Is AMD Still Relevant?

[PRIME1]

I do agree with both of you. I was thinking about the release of Windows 8 and the years ahead. The way I see it there is just a matter of time before ARM is being pushed into both desktop PC's and, more importantly, notebooks. Better performing chips and a lower price than what Intel and, of course, AMD can deliver should make these interesting for normal consumers.

x86 is relevant today but in five years? I'm not so sure about that.

I think an ARM based laptop/desktop will be able to do what most people use a PC for. Google and Apple are rumored to be moving their mobile OS upwards towards the laptop/desktop and NVIDIA is working on a full ARM based CPU.

x86 has peaked and will see it's market shrink. Granted even if they lost half of their market in 5 years they would still be fine.

x86 will be around for a long time and so will PC gaming. Just not on the scale we see today.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Exactly.

Wintel has never been bigger. There was a monentary sales slump during the recession, but the Wintel market grew last year and just continues to grow.

There are other devices that are used in addition to the Wintel market, but Wintel isn't going anywhere for a long time.

In fact, if this market prediction is accurate, there will be 50% more PC's in use in the world in 2015 than there were in 2010, and 75% more in 2020.

People talking about PC or Wintel going away are just silly, and have no idea what they are talking about. Eventually it may happen, but we are a LONG LONG LONG way away from that.

Other markets are growing, yes, and as they do, mobile parts will become a bigger and bigger share of the likes of Intel and AMD's sales, but PCs will continue to grow for a long time.

One thing we have to keep in mind is that outside of developing markets, the PC market is pretty much saturated. Everyone who wants/needs one probably has one at this point, and sales are predominantly for upgrades/replacements of existing ones, and thus don't contribute to growth This means that PC market growth is limited to population increases as well as selling in developing regions where people buy their first PC's as they start earning real money for the first times in their lives.

Smartphones and tablets have been growing as explosively as they have because not that many years ago the market didn't exist at all, and they had plenty of people to expand to. With the amount of sales they have had, eventually the smartphone market will taper off as well, as it becomes saturated, and everyone who wants/needs a smartphone already has one, again limiting most sales to replacements/upgrades and market growth to population increases and developing markets.

The smartphone market has one advantage in that people tend to upgrade their devices every two years or so, but people tend to keep their PC's much longer. If this trend keeps up, the overall sales once we reach the taper off point should be much higher for smartphones than for PC's. Add to this that many families share a PC, but all have individual cellphones.

The corporate markets are the opposite though. Most users will have PC's, but not as many will be issued smartphones.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

I think an ARM based laptop/desktop will be able to do what most people use a PC for. Google and Apple are rumored to be moving their mobile OS upwards towards the laptop/desktop and NVIDIA is working on a full ARM based CPU.

x86 has peaked and will see it's market shrink. Granted even if they lost half of their market in 5 years they would still be fine.

x86 will be around for a long time and so will PC gaming. Just not on the scale we see today.

I see x86 shrinking from a market share perspective, but not from an overall volume perspective. I see overall volume going up, but that alternatives to x86 will be growing faster, and thus making the relative market share lower.

 

[ManofGod]

Intel made some mistakes with the Netburst architecture and that did aid AMD. Just because you have a better product doesn't mean your competitor didn't screw up. I had a number of AMD CPUs in my gaming rigs and was happy. But AMD really is dropping the ball in the CPU space. Their integrated graphics solutions are very good, probably courtesy of ATI. But it's been six years since AMD had done anything really of note in the CPU space, since the launch of Intel's Core architecture. And again, they had almost nothing at Computex in the Windows 8 space, and flop or not, the vast bulk of x86 machines that are going to be sold this fall with be running Windows 8. That's just not a good sign.

At the very least AMD probably needs about 20 to 30 touch capable Windows 8 designs in the market to anything of interest to sell this fall. Intel is claiming they have around 100 such designs in the pipeline from various OEMS.

At this point it's not even a matter of the quality of AMDs hardware, they simply don't have enough product even in the market place it looks going forward. And the game is being upped this year. Good looking, solid quality hardware seems to be the name of the game. Prices are always important but cheap crap isn't going to sell that well nor make much profit.

But it does look like AMD has the edge in IGP performance by a good bit. Some Windows 8 devices targeted at gaming, graphics oriented stuff, at the right price and quality points, those might do pretty well.

This seriously disappoints me and . The fact is, I like AMD hardware, I have an Acer W500 that works great, but if AMD does not get off their butt and I mean now, they will be quickly a footnote in history.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

This seriously disappoints me and . The fact is, I like AMD hardware, I have an Acer W500 that works great, but if AMD does not get off their butt and I mean now, they will be quickly a footnote in history.

I'm thinking the recently announced E1-1200 and E2-1800 replacing the E-240, E-350 and E-450 might play a role here. The original Zacate chips were VERY successful, just hampered by AMD's ability to keep up with demand.

 

[heatlesssun]

Exactly.

Wintel has never been bigger. There was a monentary sales slump during the recession, but the Wintel market grew last year and just continues to grow.

There are other devices that are used in addition to the Wintel market, but Wintel isn't going anywhere for a long time.

In fact, if this market prediction is accurate, there will be 50% more PC's in use in the world in 2015 than there were in 2010, and 75% more in 2020.

People talking about PC or Wintel going away are just silly, and have no idea what they are talking about. Eventually it may happen, but we are a LONG LONG LONG way away from that.

Other markets are growing, yes, and as they do, mobile parts will become a bigger and bigger share of the likes of Intel and AMD's sales, but PCs will continue to grow for a long time.

No PCs and desktops aren't going away anytime soon. As much as people have said that Microsoft is dropping the desktop and going to Metro. That makes ZERO sense. The Windows desktop is perhaps Microsoft's biggest advatage in the computing landscape. Nothing is better supported or deployed in all the IT world.

Windows 8 is as much for Intel and Microsoft's PC partners as it is for Microsoft. We can argue about the UI changes to Windows 8 all day long but the fact is that Windows 8 running an an x86 tablet can do everything an iPad does, everything an Android tablet does and everything Windows 7 does. One device can do it all.

And if you look at the devices that came out at Computex, it's pretty clear that Intel and PC OEMs are pushing designs based on Windows 8 ability to do it all. Even AMD should up with one lonely hybrid prototype. They want a piece of that action as well.