Is it all AMD’s fault?

[Domokun]

Originally Posted by PCFormat

When you’re sitting there in a couple years, coveting that £1,000 mid-range graphics card masquerading as a top-end GPU and another overly expensive quad-core CPU, there’s only one company to blame. And that company is AMD.

Essentially you can put every tech problem in the world at AMD’s feet.

Because you wont be coveting an AMD CPU; those two acronyms wont be strapped together in a few years time. No, CPU will become so synonymous with Intel that you wont even have to call it an ‘Intel CPU.’ There will be no other desktop option.

Without serious competition from the likes of the Texan silicon herdsmen of AMD Intel will be your only choice.

Think I’m being reactionary? Damn right.

Because of the absolute failure of the Bulldozer architecture – and there can be no possible way AMD can honestly say it has been anything but – Intel can sit back on its huge pile of cash and keep churning out barely iterative releases of chips.

One of Laird’s favourite flavour combinations at the moment has been Intel and sandbagging.

Essentially Intel doesn’t really have to push itself to really squeeze out genuinely impressive technology because there’s nothing pushing them to such lengths.

The geriatric console generation has stalled games to the extent that any CPU of the last 2-3 years is good enough for any game on the market, and AMD has screwed the pooch so hard on the CPU side that the Bulldozer chips are sitting in the corners of IT warehouses across the land nursing sore behinds.

Things moved pretty fast when the Netburst architecture flopped onto the market. Intel went on the search for cores to hit back at a suddenly competitive AMD and we quickly moved from single to dual to quad core CPUs in a trice.

It’s taken it a lot longer to move onto six as AMD’s competitive nature has significantly waned.

Indeed we’ve only actually got six cores on the silly server segment of the desktop market – the full-fat Nehalem and Sandy Bridge E platforms.

Well, we’ve actually got eight core CPUs capable of being dropped into desktop motherboards, but Intel isn’t going to actually bother selling them for sensible money as it simply doesn’t need to.

AMD is also responsible for the rise and rise of graphics card prices too.

Back in the HD 4000 series (hmm, where have I heard that name re-used recently?) of AMD GPUs it was all about relatively cheap, efficient chips and using CrossFire tech to create the top-end cards of a generation.

It was a laudable stance and would have benefited all if it hadn’t only lasted that single generation.

It then found a gap in the DirectX 11 market big enough to drive its HD 5000 series truck through and flog its new cards for stupid money with that trend continuing through the HD 6000 and peaking with the HD 7000s.

Sadly performance hasn’t quite matched the rising cash demands and so Nvidia has recently been able to release a mid-range card which beats AMD’s best and badge it up as a GTX 680 so it can charge us all top-end prices.

A pox on your house, AMD.

And don’t think it’s just a PC problem either. Don’t come crying to us when the ‘next-gen’ consoles are nothing but two-year-old, second-tier AMD PCs at launch…

Posted on Thursday, May 3rd, 2012 at 11:39 am under Uncategorized. You can subscribe to comments. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

Source: http://pcformat.techradar.com/2012/0...ll-amds-fault/

This article was actually written on 03/05/2012, but I only recently discovered it. What do you guys think?

[Madengineer]

I think its a load of crap.

They seem to think that AMD will end as a production line for CPUs. I doubt that will ever happen, and they imply when it does, Intels prices will skyrocket. Again wont happen, because they still need to abide by certain laws.

There are still millions of PC's worldwide that are using AMD CPUs. And quite a large majority of them use Bulldozer chips. Sold brand new in systems.

I just think the writer is trying to stir up the bee hive. Probably somebody else that hates AMD.

Fact though. AMD CPUs perform just as well as intel CPUs when it comes to everyday tasks. IE Browsing, Word Processing etc. Not the specialised things alot of people do on PCs, Folding/benching/encoding, And yes, I would even class gaming/photoshop as a specialised event that computers get used for.

Fact is, I'd be willing to be that 3/4 of the computers in the world are used for nothing more than word processing and browsing.

I'd be blaming the PC manufacturers, IE HP/Acer/Dell for not using a wider variety of CPUs.

Looking at some of the current PCs dell sells. What would be the difference in substituting the current CPU for a AMD cpu.They dont do it because names sell. I cant remember the last time I saw an AMD advertisemnet on the internet/TV. Yet everytime dell has an advertisemnet, they also advertise Intel. So obviously if dell mentions them all the time, they must be good!

/end crappy rant!

[.Radiant]

Im pretty sure this was posted in the videocard/monitors section awhile back.

I laugh at the article though, the guy's reacting like prices have never been absurd for hardware before. 5000 series was hardly a pricey launch, average from what i can remember.

[Pemalite]

Prices are high in GPU land because 28nm is expensive, hence why AMD and nVidia stuck with 40nm for the low end as it has high yields and is cheap as chips to throw out.

Plus.. AMD beat nVidia to the punch so they could have some exclusive high pricing for being the only high-end choice.
nVidia since launched it's new cards and has been supply limited. - Again, AMD will capitalise on that to make the biggest monetary return.

Plus... AMD is a company, their main focus is to make money, not give consumers cake and flowers.

Also... I recall the 6000 series being cheap as chips.
And can't forget that nVidia broke the $1,000 GPU barrier first with the Geforce 8800 Ultra as AMD didn't really offer any competition with the Radeon 2000 series.
AMD is entitled to have high prices like anyone else in the industry, Capitalism will take it's course.


As for CPU's, yes AMD sucks on an old ladies fat fungis covered big toe right now, but they offer some good value to some people, especially in the APU department.

[richan3185]

Originally Posted by .Radiant

Im pretty sure this was posted in the videocard/monitors section awhile back.

I laugh at the article though, the guy's reacting like prices have never been absurd for hardware before. 5000 series was hardly a pricey launch, average from what i can remember.

Yep theres a just as stupid thread in the video card forum. Mindless rants by stupid people.

[NNNG]

Lame article written by a fanboy. Also doesn't know the history of the last previous generation graphics cards, or know anything about processors. So basically the credibility of PC Format is zero and is now known to me as the computer hardware version of a tabloid.

[SLATYE]

Originally Posted by Domokun

What do you guys think?

I think that if you had search this thread's exact title, you would have found the earlier thread with the same title discussing the same article. However, that's in the Video Cards forum, so I'll leave this one open.

[stmok]

Originally Posted by Domokun

This article was actually written on 03/05/2012, but I only recently discovered it. What do you guys think?

The article is an opinion.

There's no attempt to offer genuine analysis or research with the goal of contributing something useful to PC Format name. Its just drivel from the Editor that reinforces why one should never buy their magazine. (Especially when other tech websites do a better job covering enthusiast computer matters!)

Its a whinge. As such, one should learn not to give a $hit.

[SLATYE]

If IBM had put the IBM 801 CPU in the IBM PC, and maintained the open architecture, and offered the chip for sale to other companies, then it's likely that they'd still rule the market (with AMD and Intel most possibly building chips under license).

If Microsoft had talked with DEC and come up with an affordable desktop PC using an Alpha chip running Windows, we'd probably still be using the Alpha architecture.

If Apple had sold the Mac for substantially less than they actually did then that may well have wiped out the IBM PC; and as a result we might all be using Motorola CPUs.

Going further back, if the British government hadn't tried to keep the Colossus secret after WW2, who knows where computers would be these days? Maybe British companies would have a stranglehold on the market.



Pretty much, if people had made different decisions, things would be different now. That should not come as a surprise to anyone. In some of these cases components might be cheaper and/or faster; in other cases they might be more expensive and/or slower. I'm sure that AMD's management wish that the company as a whole had made decisions that resulted in them building a much faster CPU than the Bulldozer is; but they did not. Presumably the author of that article would have happily written one about how it was all Intel's fault, if Bulldozer had been twice as fast as anything Intel could produce.

[Geno]

Old news, article already discussed on video card section.

Link

edit - im a bit late, lol..

[lithos]

AMD fucked up once - granted, it's not a minor fuck-up - and suddenly it's "Oh, noes, the world is gonna end"?

Bit of a whinge, and, yeah, there's a ton of fanboyism in it. Reeks of it.

It's not as if AMD have completely folded and gone bankrupt and out of business leaving Intel with a complete monopoly (I get the feeling the author really wishes they had, though), but rather they've made a single poor choice. But they've still got other stuff going for them.

Llano's doing quite well in the mobile/pre-built field, but of course the author's a bit too much of a neckbeard to ever rate that. Unfortunately, as with everything that's got an enthusiast-level consumer base somewhere, the enthusiasts tend to mistake their emotional involvement with actual, real-world clout. You see it in cars, photography, and, yeah, computing. "Company needs to do X, because I want X!" doesn't work when 90% of their consumers don't give a shit about X.

They're GPUs are far from shit, too. And their Phenom II chips were probably the best value-level chips from a year ago (too bad they didn't continue with them, granted).

Far from a "SKY IS FALLING!" scenario, but.

[RAtSAcK]

I agree with what lithos said.

[SLATYE]

Originally Posted by lithos

Llano's doing quite well in the mobile/pre-built field, but of course the author's a bit too much of a neckbeard to ever rate that. Unfortunately, as with everything that's got an enthusiast-level consumer base somewhere, the enthusiasts tend to mistake their emotional involvement with actual, real-world clout. You see it in cars, photography, and, yeah, computing. "Company needs to do X, because I want X!" doesn't work when 90% of their consumers don't give a shit about X.

Indeed. This is exactly why Intel has a larger GPU market share than AMD and Nvidia combined.

The vast majority of people are perfectly happy with Intel integrated video; they don't need a high-end GPU. Intel's probably spending a tiny fraction of what AMD and Nvidia are on GPU development, and still making a similar amount of money through sheer volume.

If AMD can eat 20% of Intel's low-end and mid-range market share, that'll do them a lot more good than taking 20% of the (tiny) Core i7 Extreme market share.

[lithos]

Hell, Slatye, that's probably why they released Bulldozer anyway: they can afford to fuck up BD. They can't afford to fuck up the APUs.

An Intel CPU/IGP combo can handle everything normal, non-power users like, say, my mum do. HD video, email, Facebook.

It's like if Ford released the new XR series that underperforms last years' XR series, and a Ford fan starts claiming Ford are now doomed. No, idiot, they're not doomed until the Focuses and Fiestas stop selling.

[SLATYE]

Originally Posted by lithos

Hell, Slatye, that's probably why they released Bulldozer anyway: they can afford to fuck up BD. They can't afford to fuck up the APUs.

Interesting point there. I guess it did make sense to release Bulldozer anyway; the only alternative would have been to stick with the older (possibly faster) cores, but that'd look even worse than just releasing Bulldozer as it is.

Originally Posted by lithos

An Intel CPU/IGP combo can handle everything normal, non-power users like, say, my mum do. HD video, email, Facebook.

Yes. Intel's major challenge is persuading "mum and dad" buyers that they should be upgrading from an old Pentium 4, and that they actually need a Core i5. Realistically, they'd be more than satisfied with a Celeron G530, and they'd be better-off buying the G530 and an SSD than an i5 3550 and a standard HDD.

The same issue affects lots of other companies too. HDD manufacturers, for example, need to persuade "mum and dad" that they'll need at least 2TB in the new system, even though they never managed to fill the 20GB drive in the old one.

Dedicated GPU manufacturers have it easy, because the only people who buy them want them for games, and game developers are always happy to use as much processing power as the GPU can provide.