AMD bowing out? Says its going mobile...

This isn't a big deal. Lots of revenue in the mobile market. revenue which they need. A lot more than high-end PC's. They can come back when the can afford to make a proper desktop cpu.
 
I predicted this, but you all doubted me. You all made out like I was insane. :p
 
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Ive heard this story before and I admit it does look more like it could be true this time around with them laying off 1400 people but had those not been mainly marketing and PR guys, then Id be worried.

I think AMD is just restructuring itself but I dont see them getting out of any market segment. Their GPU's are still selling like hot cakes and they are arguable top dog in the GPU world. Their server and mobile lines are doing quite well too. AMD has a lot of money makers and its really only its desktop products that are lacking and Id be surprised if theyre really losing a lot of money with them. They can still sell a lot of them in desktops to average consumers at Best Buy and so on.

I dont think AMD will retain the performance crown any time soon but I do believe they can put out a viable alternative to Intel. Phenom II was that for a while and its only just now that Intel has run off and left them.

Im not that business or market savvy so I could be totally wrong but I dont see AMD as circling the drain. Yes theyre not at their best right now but the majority of their products (server, mobile, GPU) are doing pretty good and I think that can keep them going while they get their desktop products up to speed.
 
SnowBeast said:
if this is true, its gonna be INTEL INSIDE for desktop users, period.
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Why? Is x86 magically going to make all other architectures disappear from the face of the earth without a trace?

If anything, x86 has been losing ground over the last few years.
 
Even if they did pull out of that market, I'm not convinced it's going to be the doomsday everyone says. Competition is important, but Intel is still competing with itself. Simply put, if the new processors came out in this theoretical world without AMD in the desktop segment, it would still have to be of enough value over the 2500k for me to upgrade. I suspect the average person is the same way.
 
I don't see anything here's that's all that horrible or earth shattering. Bottom line, AMD has had ZERO success battleing Intel on the high end except a few times in the 20 years I've been bying AMD products. The best AMD has ever done there what in the from about the late 90's to 2006 and then Intel said enough of this shit and has left AMD in the dust on the CPU side.

But the problem for AMD with a mobile focus strategy is guess who's also thinking about going there, yep Intel. Fusion has solid GPU performance but the CPU blows and Ivy Bridge looks to be a killer low-power x86 design, it's going to be the chip in all of the thin and lights and Windows x86 tablets on the higher end. leaving AMD with the low end, low margin market again.

AMD simply can't charge enough for it's CPUs and even in the GPU where it is competitive its staying competitive because of price. The last AMD CPU I bought 6 years ago was an Athlon X2 4800+, paid $800 for that bad boy, and 6 years ago it was at the top of the gaming world. AMD doesn't have shit it can sell at that price these days.
 
Agreed, I miss my Opteron 148 but the facts are clear, Intel has dominated consecutively since the core 2 duo days.
 
heatlesssun said:
I don't see anything here's that's all that horrible or earth shattering. Bottom line, AMD has had ZERO success battleing Intel on the high end except a few times in the 20 years I've been bying AMD products. The best AMD has ever done there what in the from about the late 90's to 2006 and then Intel said enough of this shit and has left AMD in the dust on the CPU side.
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I know a lot of people consider the K8 a 'success', but it actually wasn't enough to keep the company afloat.

heatlesssun said:
But the problem for AMD with a mobile focus strategy is guess who's also thinking about going there, yep Intel. Fusion has solid GPU performance but the CPU blows and Ivy Bridge looks to be a killer low-power x86 design, it's going to be the chip in all of the thin and lights and Windows x86 tablets on the higher end. leaving AMD with the low end, low margin market again.
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This is my biggest issue with AMD... Why it took so damn long to come up with a mobile design (Llano) that was at least worth a damn.

heatlesssun said:
AMD simply can't charge enough for it's CPUs and even in the GPU where it is competitive its staying competitive because of price. The last AMD CPU I bought 6 years ago was an Athlon X2 4800+, paid $800 for that bad boy, and 6 years ago it was at the top of the gaming world. AMD doesn't have shit it can sell at that price these days.
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Even if AMD did have a CPU that would go for $500 and up, it wouldn't mean jack shit unless they could outproduce Intel, and as everyone should know by now, that will NEVER happen. Remember, AMD didn't make real inroads into the OEM space until the late Athlon64/X2, early Phenom era.

I love AMD, and would hate to see them exit the desktop market altogether, but it would take a MASSIVE infusion of cash (in the order of tens, maybe hundreds of billions of dollars) just to bring AMD up to where Intel was 18 months ago, but no one is crazy enough to put up that kind of cash.
 
JMccovery said:
Even if AMD did have a CPU that would go for $500 and up, it wouldn't mean jack shit unless they could outproduce Intel, and as everyone should know by now, that will NEVER happen. Remember, AMD didn't make real inroads into the OEM space until the late Athlon64/X2, early Phenom era.
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Who can outproduce Intel? Their manufacturing prowess might be their greatest strength.
 
At the end of the day a Athlon II X2 3GHz is more than enough CPU power for 85% of the Earths computer users. Anything more is just extra cost. AMD has realised just creating faster and faster chips for a smaller and smaller group of users and applications is a waste of their time.

Some folks here tend to forget that.
 
daglesj said:
At the end of the day a Athlon II X2 3GHz is more than enough CPU power for 85% of the Earths computer users. Anything more is just extra cost. AMD has realised just creating faster and faster chips for a smaller and smaller group of users and applications is a waste of their time.

Some folks here tend to forget that.
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So is power of Intel GPU in SB. And unfortunatly for AMD what is great for mobile (performance per watt/low idle consumption) is also what server guys need and what gives good enough results in desktop which is why Intel can cover all types of market with SB architecture chips.
 
AMD suck, but i hope the article is BS.
Intel need competition
 
despite how crappy bulldozer is, the desktop market is still their major source of revenue and theres no reason for them to back out.
 
If this is in fact the truth, then I am a truly sad PC enthusiast. I cut my teeth building my first PC with an A64 2800+ Socket 754. Lol it was the lowest A64 on the totem pole, but it was a massive upgrade over my silly Dell. Learned a lot of great things building and tweaking that system. And for the entire time the A64s were out (especially the S939's) it was a sight to behold them time and again destroying the P4s!

When I built my latest rig though, pound for pound Intel simply could not be beat. Core i7 v. Phenom II? Hands down the i7. Hell Im so pleased with the performance of my i7 930, I dont see any reason to upgrade it for at least a few years. But all that being said, my inner geek was sad that I had no real choice from AMD (based on performance, not price).

Hopefully in time they rededicate themselves to CPUs. Hell their buyout of ATI 5 years ago is paying off, as AMD and Nvidia are locked in head to head combat! With the same sort of focus, perhaps they can once again put their armor back on and go after the Intel Goliath!
 
Its kinda weird when you think about it. AMD is competing with 2 companies in 2 different markets and 2 different products and now focusing on mobile which is a 3rd market with a 3rd massive competitor in ARM.

So its not so much AMD vs Intel, it is AMD vs Intel, Nvidia, and ARM..
 
I tend to think that AMD is presented with a choice and their decision is rather obvious. The rate of acceleration for AMD cpus is outmatched by Intel CPUs, time has made the difference only noticeable in the past two years. I think AMD is looking at two markets, the PC market, where they have a presence in the OEM boxes of the world with the E 350 series and they want to be in the device component industry to catch Tablets, ipads, iphone, androids, set-top boxes and consoles. The Llano series of APUs are actually filling that bit quite nicely, the right amount of processing power to run a full version of windows 7 and enough GPU power to run things like the greatest selling game of all time Modern Warfare 3 (hate all you want but sales numbers dont lie).

AMD has made the choice to go after that non conventional computing market, I would not be surprised is the new xbox and play station will have some sort of AMD APU base processor, or at least licence a good amount of technology from AMD to make it happen. AMD isnt dead, there is too much money to be made here for investors to just pack up shop.
 
Wouldn't surprise me if they at least put desktop processors on hiatus for the time being. Would probably be bad for us to have a single maker running the market, but I'm not sure AMD would be sad about it.
 
Its a silly rumor . Yes bulldozer has problems but its not like it can't compete with intel cpu's in a bunch of tests. If GF's 32nm process improves (which frankly it would have to for them to compete in the mobile space ) then alot of Bulldozer's problems will be fixed mainly heat .

Amd is finding alot of sucess combining their cpu and gpus together and i don't doubt that Trinity will be another sucess in that area .

For the desktop they simply have to fix bulldozer its already 90% of the way there
 
@matrix563

ROFL I'm actually laughing out loud at this at work (quiet office). One of the funnier things I've seen in a long time.
 
I loved all my Athlons dearly, I really did. They were excellent silicon at a fabilous price, and made all my Intel Pentium buddies angry at me. I had one of every iteration, Slot A, Socket A, 754, 939, AM2, before I finally went Intel.

Now I fear I will never get back to AMD. What a shame that the company that embarasses Intel at the turn of the century, could not innovate any further, and was mismanaged into CPU oblivion.
 
MacLeod said:
I....

Their GPU's are still selling like hot cakes and they are arguable top dog in the GPU world. Their server and mobile lines are doing quite well too...
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uhhhh....no

Not in sales anyway. Intel blows every one away in GPUs in use, and even 40% of the sales of descrete GPUs will not keep AMD afloat.
 
I'm sure AMD was pretty happy about their notebook cpus doing well during the black friday time period.
I was seeing a lot of E and A4/A6 series laptops on special so I'm not surprised that AMD wants to focus on what's more profitable for them.

I'm however disappointed that they are putting their tail between the legs and running the other way. I built my first PC with an AMD Duron ...did the pencil mod to unlock the multiplier. Good times. After switching to Core2Duo several years ago I've switched to Intel exclusively (currently running i5 2500k) for the time being but I also know that Intel is now going to price gouge every chance they get now. Eff you AMD.
 
Payne said:
I'm sure AMD was pretty happy about their notebook cpus doing well during the black friday time period.
I was seeing a lot of E and A4/A6 series laptops on special so I'm not surprised that AMD wants to focus on what's more profitable for them.
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Well profitable might not be the right word. Sure you don't push a lot of the high end stuff but you don't have to sell nearly as much of thud stuff to generate the same profit either. AMD would LOVE to be able sell $1k desktop CPUs, they simply can't.
 
This is just AMD saying it doesn't care about single core performance anymore as desktop is the only area where that matters. Mobile is about squeezing as much performance per watt as you can, and server is about multithreaded performance.

What AMD should do is just put the desktop and server chips on the same socket and give us access to 8 module 16 thread Interlagos and let us overclock it, creating a platform like the evga SR-2 motherboard.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113037

That overclocked would probably be pretty damn competitive with x3900 series chips. AMD could be a key player in the enthusiast market. It has the chips to do it. Not to mention those chips have extra links for multi-CPU setups. 32 threads of overclock would be insane.

It just doesn't care. This admission of AMD is nothing new at all, it's just saying what it's been doing since it gave up when the Quad-Father 4x4 flopped.

http://img248.imageshack.us/img248/3637/cpuz32.jpg

These opterons can overclock just fine. I wish AMD would just open the flood gates and give us access to Opterons that could be overclocked and were on enthusiast platforms.
 
EuphoricRage470 said:
Intel can't "charge whatever they want" with ARM around. If they start gouging CPU prices, then people will just be happy to grab a cheap tablet/laptop and call it a day.

I think all of you who say that Intel will stagnate, sell us Pentium 4's for $1000, just simply don't understand how things work economically. They need to give people a reason to upgrade, especially with the tablet/laptop onslaught.
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I see this argument all the time. The price equilbrim for a monopoly is ALWAYS higher then the price equilibrim in a competitive market. If intel has no competition they can lay off a ton of employees and reap in more profits.
 
sdlvx said:
This is just AMD saying it doesn't care about single core performance anymore as desktop is the only area where that matters. Mobile is about squeezing as much performance per watt as you can, and server is about multithreaded performance.

What AMD should do is just put the desktop and server chips on the same socket and give us access to 8 module 16 thread Interlagos and let us overclock it, creating a platform like the evga SR-2 motherboard.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113037

That overclocked would probably be pretty damn competitive with x3900 series chips. AMD could be a key player in the enthusiast market. It has the chips to do it. Not to mention those chips have extra links for multi-CPU setups. 32 threads of overclock would be insane.

It just doesn't care. This admission of AMD is nothing new at all, it's just saying what it's been doing since it gave up when the Quad-Father 4x4 flopped.

http://img248.imageshack.us/img248/3637/cpuz32.jpg


These opterons can overclock just fine. I wish AMD would just open the flood gates and give us access to Opterons that could be overclocked and were on enthusiast platforms.
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That would be so hot. I am drooling over an Asus KCMA-D8 with dual opteron 4226 bulldozers. $520 for the board and dual 6 cores, but the fact i cant overclock kills it. I might as well just get an 8120 and overclock that and save about $200

I wonder if we can do a pin mod or something? Right now im using Dual xeons , i put some tape over Pin 30 and FSB went from 533 to 667
 
buttons said:
That would be so hot. I am drooling over an Asus KCMA-D8 with dual opteron 4226 bulldozers. $520 for the board and dual 6 cores, but the fact i cant overclock kills it. I might as well just get an 8120 and overclock that and save about $200

I wonder if we can do a pin mod or something? Right now im using Dual xeons , i put some tape over Pin 30 and FSB went from 533 to 667
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I've seen 12 core Magny Cours overclocked to over 3Ghz with K10Stat. I've also seen people change clock speeds with tools in Linux.

But even then you're going to be on a mobo that doesn't have good VRMs and isn't made for overclocking. If someone managed to pull 3.1ghz on a MC on a server board (that probably has insane VDroop when OCed), imagine what it would be capable of on a good overclocking board.

AMD is probably aware of this and they probably know doing something like this isn't worth the effort because it's not going to sell because of what happened with Quadfather, but times have changed.
 
The reason for the focus on the mobile and tablet space is because a tablet/ultrabook/phone is far, far cheaper than a desktop computer in most cases and will sell in far greater numbers. The desktop market can be considered 'mature' at this point, and while I don't think that tablets will ever replace a desktop PC, I do think that it's the biggest growth area right now because these devices are cheap.

We are in the middle of an economic crisis, and AMD destroying itself by eroding its server margins by moving to the same platform on the desktop won't help matters, especially because a very, very, very small number of people would actually buy such a product - especially considering you're lucky to even have an income right now, nevermind enough cash to blow $2k on computer parts every 18 months.

As mentioned above, Intel blows every other manufacturer away not because of a superior product, but because their graphics chipsets are bundled with almost everything, especially the cheap, crappy stuff nobody on this forum would give a second look. It's the volume sales that count, even when you are operating on a razor-thin margin.

AMD's moves have been very creative given the competition it's been facing, and the sad, cold truth is that the company has been losing money by competing in the desktop and to a lesser extent the server space.

I think it'll be a tragic loss to x86 desktop and server computing if AMD bows out of the market, but at the end of the day money is what it's all about, and no matter how brilliant and driven the people at AMD are, if they can't make money then the effort is doomed.

Personally I think it would be in Intel's best interest to do what Microsoft did with Apple in the 90's and bail them out as far as the concept translates. A duopoly with ARM devices on the mobile and low end, and Intel on desktops and servers won't really push anyone to innovate.

Then again, since AMD today seems to have lost most of its core engineers, who knows whether the organization as it stands is really the same entity? The AMD I remember was the one that brought in the Athlon.
 
Im still running an overclocked 965 BE and couldnt be happier...

This is my first non Intel chip and i think it rocks.. Ill gladly let any comparable Intel chip be 10%-15% faster at stock speeds to save 30-40% in my pocket.

AMD rocks
 
wEvil said:
The reason for the focus on the mobile and tablet space is because a tablet/ultrabook/phone is far, far cheaper than a desktop computer in most cases and will sell in far greater numbers.
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Huh? Totally not true. A typical desktop is cheaper than a phone or tablet. Plus x86 are the MOST expensive tablets.
 
wEvil said:
considering you're lucky to even have an income right now, nevermind enough cash to blow $2k on computer parts every 18 months.
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Then why did Intel just release a $1000+ CPU on an expensive platform?
 
sdlvx said:
Then why did Intel just release a $1000+ CPU on an expensive platform?
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Because they can, and they know somebody will buy the stupid things and it's a huge profit margin for them.

I say if AMD wants to keep focusing on Llano/Fusion, whatever, just make the parts available for desktop too if we want them. I don't, but for budget power they are not bad at all.
 
From my perspective, desktops are on the way out for most ordinary users.

Most of my customers when they come to me for their next computer all ask for a laptop instead of another desktop PC. Probably a ratio of 5:1 for laptops. Folks don't want to be tucked away in the study or the kitchen. They want to sit and browse in the living room or anywhere.
 
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