How long will AMD stay in business (CPU), and aftermath.. (speculation(

How many years more of AMD?

  • 3-5

    Votes: 49 38.9%

  • 6-9

    Votes: 21 16.7%

  • 10-15

    Votes: 8 6.3%

  • 15+

    Votes: 48 38.1%
  • Total voters
    126
A

a3venom

Gawd
Joined
Mar 3, 2015
Messages
695
Just thinking, they are trying hard to stay afloat, and that means they are not in a position to spend money on R&D/MKTG like their competition.
Even if the next "ZEN" will perform +/- 5% of skylake, how much will that really help considering their brand image now?

In case they go out of business, is it even legal for a company(intel) to be a monopoly? won't the govt give them money to get back up on their feet?

It is near-monopoly now already, intel has no need to have more than +5% perf every gen because they don't have anything to compete against.

Your Views?
I won't talk about GPU because the situation is far less worse and i think they will manage just fine.
 
If ZEN performs within 5% of skylake, is good on power, and has similar features, I'd buy AMD just because I like them.
 
There is no reason for Intel to be considered a monopoly because AMD is doing themselves in unfortunately. The past court cases are done and over with and the damage is already done. Do I want AMD do go out of business or Intel to be a monopoly? Nope but, I cannot control what happens.
 
Kuromizu said:
If ZEN performs within 5% of skylake, is good on power, and has similar features, I'd buy AMD just because I like them.
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I would too, because i like Red Color + underdogs.
But i think most people won't. I am sure most PC buyers don't even know what AMD is.
The ones who build their own, like us, seem to know but seem to hate too.
 
Does something LEGAL stop intel from selling i3s @ 300$ if they are the only ones in the market?
 
a3venom said:
Does something LEGAL stop intel from selling i3s @ 300$ if they are the only ones in the market?
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Well, not that I know of. After all, back in the early 90's, my Pentium Overdrive chip set me back about $300 so, it could happen again. Probably will not because of the pricing they have set already but, slowly increasing prices are not out of the realm of possibility.
 
ManofGod said:
Well, not that I know of. After all, back in the early 90's, my Pentium Overdrive chip set me back about $300 so, it could happen again. Probably will not because of the pricing they have set already but, slowly increasing prices are not out of the realm of possibility.
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That would be pretty scary. Maybe we will see products with a much larger life cycle then, atleast on the consumer level.
 
a3venom said:
That would be pretty scary. Maybe we will see products with a much larger life cycle then, atleast on the consumer level.
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We already have a much longer life cycle. Late 90s early 2000s I've been replacing my CPU/GPU every six months on average. My last three CPUs lasted me over 2 years.

Slowly increasing prices are happening already too. A few years ago high end GPUs were around $400, and now we're getting close to $1000. The inflation wasn't that high.
 
M76 said:
We already have a much longer life cycle. Late 90s early 2000s I've been replacing my CPU/GPU every six months on average. My last three CPUs lasted me over 2 years.

Slowly increasing prices are happening already too. A few years ago high end GPUs were around $400, and now we're getting close to $1000. The inflation wasn't that high.
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i think the life cycle has already ended if a new flagship arrives? Correct me if I am wrong? Again just bored at work today.
What I meant was more time between flagship releases/refreshes from Intel, Maybe new gen after every 4 years.

You're right about the second point.
 
a3venom said:
i think the life cycle has already ended if a new flagship arrives? Correct me if I am wrong? Again just bored at work today.
What I meant was more time between flagship releases/refreshes from Intel, Maybe new gen after every 4 years.

You're right about the second point.
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Intel's tick/tock life cycle is about the same speed as it ever was. So flagships are still being put out at the same cycle. The problem is that performance is only increasing 15-25% per release. Its not like the good/bad old days where you had a 486 dx133 and then a year later you had a pentium 60 and then a year later a pentium 166 and then a year later a pentium 2 233...

As for video cards, eh a good one has always been $400-500 for the past decade. Now if you want the "cards" that are really 2 sli's on the same pcb, yea you can get in to the $1000 range.
 
Regardless of Zen, it'll depend on what the chips go in. APUs are one slice of the pie, then servers, (don't know what they make for phones), etc. Corporate synergy could save them. Unless they get a lobotomy, marketing clearing isn't going to.
 
I voted wrong in the poll. I thought those numbers were in MONTHS, so I chose 10-15 :D

3-5 *YEARS* is the shortest duration in the poll? :rolleyes:

You're smoking crack if you think AMD will even be around at the end of next year or two. They've borrowed all they can, sold all the property they can to staunch the bleeding, but they continue to lose a hundred plus million or more dollars a quarter (even after they cut essential investments like R&D). They have 800 million left in the bank, so you can guess how many years it will take to go though that (1-2).

They'll get less bleeding due to the upswing in console buying in the holidays, but that's it. By the time they have Zen next year they'll barely have the money to build and ship it! And I don't really know who the market for 8-core GPU-less Zen is, since AMD is not going to get back into servers in any measure before the company runs out of money. It takes YEARS to get server design wins when your competition is already fantastic. And the Mobile workstation market is swallowing the desktop workstation market, so Zen better be efficient enough to compete with Intel's 35-45w quad cores if they want to get in on those high-margin designs.

AMD's server market share is 1.5%, so they're basically dead in the water. I'm absolutely amazed that it dropped below 5% since 2013, but then with AMD's incredibly crappy management anything is possible! Without a massive performance differential like the Athlon 64 versus the P4, that mountain is not moving.

Or are you going to tell me that somehow magically Carrizo is selling like hotcakes? Or that all those "sold out" Fury X cards mean AMD is moving millions of units this quarter, instead of not being able to meet vendor demand due to poor yields?
 
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This obviously TOTALLY depends on their next gen products, CPU and GPU.
In any case they wont be going away in the next couple of years, and I see the poll does reflect that, so props there, but beyond that it's impossible to tell.

Next gen CPU is mediocre? Well, things won't be looking good, but I doubt it would be the death knell, they have survived a long time with mediocre CPU perf. Obviously if Zen is really good, then that will bring back a lot of enthusiast mind-share as well. Its that erosion of mindshare that is AMD's biggest issue..

Which brings me to: Next gen GPU's. If they are not competitive on perf? Then they are pretty much done. They really need the next gen GPU's to do well. They have lost a lot of mindshare with the current Fiji situation. However what they are doing with the prices is the correct thing to do, besides the fact that it pisses off some people. Those are the same people that will flock back when/if HD4000/5000 series price/perf comes back. See the thing is due to the supply constraints, they will sell every Fiji GPU that they can make, so they might as well sell them for high prices and make as much off them as they can. However anyone who thinks that premium/high pricing is AMD's new strategy and will continue beyond the Fiji parts has no friggin clue, LOL.

AMD will DEFINITELY not be gone in a matter of months, LOL. I mean WORST case is AMD will sell off the GPU division, and maybe some of the CPU stuff, but it wont just disappear in a cloud of dust, lol.
 
extide said:
AMD will DEFINITELY not be gone in a matter of months, LOL. I mean WORST case is AMD will sell off the GPU division, and maybe some of the CPU stuff, but it wont just disappear in a cloud of dust, lol.
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That's the last thing they can do to keep afloat, but it won't help them. Without GPU tech AMD is dead in the water, because the entire PC market is NOT GROWING, it's shrinking! And they will not produce a more capable architecture than Intel, so they will not make any headway trying to consume Intel's market share. In fact, AMD's market share has collapsed over the last year due to the downturn, even with massive price cuts on their APUs. Do you think just the CPUs alone would do any better?

In addition to the PC market contracting, Intel has no obvious under-served holes in their product lineup like they did back in the days of the K6: the Pentium MMX and the cacheless Celeron pretty much sucked, and were an easy target for AMD!

Today's Intel product lineup is completely different: from the Celeron to Core i7, all chips are current and share most of the same technology. The only major differentiators are clock speed, core/thread count and iGPU - but you can still get a highly functional system with a lowly $45 Celeron. And then there's Bay Trail if you want to go even cheaper.

It's a lot harder to convince an OEM to take a chance on your product when the market is contracting. More choices means more inventory and design costs (especially since they don't use compatible buses like the Pentium MMX and the K6 did).
 
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A better question, how long till they file bankruptcy, or get gobbled up by someone else.
 
defaultluser said:
That's the last thing they can do to keep afloat, but it won't help them. Without GPU tech AMD is dead in the water, because the entire PC market is NOT GROWING, it's shrinking! And they will not produce a more capable architecture than Intel, so they will not make any headway trying to consume Intel's market share. In fact, AMD's market share has collapse over the last year due to the downturn, even with massive price cuts on their APUs. Do you think just the CPUs alone would do any better?

In addition to the PC market contracting, Intel has no obvious under-served holes in their product lineup like they did back in the days of the K6: the Pentium MMX and the Cacheless Celeron pretty much sucked, and were an easy target for AMD!

Today's Intel product lineup is completely different: from the Celeron to Core i7, all chips are current and share most of the same technology. The only major differentiators are clock speed, core count and iGPU - but you can still get a highly functional system with a lowly $45 Celeron. And then there's Bay Trail if you want to go even cheaper.

It's a lot harder to convince an OEM to take a chance on your product when the market is contracting. More choices means more inventory and design costs (especially since they don't use compatible buses like the Pentium MMX and the K6 did).
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Well, thats not what I meant. What I meant is if they DO go bankrupt they won't just disappear into the night, parts will be spun off, but yeah that won't be AMD anymore.
 
extide said:
Well, thats not what I meant. What I meant is if they DO go bankrupt they won't just disappear into the night, parts will be spun off, but yeah that won't be AMD anymore.
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Yeah, the GPU tech is easy to spin-off, but the buyer will probably wait until the market share is single digits, so they can buy it for a song and stop making cards without pissing off too many hardcore fans. They'll make some sort of short-term commitment about driver development, and that will be that. Intel is the only one whose GPU market share is growing, and it's at the expense of discrete GPUs.

AMD's x86 CPU license cannot be transferred without a major bit of negotiations with Intel. Because Intel holds the original x86 technology, they set the terms. So Intel can continue to use x86-64 even after AMD either dies or gets purchased.
 
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AMD has a problem where R&D is pretty low and people seriously are writing that AMD has to beat Intel. When you look at it from that perspective AMD does okay, low R&D and stil not that bad. AMD has the misfortune to be stuck on a certain manufacturing process all these years. When you compare them with Intel this of course will make most of "us" pessimistic.
Looking at the console side of things you can see that AMD can perform some people dismiss this to easily when sizing up AMD consoles show AMD is by far the best option for this market.

If you want to discuss how long will AMD wil survive do this after ZEN has launched when we know how well the manufacturing process is performing. If you want to look at something positive take a look at how many consoles last generation sold. Supposedly this generation will break those records...
 
If the performance of zen is with in 10 percent of intel, you will see their server market share go up and they will be fine. The whole reason they bought SeaMicro was for their power saving software. You couple that with a processor that is almost as fast as intel and they will survive no problem.

I also feel if they can make the cpu part of their apus almost as fast as intel, then there is no reason they don't corner the laptop and tablet market. AMD's gpu part of the apu is better than intels chips.
 
If Via is still in business then AMD can do it too.

Not saying they'll be in a great spot 15 years from now, though.
 
Hell, if Zen performs like my 4790k I'll pick one up. I believe that it should be far enough to at least stomp my 4790k. It would be nice to get Skylake performance out of it. Imagine if AMD had a competent CPU in between the 6600k and 6700k in performance, but leaning closer to the 6700k. With this apparent shortage of 6700k's AMD would be making a killing. I still don't know why AMD has yet to make an 8 or at least 6 core APU for the FM platform, with or without graphics. Their's a lot of "Captain Hindsight" when it comes to AMD...Why didn't they just die-shrink Deneb, and have a fused dual-deneb core and have a high-clocked 8-core that would have been extraordinarily competitive with sandybridge, especially in multi-threaded apps.
 
Ryun said:
If Via is still in business then AMD can do it too.

Not saying they'll be in a great spot 15 years from now, though.
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Via is on the edge of bankruptcy. Check their numbers, they haven't turned a profit in five years.

http://www.bloomberg.com/research/s...dataset=balanceSheet&period=A&currency=native

They also haven't gotten any stupid fools to give them money in four years, Eventually the banks catch on, no matter how good the company's golden days were.

AMD is headed for the same fate. It's hard to command a high margin in a market where anyone with a few dozen techs on staff can build a simple chip and fab it at TSMC. The tiny niche embedded x86 market VIA cornered until 2008 disappeared overnight when Intel released the Atom, and then AMD released Bobcat.

When you're a one-trick pony, it's easy for another pony to copy your trick and do it better. AMD is on their way to becoming another one-trick pony. If they sell off ATI they will have cash to survive another couple years, but they will have become that one-trick pony.

But if they keep the company running in it's current form, they'll go bankrupt in two years.
 
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What scares me about there not being any other major players isn't the rise in prices over time (though that is a close second), it's the lack of innovation that happens. It simply won't drive technology forward nearly as aggressively as I would argue it should be. AMD making the first 64bit dual core desktop CPU's in a way force Intel to get rid of crappy P4's with HT that could cook eggs but not FPS.
 
Society is about to collapse as a whole anyways. There will be no electricity to power all your gadgets so it doesnt really matter anyways....

muhaha
 
I'm honestly BORED of Intel chips. Sure they do this and they do that but I want to have a satisfaction of using something else that is just as fast if not faster. I wished AMD will do something great in the next iteration of whatever they release. Maybe release the first 128bit CPU. Atleast they will be doing something that drives innovation.
 
IMHO biggest danger is in next 12 months - if they make it to the point where Zen is on the market in volumen they should be fine for next few years since it will be more competitive than current offerings.
 
When you talk about Zen, keep in mind that the only release date info we have is "2016". AMD may well find themselves competing with Kaby Lake instead of Skylake if they can't get Zen out before 2H 2016.
 
I really don't think AMD will survive past 2016 when their revenue and marketshare for both the CPU and GPU business are in shambles, much less the more lucrative portable and server market.

Mobile? LOL GG ARM is already more than good enough here, even Intel can't break this segment here by bribing OEMs to use Baytrail which is actually a decent mobile SoC.

Even during the A64 2003-05 golden days AMD won only because Intel gave them a free pass by not using the Pentium M on the desktop, and ATI was the much stronger company before they stupidly allowed themselves to be bought out by AMD only to end up being mismanaged into oblivion.
 
Palladium@SG said:
I really don't think AMD will survive past 2016 when their revenue and marketshare for both the CPU and GPU business are in shambles, much less the more lucrative portable and server market.

Mobile? LOL GG ARM is already more than good enough here, even Intel can't break this segment here by bribing OEMs to use Baytrail which is actually a decent mobile SoC.

Even during the A64 2003-05 golden days AMD won only because Intel gave them a free pass by not using the Pentium M on the desktop, and ATI was the much stronger company before they stupidly allowed themselves to be bought out by AMD only to end up being mismanaged into oblivion.
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You couldn't be more wrong about this, AMD showed that pouring money into a dead segment as AM3+ is not something they consider good business, this should tell you that when they don't have anything to go for they don't blindly go all in for the sake of going all in.... On other fronts where Intel is bribing the crap out of the OEM (funnelling money in the legal way of course ;) ) they also stopped pushing those areas.

ARM has some nice attributes Jim Keller already did some good stuff for Apple why doubt him now ?
If you look at Intel and their superior manufacturing process they got their ass handed to them by ARM which didn't have the same head start. Intel was to busy beating their own chest on how well they were beating AMD ......If you look at AMD management people are complaining but the complacency of Intel shows you that vision in the cpu industry is still based on greed rather then pushing the cpu forward...
 
evilsofa said:
When you talk about Zen, keep in mind that the only release date info we have is "2016". AMD may well find themselves competing with Kaby Lake instead of Skylake if they can't get Zen out before 2H 2016.
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We already know summit ridge won't be coming any earlier than Q4 2016.
 
Semiaccurate ran a pay wall story about this.
From fudzilla story :
Hopes are high that a super star CPU designer Jim Keller can put AMD roadmap back in order. He and his talented team have been working for a while on a brand new architecture codenamed Zen, but we don’t expect to see Zen for at least couple more quarters. On the graphics side, the company can compete in the higher end market but it doesn’t really had much new to offer in mainstream and entry level.
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Figured this was happening, look at the basic math:

AMD Net Valuation: ~$1.2 Billion
Total Debt: ~$2.2 Billion
Cash on Hand: ~$800 Million
Losses last Quarter: ~$400 Million

AMD was in danger of running out of cash before the Zen release. This also tells me to expect another big (> $100 Million) loss this quarter. The fact the article hints at another restructure is farther proof of this.

AMD is bleeding cash, and frankly, can Zen by itself be a big enough improvement to allow a $400 Million a quarter turnaround? I doubt it. I think AMD is going to break up when it's debt turns over in 2019-2020. I simply don't see them raising the $1 Billion needed to pay of their debts.
 
Between today's AMD leadership and the long reaching consequences of Hector Ruiz bringing down AMD, I do not see them lasting more than a few more years either. Their CPU's, APU's and Graphics cards are all quite good but, since they cannot get them into OEM's in any appreciable quantity, it makes no real difference.

I am seriously thinking the AMD higher ups are not really worried about the future of the company, just themselves. Hopefully, Jim Keller can go back to Apple or be snatched up by another company. I want Zen to succeed but, with so little information about it and no push to sell what they have right now, I do not see how that will be possible.
 
Never underestimate AMD's ability to run without making any money. The company is quite good at it.
 
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