Chips not down at AMD: Despite layoffs and financial troubles, the future still ...

RamonGTP said:
Hopefully this is a start to a new beginning instead of the beginning of the end for AMD.
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I sure hope so. Even for Intel fanboys (I'm not implying there are any of those in this thread, but I know there are some in this forum), it behooves them to root for AMD. Otherwise, if AMD becomes history, then Intel will go back to its ways of procrastinating faster and more powerful chips, instead trying to milk as much profit as possible, exploiting what would be a virtual monopoly. :eek:
 
Cheerleading is just bad for companies that screw up.

In sports cheerleading helps morale resulting in better performance, one hopes. But, unlike in sports, cheerleading won't make AMD processors perform or overclock any better.

Should we expect AMD employees and executives to be reading up on all the latest cheerleading efforts? Would it help them make better processors?

I don't think so. AMD is in the rut because it got cocky and arrogant from the cheers of fans when it did one thing right. And it got complacent because they continued to cheer despite things going downhill.


If they are reading then the best thing to do is to give them hell when they screw up. Send them the right message, because when you give losers too many laps to cry on they invariably stay losers. This is business, don't ever let them forget it.


Whenever someone tries to explain the disappointing reality, AMD fanboys inevitably enjoin to shield and mask the sorry state of affairs and pave everything in thick layers of fudge or put up strawmen to stoke the flaccid fanboyism, which does squat except to foster complacency. This practice should stop.


Let's just agree to speak the truth and leave the sugarcoat behind.


I dont' root for any company. If things suck, I say things suck. If things are looking to suck, I say they are looking to suck. No apologies.
 
Bao01 said:
<snip>
Whenever someone tries to explain the disappointing reality, AMD fanboys inevitably enjoin to shield and mask the sorry state of affairs and pave everything in thick layers of fudge or put up strawmen to stoke the flaccid fanboyism, which does squat except to foster complacency. This practice should stop.


Let's just agree to speak the truth and leave the sugarcoat behind.


I dont' root for any company. If things suck, I say things suck. If things are looking to suck, I say they are looking to suck. No apologies.
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I agree with you completely. But I did buy a 9850, knowing I could have gotten a better rig with Intel. Why? I weighed the performance differential vs. the value of losing AMD as a competitor, and voted with my wallet. I remember the days in the mid 90s when Intel had no competition. They were not pretty. That being said, I have my limits, and won't do this again if AMD continues to mess up. Who knows? Maybe there's hope for another competitor with Via + Nvidia.
 
I personally refuse to reward a company for having an inferior product with my hard earned money. I voted with my wallet too, my vote said "if you want my business, get your shit together." I think that would be a much bigger motivator then treating them as a charity case.
 
Bao01 said:
In sports cheerleading helps morale resulting in better performance, one hopes. But, unlike in sports, cheerleading won't make AMD processors perform or overclock any better.

Should we expect AMD employees and executives to be reading up on all the latest cheerleading efforts? Would it help them make better processors?
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Actually, I promise to work harder if you cheer for us.
 
If AMD goes belly up the whole industry will be set back years. No competition is a very bad thing.
 
sdlvx said:
AMD just needs to hang in a little longer. Once intel releases larrabee, it's not only going to be fighting AMD, but it will be fighting NVIDIA as well. I think that NVIDIA and AMD both know that they aren't going to do the best on their own against intel, you'll see them be a little more friendly with eachother.
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Intel probably decided to go up against nVidia because Intel has already taken AMD out, and because AMD was so friendly to buy out ATi, they took ATi out with them.
There just simply is no way that AMD can get back in the game anytime soon. They don't currently have a good architecture, and it will take them years to develop a new one... years in which Intel will keep the thumbscrews on tight so AMD isn't making any money to invest in R&D and new 32 nm technology and up.
All Intel has to do for that is hang on to its current Core2 architecture. Technically it doesn't even need Nehalem.
 
Obi_Kwiet said:
If AMD goes belly up the whole industry will be set back years. No competition is a very bad thing.
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I agree. While I am cheerleading for AMD (I'm not sure if Bao01's post was directed at me), I wouldn't just buy AMD for the sake of buying them. I'd buy the best product for the $, which is Intel right now. But that doesn't mean I'd continue to root for Intel to slaughter AMD. Like you implied, if AMD goes away, then Intel will cease to innovate and chip upgrades will slow to a trickle. :(
 
Intel cannot afford to stop innovating actually.
CPUs don't really break down or wear out. Given the fact that the market is pretty much saturated, I'd say that at least 80% of all CPU sales today are from replacing/upgrading computers rather than market expansion (well, the market may expand somewhat because servers go from 1 to 2 or more CPUs, but still). Even many grandparents have computers these days, and pretty much every desk and every home has a computer, or more.

This situation only gets worse in the future. Therefore, Intel needs to innovate in order to keep people upgrading their computers.
I think most of us here have bought at least three computers by now, which were all pretty much the same, except that they were more powerful... And the fact that they were more powerful is why we bought them. Just look at the console market... How many people buy the same console more than once (aside from those that break down)? You don't buy something that gives you the same that your old one does. You only get a next generation console, else you get nothing.

So in short, the less Intel innovates, the less CPUs it can sell. I think people are already overestimating the influence of AMD in this matter. AMD only had 25% marketshare at most, and was completely limited by its production capacity at that point (so Intel had the comforting thought of knowing that it was physically impossible for everyone to buy an AMD system anyway, most people had to buy Intel simply because Intel was available, and AMD was not). A lot of the time it was somewhere between 10-20%, meaning that for 80-90% Intel had to sell new CPUs to its existing customerbase, most of whom probably don't even realize that there ever was an AMD alternative. They just wanted "a faster PC"... usually just for the simple reason that "a faster PC" was available, not really because they actually needed one.
 
Well said, Scali, although I do think that since they have the undisputed performance crown at this point, if AMD were to go under, the pace would certainly slow up, ergo the Pentium and P6 days, and their tick-tock strategy (e.g. a new architecture every two years) may in the future just get swept under the rug. Especially without AMD to be an occasional thorn in Chipzilla's side - AMD being the first to 1GHz and K8's profound superiority over Netburst being prime examples.

I personally think that all this speculation about AMD's future is pointless. I really don't think anybody knows the whole story about the company's survival and future except for the board of directors, their investors, and God Himself. And they're not talking. Are things dire? Yes. Will things turn around? I don't know, and I will seriously scrutinize (and pretty much call shens off the bat) anyone who comes along saying that they do.

So why don't we put away those crystal balls and stop rubbing them before they're worn down to a nub? I've pretty much stopped speculating about AMD's future because I've realized it's a fruitless pursuit. Maybe the 45nm shrink of Barcelona will change things for the better in the interim until Bulldozer does eventually rear its head - if ever - but I won't speculate about it. I'm just going to watch from the sidelines, as should we all.
 
Well one thing is for certain. If AMD goes, processor prices WILL go up. And while Intel may not stop producing new CPU's, they certainly won't be as quick to introduce new architectures. If it wasn't for AMD showing up Intel for two years with the A64, I highly doubt Intel would have adopted a "tick tock" strategy for introducing new CPU's. Heck, we've already seen the Penryn quads get delayed simply because there was no reason to put to them out there due to lack of competition.
 
Mr. Bluntman said:
Well said, Scali, although I do think that since they have the undisputed performance crown at this point, if AMD were to go under, the pace would certainly slow up, ergo the Pentium and P6 days, and their tick-tock strategy (e.g. a new architecture every two years) may in the future just get swept under the rug. Especially without AMD to be an occasional thorn in Chipzilla's side - AMD being the first to 1GHz and K8's profound superiority over Netburst being prime examples.
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Actually, if anything, Netburst showed that Intel does not respond to AMD *at all*. They just let AMD have the performance crown for a long time, and Netburst was the longest-running (and most financially successful) architecture in the history of Intel.
And you think the Pentium and P6 days were slow? Hah, things turned around quicker back in those days.
You had to get a new computer every 2-3 years just to keep up with the pace back then. The 8088 and 286 days were slow, but after the 386 the pace really picked up, especially when people started to use computers at home, gaming on PCs became popular, and DOS was being replaced with Windows.
We had the 486 in 1989, the Pentium in 1992, the Pentium Pro in 1995, the PII in 1997, PIII in 1999 and the P4 in 2000... Then it slowed down and we had to wait for Core2 until 2006 (okay there was the Pentium D in between, but I don't really consider that a new architecture, it's just a result of smaller production processes), exactly at the time that AMD was at its competitive peak.

With the tick-tock scheme we're finally getting back to the pace of the 486-Pentium 3 days, basically the days before AMD became competitive (Athlon took off only just before the Pentium 4 was introduced).

So the whole idea that AMD somehow made Intel more competitive is not supported by fact. You could attribute the introduction of the tick-tock scheme to the fact that K8 was a success, however you could just as easily attribute it to the fact that Intel merged its desktop/server architecture and mobile architecture, and therefore now has more resources to focus on this single architecture. If Intel really cared about what AMD was doing, they'd have moved to tick-tock years ago. They wouldn't have let AMD get away with the success of the K7 AND the K8.

Even so, Core2's introduction may have been an earth-shattering experience, especially for AMD, but since the introduction (of Kentsfield) nothing really happened. 45 nm didn't really bring extra performance, it didn't bring more cores... it didn't make the CPUs cheaper (yet) either. They just use a bit less power. I don't think anyone with a Q6600 or higher will have much of a reason to upgrade to Penryn. So it's not like tick-tock has somehow made a big difference in practice yet. I've seen faster jumps in performance, price etc in the past.
 
People who think Intel would design new chips at the same rate and release them at the same price margins they are doing now if AMD didn't exist are smoking crack. I know some people have hated and marginalized AMD for along time no matter what (Scali) but to suggest AMD has had zero effect on Intels product delivery schedule and pricing is absolute insanity at best.
 
Monkey God said:
People who think Intel would design new chips at the same rate and release them at the same price margins they are doing now if AMD didn't exist are smoking crack. I know some people have hated and marginalized AMD for along time no matter what (Scali) but to suggest AMD has had zero effect on Intels product delivery schedule and pricing is absolute insanity at best.
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I have presented a collection of facts, I suggest you refute those, rather than resorting to personal attacks towards someone who has excusively used Athlon processors for over 5 years and continues to use them on secondary systems.
 
RamonGTP said:
I personally refuse to reward a company for having an inferior product with my hard earned money. I voted with my wallet too, my vote said "if you want my business, get your shit together." I think that would be a much bigger motivator then treating them as a charity case.
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I hear you and agree basically with that sentiment. But the 9850 isn't exactly a charity case. It comes reasonably close in performance to what Intel has to offer. Close enough that most of us probably wouldn't notice to be honest. It's not like I'm trying to buy an 80286 20mhz cpu. The 9850 is respectable.
 
Scali2 said:
I have presented a collection of facts, I suggest you refute those, rather than resorting to personal attacks towards someone who has excusively used Athlon processors for over 5 years and continues to use them on secondary systems.
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With all due respect. Saying Intel did not respond to AMD "at all" is not a fact, it is your interpretation of what happened. I personally think that Core 2 Duo and the tick tock cycle is directly related to competition from AMD. I also think the delay with Penryn is a direct result from a lack of competition from AMD. Yes you did present some facts, and I don't think anyone is arguing those. What a few of us are arguing is your interpretation and conclusions you are drawing from those facts.

Penryn quads were delayed is fact. The reason behind it is my opinion.

Netburst being the longest running architecture is indeed a fact. Intel simply letting AMD have the performance crown because they felt like it is anything but, that is merely your interpretation of the facts.

It's simple economics really, and it would be silly to deny it. Competition drives production up and prices down. This is the case with every industry and every company out there. There isn't anything special about processors in general or Intel in particular that make them an exception to the rule.
 
What I was trying to show is that these facts can lead to various plausible conclusions (your opinion is no better than anyone else's). Saying that AMD is fully responsible for Core2 and the current tick-tock strategy is just as ridiculious as saying AMD has had no effect at all.
I was trying to make you see that the truth is not at the extreme, but rather somewhere in between. It's probably closer to my extreme than yours though, the facts hint in that direction.
Note also that Intel NEVER compares to AMD directly in any presentations, demos or marketing material.
 
If you look back, Intel has released a new chip architecture or revision roughly every one to three years since the 8086. The tick/tock has always been there, Intel just pointed it out with Core 2 and promised to streamline it to every year.

Intel
Tick 1980 8086/8088
Tock 1981 80186/80188
Tick 1982 80286
Tock ---
Tick 1986 80386
Tock 1989 80486
Tick 1993 Pentium
Tock ---
Tick 1995 Pentium Pro
Tock 1996 Pentium II
Tick ---
Tock 1999 Pentium III
Tick 2001 Pentium IV (Willamette)
Tock 2002 Pentium IV (Northwood)
Tick 2004 Pentium IV (Prescott)
Tock 2005 Pentium D
Tick 2006 Core 2 Duo (Conroe) / Core 2 Quad (Kentsfield)
Tock 2007 Core 2 Duo/Quad Wolfdale/Yorkfield
Tick 2008 Nehalem
 
Scali2 said:
Intel cannot afford to stop innovating actually.
CPUs don't really break down or wear out. Given the fact that the market is pretty much saturated, I'd say that at least 80% of all CPU sales today are from replacing/upgrading computers rather than market expansion (well, the market may expand somewhat because servers go from 1 to 2 or more CPUs, but still). Even many grandparents have computers these days, and pretty much every desk and every home has a computer, or more.

This situation only gets worse in the future. Therefore, Intel needs to innovate in order to keep people upgrading their computers.
I think most of us here have bought at least three computers by now, which were all pretty much the same, except that they were more powerful... And the fact that they were more powerful is why we bought them. Just look at the console market... How many people buy the same console more than once (aside from those that break down)? You don't buy something that gives you the same that your old one does. You only get a next generation console, else you get nothing.

So in short, the less Intel innovates, the less CPUs it can sell. I think people are already overestimating the influence of AMD in this matter. AMD only had 25% marketshare at most, and was completely limited by its production capacity at that point (so Intel had the comforting thought of knowing that it was physically impossible for everyone to buy an AMD system anyway, most people had to buy Intel simply because Intel was available, and AMD was not). A lot of the time it was somewhere between 10-20%, meaning that for 80-90% Intel had to sell new CPUs to its existing customerbase, most of whom probably don't even realize that there ever was an AMD alternative. They just wanted "a faster PC"... usually just for the simple reason that "a faster PC" was available, not really because they actually needed one.
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I can see where you're coming from. But you have to remember that we [H]'ers are not the typical customers of CPUs. [H] folks are hardcore and frequent upgraders. However, the avg. customer buys a computer and uses it until it's way too painfully slow. Most people I know milk at least 5 years out of their desktop or laptop. But how many [H]'ers use the same CPU for their primary system? I upgraded mine in less than 2 years on my current build and I'm not even close to hardcore as many [H]'ers.

Therefore, whether Intel innovated more or less wouldn't really affect the upgrade cycle of most customers. Only the hardcore power users would be most affected by a slower innovation cycle that Intel would pursue if AMD was not competing with it.
 
ryan_975 said:
If you look back, Intel has released a new chip architecture or revision roughly every one to three years since the 8086. The tick/tock has always been there, Intel just pointed it out with Core 2 and promised to streamline it to every year.

Intel
Tick 1980 8086/8088
Tock 1981 80186/80188
Tick 1982 80286
Tock ---
Tick 1986 80386
Tock 1989 80486
Tick 1993 Pentium
Tock ---
Tick 1995 Pentium Pro
Tock 1996 Pentium II
Tick ---
Tock 1999 Pentium III
Tick 2001 Pentium IV (Willamette)
Tock 2002 Pentium IV (Northwood)
Tick 2004 Pentium IV (Prescott)
Tock 2005 Pentium D
Tick 2006 Core 2 Duo (Conroe) / Core 2 Quad (Kentsfield)
Tock 2007 Core 2 Duo/Quad Wolfdale/Yorkfield
Tick 2008 Nehalem
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That is a very arbitrary list. Tick is a new architecture, tock is a dieshrink of the current architecture.
486 is certainly not the 'tock' of the 386... It's a new architecture. The Pentium did have multiple 'tocks' (dieshrinks). The Pentium Pro, II and III are all the same architecture aswell, and apart from MMX, SSE and moving cache onto the die, they are little more than dieshrinks aswell.
The Prescott is another dieshrink of the Northwood, and nothing of a new microarchitecture.

I suppose we can say that in earlier generations, Intel just shrunk or replaced the microarchitecture as they saw fit. Currently a 2-year window seems like a good idea, but I don't know how long they want to stick to that. Personally I'm more comfortable with the older strategy, where apparently technological opportunities dictated the strategy. Now they want to force the technology into a strict bi-annual update. That could mean that there is not enough time to fully develop and implement new technologies.
We've already seen that Intel didn't quite make the first 'tock'. Nehalem looks to be on schedule though, and it actually seems to be a killer architecture.
 
beowulf7 said:
I can see where you're coming from. But you have to remember that we [H]'ers are not the typical customers of CPUs. [H] folks are hardcore and frequent upgraders. However, the avg. customer buys a computer and uses it until it's way too painfully slow. Most people I know milk at least 5 years out of their desktop or laptop. But how many [H]'ers use the same CPU for their primary system? I upgraded mine in less than 2 years on my current build and I'm not even close to hardcore as many [H]'ers.

Therefore, whether Intel innovated more or less wouldn't really affect the upgrade cycle of most customers. Only the hardcore power users would be most affected by a slower innovation cycle that Intel would pursue if AMD was not competing with it.
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Ofcourse it would. Computers only become painfully slow because hardware keeps getting faster and applications keep pushing the boundaries. If Intel stops innovating, hardware doesn't become faster, and therefore software won't push it to the limits that the system becomes slow... or if it does, there's nowhere to go from there, because there simply are no faster CPUs available on the market. We've already had a situation much like this, before Core2 arrived. Pentium hung around 3.2-3.8 GHz for a long time (Intel hit 3+ GHz in November of 2002!), and the Athlon 64/X2 didn't improve much either.
I myself didn't upgrade for years either, during that period, and waited out Core2 after the first positive news. And again, today I see no reason to ditch my E6600 @ 3 GHz for a new CPU, because they simply are barely faster.
 
Scali2 said:
That is a very arbitrary list. Tick is a new architecture, tock is a dieshrink of the current architecture.
486 is certainly not the 'tock' of the 386... It's a new architecture. The Pentium did have multiple 'tocks' (dieshrinks). The Pentium Pro, II and III are all the same architecture aswell, and apart from MMX, SSE and moving cache onto the die, they are little more than dieshrinks aswell.
The Prescott is another dieshrink of the Northwood, and nothing of a new microarchitecture.

I suppose we can say that in earlier generations, Intel just shrunk or replaced the microarchitecture as they saw fit. Currently a 2-year window seems like a good idea, but I don't know how long they want to stick to that. Personally I'm more comfortable with the older strategy, where apparently technological opportunities dictated the strategy. Now they want to force the technology into a strict bi-annual update. That could mean that there is not enough time to fully develop and implement new technologies.
We've already seen that Intel didn't quite make the first 'tock'. Nehalem looks to be on schedule though, and it actually seems to be a killer architecture.
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I don't think it's that arbitrary at all. Like you said, Tick is the new architecture, but tock implies a relatively minor tweak in the current architecture be it a dieshrink, re-arranging unit layout, adding instructions, or whaterver that doesn't really provide a massive increase in performance.

The 486 was nothing more than a faster 386 that pulled the coprocessor, cache controller and SRAM off of the motherboard and into the core. It also added the CMPXCHG instruction.

Prescott was definately a drastic change in the Netburst achitecture. Going from 20 to 31 stages in the pipeline, reworking the prefetch and branch prediction units to better provide the execution units with the data and instructions they needed, and of course SSE3 if you want to count that.
 
ryan_975 said:
The 486 was nothing more than a faster 386 that pulled the coprocessor, cache controller and SRAM off of the motherboard and into the core. It also added the CMPXCHG instruction.
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Actually it was.
The 386 had nothing more than a fetch-buffer. The 486 was fully pipelined (and therefore instruction latency for most instructions was reduced to 1 clk, greatly improving IPC).
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/80486
Oh, and there were more instructions added than just CMPXCHG. How about BSWAP for example?

ryan_975 said:
Prescott was definately a drastic change in the Netburst achitecture. Going from 20 to 31 stages in the pipeline, reworking the prefetch and branch prediction units to better provide the execution units with the data and instructions they needed, and of course SSE3 if you want to count that.
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Not really. They just cut up the pipeline with a bit more granularity and in *some* cases it was longer, but not in all cases. That '20 to 31 stages' is mostly gibberish blown up in the media. The changes were mostly to incorporate the new 64-bit mode.
The actual microarchitecture didn't change. There is no difference in programming rules for the Prescott, compared to the Northwood and Willamette. Trust me, I checked, I'm an assembly programmer, and in those days I used to study the optimization manuals and all... and I also timed my code to the last cycle.

Back in those days I knew exactly how to optimize for 486, Pentium, PPro/PII/PIII and P4... those were the days :p
 
Scali2 said:
Actually it was.
The 386 had nothing more than a fetch-buffer. The 486 was fully pipelined (and therefore instruction latency for most instructions was reduced to 1 clk, greatly improving IPC).
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/80486
Oh, and there were more instructions added than just CMPXCHG. How about BSWAP for example?
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I know there were more instructions, I was exaggerating a bit. I didn't know however, that the 486 was pipelined. I'd always thought the Penitum for the first pipelined processor. But hell, in the 486's heyday I was 13 and playing Doom and SC2k.


Not really. They just cut up the pipeline with a bit more granularity and in *some* cases it was longer, but not in all cases. That '20 to 31 stages' is mostly gibberish blown up in the media. The changes were mostly to incorporate the new 64-bit mode.
The actual microarchitecture didn't change. There is no difference in programming rules for the Prescott, compared to the Northwood and Willamette. Trust me, I checked, I'm an assembly programmer, and in those days I used to study the optimization manuals and all... and I also timed my code to the last cycle.
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Adding 64bit mode is quite a change in microarchitecture don't you think?
 
ryan_975 said:
I know there were more instructions, I was exaggerating a bit. I didn't know however, that the 486 was pipelined. I'd always thought the Penitum for the first pipelined processor. But hell, in the 486's heyday I was 13 and playing Doom and SC2k.
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In the 486 days I was hand-optimizing subpixel-corrected rotating donuts: http://bohemiq.scali.eu.org/486compo.exe

ryan_975 said:
Adding 64bit mode is quite a change in microarchitecture don't you think?
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No. Architecture is how all components are pieced together and how they work together, not whether a particular component is 32-bit or not.
By that logic a 386SX would be a different architecture from a 386DX.
 
beowulf7 said:
Therefore, whether Intel innovated more or less wouldn't really affect the upgrade cycle of most customers. Only the hardcore power users would be most affected by a slower innovation cycle that Intel would pursue if AMD was not competing with it.
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Which, is what I was getting at. Couldn't have said it better. :)
 
You guys seem to be misunderstanding tick-tock.

A tock is a new microarchitecture. Core 2 was a tock, Nehalem is a tock. Tick is a die shrink or process technology improvement, plus minor architecture tweeks.
 
Scali2 said:
What I was trying to show is that these facts can lead to various plausible conclusions (your opinion is no better than anyone else's). Saying that AMD is fully responsible for Core2 and the current tick-tock strategy is just as ridiculious as saying AMD has had no effect at all.
I was trying to make you see that the truth is not at the extreme, but rather somewhere in between. It's probably closer to my extreme than yours though, the facts hint in that direction.
Note also that Intel NEVER compares to AMD directly in any presentations, demos or marketing material.
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I completely agree that my opinion is not better than anyone else's. The only point I was trying to make is that in your previous post, you seemed to be passing off your opinion as fact, and that's really what I'm getting at. If that wasn't your intention, then my apologies for the misunderstanding.
 
ryan_975 said:
A 386SX was still internally 32bit wasn't it?
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Depends on your definition of 'internally'. Regardless, it doesn't matter. Dropping in another ALU doesn't change the architecture any more than adding SSEn or whatever.
 
RamonGTP said:
I completely agree that my opinion is not better than anyone else's. The only point I was trying to make is that in your previous post, you seemed to be passing off your opinion as fact, and that's really what I'm getting at. If that wasn't your intention, then my apologies for the misunderstanding.
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And that's the problem with forums. You can't express an opinion without people getting all uptight because they have a different opinion.
What do you expect me to do? Add "Disclaimer: This is my opinion and my opinion only" to every sentence that I write? I shouldn't have to, the intelligence and comprehension of the people reading it should be enough to separate opinion from fact.
It's impossible to actually have any kind of depth in a discussion if people constantly fall over such non-issues. Focus on the topic at hand instead.
 
Scali2 said:
And that's the problem with forums. You can't express an opinion without people getting all uptight because they have a different opinion.
What do you expect me to do? Add "Disclaimer: This is my opinion and my opinion only" to every sentence that I write? I shouldn't have to, the intelligence and comprehension of the people reading it should be enough to separate opinion from fact.
It's impossible to actually have any kind of depth in a discussion if people constantly fall over such non-issues. Focus on the topic at hand instead.
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"IMO" would suffice actually ;)

But as you say, lets focus on the topic. I really don't think you're giving AMD's influence enough credit. To say that they they "only had 25% market share" is a bit of an oxymoron. 25% is a pretty nice chunk, more than enough to get Intel's attention, especially considering where they came from prior to the release of the original Athlon.

In AMD's glory days, they got the attention of every single OEM with the exception of Dell who held out for a long period of time. I don't have exact numbers on hand, but I'd be willing to bet that In the enthusiast segment, they probably had at least as much market share if not more so than Intel.

You can pretty much be guaranteed that they had Intel's attention. The fact that Pentium 4 and Pentium D CPU's were actually cheaper than Athlon64's and X2's is a solid indication that AMD, when competitive, most definitely has influence.
 
RamonGTP said:
"IMO" would suffice actually ;)
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No it doesn't, I speak from experience. People just suck.

RamonGTP said:
But as you say, lets focus on the topic. I really don't think you're giving AMD's influence enough credit. To say that they they "only had 25% market share" is a bit of an oxymoron. 25% is a pretty nice chunk, more than enough to get Intel's attention, especially considering where they came from prior to the release of the original Athlon.
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You don't know the full story. Perhaps the 25% that AMD managed to grasp was mostly from market expansion or migration from other platforms. Perhaps Intel didn't feel like catering for that extra market at that point in time, because they didn't have the production facilities? Remember also that the Pentium 4 had a huge die. With the same production facilities they can now make a lot more Core2 dies.

RamonGTP said:
In AMD's glory days, they got the attention of every single OEM with the exception of Dell who held out for a long period of time. I don't have exact numbers on hand, but I'd be willing to bet that In the enthusiast segment, they probably had at least as much market share if not more so than Intel.
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Perhaps so, but still it was Intel making the healthy profits, not AMD.

RamonGTP said:
You can pretty much be guaranteed that they had Intel's attention. The fact that Pentium 4 and Pentium D CPU's were actually cheaper than Athlon64's and X2's is a solid indication that AMD, when competitive, most definitely has influence.
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Yes, but even that didn't just come out of the blue. You often see AMD resort to marketing spasms in response to Intel, resulting in ill-conceived products such as the QuadFather, and often prices too low to make a healthy profit.
Intel simply waited for a dieshrink, then dropped the prices because they were saving on production. They also were so smart to design their dies so that two of them could interface and become a multicore CPU, cutting yet more costs. A technology that they still use today, even though they no longer have to undercut AMD's prices.
Intel never lost any money over it. They kept pretty much the same healthy profit margins throughout all this, while AMD only barely got out of the red numbers on a few occassions. Running a business is about making money, not about getting the fastest processor on the market.
 
I'm most certainly not arguing profitability. You'll hear no argument from me in that regard. Intel is, has always been, and probably will always be more profitable than AMD.

You'll also hear no argument from me in regards to poor decisions by AMD, namely, "native quad core" while it sounds nice in theory, obviously it didn't work out very well.

AMD's problem is that Intel can afford to miss a product cycle. Nehalem can be a complete disappointment, while at the same time AMD can have a diamond in their hands and Intel will still remain profitable. They may lose some market share for a year or two, as we've pointed out, but it won't kill them financially. Whereas if AMD makes a mistake, they are on the verge of bankruptcy for the next 2+ years.
 
AMd will come back better than ever shortly. Just have to give them time just like before. Besides, now they've actually got some good things coming out. New laptop chipsets that will make their battery life last a good long time. Awesome processors for the future and still keeping their prices friendly to everyone in the market place and they are actually doing reasonably well against Intel in the OEM side of things with lots of places selling more AMD based notebooks and desktops than Intel because of the huge price difference. Things are only going up from here. Besides, all you Intel freaks out there should love AMD. AMD is the reason your processors aren't an arm and leg expensive.

But even if their processors never match up against Intel in the future...that's fine with me because I'll never buy another Intel processor ever. AMD only.
 
KamuiRSX said:
AMd will come back better than ever shortly. Just have to give them time just like before. Besides, now they've actually got some good things coming out. New laptop chipsets that will make their battery life last a good long time. Awesome processors for the future and still keeping their prices friendly to everyone in the market place and they are actually doing reasonably well against Intel in the OEM side of things with lots of places selling more AMD based notebooks and desktops than Intel because of the huge price difference. Things are only going up from here. Besides, all you Intel freaks out there should love AMD. AMD is the reason your processors aren't an arm and leg expensive.

But even if their processors never match up against Intel in the future...that's fine with me because I'll never buy another Intel processor ever. AMD only.
Click to expand...

When a product cost you $35 to produce and your selling it for $35.01, that doesn't net you much in profit to pay back your business loans much less put back into R&D for better products now does it?.
 
KamuiRSX said:
AMd will come back better than ever shortly. Just have to give them time just like before. Besides, now they've actually got some good things coming out. New laptop chipsets that will make their battery life last a good long time. Awesome processors for the future and still keeping their prices friendly to everyone in the market place and they are actually doing reasonably well against Intel in the OEM side of things with lots of places selling more AMD based notebooks and desktops than Intel because of the huge price difference. Things are only going up from here. Besides, all you Intel freaks out there should love AMD. AMD is the reason your processors aren't an arm and leg expensive.

But even if their processors never match up against Intel in the future...that's fine with me because I'll never buy another Intel processor ever. AMD only.
Click to expand...


*yawn*
 
Would a company like IBM bail out AMD by buying them out? Didn't IBM invest heavily in AMD a few years ago? Obviously Intel won't buy out AMD (and even if they wanted to, the gov.'t wouldn't let them).
 
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