Why have AMD APUs failed on the market?

[theeedude]

APU was an interesting idea when the merger took place in 2006, when CPUs were standalone and graphics were all either discrete or on chipset.
Now APU just means SOC, and it's a crowded market.

 

[erunion]

:

AMD APUs are good for all thoses basics tasks but not Intel s APUs, now point me something generic that AMD APUs would be mediocre at processing if you can...

You have been having the same handful of arguments non-stop for years on this forum, pausing only to find a new opponent. Why would I attempt to change a mind that is committed to not changing, no matter the evidence.

 

[cbn]

Both brands will perform correctly for generic usages but once games are introduced Intel s APUs become irrelevant for such PCs

But if the Intel Celeron desktop can take a dGPU (ie, it is not a AIO) then that has to be factored in.

And another plus for the Celeron + dGPU is that it would only need single channel memory (4GB stick) whereas the APU would need more expensive dual channel memory (either 2 x 2 GB or 2 x 4GB) to get the FPS.

 

[Abwx]

You have been having the same handful of arguments non-stop for years on this forum, pausing only to find a new opponent. Why would I attempt to change a mind that is committed to not changing, no matter the evidence.

You are right in some way, it is year that i read people talking about metrics that are irrelevant for a basic consumer, the purpose of course is to set the metrics where it suits Intel but certainly not where the consumer would get a better experience overall.

Enter a general store and see what is proposed with Intel gear, that s all Celeron/pentiums and eventualy i3s but with IGPs only, you would pick such a PC over one that has an AMD APU to give it to your children.?.

You are stuck on offices PCs with metrics related to office usages, what is the point to compress a folder in 5 seconds rather than 6 if your familial PC cant even handle usages that can last hours like games..?.

That is, your PC will be useless or at best mediocre for one of the most appaling usages, that s the price to pay, litteraly, by going Intel over AMD.

But if the Intel Celeron desktop can take a dGPU (ie, it is not a AIO) then that has to be factored in.

And another plus for the Celeron + dGPU is that it would only need single channel memory (4GB stick) whereas the APU would need more expensive dual channel memory (either 2 x 2 GB or 2 x 4GB) to get the FPS.

Because joe average will surely add a dGFX, are you kidding.?.

This argument burned to the rope has been used for years as a mean to downplay Intel s GPUs unability to provide the minimum requirement in games, get used to it, Intel APUs have good CPU performance but their mediocre GPU render them less good than an AMD APU when it comes to real life usage.

 

[cbn]

Because joe average will surely add a dGFX, are you kidding.?.

This argument burned to the rope has been used for years as a mean to downplay Intel s GPUs unability to provide the minimum requirement in games, get used to it, Intel APUs have good CPU performance but their mediocre GPU render them less good than an AMD APU when it comes to real life usage.

Yes, if wanting to play games knowing about dGFX would not be much of a stretch for someone with basic knowledge of computers.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Hell, there is heaps of "viral marketing" from people like you, that might trick some poor newbie into buying an AMD CPU.

Or a Brazos or Kabini rig... :whistle:

 

[Abwx]

Yes, if wanting to play games knowing about dGFX would not be much of a stretch for someone with basic knowledge of computers.

You are hanging too much often on enthusiast sites, go see people here and there to check what they have and how much they are not interested at all by thoses issues, they enter the store, buy the PC and want it to work without bothering to open the thing, let alone mess with drivers installations.

.

Hell, there is heaps of "viral marketing" from people like you, that might trick some poor newbie into buying an AMD CPU.

Newbies want general usages PCs, not office dedicated PCs that are incapable of playing games.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Intel APUs have good CPU performance but their mediocre GPU render them less good than an AMD APU when it comes to real life usage.

I thought I remembered someone posting some gaming benchmarks, and the Haswell Pentium IGP was more powerful than the Kabini AM1 quad-core's IGP.

So, this point has been debunked before.

 

[VirtualLarry]

You are hanging too much often on enthusiast sites, go see people here and there to check what they have and how much they are not interested at all by thoses issues, they enter the store, buy the PC and want it to work without bothering to open the thing, let alone mess with drivers installations.

This is why, Nvidia does so well, and is a household name like Intel?

 

[Ramses]

What I want to know, is how many of you have submitted your resume to AMD in the last few months since so many folks have decisively pinpointed where they have gone wrong and how to fix it. I haven't, because I don't know the answer. In fact the more I learn the more questions it makes. Anyone? Not every day you get a chance to turn around an iconic brand in the PC industry eh? They seem to be hiring lately.

 

[Abwx]

This is why, Nvidia does so well, and is a household name like Intel?

They do well because they are unscrupulous and baseless.

How to call otherwise a firm that cashed more than 1bn by willfully selling faulty chips that ended in 30-40 millions laptops that went down the drain, that s 30bn worth of laptops thrown in trash bins at the expense of consumers, any other firm would had been bankrupt, but still, we have people branding this firm as a quality firm....

 

[escrow4]

A general allrounder won't be cranking up Dying Light. Old games run fine on HD 4600. An i3/i5 with that makes way more sense than an APU which is lopsided, CPU grunt still matters a lot. The iGPU for general consumers meh.

Seriously:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/amd-a10-7850k_10.html#sect0

"We see a typical picture in Photoshop: the new A10-7850K falls behind its predecessor A10-6800K by 5% and is downright slow in comparison with Intel's products. Even the dual-core i3-4340 beats the senior quad-core Kaveri model by 42%."

Finereader:

"We’ve tested the new Kaveri in very different applications but the A10-7850K hasn’t been able to compete with the Core i3, let alone the Core i5. Here, the senior Kaveri model is 17% and 28% slower than the Core i3-4340 and the Core i5-4430, respectively. It is also worse than its Socket FM2 predecessor A10-6800K."

Other benchmarks are equal or slightly faster. Overall there is very little reason to pick one up opposed to Intel.

 

[Abwx]

I thought I remembered someone posting some gaming benchmarks, and the Haswell Pentium IGP was more powerful than the Kabini AM1 quad-core's IGP.

So, this point has been debunked before.

They are not better, not counting that Celeron/Pentium must be discarded since they are not even capable of playing 4K video, what is actualy debunked is that you re promoting some Intel CPUs that are already outdated for average consumers usages.

 

[Abwx]

Seriously:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/amd-a10-7850k_10.html#sect0

.

The whole revue is an exemple of trolled review, there s no secret that Anton Shilov was massacring AMD as much as he could since they stopped to send him some gear, indeed he was rewarded some times later by being offered the whole Devil Canyon line, so you re right to ask if it s serious, did you only read what this shill(ov) did write..?. It s a rant from start to finish and a caricature of a review.

 

[Blue_Max]

They missed their true calling! The biggest appeal of the APU is its small size... they should've really pushed for more small & cool machines capable of playing a few games too, or even give the iMac a run with more AIO machines (with just a little more bulge hidden at the back for cooling...)

 

[bullzz]

so you are going to dis the review because you dont like OP criticizing the product hes reviewing? um ok

didnt you just comment saying A8 is good enough for "normal people". then suddenly 4k video becomes important?

 

[cbn]

I thought I remembered someone posting some gaming benchmarks, and the Haswell Pentium IGP was more powerful than the Kabini AM1 quad-core's IGP.

So, this point has been debunked before.

It was in this thread the benchmarks were posted:

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

Keep in mind though that the 3.0 Ghz Haswell Pentium has a much stronger CPU whereas the little Athlon 5350 AM1 is just a single channel APU.

 

[cbn]

You are hanging too much often on enthusiast sites, go see people here and there to check what they have and how much they are not interested at all by thoses issues, they enter the store, buy the PC and want it to work without bothering to open the thing, let alone mess with drivers installations.

Installing a card and drivers is not tough (especially if it doesn't need additional power beyond PCIe).

But if your standard is a sealed OEM box then we need to make sure these APUs being tested have DDR3 1600 memory installed then.

 

[mrmt]

I frankly don't think it has anything to do with IPC or wattage use. I just think it's terrible marketing and the fact that we're at the race to the bottom.

If we are in a race to the bottom then AMD APU is a bad idea because of the big die.

 

[Abwx]

so you are going to dis the review because you dont like OP criticizing the product hes reviewing? um ok

didnt you just comment saying A8 is good enough for "normal people". then suddenly 4k video becomes important?

Virtual larry is speaking of the Athlon 5350 not of the A8 7600, this latter destroy anything intel, including the i7, when it comes to games on the IGP, it s not by chance that the debate was opportunisticly switched to the AM1 APUs...

As for Xbit review of the 7850K it doesnt negate the greater perfs of AMD Kaveri in games :

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/amd-a10-7850k_11.html#sect0

But of course, you can discard thoses graphs and give more importance to theses ones to decide what is the best choice :

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/amd-a10-7850k_8.html#sect1

That said i can only aknowledge that those who use their PC mainly for Sysmarking should indeed shoot for an i3.()

You have a more serious review at Hardware.fr despite the somewhat outdated softs, i already gave this link and i did specify the limits of the benches that are old compared to their current softs versions that favour CPUs with real cores.

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/913-1/kaveri-amd-a10-7850k-a10-7700k-test.html

 

[Ramses]

What I want to know, is how many of you have submitted your resume to AMD in the last few months since so many folks have decisively pinpointed where they have gone wrong and how to fix it. I haven't, because I don't know the answer. In fact the more I learn the more questions it makes. Anyone? Not every day you get a chance to turn around an iconic brand in the PC industry eh? They seem to be hiring lately.

Nada huh?

They seem to be looking for engineers.... lol

https://www.amd.apply2jobs.com/ProfExt/index.cfm?fuseaction=mExternal.returnToResults&CurrentPage=1

 

[Vesku]

Yes, if wanting to play games knowing about dGFX would not be much of a stretch for someone with basic knowledge of computers.

Almost everyone I've known who wasn't a "hardcore" gamer or really into a particular game just makes do with the computer they happen to have. Which is one of the reasons consoles are popular, so much better than trying to game on a budget APU.

 

[mrmt]

Here's Kumar's take on why AMD GPU sales are declining:

http://seekingalpha.com/article/225...lynch-global-technology-conference-transcript

I think if you ask me from my standpoint generation to generation, if the market share is 40-60 and it oscillates from one company to another, that’s probably how it will go and that’s the way it’s been. There were some decisions made two-three years ago when we were pushing the APU and our view of how the attach rates are going to change. Some product decisions were made, in particular in the low end. And I think that kind of hurt us in particular with the platform, in particular with decisions that Microsoft made with some customers with the Haswell platform. If there's one area that we’re confident of gaining market share is in the graphics space, not just in professional graphic product, but in the graphic space. And I think as the year evolves, the Ivy Bridge platforms come in to play, the attach rates actually have surprised us. We thought the attach rates would go down. If you ask someone two years ago, the attach rates were expected to go down more but they've actually not gone down as much, and now we [ph] participate in that market to go ahead and get the market share that I think we will see in the second half of 2014.

Looks like they misread the GPU market to me, both in terms of how well their APU fare on the market and in terms of whether the GPU could become a player in this slim form factor new market. Management simply assumed a false set of premises and asked engineers to come up with something that didn't sell. Had AMD predicted correctly how the market would fare, maybe they wouldn't have killed their bottom market dGPU chips and would try a smaller iGPU APU.

The point is, if AMD can do this in a market where they have a much stronger clout than then CPU market, I don't think this marketing department is good enough to direct efforts in the more challenging CPU market. IMO it's not only a question of the foundry partner or engineering execution, but a question of what management is asking the engineers to come up with.

Oh, and they screwed up again with their sales forecast, Kumar was saying AMD would gain share from Nvidia in H214, but instead what we saw is Nvidia record market share. They couldn't forecast that Maxwell would be that good.

 

[bononos]

Given the amount of posters defending AMD APUs in the AMD Q414 results thread, I'd like to open a new thread to explore why the APUs failed on the market. Regarding the consumer market, AMD lost share in every single market bracket where it fielded APUs and the bleeding is yet to stop.

I'm rather curious to see the opinions of the people here on what are the APU value proposition strong points and why it failed on the market despite these strong points.

APU failed because HSA failed to take off. 5yrs ago we wondered whether the APU would be just another ol GPU tacked onto the CPU and that turned out to be the case. So it was the same old story as with bulldozer with slower single core performance.

For gaming, until the most recent price cut, Kaveri didn't make sense for the low budget gamer because a i3+7770 offered better performance for the same price. Its only exciting for the small minority who like tinkering with opencl and some low budget gaming in a compact case. For the vast majority of people, its just falls in between their wants.

 

[MisterLilBig]

I thought I remembered someone posting some gaming benchmarks, and the Haswell Pentium IGP was more powerful than the Kabini AM1 quad-core's IGP.

Try Kabini vs Atom. You know, fairness.

This is why, Nvidia does so well, and is a household name like Intel?

Nvidia a household name? Lol, please. Not even Intel. Haven't you ever been asked 'what/who is AMD?', people think that computers are Intel, they compare them to Macs! As if it was Windows vs MacOSX! Its chaos I tell you!

didnt you just comment saying A8 is good enough for "normal people". then suddenly 4k video becomes important?

4K TV's will sell like Hotcakes and Netflix and Youtube and who knows what other Video Streaming will support 4K video. So, yeah, its important. More important than pushing 60-144 FPS in Battlefield 4+ and extremely way more important than having a high cpu benchmark score.

APU failed because HSA failed to take off.

HSA has not arrived yet.