AMD Backing Out of CPU Speed Wars Against Intel

[cold2010]

AMD's future is not in making the fastest processors.

ZoomThe company's CEO has taken AMD on a transitional path that appears to be more disruptive than any other event in the company's history, especially in light of the ongoing change in executive management. There is no interest at AMD to continue a processor war with Intel that has lasted decades, but only rewarded AMD with occasional superiority

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http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd...ors,15741.html

[HotGore]

It is understandable they would shift this way, but sadly we will probably end up with another P4 in the next few generations. Hopefully AMD can make more compelling mobile options.

[Manicdan]

fact is cpus do not need to be upgraded every 6 months for 95% of what the world needs. so then we started getting smaller PCs with a much lower TDP. so while they might not care about having a 1000$ chip, they NEED to care about perf/watt if they want to get any kind of revenue from the laptop/mobile market.

so i really dont consider this news at all, unless they basically are saying they wont have any more chips over 250mm2 and are backing out of most of the server market.

[THX1138]

“That era is done,” Rory Read said in an interview and added, “There’s enough processing power on every laptop on the planet today" GTFO !!

"That transformation may be done by 2015, according to Read" Really ? I have to wait till 2015 ?

[solofly]

There can only be ONE...

[zanzabar]

fact is cpus do not need to be upgraded every 6 months for 95% of what the world needs. so then we started getting smaller PCs with a much lower TDP. so while they might not care about having a 1000$ chip, they NEED to care about perf/watt if they want to get any kind of revenue from the laptop/mobile market.

so i really dont consider this news at all, unless they basically are saying they wont have any more chips over 250mm2 and are backing out of most of the server market.

laptop cores are what servers are wanting now. servers now are about threads and low power and not higher clock speeds. as of now amd makes chips that are great at 2ghz even 2.4 but once you try to get them to desktop speeds they suck watts and do not scale with the clocks. it will suck for desktops though since intel banned overclocking on non unlocked chips and they will just jack the price up since every DIY build will have an amd with IGP or intel K edition, there will not be a reason for anything else to be built.

[THX1138]

There can only be ONE...

yeah that's great and watch what happens with the price of a cpu.

[Unbornchild]

There can only be ONE...

There HAVE to be two... Otherwise, you wouldn't exist.

Ontopic: less focusing on competing in speed, more focusing on quality, is what i initially hoped he was saying.
Instead he seems to be saying they will be focusing more on the mobile market....

[phantomferrari]

There can only be ONE...

i always saw AMD as more of a Duncan McCloud than intel though

[highoctane]

The quickening for Intel I guess...

[masterg]

hope this doesnt lead to more intel control of the chips. would be terrible if intel came out 1$ for 1mhz overclocking unlocking scheme @_@

[haylui]

hope this doesnt lead to more intel control of the chips. would be terrible if intel came out 1$ for 1mhz overclocking unlocking scheme @_@

you had just enlightened them

[DilTech]

Is anyone really all that surprised here?

Fact is simple, AMD will bleed themselves dry if they attempt to even consider trying to keep pace with Intel on the cpu front. AMD may have hit a home-run with the A64 (I happily owned SEVERAL of them), but they sat on it too long without doing much to improve it, much like intel did with the P4 design. What they didn't have during that time was the brand recognition, which is something they never did truly manage to steal away no matter how much better they were in those days. So the only thing they truly managed to do was bring out the onslaught from intel that we see today.

Let's be perfectly clear here guys. AMD's fastest current desktop processor, the FX-8150, has to be clocked OVER 4.5ghz to come close to Sandy bridge at STOCK. That's not even considering what happens if you do overclock the 2500k. Add to that fact that the FX draws more power than most videocards once you overclock it and you see the issue compounded. The problem for AMD is their chips always seem to be competing with the previous generation from intel, how anyone can ignore that fact will forever remain a mystery to me, but it is the truth. Essentially, the cpu race has been like watching a special olympics running champion against a normal olympics running champion, and cheering for the special one even though he's multiple laps behind. AMD just don't have the R&D budget to go head to head, and even if they did, they don't have the customer base to make a return on that investment against intel's tick/tock strategy.

What AMD DO have going for them right now is a strong shot in the mobile department. Let's be honest, fusion chips do great considering their low power draw. GPU power is the one place that Intel will have a hard time keeping up with AMD, as we see them still fighting with AMD's last gen and losing (complete switch of the aforementioned situation). The mobile sector doesn't need ultra powerful processors except for maybe gaming laptops, and even then practically NO mobile gpu is strong enough to hit the gpu bottleneck anyway, which means AMD's CF between iGpu and discrete gpu is liable to be faster than a competing intel in that market.

Unfortunately, this is all bad for us, because there's a chance that we're going to see prices sky-rocket. Of course, let's face reality, when's the last time AMD truly competed with intel on performance...2006? As long as AMD can keep a footing in the budget sector, intel will still have to keep things affordable outside of the ultra high end.

[FlanK3r]

this is old story from February! This doesnt mean, desktop minstream/highend will not continue. Its about effectivity and no war with Intel in XE series (LGA2011 aka highend)

[G.Foyle]

Yeah, this is old news and people read WAY too much into it.

[informal]

Ok,just imagine intel has no access to its present alien process technology () and it needs to compete with AMD just the same as Nvidia does. It would not be "special Olympics" anymore,would it? AMD has great engineering teams,the problem is that intel has MORE of them and equally as talented while being 1 or 2 nodes ahead. You can see why AMD can't compete directly against intel anymore.
But look at Trinity today. With 4 pretty decent x86 cores and a best in class GPU on die,AMD is a fabless company that does pretty good. Next year brings us next gen CPU and GPU cores and they will be fine in the short term. But what happens after say 3 or 4 years is anyone's guess.

[Rollo]

The problem for AMD is their chips always seem to be competing with the previous generation from intel, how anyone can ignore that fact will forever remain a mystery to me, but it is the truth. Essentially, the cpu race has been like watching a special olympics running champion against a normal olympics running champion, and cheering for the special one even though he's multiple laps behind. AMD just don't have the R&D budget to go head to head, and even if they did, they don't have the customer base to make a return on that investment against intel's tick/tock strategy.

It must be strange times at AMD these days, your analogy is correct.

[Dami3n]

They are not competing since A64 days. We know that, they know that, where´s the news?
They should focus in the GPU market to avoid face the same issues with Nvidia. We can´t afford the lack of competition in both sides.

[Particle]

I don't understand how someone can hear a true statement like "Everything is already very fast," and have that trigger the thought "We're exiting the pursuit of improving our CPU cores." You can still do the second with the first being true.

[gosh]

It's just AMD that is changing the way in how they market their processors. They will obviously try to do as fast processors as possible, which consumes minimal power. But they want to shift the focus from the synthetic tests. Difficult to compete there when the competitor has 80% of the market and applications will always be optimized for the competitor.

[PatRaceTin]

cpu speed ?

[thematrixhazune]

Since AMD knows they cant compete fully with Intel's x86, they might be waiting until OpenCL/direct compute is embraced more. It would be nice if Microsoft could incorporate OCL/DC into Windows and let it choose to boost the apps automatically.

[Piledriver]

What AMD DO have going for them right now is a strong shot in the mobile department. Let's be honest, fusion chips do great considering their low power draw. GPU power is the one place that Intel will have a hard time keeping up with AMD, as we see them still fighting with AMD's last gen and losing (complete switch of the aforementioned situation).

Having a shot at mobile department means having a decent CPU. Better perf\watt CPU, means more TDP for the GPU, meaning better GPU.


This is all marketing, this is "AMD delivers enough processor power, why waste money on Intel?", this is focusing attentions on the segment AMD can compete. Pretty sure AMD will continue to do anything to have the best CPU possible. Fact is, this is old news, and meanwhile AMD released trinity out that is a major improvement within the same arch. Steamroller isn't canceled afaik, and steamroller is labeled NEXT-GENERATION, unlike Trinity that is labeled ENHANCED, for a reason. And we are talking about a CPU designed for multi-threading, not mobile.

[SEA]

This crap appears every half year in news, including here, XS...
AMD is finally shifting its focus away from competing with long-time rival Intel, and instead will focus its energy on emerging markets and cloud computing
It was discussed here as well.
There are lots of similar news for last year in Internet.

People say "Everything new is well forgotten old"

[DilTech]

Ok,just imagine intel has no access to its present alien process technology () and it needs to compete with AMD just the same as Nvidia does. It would not be "special Olympics" anymore,would it? AMD has great engineering teams,the problem is that intel has MORE of them and equally as talented while being 1 or 2 nodes ahead. You can see why AMD can't compete directly against intel anymore.
But look at Trinity today. With 4 pretty decent x86 cores and a best in class GPU on die,AMD is a fabless company that does pretty good. Next year brings us next gen CPU and GPU cores and they will be fine in the short term. But what happens after say 3 or 4 years is anyone's guess.

Compare AMD's best on 65nm with intel's best on 65nm.

Now do the same with 45nm.

Now do that again with 32nm.

It's not just Intel being a process ahead of AMD, it's the fact that even on the same process Intel is STILL ahead of AMD, even with processors that came out before AMD. Forget 22nm, AMD still can't convincingly beat Intel's top 45nm part! They can't even beat the i7 920 anywhere close to consistently!

Now I'll be real here, I like AMD as a company. My laptop is running an AMD chip, my brothers entire network is using AMD processors, and I went from a S754 3000+ to a S939 3500+ to a S939 3700+ to a S939 x2 3800+ and rocked out with that chip until the Q6600 sale fry's had for $184. That was the last time I had a AMD processor for my main system. There's no real way to sugar coat that.