Where is AMD going these days ?

[Kobaltrock]

This is so depressing, been a AMD user ever since the socket A days, and even with all the problems with the VIA / nforce 2 chipsets, I still stuck with AMD throughout the years, since there was actually some real value & cost savings to be had.
Now however, ever since the downfall of STARS, and their launch of bulldozer / piledriver / steamroller / excavator AMD seems to have abandoned the enthusiast market completely.

There is nothing in their current lineup, nor anything in the foreseeable future (through 2017 ) that would make most people looking for raw CPU power even consider AMD anymore.

For AMD to even get close, you got to deal with some serious heat & voltage issues and that really don't make much monetary sense, compared to what you can get on the other side of the isle.

Intel dropped the ball with their NetBurst microarchitecture, (which AMD benefited greatly) and corrected it with their current lineup, so, why hasn't AMD corrected their disastrous experiment with bulldozer?

Is this all we can expect from AMD until they drop their current microarchitecture design they went to long ago and actually start competing with intel again on the high end ?

[FlanK3r]

I do not know...In my opinion Stars was not bad, specially Phenoms II. It was boom, forum was active in AMD part, first days more than Intel ...After good Thuban people wanted awesome killer Bulldozer. But it was only small performance gain over Thuban with high power consumption and less x87 performance (not worse single thread!). People were disappointed...Vishera fixed name of Bulldozer to better value. But today...Vishera is 1.5 years old and nothing new here...Kaveri is good, but its APU for mainstreams. For highend/enthusiast future of AMD? Who knows...:-( Im still hope a little for some surprise in 2015.

[ohms]

I am disappointed in this as well, and in the end it does not bode well for enthusiasts. Eventually Intel will be able to charge what they want and prices of processors will go through the roof since there will be no competition and nowhere left for current AMD users to turn.

I do hope that they have something hidden under their hats and come back with a vengeance like they did with the K7.

I really wish that they would create a dual AM3+ socket motherboard similar to the EVGA SR-2 motherboards which fill a nice niche with AMD enthusiasts since it's the end of the line for the FX line.

[leo5111]

i am a AMD fan but THIS is where AMD has gone/is going http://nameun.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/toilet.jpg

[AMDforME]

AMD has not given up the discrete desktop CPU market segment. They don't have any current successor to Vishera which is piss poor management IMO. They will however offer a significant improvement beyond Steamroller for their next discrete desktop CPU. They are losing billions of dollars in sales by not having a proper product line.

[tbone8ty]

they are hanging in there still! they desperately need a node change.

waiting for an 6 or 8 core apu

[Olivon]

As my comment is gone, I will repeat myself :

AMD is clearly aiming Mainstream and Entry Level market.
BD/PD/KV are a complete failure/disaster, AMD desesperatly need a new performing/efficient arch.
Hopefully graphical part is good and AMD seems to go HSA all along.
But x86 thang is really bad and the situation is quite boring, Intel are fightning with a ghost and, de facto, are taking x86 on their own shoulders.
I just hope AMD have not give up the fight for real.

[Miwo]

APUs are only good for mass market laptop/desktop/small form factor where vendors can have something half-decent without putting in any add-in cards. I was on the APU hype train, but their performance just doesn't come close to what a even a PC desktop casual gamer would expect. Memory bandwidth continues to be its biggest problem, even with Kaveri changes... if you are on a tight budget to even consider APU platform, it just doesn't make financial sense to have to pair DDR2133+ ram with the platform to get the most out of it.

I think to make FM2+ viable for desktop markets, AMD needs 3/4 module Steamroller chips. They need to also address the flaw that APUs are pretty much bricks as soon as you pair them with any high performance GPU. APUs need to provide value-added when paired with a R9 260/270/280/290 via assymetrical crossfire that actually works.... or perhaps provide TruAudio or OpenCL compute assistance if you have an NVidia card. After 4 APU generations, they still can't do this

its probably not worth the R&D effort for them. They are probably making enough money off Xbox One / PS4 , laptops to offset desktop losses. If FM2+ is here to replace AM3+, at least make it a passable alternative for current AM3+ users.

[imamage]

As a long time AMD fan (since K6-2 300MHz) ,
Phenom II era was nice and fun , AMD is competitive as well (at least for the price/performance you get)
But Faildozer fiasco I have lost faith with new AMD product

I tried to like APU , from Llano to latest Kabini (Temash) , they look good on paper/spec
but the CPU part doesn't pack enough performance. As Miwo replied mention, once you added discrete graphic , the onboard iGPU is pretty much useless, when the blue team (Intel) can at least get QuickSync to asssit encoding.

They gave up AM3+ is fine with me , but changing socket every generation of APU really pissed me off. I know Intel did the same but hey I can upgrade Sandy bridge Pentium G with a Core i5 Ivy Bridge as long as my board have BIOS upgrade to support

For Llano (Socket FM1) no further upgrade path
Socket FM2 can't use Kaveri , rebrand Chipset as new
same goes to FM2+ just for Kaveri launch.

And now since they can't sell Kabini embedded to OEM/ODM
they make Socket AM1 just for the sake of it.

I have no clue what the heck AMD they are thinking now.....

[Dimitriman]

AMD doesn't need to beat the 6 core Intels on socket 2011, that is a niche market.

Even enthusiasts do well with 4 core i7s. This is where AMD had to aim for, but more and more the focus is shifting to tablets and small factor, this is where AMD intends to be strong at. Unfortunately, AMD as we know it is as good as dead. The APUs are all we are going to get for the desktop for the foreseeable future.

[FlanK3r]

of course, but FX are alternative to core i5/i7 "K". But Haswell is now very good...FX Vishera can sometimes be better, sometimes similar in performance (work with video, rendering, hard multitasking), but it have much higher power consumption (+60-70W in load). Its still OK as alternative, but for future, Vishera FX cant fight longer with next Intel chips (Vishera was OK against Ivy Bridge or Sandy)

[charged3800z24]

Weird, I am still pushing AMD for server builds with Hyper-V especially for Exchange and Database servers due to the penalty with Hyper Threading. We have to turn off HT on all Intel builds. For desktops, I personally still use APU's for all media Center rigs and FX for my main rig. I'm personally Glad AMD is trying to focus in Markets where real life people are buying Products. We sell HP Probooks with APUs and no one has ever complained the system is slow or has poor battery life.

[vario]

they are hanging in there still! they desperately need a node change.

waiting for an 6 or 8 core apu

While node would help, lets not kid ourselves, Intel got ahead with bloomfield already at 45nm,ya, amd was kinda competetive there still, but thats because intel started to cut down itself.
At 32nm westmere they established a clear lead and started to ask serious money, after that intel does AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE for as much as possible.
AMD is at 28nm now, yes the fabs and process are different, but lets be realistic, node wont help if it wont be pushed by some serious
A) architecture that is hand tuned
B) THE WILL at the exec/board level.

Biggest failure at AMD right now is just lack of true leadership, lack of "political" will to do best and innovate ,even with as little as possible.They had steamroller ,but scrapped it.They invest in arm and apus, which is nice, but reality is, theres gonna be a long time still when HSA and arm can be REALLY money makers for them.
I mean, AMD engineers MUST HAVE KNOWN what BD is gonna be like at least 2 years before we`ve seen it, there were 45nm prototypes.And here we are, vishera changed very little, SR changed little and they scrapped 6-8-10 core versions (yes there were 10 core chips in the works).
I mean i get it, you dont want to suppport am3+ still , ok, but for gods sake, a 2 module kaveri chip is just too weak.4 module kaveri w/o gpu on 28nm would be a nice chip allround and certainly smaller and cheaper to make than vishera FX.But no, constant rehashes of the same or almost the same on the apu front (cpu perf wise).
Only plus side for amd is this whole console deal+mantle.
Mantle and probably DX12 means i can use this FX for a year more, but all in all its gonna end in me buying intel chip, which disgusts me, because intel CAN but they WONT.
All this makes me specially angry, because GPU division shows that they CAN if theres a will.Although amd execs and board will probably kill this too sooner or later.
There was a time when i was changing cpus 2 times a year.Now i dont have a thing to buy, besides astronomically priced intel 2011, which even tho are supposed to be bleeding edge hardware, are a year behind architecture wise and offer 50% core count wise.Eh.ty ty times ahead.

[Darakian]

I disagree vario. AMD has a clear vision of the future and it's in a different market than where intel is. They're betting big on HSA and if it pays off they'll be back in the high end market in a few years time. Until then they're just focusing on where the money is.

[MadDias]

I'm personally Glad AMD is trying to focus in Markets where real life people are buying Products. We sell HP Probooks with APUs and no one has ever complained the system is slow or has poor battery life.

personally I am here to meet "unreal" life people. after all this is XtremeSystems not OkSystems.
When i started using amd, u could buy the smallest processor of a family and overclock it, to exceed the performance of the biggest chip of that family, or even the performance of a higher priced intel. today u have to buy the biggest amd chip and clock the hell out of it, just to reach the performance of a midrange intel chip? sure one can say "but the amd is better in this and that", but i want a cpu, not a videoencoding or encrypting chip.
the day simon announced that amd is no longer into enthusiast marketing, like they did with the phenomIIs, i knew something was fishy with those hyped 8core bulldozers. i would have never thought that it would go this way, but as someone mentioned earlier, amd as we knew it, is dead.
i can?t believe people are still preaching bd was a "performance gain" over thuban... my old 1090t still runs circles around any bd or pd or kv at 4ghz in brute computing force.
don?t get me wrong! it?s nice to see people still doing extreme things to these chips. but is it extreme, when an i3 can do the same, effortless?
I don?t see amd anywhere near the enthusiast market in the next few years, when all their effort is going into the low (power) budget or the handheld segment.
this is not the future, this is desperately grabbing for a straw, to keep from drowning.

[NEOAethyr]

I think if you're gonna build a rig, you might as well start with a $300 intel midrange cpu.
Might cost you an extra $100 for the board compared to the amd, but overall I think it's worth it.
2-3x the performance, and 2x less power draw.

The best bang for your buck isn't amd anymore.
I would of bought one if it was.

Its been 4 years since amd's been worth anything.
Those that say otherwise are really just kidding themselves.

Sure you can use a fx cpu and do anything you want pretty much.
But the power usage, and the price, just doesn't make any sense to me.
And neither does the performance really...

It doesn't really matter if they do come out with an 8 core apu.

You guys check out the FX-670K?
65w tdp for a dual core... (yeah it says quad but we all know thats bs).
Compare to a real quad core, the 3770k at 77, that amd is double the wattage, and up to 4x less performance.

We can bs ourselves all day, but the reality is, amd is a dead duck, at least for the foreseeable future.
It could be years before they are worth anything at all.

For the heck of it, the old barton was 130nm, the mobiles around what 35-45w?
Times that by 2 and you essentially got yourself a cpu made in 2014 lol, same wattage and essentially the same performance.
Mem controller is a diff story though.
The bartons were supposed released around 2003-2004.
10 years..., and that's what we got ^^.

I really don't know what the exec's at amd are thinking.
You would figure if they liked making cpu's they would have something that was at least decent.

[vario]

I think if you're gonna build a rig, you might as well start with a $300 intel midrange cpu.
Might cost you an extra $100 for the board compared to the amd, but overall I think it's worth it.
2-3x the performance, and 2x less power draw.

The best bang for your buck isn't amd anymore.
I would of bought one if it was.

Its been 4 years since amd's been worth anything.
Those that say otherwise are really just kidding themselves.

Sure you can use a fx cpu and do anything you want pretty much.
But the power usage, and the price, just doesn't make any sense to me.
And neither does the performance really...

It doesn't really matter if they do come out with an 8 core apu.

You guys check out the FX-670K?
65w tdp for a dual core... (yeah it says quad but we all know thats bs).
Compare to a real quad core, the 3770k at 77, that amd is double the wattage, and up to 4x less performance.

We can bs ourselves all day, but the reality is, amd is a dead duck, at least for the foreseeable future.
It could be years before they are worth anything at all.

For the heck of it, the old barton was 130nm, the mobiles around what 35-45w?
Times that by 2 and you essentially got yourself a cpu made in 2014 lol, same wattage and essentially the same performance.
Mem controller is a diff story though.
The bartons were supposed released around 2003-2004.
10 years..., and that's what we got ^^.

I really don't know what the exec's at amd are thinking.
You would figure if they liked making cpu's they would have something that was at least decent.

Uhm, while i do agree to some degree with everything you said, lets not get too far out.
You say Intel offers 200-300% the performance , at 300$ ? 300$ wont even get you 4770K im not sure even 1000$ dollar 6 core for 2011 is gonna be overall 200% dude ...And the amd counter part can be had for 159$ i mean, yea, they suck compared to 4770K but not THAT bad and theyre 2x less.FX 8320 is the same chip and same functionality as 8350 even those cost 199$.
As for this "new" fx, thats just a richlang apu with gpu disabled, ya, its sad they called it "FX"

[NEOAethyr]

The 4770k used to be $300 online, its more now apparently.
From time to time though you can get the 4770k locally for around $200 at microcenter.

The 4930k is under $600.
My previous cpu was a amd 1090t, the 4930k is literally at least 2x faster at the very min.
Sometimes up to 3x faster, in actual usage, not benchs.
Though I can't remember in exactly what off hand lol (saying this because I know someone would ask for screens...).
It might of been ffmpeg.

The 4770k is pretty much gotta be the same way, in things that don't don't use every core anyways.
"Most" things don't use more then 2-3 cores.
Work station apps are diff though.

But either way, even if intel only sold dual cores with ht, they'de still be twice as fast.

[vario]

The 4770k used to be $300 online, its more now apparently.
From time to time though you can get the 4770k locally for around $200 at microcenter.

The 4930k is under $600.
My previous cpu was a amd 1090t, the 4930k is literally at least 2x faster at the very min.
Sometimes up to 3x faster, in actual usage, not benchs.
Though I can't remember in exactly what off hand lol (saying this because I know someone would ask for screens...).
It might of been ffmpeg.

The 4770k is pretty much gotta be the same way, in things that don't don't use every core anyways.
"Most" things don't use more then 2-3 cores.
Work station apps are diff though.

But either way, even if intel only sold dual cores with ht, they'de still be twice as fast.

Uhm , we just have to disagree on the severity of this difference, it MAY be true for some extremely rare cases, but there are rare cases when 8 core FX is actually faster than 4770K too ...
Maybe youre feelin the difference so much because you came from 1090T which in some cases is noticably slower than FX which in turn is noticably slower than 4770K and up, or maybe there was IO issue on teh 1090T build, and we know intel has faster sata/usb controller.

Dual core haswells faster ,and two times faster than FX 8350 ? i mean, come on man.In true crypt or was that or was it at video coding ;P



And to other participants, yea im stopping here with this.However i dont think theres much to add about AMD and their cpu business.Its sad, and will be probably forever.Soonest glimmer of hope would be 2016 or something the like, but im doubting anything will change, besides intel moving even further while doing even less.

[NEOAethyr]

I used to get 15fps on ffmpeg on my 1090t, using a raw test video I have, encoding 422 8bit lossless avc.
On my 4930k, 80 fps.

On pcsx2, dx11 software mode, gran turismo 4, I press x button a bunch of times to get a race loaded (it loads up some crappy ford on some german raceway I think), used to get around 25fps, now over 115fps on the 4930k.

Mafia 2, I can't test right now, something is up with my xinput emu, I don't have the controller hooked up right now either, weird...
All I remember was the fps was way higher then the amd.
I'm gonna try to fix it real quick.

Anyways when it comes to video encoding, there's not a single benchmark on the net probably that I care about.
I don't encode anything other then lossless.

Edit:
Mafia 2 has to be at least 3x faster.
It used to dip below 30fps I think during the benchmark when those peeps were running, now it's over 75.

If you really want me to get screens you'll have to wait until after next weekend when I have a vehicle.

[FlanK3r]

hm, believe me, from my experience as tester and reviewer and CPU reader enthusiast, FX-8350 has around 80% of performance i7-4770K (both are 8 threads)...In some situation is Vishera better, many situation are very close (around 10%) and some situation are better at 4770K (specially non instruction, pure single operation).
The main problem of FX today is power consumption in load. In idle its OK, few watts up, doesnt matter. In load is much higher difference for similar performance. It could be OK against 32nm SB-DT, but against 3D-22nm at Haswell its a problem. Basically is power consumption of FX-8xxx in load OK for die size of chip and 32nm. But die size is big or the performance effect/die size is not ideal... There is some situation for excelence of FX, very hard multitasking, in this beating 4c/8t chips of Intel. But seriously, in practice use is not often (0.1% in the same time video encoding, movie wathing, AES crypting, unpacking...)

[vario]

I used to get 15fps on ffmpeg on my 1090t, using a raw test video I have, encoding 422 8bit lossless avc.
On my 4930k, 80 fps.

On pcsx2, dx11 software mode, gran turismo 4, I press x button a bunch of times to get a race loaded (it loads up some crappy ford on some german raceway I think), used to get around 25fps, now over 115fps on the 4930k.

Mafia 2, I can't test right now, something is up with my xinput emu, I don't have the controller hooked up right now either, weird...
All I remember was the fps was way higher then the amd.
I'm gonna try to fix it real quick.

Anyways when it comes to video encoding, there's not a single benchmark on the net probably that I care about.
I don't encode anything other then lossless.

Edit:
Mafia 2 has to be at least 3x faster.
It used to dip below 30fps I think during the benchmark when those peeps were running, now it's over 75.

If you really want me to get screens you'll have to wait until after next weekend when I have a vehicle.

You do realize you stepped up the from the 4770K at 300something in initial posts to a 600$ chip ,thats one, and second youre talking about 1090T and not PD FX here which in some cases has some nice gains.
AND, thats still not being 300% OVERALL faster ,thats isolated situations, and "dipping below 30fps" is not a constant 30fps and so on and so on.You are just wrong.

So, in essence, if youre telling me :
"in some cases a 3930K on socket 2011 which costs like 500$ more for a platform can be two times faster"

Well then yea, i agree.
Were in AMD section now show some respect to a dying forum part :P

[Daveburt714]

I may get some flack for this, but I'm a longtime AMD user too... I've been messing with/tweaking computers for over 30 yrs!
While it's true that AMD hasn't offered anything interesting in the "high performance" category since the 1090T, I'm still not ready to buy into the AMD is dead rhetoric that we've heard for I can't remember how long!

I'm not a hardcore gamer, so in that sense I may be in the minority. The one thing I do with my rig that requires performance is encoding and this OC'd 9370 does really well in that area even when compared to Intel systems that cost substantially more... YES, when it's running flat out, it does use excess power but under normal circumstances (using power saving features), it's not really a hog at all!

For everyday tasks (Surfing/E-mail/Text Editing) the few nanoseconds lost compared to higher priced systems is a non-factor.

I know this is XS, and I'd love to see AMD pull a rabbit out of their hat that could compete in benchmarks.
In all honesty though they're still competitive for modern uses, and generally they still offer a good "bang for the buck".

I have 3 rigs that are running AMD APU's, 2 HTPC's and a NAS, plus an FX rig for performance...
I have no complaints about any of these machines!!!

Intel stumbled into an awesome uArch with C2D by working on low powered mobile chips.
Hopefully AMD can do the same thing with their APU's...

[Maxforces]

hm, believe me, from my experience as tester and reviewer and CPU reader enthusiast, FX-8350 has around 80% of performance i7-4770K (both are 8 threads)...In some situation is Vishera better, many situation are very close (around 10%) and some situation are better at 4770K (specially non instruction, pure single operation).
The main problem of FX today is power consumption in load. In idle its OK, few watts up, doesnt matter. In load is much higher difference for similar performance. It could be OK against 32nm SB-DT, but against 3D-22nm at Haswell its a problem. Basically is power consumption of FX-8xxx in load OK for die size of chip and 32nm. But die size is big or the performance effect/die size is not ideal... There is some situation for excelence of FX, very hard multitasking, in this beating 4c/8t chips of Intel. But seriously, in practice use is not often (0.1% in the same time video encoding, movie wathing, AES crypting, unpacking...)

From my point of view is more than 80%

Used programs:
Blender, Cinebench, Photoshop,3ds Max, AutoCAD, Catia

Used programs:
(Google Chrome), Flash, HTML5,x264, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premiere Pro, *.mp4,image processing, Word, PDF, 7-Zip, TrueCrypt

Used games (not benchmarks):
Battlefield 4, Crysis 3, Far Cry 3,ARMA 2, Battlefield 3, Crysis 2, Max Payne 3, Metro 2033,(civilization V, Shogun 2 Total War, StarCraft 2, Flight Simulator X, WOT,Assassin's Creed, GTA IV, Skyrim, Wiedźmin 2, DiRT Showdown

Overal 70.5%

[FlanK3r]

pclab.pl are not the best web...They dont know nothing about throtling of FX-9590 and what doing against it . There was 9590 review, but really not good. Not many reviewers knwo, with 9590 you must cooling VRM area as bonus for non throtling. But this is different story. I like examples hardware.fr. Or hardwarecanucks. Anandtech is "sh1t" few last years. Still good looks Computerbase, overclocked, TomsHW is not bad...ANd of course PCtuning from czech (most of reviewers are overclockers - OBR, me, Froxic)