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Is AMD Dead Yet?

Posted by kdawson on Mon Feb 25, 2008 04:24 AM
from the pining-for-the-fjords dept.
AMD
TheProcess writes "Back in February 2003, IBM predicted that AMD would be dead in 5 years (original article here), with IBM and Intel the only remaining players in the chip market. Well, 5 years have passed and AMD is still alive. However, its finances and stock price have taken a serious beating over the last year. AMD was once a darling in this community — the plucky, up-and-coming challenger to the Intel behemoth. Will AMD still be here in 5 years? Can they pose a credible competitive threat to Intel's dominance? Do they still have superior but unappreciated technology? Or are they finally old hat? Can they really recover?"

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Firehose:Is AMD dead yet? by darCness (151868)
[+] AMD To Shed 10% of Its Workforce 7 comments
stress_life writes "Recent rumors about AMD firing 5% of its workforce proved to be understated. AMD just announced that the company is going to deliver pink slips to 1600-1700 workers, or around 10% of its employees. AMD needs revenue of $2 billion per quarter, but Q1'08 is expected to come in around $1.5 billion. These firings have to be complete by Q3'08, the quarter by which Hector Ruiz promised to be profitable." We most recently discussed AMD's struggles in February.
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  • Why did they buy ATI? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ookabooka (731013) on Monday February 25, @04:31AM (#22543262)
    I was wondering if anyone could explain to me why they purchased ATI. They spent oodles of money to R&D the new quad core architecture to really be a seamless 4 core proc that shared caches etc. Intel just slapped two dual cores together and shipped that. Turns out that in benchmarks for consumer programs, intel's stuff works quite well. AMD's cache sharing and topology of memory access that seems better for true multithreaded applications is irrelevant and occasionally a hinderance when you're running multiple single threaded programs. So they spend oodles on R&D and may not see that much of a return until apps can utilize it better. . .Then they go off and buy ATI? Wouldn't it make sense to hang onto money a bit more than just purchase another company? Could that move end up dragging ATI down too?

    • Re:Why did they buy ATI? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Heir Of The Mess (939658) on Monday February 25, @04:48AM (#22543380) Homepage

      What they originally wanted to do was merge with nVidia, it made sense at the time because nVidia was producing the best chipset for AMD CPUs. Anyway the communications between the 2 companies went sour, so AMD, still hot to do something picked the number 2 choice, ATI.

      Now a merger between nVidia and AMD would have produced a powerful company. nVida has 3DFX tech, Telsa, chipsets and the 2 companies had already done a lot of joint work on the original X-BOX design (intel was a late entry). AMD brought CPU tech, flash and some other tech into the mix. However it was not meant to be.

      So buying ATI was just a plan B, and not really optimal.

      The Intel Core architechture is impressive. It's powerful enough over the Athlon that they can take shortcuts. Gives them more headroom for later, whereas the Athlon is reaching its maximum efficiency of instructions per clock so they have to be more thoughtful with their engineering.

    • Re:Why did they buy ATI? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by DrSkwid (118965) on Monday February 25, @04:58AM (#22543434) Homepage Journal
      I'm hoping that their new interest in opening up documentation and APIs is along term winner and they follow that through properly. OSS really needs a top hardware vendor on board that is open. If ATI is a secondary income stream then "we're protecting our IP" *should* be heard less and less. If the open model is right then a vendor that makes solid open hardware should be a winner over closed locked down stuff.

    • Re:Why did they buy ATI? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Tablizer (95088) on Monday February 25, @05:00AM (#22543454) Homepage Journal
      They spent oodles of money to R&D the new quad core architecture to really be a seamless 4 core proc that shared caches etc. Intel just slapped two dual cores together and shipped that. Turns out that in benchmarks for consumer programs, intel's stuff works quite well. AMD's cache sharing and topology of memory access that seems better for true multithreaded applications is irrelevant and occasionally a hinderance when you're running multiple single threaded programs.

      When you are designing architectures for 7 or so years out, you need a powerful crystal ball, but no such thing exists. AMD just guessed wrong about the nature of future applications. Intel guessed wrong with the Itanium also. Maybe the common thread is you have to fit existing apps instead of the other way around. But, betting against app change has risk also.

      Perhaps AMD should focus on the low end rather than guess what the high-end app technology of the future will look like. This may be a better bet for them because they cannot absorb the kinds of gambles that Intel can, being a smaller company. Thus, if they focus on the low-end, they don't have to predict the future of the high-end apps, reducing their risk. They just have to make existing apps run faster and/or cheaper. This would essentially force Intel to be the pioneer (of app change guessing) and take the arrows so that AMD doesn't have to. Of course there are the arrows of internal technology changes, but at least having to guess what *apps* of the future will be like is out of their court.
           

      • The problem is (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Sycraft-fu (314770) on Monday February 25, @06:11AM (#22543722)
        That good high end technology often gives you a good low end too. That is the current case with Intel's Core technology. You take a Core 2, but instead just make a single core version with less cache and clock it way down. You then have a chip with extremely good performance per watt, and good yields (and thus low price) to boot. The Core Solos, as Intel calls them, are extremely competitive on the low end. They've got ones with a TDP as low as 5.5watts.

        So it can be hard to try and just compete on the low end of things, since you can't charge as much, and often the people doing the high end things get killer low end products as a side effect.

        This is something companies have found out with graphics cards. There have been a number of companies who have tried to compete with nVidia and ATi in the lower end market. Their idea is that while they don't have the R&D to produce a top flight graphics card, that's ok because most people don't buy one of those anyhow. They'll make midrange and lower end cards and sell those.

        Great idea, it seems, until you consider that ATi and nVidia get great midrange cards as a side effect of their high end cards. Graphics cards are highly parallel beasts so all they do to make a lower end card is cut some of the units off, put on less memory, maybe clock it down a bit to improve yields and they are good to go. An 8800 GTX and an 8600 GT are the same beast at heart. The 8600 basically just has 25% the number of shader units the 8800 does, and other things like a smaller memory bus. End result is nVidia has and extremely fast $100 card that cost them very little in terms of R&D that wasn't already done for their high end card.

        So the companies that have tried have thus far met with little success. Their offerings just haven't been able to compete with the big boys and it is no surprise. You can pour a lot more in to R&D when you are going to sell graphics cards at $500+ and then make use of that very same technology in midrange and low end cards.

    • Re:Why did they buy ATI? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Beliskner (566513) on Monday February 25, @05:03AM (#22543468) Homepage

      Then they go off and buy ATI? Wouldn't it make sense to hang onto money a bit more than just purchase another company? Could that move end up dragging ATI down too?
      That's because their plan is to merge the CPU and GPU into one unit [computerworld.com]. This is an advance that even Intel does not appear to be planning

      • Re:Why did they buy ATI? (Score:5, Informative)

        by JorDan Clock (664877) <jordanclock@gmail.com> on Monday February 25, @05:28AM (#22543544)
        O RLY? [tech.co.uk]

        Internet memes aside, Nehalem has been confirmed to have GPU cores glued together in the same package as the CPU. That means you could have a Nehalem chip with an Intel X4500 (or even the memory controller) in one package. Considering Intel is currently the largest producer of graphics processors and seems to be more capable of developing and launching such technologies than relatively-small AMD, I would not be surprised in the least if Intel's technology beats out AMDs Fusion technology to the market.

  • AMD did it to thsemelf (Score:5, Insightful)

    by vxvxvxvx (745287) on Monday February 25, @04:34AM (#22543284)
    When AMD came out with low priced CPUs that were highly overclockable and great performance at stock they became *the* CPU for any serious geek. When they changed their mind and decided to price-match Intel causing massive price increases they alienated their primary sales force. Geeks selling to family & friends was a great system and without that AMD has been hurting. It's possible they would have died anyway sticking to the cheap, but they've never made a sufficient argument to their customers of why they can't keep the prices low like in the past without letting it on that they like all big business care more about short term cash than long term relationships.

  • Darling of the community! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by kingmetal (1245586) on Monday February 25, @04:43AM (#22543346)
    I hope that AMD soon becomes the darling of the community once again, it's because of them that I recently got back into PC gaming. I had totally given up on gaming on the PC, I had bought a gen1 X2 4200 and AM2 motherboard right before the Core 2 Duos came out and I was cursing my bad luck ever since - until I realized that the real holdup in my system wasn't the processor, but my aging 6600GT. In fact, even though I had bought my AM2-based system almost 2 years ago (or longer! I can't remember when the platform launched) I still had a fairly recent system that could actually support even the newest AMD chips. The real kicker came when I bought my Ati Radeon HD3850. This thing, in my oppinion, should be getting just as much press as the 8800GT. For someone like me, spending $180 on a graphics card is a whole lot more reasonable than spending $250+ on an 8800GT just for performance gains in games like Crysis. My housemate dropped over $1000 on a new Intel Quad-core based rig with an 8800GT in it and my system keeps pace with his very well under almost all scenarios. There is a difference, sure, but considering my entire rig probably cost less than $500 (exluding monitor), I'd say I'm doing pretty well. AMD is doing a great job at catering to people like me who were about to be console-only gamers because keeping up to date on the PC side was getting expensive. AMD offers an affordable upgrade path at a lower performance point - but it's good enough to make my Xbox 360 jealous! I'm proud to say that I'm still an AMD fan. Will an X2 5000+ Black Edition beat a comparably clocked Core 2 Duo? No! But look at the price! I'd say the price to performance ratio is way up there!

  • IBM habitually declares competion dead (Score:5, Informative)

    by MrMr (219533) on Monday February 25, @05:04AM (#22543472)
    Long ago, FUD was the bread and butter of the IBM consultant, what's new?

  • Free Software friendly (Score:5, Interesting)

    by that_itch_kid (1155313) on Monday February 25, @05:07AM (#22543482)
    I'll admit I don't know much about the matter, but they seem to be fairly Free Software friendly, in terms of their releasing of documentation for both their CPUs and the ATI GPUs.

    Does anyone have any detailed information on this? Perhaps the Free Software community can support AMD's openness by buying AMD hardware, *and letting them know this is the reason*.
  • It is interesting to note that this article is dated February 17, 2003. In other words IBM made this prediction literally 2 months before AMD introduced their first 64-bit processors, the Opteron, in April 2003. Little did they know the impact the AMD64 architecture would have on the industry (Intel cloned the architecture) and on AMD itself (it helped them stay afloat for the past 5 years).
  • ... when I deliberately switched to Mac.

    Before I switched to using Macs, I would always build my own PC's from components, and I always chose an AMD processor (starting with the 450 MHz AMD K6-III).

    Until Macs start coming with AMD chips, I doubt I'll buy another one any time soon.

  • "Is AMD Dead Yet?" (Score:5, Funny)

    by ettlz (639203) on Monday February 25, @05:43AM (#22543604) Homepage Journal
    Whoa, one thing at a time — let's see off BSD first, OK?

  • Not if I can help it... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by NerveGas (168686) on Monday February 25, @05:51AM (#22543642)
    I've built a very good number of machines for people lately with Abit micro-ATX boards, with built-in graphics (d-sub and DVI). Throw in a 2.4 GHz X2 and 4 gigs of memory, a hard drive, and a burner, and the hardware comes to something like $300. Good, fast, and CHEAP.

        One of the offices was broken into lately, and the thieves bypassed the "wimpy" micro-ATX cases and stole big, heavy machines... which happened to be older, slower stuff.

  • Let's hope they don't die! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by siyavash (677724) on Monday February 25, @06:03AM (#22543696) Journal
    Let us all hope they don't die, I'm almost an Intel fanboy but my god if AMD dies! Intel would rape us all. Competition is always healthy. I think AMD has good low priced CPUs though and they sure do the job.

    • Re:Don't think so. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Bender_ (179208) on Monday February 25, @05:00AM (#22543450)
      In the past, AMD had an architecture advantage over Intel and Intel had a slight process technology advantage.

      Now the situation is different:

      -Since the introduction of the Core 2 Duo Intel has the better architecture (minus memory controller though).
      -Intel is smoking the rest of the industry with 45nm high-k/metal gate in therms of process technology. Compared to what has been published by IBM about their hkmg technology IBM/AMD has a long way to go to catch up.

      And let me say this: Intels technology is extremely clever, they did one fundamentally different thing (gate first) against conventional wisdom which took them onto an entirely different path. Getting the fundamental flaws out of this approach enables a flurry of additional optimizations that IBM/AMD will not be able to apply in their technology. (full metal gates, not using any exotic materials for the gate)

      The only disadvantage for intel could be higher cost/lower yield associated with the hkmg process. However they have the benefit of scale (in therms of volume) on their side. In addition they went go through the painful hkmg transition two years earlier and hence things will be much easier for them at the 32nm node. IBM/AMD will be in even more trouble than they are now. I predict that Intel will have a very quick 32nm ramp around the time IBM/AMD managed to get their 45nm hkmg process to manufacturable yield.

    • Re:Don't think so. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by steevc (54110) on Monday February 25, @06:17AM (#22543760) Homepage Journal

      For instance the AMD Athlon X2 64-bit dual core chip i use, is quieter, less power hungry and more powerful than its intel-equivalent.
      I thought all chips were pretty much silent. It tends to be the cooling fan that makes the noise, but using less power should allow for a quieter fan.

      I've used several AMD processors (couple of Durons and now an Athlon X2). I chose them on a value for money basis. I never buy the fastest chips that command a heavy price premium, so the arguments over who has the top chip of the moment are irrelevant to me. I considered an Intel for my current PC, but the price difference was minimal and I know the AMD-based chipsets a bit better so I knew it should work for me. I do like to support the underdog, but not if it exceeds my budget.

      Even in the last few years I have met people who consider AMD to be inferior or less reliable than Intel chips. Intel's marketing millions must be doing something for them, but I find their jingle intensely annoying when it crops up in the middle of an ad.

    • Re:Of course AMD will survive. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Ihlosi (895663) on Monday February 25, @05:03AM (#22543470)
      they just bought ATI and are thus in a position to better integrate CPUs and GPUs (for lower price), which is something that I'm sure the mass market might be interested in.

      Fixed that for you. Anyway, the mass market is where the money is. Pandering to gamers is more of a prestige thing, 90-something percent of the PC buyers don't care about that.

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