Is AMD Dead Yet? 467
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?"
Re:Apparently not (Score:4, Informative)
Will they make it? (Score:2, Informative)
For the sake of competition, let's hope so, but it doesn't seem like it. The first Radeon card to support Direct3D 10 took way too long and their processors (both CPU and GPU) are all but impressive these days. Also, their CPUs' cost:performance ratio aren't what they used to be in the glory days which makes them less attractive.
The FX-60 was in my opinion the last exceptional AMD processor to hit the market, both quality and innovation wise. After Core 2 Duo, AMD kind of hit the ground burning.
Re:AMD did it to themselves (Score:5, Informative)
Hewlett-Packard
IBM
Infineon
Intel Corporation
Lenovo Holdings Limited
Microsoft
Sun Microsystems, Inc
IBM habitually declares competion dead (Score:5, Informative)
Prediction made 2 months bef. the Opteron release (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why did they buy ATI? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Paernt is the liar (Score:5, Informative)
Links: Intel stock (Score:5, Informative)
See also this January 16, 2008 Bloomberg story: U.S. Stocks Fall on Intel Forecast, Extending Global Tumble [bloomberg.com].
Quote: "Intel, the world's largest computer-chip maker, tumbled the most in five years in Nasdaq Stock Market trading after saying first-quarter sales will be as much as 6.9 percent below analysts' estimates."
Re:Of course AMD will survive. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:For me, this story crossed a line. ATI excellen (Score:5, Informative)
now, why is it down? well, look at their earnings. they have done pitiful. turns out in a slugout pricewar, intel can stay profitable while AMD is on the ropes. last year they lost money and continue to show no signs of recovering from their tech deficit they have again built against Intel. Now adays, the fastest AMD chip not on the market yet is slower than what intel already has at full production.
FYI: they last 166 million dollars last year. I'm not sure why this looks like manipulation as compared to just poor performance by the company without much of an end in sight.
oh, and my disclaimer: following my advice will hurt my long position in AMD.
Re:It is all about the platform. (Score:4, Informative)
Now for the really cheap machines, AMD 64 X2's are the way to go...much better than any Intel processor in that price range ($60-$120).
Re:It is all about the platform. (Score:5, Informative)
Ok, what are you smoking (Score:2, Informative)
Hmm. Phenom 9700, $200. E6420, $200.
Phenom kicks the crap out of E6420.
I go with the AMD.
Re:Shorting AMD stock: NASDAQ figures (Score:3, Informative)
If you really want to see massive, blatant stock manipulation, illegal as all get-out, on a grand scale, check out the third friday of December 2006 ticker history for AMD. AMD was riding relatively high, and two market-makers were in a price manipulation war, one trying to make the options expire worthless at the 20.00 strike, and another at the 22.50 strike. I made a big chunk of money riding on the coat tails, in both directions, on that day, but watching the blatant illegality of it occuring on such a grand scale soured me on playing options. What chance does a retail investor ultimately have in such an environment? Essentially, you have to be able to psychoanalyse the market manipulators, estimate their audacity relative to the regulators, and predict their next manipulation, in order to ride piggy-back. It works great when it works, but it's a very dodgy business at best.
Re:For me, this story crossed a line. ATI excellen (Score:2, Informative)
Re:It is all about the platform. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Links: Intel stock (Score:2, Informative)
Both stocks are actually higher than they were 5 years ago.
Nothing to see here, move along.
Re:It is all about the platform. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Wrong marketing did them in, clock *does* matte (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not going to question your personal experience as the others did. It's certainly believable that there's an application where the AMD processor performs 1/4th the speed of an Intel one (and vice versa).
I just want to point out that if the AMD processor actually was 2200 MHz, then you still could have found that the application that interests you performed at 1/4th the speed on that processor than the equivalent Intel one. Meaning that without the performance modeling numbers, you still would have found the equivalent "numbers" to result in an invalid comparison.
Clock frequency is not an automatic benefit for number crunching. If you don't change the architecture, then obviously yes a faster clock helps. But you don't go from a 1600 MHz chip to a 2200 MHz chip in the same time period without changing architectures. Performance is Clock Frequency * Insructions per Cycle, and a wide machine (many execution units) with low memory latency is going to tend to have higher IPC. However, the IPC value varies wildly by benchmark, and a benchmark that reveals certain deficiencies or strengths of the architecture may fall well outside normal, as was your case.
AMDs "modelhertz" or "markethertz" numbers became strained when the new generation of Intel products came out, but for most of the life of the Pentium 4 they were extremely generous to Intel's architecture. It's not just office applications -- go check benchmarks on Tom's, HardOCP, Ace's Hardware, and you'll see the AMD processor outperforming in a wide variety of benchmarks from games to high-performance scientific computing (the true number-crunching benchmarks), even including some media encoding benchmarks though Intel was very strong there and generally dominated.
My point is that if what you're looking for is a singular number by which to compare performance, then there is no "truth" to be stretched. MHz is an actual measurable number, true, but to equate that number with performance is "stretching the truth" to a greater extent than taking an aggregate of a wide variety of benchmark scores and relating that to performance. Marketroids can and do manipulate which benchmarks are chosen, but at least the resulting number means something regarding the performance of those benchmarks. MHz, by itself, means essentially nothing for a cross-architecture comparison.
So next time if you want to get the truth about performance, then the truth is that you have to measure the performance of the application you personally care about on the two processors in question. You can get an idea from reading reviews with benchmarks and looking at the results of similar applications (i.e. media encoding, or games, or what have you), but even that won't get you the real picture.
Re:For me, this story crossed a line. ATI excellen (Score:3, Informative)
Then you will see line breaks when you hit return.
If using "HTML Formatted", you have to put in br's for line breaks.
Re:Shorting AMD stock: NASDAQ figures (Score:4, Informative)
Re:It is all about the platform. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Darling of the community! (Score:3, Informative)