missed the boat by spending its marketing bucks on pc gaming master race and not going for the filthy casuals.



lastly, i doubt 2 sticks of 4 GB ram cost the same as 1 8 GB stick to anyone buying them by the tens or hundreds of thousands. they're probably going with a single stick every time (unless they're trying to hit weird memory figures like 6 GB). lower bill of materials with 1 stick. also, i bet the price difference between the kaveri and the pentium is much bigger for OEMs. intel is selling much less silicon in each chip than AMD is so its variable cost is lower. while intel's fixed costs are higher (engineering the processor and building/establishing the node), intel is spreading them out over an order of magnitude more chips. i wouldn't be shocked if intel is selling haswell pentiums for about the same price as AMD is selling beema/mullins.

 

[Ramses]

I see a lot of new boxes with oddball 6 or 12gb memory supplied with them. I figured it was OEM's grudgingly doing dual channel as cheap as they possibly could(the jerks). Seems to be both AMD and Intel stuff that way. That $400 Toshiba a8 lappy I had awhile ago came with two different brand sticks, a 4 and a 2, the thousand dollar HP i7 had 12, an 8 and a 4.
Neither stayed in there but long enough for amazon to deliver me something proper.

 

[Shivansps]

HD8470D is the same the A6-6400K has, 192 Cores at 800MHz.

The A4-7300 is a Richland APU like the A6-6400K(Single Module dual Core + 192 core iGPU) but it is locked and only supports 1600MHz Memory.

http://www.amd.com/en-us/products/processors/desktop/a-series-apu#

You are 100% sure on that right? there is way too much cross information

 

[AtenRa]

You are 100% sure on that right? there is way too much cross information

I dont have one to be 100% sure no ehehehe
But from what info i have it looks like that.

 

[Lepton87]

To your "Secondly", AMD's APU are cheaper, use around the same power(currently) and perform way better in games at same and above resolutions and more compatible with DirectX/OpenGL versions, and the great majority of customers won't upgrade unless a few years passed.

To your "thirdly", most don't until they try to play a game and realise it just wont run at all because of lack of the feature to run, mainly DirectX/OpenGL version or because the framerate is a horrible slideshow, literally. And I know Intel has the majority share in graphics, that's the point of the topic.


The topic is about why AMD APU's failed. This isn't about high-end users or even mid-end users, I have a dGPU in my system after all, an AMD APU can do a more important thing than what an Intel APU does and that is, if the user would like to play a game, and most users do, an AMD APU has a higher probability of running it and then, run it better. That is fact. The Intel APU will Install programs faster, slightly faster, but that's about it.


Is installing a program 5-50% faster better than playing any game 2-3 times faster and with better quality, more important to 80% of users? Most people don't install that many large programs, most people will play some form of video game. faster and better video, faster and better gaming, AMD had the upper hand in that for years and it failed in the market. It was not because of a bad product, it was because of bad marketing and Intel being a genius at marketing.

I don't take Intel's credit away, but I wont say that their APU's are better where it matters, performance wise, when they aren't, and by the looks of it, Broadwell GT3e might reach high-end Kaveri in performance, doubtful but it might.

Isn't installing programs more storage bottle-necked than CPU bound? And when it is CPU bound it is basically decompression and that is a very well threaded task and AMD's 4C APUs don't lag 2C/4T intel CPUs in MT performance.

 

[Shivansps]

Isn't installing programs more storage bottle-necked than CPU bound? And when it is CPU bound it is basically decompression and that is a very well threaded task and AMD's 4C APUs don't lag 2C/4T intel CPUs in MT performance.

Yes and no, yes is storage bound, no because CPU affects it greatly too, and it some cases, like installing .Net 4.5 and Office you can notice a huge cpu affect on the speed on them.

And yes, its slower on AMD, but only AM1 has a significant effect, like a Sempron 2650 takes about 3-4 time of what a G3220 needs to complete my "install apps" script, and they are all using the same model of hard disk.

The great snail is the C-70 of the dreaded Lenovos G485, and belive me, Pentium notebooks dont even take 1/4 the time than those take.

But i cant notice a significant time diff on FM2 or AM3... well, kinda, the A4-4000 was slow too.

 

[coercitiv]

And yes, its slower on AMD, but only AM1 has a significant effect, like a Sempron 2650 takes about 3-4 time of what a G3220 needs to complete my "install apps" script, and they are all using the same model of hard disk.

In the time I spent playing around with my Athlon 5350, I came to the conclusion that the minimum frequency I would require to get office work done on Kabini would be ~1.6Ghz. Also, Kabini needs 4 cores, otherwise multitasking suffers dramatically. Use it at 2-2.4Ghz and it performs quite ok for a budget system.

Considering there will be Carrizo-L SKUs with 25W, I hope to see Puma cores going over 2.4Ghz this time.

 

[cbn]

With regard to what I wrote in post #386 here are some passmark score comparisons between A4-7300 and Athlon 5350:

A4-7300: 2183 cpu marks http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+A4-7300+APU
Athlon 5350: 2607 cpu marks http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Athlon+5350+APU+with+Radeon+R3

And Celeron G1820 and Pentium J2900 (quad core atom) thrown in for comparison:

Celeron 1820: 2871 cpu marks http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Celeron+G1820+@+2.70GHz
Pentium J2900: 2074 cpu marks http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Pentium+J2900+@+2.41GHz&id=2173

Kinda makes me wonder if AMD had clocked AM1 higher (say 2.4+ Ghz) how much might it have impacted the FM2 dual core sales like A4-7300? Or did AMD actually price the existing Athlon 5350 higher than the A4-7300 thinking this was already partially a problem? (despite A4-7300 much better single thread)

 

[cbn]

also, i bet the price difference between the kaveri and the pentium is much bigger for OEMs. intel is selling much less silicon in each chip than AMD is so its variable cost is lower. while intel's fixed costs are higher (engineering the processor and building/establishing the node), intel is spreading them out over an order of magnitude more chips. i wouldn't be shocked if intel is selling haswell pentiums for about the same price as AMD is selling beema/mullins.

Yep, that appears to be the case going by the very large price difference between the Core based Pentium desktops and the A8-7600 and A10-7800 boxes:

A8-7600: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...page=1&bop=And (New starts @ $429.99 with 6GB RAM and 1TB)

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

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

A8-7600 with 2GB more ram costs $130 more compared to a Pentium G3240.

 

[cbn]

Just try to put 1GB iGPU memory and run again the Medium preset.

For some reason I can't get the computer to boot with 1GB RAM dedicated to iGPU.

Did some reading and it appears I am not alone with this problem --> http://www.overclock.net/t/1519831/intel-hd4600-messes-up-screen-with-1gb-ram-allocated

EDIT: It looks the option for 1024MB iGPU RAM was removed from my board's BIOS on 9-22-2014:

http://www.msi.com/support/mb/Z97_U3_PLUS.html#down-bios

Official specs (for my MSI Z97 U3 plus) also now list "VGA Max Share Memory" at 512MB:

http://www.msi.com/product/mb/Z97_U3_PLUS.html#hero-specification

 

[Abwx]

i wouldn't be shocked if intel is selling haswell pentiums for about the same price as AMD is selling beema/mullins.

At the OEM level it s i3s that are sold at Beema s prices.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/HP-Pavilion-13-a093na-x360-Convertible-Review-Update.130928.0.html

500 to 600€

http://www.notebookcheck.net/HP-Pavilion-13-a000ng-x360-Convertible-Review.127351.0.html

589 Euro

Same laptop or so, look like Intel is not that bullish about their mobile HWs real value..