Re: AMD Bulldozer Criticism

[Dan_D]

Interesting. I'll have to see if I can dig up your opinion on i3 and i5 since as you say, you only care about absolute performance.

Go for it. I'll recommend those processors when they make sense for other people. For myself, I tend to go with the biggest and baddest hardware I can find.

There's a difference between his opinion as an editor (or when giving advice to others) and his opinion for his personal hardware. I might prefer absolute performance for my personal machine but I sure as hell won't recommend that to my parents. FWIW all I care about is what is best in the price bracket that I'm looking at. I suppose you could say that of everyone as long as you realize some people's price bracket is "unlimited"

Exactly. I've recommended all kinds of CPUs to different people for different things. It all depends on what they are going to use the system for and how much they are willing to spend. For my own hardware I typically only care about performance at the time I buy. Well that's not entirely accurate. I do care about performance vs. price, but it's not that big a factor unless the performance gap is small and the price gap is large. I got my 980X for $699.99 rather than spend the extra $300 on the 990X. The clock speed differences are insignificant at stock speeds and since I overclock, the 990X couldn't be justified. I could have gone with a 2600K and normally I'd recommend that right now vs. anything else, but I do a lot of encoding so the 980X was a nicer fit for me.

But generally speaking, performance is the most important factor when choosing my hardware.

 

[Topweasel]

tdp difference is 35w, that translates into a bit more at the wall.

i know what i'm doing, this isn't my first rodeo

That's the 80 plus gold. But its TDP, its named as such because its the most amount of power that the chip will put out. If it wasn't then the would call it Constant Power Draw or something like that. So again at worst case 35w while it can be well bellow that in more idle states where not all of the CPU is being used.

But just in the terms of a Power supply the difference at 400w with a 80 plus and a 80plus gold more then makes up for it. Or the difference between a 6950 and a 6970. I don't mind buying the "cooler" chip if every single else is the same. But in the end buying a better PSU and UPS is a much better solution on a performance desktop end then fretting over a max power usage difference like 35w.

Edit: Just say the Bitech review their Idle test is Effed. I found Anandtechs review and whole platform it was only 5 watts at idle less. To keep 32w like that, Speed step and other power management would have to have been turned off.

 

[LightningCrash]

That's the 80 plus gold. But its TDP, its named as such because its the most amount of power that the chip will put out. If it wasn't then the would call it Constant Power Draw or something like that. So again at worst case 35w while it can be well bellow that in more idle states where not all of the CPU is being used.

But just in the terms of a Power supply the difference at 400w with a 80 plus and a 80plus gold more then makes up for it. Or the difference between a 6950 and a 6970. I don't mind buying the "cooler" chip if every single else is the same. But in the end buying a better PSU and UPS is a much better solution on a performance desktop end then fretting over a max power usage difference like 35w.

80 PLUS is an initiative to promote energy efficiency in computer power supplies.
I linked you to measured power consumption. Worst case is over 35W as demonstrated by the link. My machines Fold, they don't idle.

Nobody's fretting but you. Given the same price, same performance, I'm going to look next at power consumption. Just a logical progression.

 

[SicKlown42012]

Perhaps they just have a lot of incompetent engineers in the CPU division compared to Intel while all the people they brought in from ATI actually know what they're doing?

AMD is full of smart engineers. The problem for them is the very limited R&D budget compared to Intel and the much smaller engineering force. The fact that AMD can compete at all with Intel on the CPU front(they might not be faster, but they are a perfectly usable alternative) is a big deal when you look at resources. Anyone expecting them to be able to match Intel release after release in regard to high-end performance is deluding themselves.

 

[Dan_D]

AMD is full of smart engineers. The problem for them is the very limited R&D budget compared to Intel and the much smaller engineering force. The fact that AMD can compete at all with Intel on the CPU front(they might not be faster, but they are a perfectly usable alternative) is a big deal when you look at resources. Anyone expecting them to be able to match Intel release after release in regard to high-end performance is deluding themselves.

I've always thought this as well. Competing against a company as large as Intel in any way speaks volumes for their capabilities and talent. Most people can't totally grasp the size difference between the two.

 

[Shalafi]

Perhaps but Intel caters to the performance/enthusiast crowd and its worked out pretty well for them.

I just don't see how marketing to the people that don't give a crap, is a good thing. Even the people that don't care are still likely to browse a website or two before plunking down $1000 for a computer and if "Intel is performance king" is all they find, chances are thats what they're gonna go after even in the low priced stuff. Being cheapest isn't the best marketing strategy IMO.

Ever heard of Wal Mart? Low Prices Everyday!!! That's AMD's marketing slogan as well. Seems successful to me, of course they probably won't ever outsell Intel, but it still works enough to make AMD a dollar or two.

History, I suppose. To ignore Intel's past abuse of the market and consumers, and then have websites and forum posters try to sweep it under the rug and pretend IntEl's historic actions doesn't reflect their culture as a company, brings those websites and forum posters credibility seriously in to question. IMO

As for the $1000 FX CPU's, you may recall they were still cheaper than the lower performing and much less desirable CPU's from the competition

I bought the $1031 FX-60 when Oblivion came out, I was quite happy with my purchase then, however, knowing what I know now, I wouldn't buy a top end processor again, it's rarely neccessary, which brings me to my next answer.

So called budget processors makes 95% of the revenue for Intel. AMD's strategy is to get 100% of their revenue from budget processors, ignoring the 5% from enthusiasts who will pay Intel's hefty Extreme series premiums. That being said, the i7 2600k is a superb "budget" processor, if the best Bulldozer ends up trading blows with it (well, winning in Folding is all I care about anyways), I'm satisfied. If it can't match the 2600K at all, then it'll end up being 10, 20, 30% cheaper, but AMD survives to fight another day. The only result that I'd be seriously concerned with is if it is slower on 8 threaded tasks than the 2600k at the same clock (8 versus 4 cores).

AMD's strategy is to make a dollar, and to pick it's battles, that's why their strategy is focused on budget processors, it's focused at the market that exists for them to sell their product to at a price the market will bear, it's capitalism at it's finest. They provide a reasonable PPD (performance per dollar) for their chips and offer a good upgrade path with their motherboards and being reuseable across newer chips.

Performance per dollar is all that counts. At the end of the day the HOW doesn't matter. AMD is very much competing with Sandy Bridge here. To bring the 990x into the conversation is just a bit silly.

I don't care if AMD needs 10Ghz and 15 cores to do it. If my 200 bucks buys me faster silicon from AMD than Intel I'm buying AMD. If not, well then....

The delays and lack of promotional "leaks" makes me think AMD has something to hide or at least spin.

It's incorrect to say that PPD is all that counts, when someone decides that money isn't a factor and that performance is all that matters and they are willing to pay what it takes to achieve the performance they desire, it renders the PPD argument moot. A budget minded consumer is the one most interested in PPD, or shall I say a person who isn't mad at his wallet.

Well when folks have far less money in their pockets like a lot right now do, it doesnt hurt.

Quite so, but that's not true of everybody of course.

Frankly, I'm excited to see what Bulldozer brings to the table, if anything. For the record, I've only owned 2 Intel processors, the one in my laptop, a dual core 2.33 ghz, and a Pentium 3 I believe. The rest have been AMD chips including the one in my current desktop rig.

 

[Pieter3dnow]

Im thinking that the anticipation and the whole hype around bulldozer is just to keep people talking. Still "people" claim that performance of single thread is important while everything is moving towards multiple threads....

For the hardcore people like Dan they will buy Intel that is what they want, on the other hand if no one would buy AMD you start to pay premium prices again for mid range cpu (like when the Pentium arrived).

I'm not to concerned ipc or best performance.

 

[Dan_D]

Im thinking that the anticipation and the whole hype around bulldozer is just to keep people talking. Still "people" claim that performance of single thread is important while everything is moving towards multiple threads....

For the hardcore people like Dan they will buy Intel that is what they want, on the other hand if no one would buy AMD you start to pay premium prices again for mid range cpu (like when the Pentium arrived).

I'm not to concerned ipc or best performance.

I don't always buy Intel. I had my share of Athlon 64's and two dual CPU Opteron machines. One of which was a dual Opteron 254 rig which is among the most expensive systems I've ever owned. Again, you won't pay premium prices for all Intel CPUs if AMD disappeared tomorrow. The market won't tolerate it. Not with the proliferation of sub-$600 computers. When the Pentium came out the average price of a computer was north of $1,200. We didn't have $600 GPUs and hard drives, RAM and a few other things made up the cost of the PC. Motherboards and power supplies were much cheaper etc. A CPU could make up a lot of that cost and that was OK. These days the market has different expectations. Even when there isn't much competition if any, supply and demand still effect the price of any product. Consumers demand cheaper and cheaper computers all the time. I don't know why some of you have a hard time seeing that.

A few things are almost certain though. Intel would probably milk an architecture for a lot longer than they do now and we wouldn't see price drops nearly as often without the competition. But we'd still have our sub-$150 processors and $1,000 Extreme Editions either way.

 

[drescherjm]

For the hardcore people like Dan they will buy Intel that is what they want

At home and at work (yes my work department) I am running at about 4 to 5 AMD processors to every Intel processor purchase since 1999. However my last two home purchases have been Intel. The reason for both are at the time of the purchase AMD did not have any processor that was at the level of performance that I wanted. In November 2008 when I purchased my Q9550 system to replace my dual processor opteron 285, AMD did not have any quad core processor that would have been a significant upgrade for what I already had. Last April, when I got my i7 920 (to run VMs), AMD again did not have any processor at the performance level I wanted.

 

[Harry1969]

That being said, the i7 2600k is a superb "budget" processor, if the best Bulldozer ends up trading blows with it (well, winning in Folding is all I care about anyways), I'm satisfied.

At $300 I don't consider the i7 2600 a budget processor. It's more of an upper midrange part imo. If it was a budget part I'd have one right now since it's such an awesome performer and overclocker. That said I'll buy BD if multithreaded performance is competitive with SB.

 

[next-Jin]

At $300 I don't consider the i7 2600 a budget processor. It's more of an upper midrange part imo. If it was a budget part I'd have one right now since it's such an awesome performer and overclocker. That said I'll buy BD if multithreaded performance is competitive with SB.

Do you consider the 2500k at 180-215 buget?

 

[MacLeod]

Ever heard of Wal Mart? Low Prices Everyday!!! That's AMD's marketing slogan as well. Seems successful to me, of course they probably won't ever outsell Intel, but it still works enough to make AMD a dollar or two.

Why yes I have. Not the same thing. Ever heard of Daewoo cars or Dynex tv's, or Jensen stereos? They're all very cheap and damn year flea market quality. If somebody wants a cheap car they still probably won't buy one cause its associated with a flea market brand. They'll run out and buy a cheap Honda or Toyota instead. I think it'll be the same with this. If somebody wants a cheap computer, they'll hear how AMD is the Daewoo of CPU's and Intel is what that big boys run so they may be more likely to opt for the Intel for $20 more. Remember, the i3 is barely over $100 yet spanked AMD's current flagship proc in most benchmarks so Intel ain't gonna be too far off from that " budget" price point so that's another reason not to put all your eggs in the "we're the cheapest" basket.

So I'm of the opinion that if AMD just wants to be the $100 and below king that's fine, I'm sure they can make some money but I think they'd sale more budget procs if they have a reputation for badass performance and not as a "Walmart brand". They don't necessarily need to be better than Intel, just competitive.

 

[Shalafi]

Why yes I have. Not the same thing. Ever heard of Daewoo cars or Dynex tv's, or Jensen stereos? They're all very cheap and damn year flea market quality. If somebody wants a cheap car they still probably won't buy one cause its associated with a flea market brand. They'll run out and buy a cheap Honda or Toyota instead. I think it'll be the same with this. If somebody wants a cheap computer, they'll hear how AMD is the Daewoo of CPU's and Intel is what that big boys run so they may be more likely to opt for the Intel for $20 more. Remember, the i3 is barely over $100 yet spanked AMD's current flagship proc in most benchmarks so Intel ain't gonna be too far off from that " budget" price point so that's another reason not to put all your eggs in the "we're the cheapest" basket.

So I'm of the opinion that if AMD just wants to be the $100 and below king that's fine, I'm sure they can make some money but I think they'd sale more budget procs if they have a reputation for badass performance and not as a "Walmart brand". They don't necessarily need to be better than Intel, just competitive.

In summary: R and D budget. I don't need to expound any further than that. I don't think that Bulldozer will be the killer product that AMD is hyping it to be, but if it turns out that I'm wrong, that'd be a pleasant surprise.

BTW, [H]'s own tests have shown that for gaming purposes, you're more limited by what graphics card you have rather than what process your have, because the games just aren't out to bring processors to their knees yet. Multicore gaming has become more and more common lately, but some games don't even take full advantage of quad cores yet, and many are released that are able to run just fine on medium spec computers, and that's for dual reasons.

1) The scourge of consolitis (do I really gotta explain?)

2) Their research has shown that us gamers with top end systems aren't a majority, we are actually a small minority, most gamers go with a game system from Wal Mart, Best Buy, or some offbrand shit they buy off Newegg, or cheap parts they procured and built themselves. They know their target demographics, and with the economy being what it is, there just aren't that many folks going out there and buying $1,000 processors and $700 video cards.

So why make a game when nobody has the hardware to take advantage of it? Look at the games that are most popular on the Steam listings, most of them can be run with your average computer. Those are the demographics that AMD targets, but not all gamers are going to buy an AMD chip, some of them are just content with Intel's second tier offerings (i5 socket processors) and would rather go with the big name brand (Intel) than AMD.

Intel is simply the best known processor brand and AMD has only really traded blows with Intel when the Athlon chips came out, by God, those were great chips, but since then, AMD simply hasn't been up to par, but they have focused on the market they can sell their products to, and it has worked.

You don't have to agree with everything in this post, but I don't really think you can make a good case for the basic premise of it being incorrect.

 

[Zoomer]

Sometimes we are assuming that people care what processor is in the machine. If they are that uninformed, they might just stroll into bestbuy, look at laptops in their price range, and pick the pink Sony VAIO (crap series).

 

[kirtar]

Sometimes we are assuming that people care what processor is in the machine. If they are that uninformed, they might just stroll into bestbuy, look at laptops in their price range, and pick the pink Sony VAIO (crap series).

Most of the time they probably don't care. At best the average person might ask a hw enthusiast to pick or build something.

As for the Sony part... I'd personally only do sony if it was the Z series. 1080p on a 13.3" is badass overkill.

 

[Michaelius]

Those are the demographics that AMD targets, but not all gamers are going to buy an AMD chip, some of them are just content with Intel's second tier offerings (i5 socket processors) and would rather go with the big name brand (Intel) than AMD.

You realize that for gaming starting with i3 2100 and anywhere up from it Intel Cpus are better choices for gaming rig?

That second tier Intel i5 stomps AMD best cpus into ground , to the point where stock i5 2400 outperforms X6 at 4 GHz?

 

[e-geek]

"...Again, you won't pay premium prices for all Intel CPUs if AMD disappeared tomorrow. The market won't tolerate it."

I bet intel would find it harder moving sandybridge and cpu advancements would seem idle for a while as they milk SB.

I wonder if everyone jumped ship to lga1155/1366 if intel would end of line these faster so you have to buy sandy?(assuming amd was gone)

 

[teletran8]

You realize that for gaming starting with i3 2100 and anywhere up from it Intel Cpus are better choices for gaming rig?

That second tier Intel i5 stomps AMD best cpus into ground , to the point where stock i5 2400 outperforms X6 at 4 GHz?

WOW...UBER MISINFORMATION FAIL POST!

AMD Llano destroys a Intel i3-2100. Try again liar.

Processor only test​

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoq-RBOOQc0&feature=related"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoq-RBOOQc0&feature=related[/ame]

6570 Test​

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXEghqhWDOo"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXEghqhWDOo[/ame]

 

[soulsavior]

WOW...UBER MISINFORMATION FAIL POST!

AMD Llano destroys a Intel i3-2100. Try again liar.

When it says "processor only", I'm pretty sure it means it's testing the two chips without a graphics cards, using the built in video only. It's not surprising the Llano wins, because the HD2000 on the 2100 is horrible. The other test is a bit more interesting, hybrid crossfire might be helping out, but the 6570 still barely counts as a real card. Overall though, I'm pretty sure with a good discrete card (IE: not a 6570), I'm confident the 2100 is better for gaming than Llano. I wonder if anybody has done a comparison of that (using a $200ish video card).

You should really calm down.

 

[AeonF1]

WOW...UBER MISINFORMATION FAIL POST!

AMD Llano destroys a Intel i3-2100. Try again liar.

Hmmm a quad core CPU vs a dual core CPU with handpicked multithreaded friendly benchmarks. Gee I wonder who is gonna win this one.

Anand did a good comparison: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4448/amd-llano-desktop-performance-preview/2
It seems the i3-2100 destroys the A8-3850 anything that is single threaded but trails when it comes to the multithreaded stuff. The A8-3850 seems to be a great CPU if you are avoiding discrete graphics, but its also 40 bucks more than the i3-2100 and just 30 bucks less than a i5-2500k which isn't even fair at this point and not even funny if overclocking is thrown in for both chips. It really depends on what you are doing with them (single or multi-threaded applications, discrete graphics or not) and how much money you willing to spend to get that additional performance. If theres any part of you that is serious about gaming, at this point I recommend a i5-2500k with a discrete card at the minimum, anything below that just screams casual (or very poor) gamer keeping in mind if you are planning to play future titles such as BF3.

 

[Michaelius]

WOW...UBER MISINFORMATION FAIL POST!

AMD Llano destroys a Intel i3-2100. Try again liar.

Try again dude. I'm speaking about GAMING computers not supermarket crap that uses IGP.

Hmm a game which heavily uses multithreading
2 slower intel cores kill X4

A game which uses max of 2 cores. Results speak for themselves.

Another game with great multicore scalling.

Civ 5 loves quad cores and put's them to heavy work.

What those games have in common?
In everysingle one of them slower dual core i3 CPU was faster than 4 "real" AMD Phenom II cores at higher clockspeed.

PS. Please don't commit suicide after I have destroyed your world of delusions and myths.

 

[Pieter3dnow]

Last April, when I got my i7 920 (to run VMs), AMD again did not have any processor at the performance level I wanted.

And that is what I meant , if you want the extra performance and you have the money you go for it.

 

[LightningCrash]

What those games have in common?
In everysingle one of them slower dual core i3 CPU was faster than 4 "real" AMD Phenom II cores at higher clockspeed.

PS. Please don't commit suicide after I have destroyed your world of delusions and myths.

He's talking about Llano not Phenom II X4

 

[AeonF1]

He's talking about Llano not Phenom II X4

True, the A8-3850 has very similiar cpu performance to a Athlon II 645 which is slower than a Phenon II X4 right?

 

[Putz]

I hope AMD comes out with something good just for competition sake, most end users are looking for price per $ as the majority of home users (also the majority of the market aside from business computers) do nothing more than ebay, email, surf and porn. if their pc plays games they are happy, they dont care if they get 30 fps ot 130 fps or what AA or AF is, and most dont even bother to set the games to the monitors native resolution

enthusiasts are a minority, even your average pc gamer has a budget to keep in mind, i think the bad press on bulldozer is because we seen it in roadmaps years ago... and still nothing delivered its like the Duke Nukem forever of the CPU world. I think many of us enthusiasts would also like to look back at the thunderbird days where faster cheaper AMD processors kept intel prices down and only business and the uneducated purchased intel processors

 

[LightningCrash]

True, the A8-3850 has very similiar cpu performance to a Athlon II 645 which is slower than a Phenon II X4 right?

pretty much

 

[drescherjm]

And that is what I meant , if you want the extra performance and you have the money you go for it.

It was not a huge expense for an i7 920. I paid ~$190 US for the used i7 920 and $190 for my EVGA 3SLI + $120 for 6GB of GSkill DDR3. But then added 12 more GB of GSkill DDR3 for the same $120 about 6 months later.

 

[Harry1969]

Do you consider the 2500k at 180-215 buget?

Nope, $125 and under I consider budget, $125- $300 I consider midrange and anything over $300 I consider High end. The Amd X2 560, X4 640 and Intel E5800, E7500 are good examples of budget CPU's imo.

 

[Makaveli@BETA]

He's talking about Llano not Phenom II X4

Actually Michaelius is correct.

Its painfully obvious that guy is an AMD fanboy the dicussion was never about Llano he changed to topic so he could post those selective benchmarks to prove his point.

I'm not gonna even mention that guys other post which is the biggest fail post in this thread.

 

[LightningCrash]

Actually Michaelius is correct.

Its painfully obvious that guy is an AMD fanboy the dicussion was never about Llano he changed to topic so he could post those selective benchmarks to prove his point.

I'm not gonna even mention that guys other post which is the biggest fail post in this thread.

Michaelus made the topic include Llano

Timeline:
Michaelus: You realize that for gaming starting with i3 2100 and anywhere up from it Intel Cpus are better choices for gaming rig?
amd fanboy guy: Llano stomps i3 2100, posts benchmarks
Michaelus: Phenom II X4 benchmarks

 

[Michaelius]

He's talking about Llano not Phenom II X4

Yes PII X4 955
4 cores at 3,4 Ghz with 512 kB of L2 cache per core + 4 MB of L3 cache
Llano
4 cores at 2,9 ghz with 1MB of L2 cache per core

top end Phenom II cpus are faster than Llano

If you make dedicated gaming rig Llano is worst possible choice you can make at this moment.

If you have cash 2500K+P67 is your choice
If you have less cash i3 2100+P67 (or H61 if you don't plan to upgrade and oc later)
If you have even less cash you get Phenom II + am3+ mobo for bulldozer upgrade path
Ultra low budget X3 445 with am3 mobo will cost peanuts and offer good chance to at least unlock 4th core if not L3 cache.

Then you throw any 50+$ gpu and you have better machine than llano.

 

[LightningCrash]

Yes PII X4 955
4 cores at 3,4 Ghz with 512 kB of L2 cache per core + 4 MB of L3 cache
Llano
4 cores at 2,9 ghz with 1MB of L2 cache per core

top end Phenom II cpus are faster than Llano

debate the Phenom II while the 6550 destroys the HD3000

curious

 

[LightningCrash]

oh ok, i see, you're backpedaling on the blanket statement. well i don't disagree there

 

[InternationalHat]

Who the heck builds a gaming machine with a dual core processor now? Even if it is a sandy bridge? I'm pretty sure you have to be beyond inebriated to do anything that silly.

 

[Michaelius]

oh ok, i see, you're backpedaling on the blanket statement. well i don't disagree there

I'm not backpedalling on anything.

i3 2100 > any Thuban/Phenom II/Llano currently released for gaming machine.

 

[InternationalHat]

I'm not backpedalling on anything.

i3 2100 > any Thuban/Phenom II/Llano currently released for gaming machine.

That's ridiculous. How long do you expect that to last? A dual core chip for gaming buys you maybe another 6 months to a year if there are a bunch of crappy console ports. If you're buying on a tight budget, it's unlikely you'll be able to significantly upgrade that quickly.

Then what happens when web workers start getting more use, your office products become many threaded, etc. The chip's going to be in the for sale section faster than you can misspell Sally. It's going to suck just for web games in short enough time.

Llano isn't great, but your rationalizations for i3 2100 are even worse. i3/Thuban/Phenom II/Llano for desktop gaming is not smart. The i3 is a decent HTPC/home server chip when paired with a good discrete card. It also makes sense for family members, basic use machines, etc.

It sorta works for the current crop of games, but that is highly unlikely to continue into the foreseeable future. If gaming is all you care about, buy i7. Llano is a transitional chip. They're expecting OpenCL to come to boost performance in productivity and general purpose applications. Chrome's building GPU acceleration into the browser and IE 9/10 or whatever has already done it to some degree. The better integrated GPU is eventually going to provide a better overall computing experience, not make Metro 20nerd or whatever play faster.

You guys need to stop arguing. Both are stupid for gaming. Buying an i3 for gaming is dumb and desktop llano is overpriced and not any better, and it's too soon for OpenCL to really do anything.

The benefit to llano is that it forces everyone's hands. Laptops will start having better integrated GPUs, AMDs OEM marketing strategy will get better GPUs into the mainstream desktops and pretty soon code can be written to take advantage of an expected GPU on the client no matter the user space. It'll be really nice once the current crop of crap GMA's prior to Intel's HD Graphics are dead and gone.

 

[LightningCrash]

I'm not backpedalling on anything.

First you said it was better in all gaming, then you moved the goalpost to exclude the HD3000.

A smart choice really, the HD3000 isn't so hot.

 

[SuperDuper]

Where do people get crap like this? Intel isn't "face raping" on their prices because the market won't allow them to do so. With consumers demanding cheaper and cheaper computing solutions all the time Intel is unable to charge $300+ for all their processors. That's what market segmenting is all about. Intel would have sub-$150 CPUs whether AMD existed or not. Because of AMD's existence we see Intel more aggressively position some of their processors into lower price points than they might otherwise have done. We also see shorter development cycles as a result of the competition.

Not to be insulting to AMD, but I think people are under the wrong impression that AMD is some kind of good guy and Intel is some how evil. I don't know why people act like AMD is some kind of white knight, or shining example of virtue championing cheaper CPUs for all. They aren't. These are all companies which exist to sell product and make money. Profits are the driving force behind most companies existence and product improvement, R&D etc. are simply how they identify needs of their customer base and create products that will continue to appeal to their needs and desires. It is also how they keep from being steamrolled by their competition. AMD prices their CPUs according to their relative performance as compared to Intel's parts. When the FX series was the fastest CPU around they charged $1,000 for them. They've currently got nothing in the desktop market that can compete with Intel's $500-$1,000 price range. As a result there are no AMD processors that cost that much. I guarantee they would if they could.

QFT. In a free market it would be impossible for Intel to control 100% of the industry with high prices for more than 12 months. There's no such thing as a natural monopoly, and if AMD were to go out of business, someone else would step in the instant intel started jacking up prices, assuming there were no federal barriers to challenge intel.

Yes but you/me are a minority as you say. And we all know minorities dont count.

Intel are forging ahead with ever more powerful CPUs and more and more users are just choosing to stay behind because they dont need them.

Intel needs to look hard at what Joe Average user actually needs and reign things back for a greater part of their product line (not all).

AMD have looked at Joe Average and are concentrating on him. Intel just appear to listen to folks on Hardware forums and want to appease the benchmark freaks. To most they have lost the plot.

In effect Intels products are less and less appealing due to cost to a growing chunk of the PC world. I can build an budget AMD box with a 64GB SSD in it. If I go the cheapest Intel route I have to drop the SSD, offer a soso processor and worst of all a motherboard that lacks a lot of the more modern features the AMD based one will have (USB3.0/e-SATA/HDMI etc.).

All AMD needs to do is promote their products. I even see Acer are now advertising products on UK TV. If they can do it so can AMD.

Then ARM wades in...........

Minorities count in the free market. which is what enables intel to profit off of making $1k+ processors.

 

[JMccovery]

QFT. In a free market it would be impossible for Intel to control 100% of the industry with high prices for more than 12 months. There's no such thing as a natural monopoly, and if AMD were to go out of business, someone else would step in the instant intel started jacking up prices, assuming there were no federal barriers to challenge intel.


Minorities count in the free market. which is what enables intel to profit off of making $1k+ processors.

Umm, in a 'free market' we wouldn't have had a second x86 chipmaker, unless you wanted to commoditize x86. Under the current market conditions, a collapsing AMD would be allowed to be sold and still keep their license.

I don't think that there is anyone willing to take the risk of investing 10s of billions in capital on a gamble of whether or not they can compete with Intel in their own market.

 

[Dan_D]

Umm, in a 'free market' we wouldn't have had a second x86 chipmaker, unless you wanted to commoditize x86. Under the current market conditions, a collapsing AMD would be allowed to be sold and still keep their license.

I don't think that there is anyone willing to take the risk of investing 10s of billions in capital on a gamble of whether or not they can compete with Intel in their own market.

They'd also need a minimum of three to five years to produce a product that could even think of taking on anything Intel has to offer. The reason I say AMD's loss in the market place wouldn't change pricing too much is due to the fact that the market simply won't tolerate Intel hiking the prices on all it's CPUs. We might see a short price hike while they claim supply and demand issues with the vacuum left by AMD but after a short while prices would normalize again. The market likes cheap consumer electronics. AMD's vacancy wouldn't change that. But instead of a two year tick-tock cycle we'd be looking at much longer 4 or 5 year product cycles and generations of rehashed CPUs, chipsets etc. Honestly as much as I love progress this wouldn't be the end of the world either given how software lags behind the hardware these days.

Competition is good but in a market like this, it isn't the only factor when it comes to setting prices. Where competition really makes all the differences is in the products themselves. We need AMD or someone around always to at the very list keep Intel moving forward. Occasionally leapfrogging them like AMD did with the Athlon 64 really shakes things up leading to even better products like the Core 2 Duo.