# Graphics market share not looking good for AMD - down to just 18%?



## qubit (Aug 20, 2015)

According to the NVIDIA slide below, it's very bad news for AMD.

Right, so the research has been carried out by apparently independent outfit Mercury Research, but take something like this from a competitor with a pinch of salt. Still, there's no doubt that NVIDIA now has a much bigger market share than AMD, whatever the actual numbers are.

Once again, it's bad news for competition and is the reason why we're seeing grossly overpriced top end cards like the Titan X from NVIDIA.



> According to *Mercury Research’s latest data*, NVIDIA has jumped from 77% of the discrete GPU market in Q4 2014 to 82% in Q2 2015. This basically means that AMD has dropped from 23% to 18% (of the discrete GPU market).









www.dsogaming.com/news/amdnvidia-market-share-graph-shows-nvidia-conquering-4-out-of-5-pc-gamers-own-an-nvidia-gpu


----------



## m&m's (Aug 20, 2015)

AMD frustrates me. Their flagship the Fury X is only available with a damn watercooler and all models from all brands are the same. Lets get stuck with the reference design... JUST WHY? I don't want any damn pump in my computer, is this so hard to assimilate AMD? It's not like this Coolermaster block was really worth it compared to good coolers available from Gigabyte, MSI, Sapphire, Asus and others which can keep the Fury Non-X below 70C. WTF is wrong with AMD, do they want to kill themselves? They claim "Our cards are very good at overclocking" and it turns out that it's false and that it overclocks like shit.

Bad marketing and so so products for years, what do they expect? They're only good at selling real cheap to budget gamers since all the high end is meh compared to NVidia.

I want AMD to survive and come back strong but they have to move their asses.


----------



## R-T-B (Aug 20, 2015)

> I want AMD to survive and come back strong but they have to move their asses.



I think they need your avatar as a motivator.


----------



## xvi (Aug 20, 2015)

I'm still waiting to see how the Fury Nano pans out.

Also, I don't know how much I trust a slide from nVidia regarding AMD's market share.


----------



## qubit (Aug 20, 2015)

@m&m's Couldn't agree more.

When they had that latest change of management, it looked like the company would finally be managed properly, but I can see no difference. This company is being driven into the ground by these sorts of obvious stupidities and I'm feeling more and more that they will not survive more than 2-5 years the way that they're going. No wonder that NVIDIA and Intel charge such high prices for products that are only small or smallish improvements over the previous generation.

There's a human cost here too, with all the ordinary people that will lose their jobs due to some overpaid and incompetent executives ruining the company that supports them.


----------



## Frick (Aug 20, 2015)

It's easy to manage when you're not involved.


----------



## newtekie1 (Aug 20, 2015)

Their products have been very big let downs.  That isn't to say they aren't good products, but AMD's PR team has hyped them up so much that when we finally got them, we were all disappointed.  That puts a bad taste in people's mouths that is hard to get rid of.

Also, they don't seem to care that they are dying.  If they would have marketed the Fury X with true statements instead of lies, and then released it for $50 cheaper, the thing would have been a hit.  Very near 980Ti performance for $50 less, people would have loved it.

And yes, forcing all manufacturers to buy the cards from them, pre-built with the cooler, and not allowing them change anything was a major stupid move.  Yes, nVidia can get away with it on their $1,000 Titans, but AMD needs to realize their cards aren't in that class.


----------



## 64K (Aug 20, 2015)

qubit said:


> @m&m's Couldn't agree more.
> 
> When they had that latest change of management, it looked like the company would finally be managed properly, but I can see no difference. This company is being driven into the ground by these sorts of obvious stupidities and I'm feeling more and more that they will not survive more than 2-5 years the way that they're going. No wonder that NVIDIA and Intel charge such high prices for products that are only small or smallish improvements over the previous generation.
> 
> There's a human cost here too, with all the ordinary people that will lose their jobs due to some overpaid and incompetent executives ruining the company that supports them.



You have piqued my financial investment curiosity. What about the last management change looked like AMD would be managed properly to you?


----------



## NC37 (Aug 20, 2015)

2 big things AMD bumbled this year (Of course theres more):

-Made customers wait months for rehashed cards
-Announced Fury Nano when announcing the Fury line

The 300 series rollout was a disaster. It left everyone waiting months for a disappointment. Added to the fact that AMD insisted there was value in the old tech and kept prices high while hyping Fury. Granted a 390 will beat a 980 right now, but the stigma of 2013 tech combined with an AMD that was clearly promoting Fury over 300 series, doesn't help. 

Nano was also another killer. Wave Fury X in faces all you want AMD, that won't pay the bills. The $300-$400 segment is what makes or breaks you and you can't get people to buy 390s over 970s when they know Nano is coming. On top of that and the rehash stigma. Just a perfect storm for losing share.


----------



## Blue-Knight (Aug 20, 2015)

> Graphics market share not looking good for AMD - down to just 18%?


Linux support had an impact. Definitely.



Spoiler: Do not read if you are easily offended



I'm sorry about AMD, but my next GPU will be from NVIDIA. Unless they come with something SPECTACULAR.


----------



## R-T-B (Aug 20, 2015)

Blue-Knight said:


> Linux support had an impact. Definitely.



Not sure what Linux has to do with anything here?  They've supported linux for years and it's largely irrelevant to the topic at hand.  If anything, their support has been poor but improving, and that is all that's really economically sensible given the market segment of linux users is incredibly small.


----------



## red_stapler (Aug 20, 2015)

What's actually new from AMD aside from the Fury cards?  Everything else is a rebrand.  Not much incentive to upgrade from my 7950 at this point.


----------



## qubit (Aug 20, 2015)

64K said:


> You have piqued my financial investment curiosity. What about the last management change looked like AMD would be managed properly to you?


I just remember that they had a change at the top and that the new person was touted as having the sort of vision and ability one would need to turn around a failing company like this. In particular some of the news sites were cautiously optimistic about it. Personally, I remember feeling very cynical with a ray of hope, but now that's been dashed.

The overhyping, overpricing and limiting of their Fury products (especially insisting on that one reference design for the Fury X with the watercooler) were dumb moves that are helping a reasonable product to fail and one with promising new technology in it, too. This is so obvious to see by everyone, yet the few people who should realize this (the decision makers) somehow don't. It beggars belief.


----------



## Frick (Aug 20, 2015)

qubit said:


> The overhyping, overpricing and limiting of their Fury products (especially insisting on that one reference design for the Fury X with the watercooler) were dumb moves that are helping a reasonable product to fail and one with promising new technology in it, too. This is so obvious to see by everyone, yet the few people who should realize this (the decision makers) somehow don't. It beggars belief.



I think AMD has deep cultural issues, and they probably has issues and pressures not visible to the outside. Everone's been moaning about their management for ages, and it keeps repeating. Those people are probably not fools, at least not _everyone_. Why do they keep making mistakes?


----------



## Blue-Knight (Aug 20, 2015)

Frick said:


> Why do they keep making mistakes?


Because they are humans!?


----------



## R-T-B (Aug 20, 2015)

Blue-Knight said:


> Because they are humans!?



But some humans are better at doing it than others, apparently.  AMD are expert mistake humans.


----------



## Bansaku (Aug 20, 2015)

I would like to know how Mercury came up with those numbers. I would expect, judging from what I see out in the wild with my own eyes mixed with local computer store's inventory levels/movement, that the split would be 60/40 in favour of nVidia. There is no way in hell they hold 82% of the market, and I don't buy it for a second.


----------



## R-T-B (Aug 20, 2015)

Bansaku said:


> I would like to know how Mercury came up with those numbers. I would expect, judging from what I see out in the wild with my own eyes mixed with local computer store's inventory levels/movement, that the split would be 60/40 in favour of nVidia. There is no way in hell they hold 82% of the market, and I don't buy it for a second.



In discrete GPUs I do...  that's what this is claiming.


----------



## OneMoar (Aug 20, 2015)




----------



## qubit (Aug 20, 2015)

Frick said:


> I think AMD has deep cultural issues, and they probably has issues and pressures not visible to the outside. Everone's been moaning about their management for ages, and it keeps repeating. Those people are probably not fools, at least not _everyone_. Why do they keep making mistakes?


I agree about those cultural issues. Why the hell this company keeps making such obvious fuckups when their products could sell given the right marketing and pricing I don't know. We'd have to be privvy to the internal politics of the company to figure that one out.

Now, this is pure speculation, but it wouldn't surprise me if there's good old fashioned corruption at the bottom of this with some people in high places trying to make a fast buck before the ship goes down. Perhaps I'm completely wrong, but when I see obvious screwups that a child could see, which are repeated over and over, I begin to suspect foul play.


----------



## v12dock (Aug 20, 2015)

"I want AMD to survive I love competition blah blah blah, but unless AMD releases something 'competitive' I will only buy Nvidia" 
Either bite the bullet and buy a less "competitive"inferior product or continue to slowly kill them.


----------



## Frick (Aug 20, 2015)

v12dock said:


> "I want AMD to survive I love competition blah blah blah, but unless AMD releases something 'competitive' I will only buy Nvidia"
> Either bite the bullet and buy a less "competitive"inferior product or continue to slowly kill them.



Thing is they're not really inferior. Some are, but most of them aren't. As newtekie said, they're just not the gods among mortals the PR teams promises.


----------



## Vayra86 (Aug 20, 2015)

v12dock said:


> "I want AMD to survive I love competition blah blah blah, but unless AMD releases something 'competitive' I will only buy Nvidia"
> Either bite the bullet and buy a less "competitive"inferior product or continue to slowly kill them.



Capitalism works this way: you release stuff customers want, or you can kiss your company goodbye.

AMD tried it this way: saying they release stuff customers want, while actually re-releasing old junk that wasn't competitive in the first place. The triple rebrand, followed by the complete letdown that they dubbed Fury, I am surprised they're still standing.

I've said it before and I'll keep saying it: AMD could release a top notch product today and still screw it up. If it doesn't go wrong with the product engineering itself, it WILL go wrong with their timing and marketing. Look at how they jumped on the HBM bandwagon: it is the good old AMD approach of 'moar cores' but is now called 'moar bandwidth'. Does it help the Fury at all? NO. Does it destroy their margins, yes, because GDDR5 is cheaper. About margins, they also considered a watercooled solution to be a great idea, and I'm sure it's a whole lot less costly than a tried and tested air cooler right? NOT. They use more metal for similar performance as the direct competitor, they use more expensive memory that doesn't extract more performance, and they still haven't considered moving to a new arch while the direct competitor is revising constantly.

Completely ridiculous.


----------



## FordGT90Concept (Aug 20, 2015)

v12dock said:


> "I want AMD to survive I love competition blah blah blah, but unless AMD releases something 'competitive' I will only buy Nvidia"
> Either bite the bullet and buy a less "competitive"inferior product or continue to slowly kill them.


This is why I wait for AMD even if it is inferior to NVIDIA.  I won't consider AMD processors because they're so far behind Intel so AMD gets the consolation prize in GPU sales from me.  Truth be told, only reason why I buy AMD GPUs is because I despise NVIDIA.  Some examples:
-AMD releases Mantle, NVIDIA refuses to implement it, AMD gives the code to Khronos and Microsoft, NVIDIA implements it because it is part of a non-AMD standard.
-AMD releases TressFX based on DirectCompute, NVIDIA much later releases Hair Works based on proprietary CUDA code that won't get accelerated on AMD GPUs.
-NVIDIA creates proprietary G-Sync instead of, like AMD, implementing VESA's Adaptive Sync/embedded DisplayPort standard which is an open standard.

These things are not mutually exclusive with market share either.  By buying an NVIDIA card, just like buying an Apple device, you're locked into their proprietary ecosystem.  This translates to larger market share but these are ill-gotten gains.  NVIDIA is not acting in the best interest of gaming where AMD at least tries.

I really wish ATI acquired Ageia PhysX instead of NVIDIA.  That's the one area AMD hasn't come up with a good alternative.  With Intel having bought out Havok, the prospects for an open physics library look bleak. 


So yeah, I buy AMD because...




...and I'm damn proud of it.  I called NVIDIA's bullshit almost a decade ago now; it has only gotten worse since.


----------



## Vayra86 (Aug 20, 2015)

FordGT90Concept said:


> This is why I wait for AMD even if it is inferior to NVIDIA.  I won't consider AMD processors because they're so far behind Intel so AMD gets the consolation prize in GPU sales from me.  Truth be told, only reason why I buy AMD GPUs is because I despise NVIDIA.  Some examples:
> -AMD releases Mantle, NVIDIA refuses to implement it, AMD gives the code to Khronos and Microsoft, NVIDIA implements it because it is part of a non-AMD standard.
> -AMD releases TressFX based on DirectCompute, NVIDIA much later releases Hair Works based on proprietary CUDA code that won't get accelerated on AMD GPUs.
> -NVIDIA creates proprietary G-Sync instead of, like AMD, implementing VESA's Adaptive Sync/embedded DisplayPort standard which is an open standard.
> ...



You know these are very valid points in a utopian world where all companies play nice with each other. But the world doesn't work that way. For all the 'underhand' actions of Nvidia, this company is also the company that makes the largest investment in terms of cooperation with developers. Nvidia KNOWS that to extract maximum performance from their product line up, they need to do this cooperative action, and they have the results to show for it. It all depends on your personal approach to the way these companies work. But for what its worth: Nvidia has furthered the gaming experience in a much broader way than AMD has ever done. And this is not because AMD isn't trying, but because AMD fails to put a solid business case on their attempts where Nvidia does. Nvidia presents a profit margin through their cooperation with developers, and AMD presents a technology as is without translating that to sales. In the end, sales count, because success gets copied and only technology that gets widely used will survive.


----------



## SonicZap (Aug 20, 2015)

I'm not sure if it's their new management that should be blamed. I believe that the previous leaders screwed things up so badly that at this point they simply don't have enough money to invest in the R&D that is necessary for competing with Nvidia, especially when they're supposedly focusing more on the CPU side again (with Zen). It must be extremely difficult for their management when they have more debt than the company is worth, and their competitor is basically bathing in cash.

AMD's PR has of course also been bad, the latest example being the overhyped overclocking capabilities of the Fury X.

It seems likely that Arctic Islands must be really awesome or they're going to get completely irrelevant in gamers' eyes and die. AMD did fine before Maxwell, and with no decent competitor Maxwell has erased half of AMD's GPU market share.


----------



## FordGT90Concept (Aug 20, 2015)

Vayra86 said:


> Nvidia has furthered the gaming experience in a much broader way than AMD has ever done.


You seriously can say that with a straight face?  Mantle (and it being used extensively in DirectX and Vulkan) is the reason why Direct3D 12 is so appealing and why so many gamers have already made the jump to Windows 10.  Name the last time an API change resulted in a 40%+ jump in frames.

As to the rest: has the thought ever crossed your mind that maybe AMD doesn't blow NVIDIA away because of all the open APIs they use?  When you're coding for an open standard, you generally take a performance hit because the code isn't designed specifically for the hardware.


Anti-competition is a "solid business case" for crony capitalism.


----------



## Blue-Knight (Aug 20, 2015)

FordGT90Concept said:


> By buying an NVIDIA card, just like buying an Apple device, you're locked into their proprietary ecosystem.


And what about Microsoft Windows, DirectX...


----------



## FordGT90Concept (Aug 20, 2015)

Blue-Knight said:


> And what about Microsoft Windows, DirectX...


...that picture I posted is very relevant to this comment.

AMD is trying to end DirectX's market dominance and handing Mantle to Khronos was a huge part of that.  If DirectX got the Mantle boost and OpenGL did not, it would have consigned OpenGL to death.


----------



## Vayra86 (Aug 20, 2015)

FordGT90Concept said:


> You seriously can say that with a straight face?  Mantle (and it being used extensively in DirectX and Vulkan) is the reason why Direct3D 12 is so appealing and why so many gamers have already made the jump to Windows 10.  Name the last time an API change resulted in a 40%+ jump in frames.
> 
> As to the rest: has the thought ever crossed your mind that maybe AMD doesn't blow NVIDIA away because of all the open APIs they use?  When you're coding for an open standard, you generally take a performance hit because the code isn't designed specifically for the hardware.
> 
> ...



You attribute DX12 to AMD because they released Mantle and the 'rumors say' that Microsoft got spurred into action because of Mantle. Riiiight. It totally isn't true that Microsoft is changing course entirely and that gaming and VR aren't the main reason for DX12 adoption. Because that is what DX12 is for. Not because we 'need' a few thousand more draw calls for the enthusiast gaming culture, honestly if you think that you are completely deluded.

DX12 is a performance jump for mobile. Desktop profits from it too, but only on the lower end of the spectrum. Us enthusiasts get a little bonus but nothing that will change gaming all too much because as you know, games are built for the lowest common denominator and that bar has just been raised a little.

By the by, Mantle was proprietary until Microsoft announced DX12. Coincidence, I'm sure? All AMD did was dump a load of money into a bottomless pit, one by the name of DICE. And the main reason for doing so is because their arch is more optimized for it than Nvidia's. Read between the lines.

And yes, the thought crossed my mind that AMD loses performance because of the open nature. And that is EXACTLY what I'm underlining in my previous post. There IS NO SOLID BUSINESS CASE for building open standards when there is only one direct competitor that doesn't want to play ball. It is stupidity, with a touch of utopian fantasy.


----------



## Blue-Knight (Aug 20, 2015)

FordGT90Concept said:


> ...that picture I posted is very relevant to this comment.
> 
> AMD is trying to end DirectX's market dominance and handing Mantle to Khronos was a huge part of that.  If DirectX got the Mantle boost and OpenGL did not, it would have consigned OpenGL to death.


Sorry, I thought you would be interested in supporting alternatives to Windows and DirectX 12... As you chose to support AMD by not buying NVIDIA.


----------



## FordGT90Concept (Aug 20, 2015)

Vayra86 said:


> You attribute DX12 to AMD because they released Mantle and the 'rumors say' that Microsoft got spurred into action because of Mantle. Riiiight. It totally isn't true that Microsoft is changing course entirely and that gaming and VR aren't the main reason for DX12 adoption. Because that is what DX12 is for. Not because we 'need' a few thousand more draw calls for the enthusiast gaming culture, honestly if you think that you are completely deluded.
> 
> DX12 is a performance jump for mobile. Desktop profits from it too, but only on the lower end of the spectrum. Us enthusiasts get a little bonus but nothing that will change gaming all too much because as you know, games are built for the lowest common denominator and that bar has just been raised a little.
> 
> By the by, Mantle was proprietary until Microsoft announced DX12. Coincidence, I'm sure?


Johan Andersson (DICE technical director) tweeted 


> Direct3D 12 blog with some more details: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/directx/archive/2014/03/20/directx-12.aspx … You may recognize the design


DICE cooperated with AMD in the creation of Mantle.  Mantle may not be at the core of Direct3D 12 but it (and collaboration with AMD) heavily influenced its design.

About mobile: look at the other threads on this forum about DirectX 12.  PCs benefit hugely.

Actually, it was the decision by AMD to give Mantle to Kronos that they made the API public.



Blue-Knight said:


> Sorry, I thought you would be interested in supporting alternatives to Windows and DirectX 12... As you chose to support AMD by not buying NVIDIA.


What of it?
Windows -> Linux
DirectX 12 -> OpenCL, Vulkan

Oh, sarcasm?


----------



## tabascosauz (Aug 20, 2015)

Hang in there, old man AMD. R9 Nano and Zen are coming. All hope is not yet lost.

AMD has made lots of bad decisions, but there is still a faint light at the end of the tunnel. If they squander it, however, we are dangerously close to collapse.

Too much restraint on AMD's part has kept the last few products from succeeding. Stop worrying about profits! You can't charge that much money in the face of the GTX 980 Ti, even if the Fury X is an awesomely unique card.


----------



## FordGT90Concept (Aug 20, 2015)

The success of Zen relies more on Global Foundries to deliver a competitive process than AMD, unfortunately.


----------



## HWTactics (Aug 20, 2015)

Nvidia has been getting all the attention since the GTX 970 and Titan X (3.5GB+.5GB memory and the high price compared to alternatives, respectively).  Bad press is still publicity.  The more people that talk about Nvidia the more beneficial it is for them.

Case in point: Donald Trump.

The R9 290/390 cards deliver absolutely-frickin-tastic bang for the buck; the 290's are still going on sale for mid-$200's and trade blows with Nv's cards twice the price.  But nobody is talking about the 300 series cards at all because they're rebrands.  So, back to talking about Nvidia.


----------



## 64K (Aug 20, 2015)

I have seen a good bit of enthusiasm generated for the Nano. Depends on the price how well it will sell. I wonder how much it adds to the cost of manufacturing with HBM. Everyone says HBM is more expensive than GDDR5 but I haven't seen anyone say how much it adds to the cost. Is it just a couple of dollars or a lot more?



HWTactics said:


> Nvidia has been getting all the attention since the GTX 970 and Titan X (3.5GB+.5GB memory and the high price compared to alternatives, respectively).  Bad press is still publicity.  The more people that talk about Nvidia the more beneficial it is for them.
> 
> Case in point: Donald Trump.
> 
> The R9 290/390 cards deliver absolutely-frickin-tastic bang for the buck; the 290's are still going on sale for mid-$200's and trade blows with Nv's cards twice the price.  But nobody is talking about the 300 series cards at all because they're rebrands.  So, back to talking about Nvidia.



The R9 290x are a steal right now with prices slashed and rebates too.

Oh, and Donald Trump is a pompous ass.


----------



## Recus (Aug 20, 2015)

FordGT90Concept said:


> -AMD releases Mantle, NVIDIA refuses to implement it, AMD gives the code to Khronos and Microsoft, NVIDIA implements it because it is part of a non-AMD standard.
> -AMD releases TressFX based on DirectCompute, NVIDIA much later releases Hair Works based on proprietary CUDA code that won't get accelerated on AMD GPUs.
> -NVIDIA creates proprietary G-Sync instead of, like AMD, implementing VESA's Adaptive Sync/embedded DisplayPort standard which is an open standard.



-Intel asked for Mantle but AMD refused because "it's still in beta". AMD knew Mantle won't see a day light. Marketing stunt.
-Since HairWorks is using DX11 for rendering/simulation, it can run on any DX11 capable GPU. Pro-AMD users using fake facts. Result is AMD bleeding in market share.
-AMD calls it FreeSync, open standard and everyone losing their minds. But it's free only for business partners. Customers still have to pay for it. It doesn't matter open standard or proprietary you still have to pay for it.


----------



## Joss (Aug 20, 2015)

The only way out for AMD now would be to be bought by a tech company with deep pockets_ *and a tradition of sound management*_.
If left to their own devices they'll go bankrupt and the different divisions will be picked on the cheap.


----------



## Vayra86 (Aug 20, 2015)

FordGT90Concept said:


> Johan Andersson (DICE technical director) tweeted
> 
> DICE cooperated with AMD in the creation of Mantle.  Mantle may not be at the core of Direct3D 12 but it (and collaboration with AMD) heavily influenced its design.
> 
> ...



Yes I know there was a lot of spin going on with the Mantle debate. But economics don't lie. Gaming is a growth market, Microsoft turned over a new leaf with 'One' Windows and DX12 fits perfectly into streamlining that experience, it also fits perfectly with the lower processing power and multi threaded nature of mobile- and SFF devices and portability. Of course multi core CPU's benefit across the whole spectrum, but that was and is not the primary goal of DX12. It is just what we gamers see as the big step forward. Microsoft also needs as many carrots as it can find to make people adopt W10 and DX12 fits nicely there too. So far the only tangible evidence we have that DX12 will further gaming is that we can build benchmarks that show an increase in draw calls. Wooptiedoo. I'll wait for games that utilize this advantage before I start cheering, okay?

Let's not blind ourselves from the obvious truth here just because of what some guy at DICE tweeted. We also know that in every industry with some kind of tech development, many different paths generally lead to similar outcomes, Mantle/DX12 is nothing more than an example of that, no surprise that designs look alike. Consider the move AMD makes now on the CPU side with Zen - they are now following an Intel approach, just like Intel took over AMD's design wins in the past. That's about as coincidental as the Mantle/DX12 comparison 

Marketing-wise, presenting yourself as the company 'that is open and wants to push gaming and technology' is a perfect strategy. But only if that does result in open standards that do actually get adopted in a broad sense, and only when that adoption leads to greater sales. Open standards that don't find adoption are wasted time and do nothing to help the brand. TressFX is an example, Mantle is another. AMD is quick to scream they have the new holy grail but when push comes to shove, every single time, it isn't entirely what it should be. FreeSync may become an exception, we will have to see.


----------



## FordGT90Concept (Aug 20, 2015)

Recus said:


> -Intel asked for Mantle but AMD refused because "it's still in beta". AMD knew Mantle won't see a day light. Marketing stunt.


Irrelevant now because Intel will get Mantle by way of Vulkan.  



Recus said:


> -Since HairWorks is using DX11 for rendering/simulation, it can run on any DX11 capable GPU. Pro-AMD users using fake facts. Result is AMD bleeding in market share.


Witcher 3 Dev says Nvidia HairWorks unoptimizable for AMD GPUs.  Radeons took a huge performance hit with it enabled.  The work around is to use CCC to force Witcher 3 to use a lower tessellation setting.



Recus said:


> -AMD calls it FreeSync, open standard and everyone losing their minds. But it's free only for business partners. Customers still have to pay for it. It doesn't matter open standard or proprietary you still have to pay for it.


Customers have to pay for it because embedded DisplayPort (the technology it uses) places hardware requirements in the display not unlike G-Sync.  The difference is G-Sync is proprietary, eDP isn't.  Nothing in life is free.  I'd rather give my money to a business that supports open standards rather than closed.



Vayra86 said:


> Marketing-wise, presenting yourself as the company 'that is open and wants to push gaming and technology' is a perfect strategy. But only if that does result in open standards that do actually get adopted in a broad sense, and only when that adoption leads to greater sales. Open standards that don't find adoption are wasted time and do nothing to help the brand. TressFX is an example, Mantle is another. AMD is quick to scream they have the new holy grail but when push comes to shove, every single time, it isn't entirely what it should be. FreeSync may become an exception, we will have to see.


Vulkan is Mantle.  It doesn't have much adoption for now but as D3D12 adoption increases, so will Vulkan.  Vulkan is in an excellent position now because of Valve (Steam Machines/Linux) and AMD.  AMD is also working on an open display driver standard for Linux (which is what made Linus angry at NVIDIA).

HairWorks is likely to be as successful as TressFX (that is, not).  It was just an example of NVIDIA not only screwing over AMD consumers, but also reinventing a round wheel into a square one that only works well on special roads (conveniently also made by NVIDIA).  TressFX works well on NVIDIA cards too; the reverse is not true.  HairWorks exists for only one reason and that is to sell more NVIDIA cards.  I hope CD Projekt learned their lesson and never uses HairWorks again.


----------



## rtwjunkie (Aug 20, 2015)

Over in the news section, this same research company produced slides that did not give this big a market share to Nvidia as this thread suggests:  http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/nvidia-ships-over-75-of-discrete-gpus-in-q2-2015.215405/


----------



## FordGT90Concept (Aug 20, 2015)

Heh, because it includes Intel.   Look at discreet...pretty close...unfortunately. 

NVIDIA: 76.4%
AMD: 23.6%

Actually, the source is supposed to be the same by NVIDIA claims 84%/AMD 18%.  That's a pretty big jump when the numbers should be the same.  Am I missing something or did NVIDIA cook the books in that slide?


----------



## Vayra86 (Aug 20, 2015)

18% is next year, don't even worry.



FordGT90Concept said:


> HairWorks is likely to be as successful as TressFX (that is, not).  It was just an example of NVIDIA not only screwing over AMD consumers, but also reinventing a round wheel into a square one that only works well on special roads (conveniently also made by NVIDIA).  TressFX works well on NVIDIA cards too; the reverse is not true.  HairWorks exists for only one reason and that is to sell more NVIDIA cards.  I hope CD Projekt learned their lesson and never uses HairWorks again.



Oh you're right. Nvidia screwed up big time with Hairworks I fully agree. They even tried screwing over the Kepler customer base because it would run like crap on Kepler too. Do I care about Hairworks? About as much as I care about TressFX really. All I personally care about is whether games run well, and I'm not prepared to pull out the wallet to 'help' whatever company because their marketing language is so cool and awesome. Mind you, Hairworks does run a lot better now on Kepler too so I guess Nvidia did come back on that one. Still don't use it though.


----------



## FordGT90Concept (Aug 20, 2015)

2015 Q2 ended a few months ago...

NVIDIA has to have left out some data to get their more favorable 84% figure.

Edit: Source. I'm convinced the numbers aren't stretched, they're cooked.  Yet another reason to despise NVIDIA.


----------



## rtwjunkie (Aug 20, 2015)

FordGT90Concept said:


> 2015 Q2 ended a few months ago...
> 
> NVIDIA has to have left out some data to get their more favorable 84% figure.


 
I think you're right.  I think the numbers are probably 75/25.  Let's just say it...Nvidia is flat out lying.  I think the reports cited in news section is a little more accurate...although still pretty bleak for AMD.


----------



## RejZoR (Aug 20, 2015)

What really killed AMD this year is endless waiting for what ended up to be just a rehash of old cards. They could easily counter GTX 980 with R9-390X already back then and leave Fury for summer like it was released. Instead they kept losing market share all this time.

Second issue is the R9 Nano. They made a huge hype around it and it's still nowhere to be seen. Which is a total PR disaster if you ask me. Users don't care how they use different grades of GPU's, they just want the products.

If I look myself, I waited for R9-300 series for friggin half a year longer just to be offered a rehash of old models. Ugh. And so I bought GTX 980. Guess why...


----------



## BiggieShady (Aug 20, 2015)

FordGT90Concept said:


> AMD releases TressFX based on DirectCompute, NVIDIA much later releases Hair Works based on proprietary CUDA code that won't get accelerated on AMD GPUs.


You are wrong there, HairWorks use DirectCompute, not CUDA. 
Trouble is that there is cheap licence where devs get DLL-s and can't optimize for AMD, and there is expensive licence where devs get source code and can optimize code-paths to their liking.


----------



## tabascosauz (Aug 20, 2015)

RejZoR said:


> What really killed AMD this year is endless waiting for what ended up to be just a rehash of old cards. They could easily counter GTX 980 with R9-390X already back then and leave Fury for summer like it was released. Instead they kept losing market share all this time.
> 
> Second issue is the R9 Nano. They made a huge hype around it and it's still nowhere to be seen. Which is a total PR disaster if you ask me. Users don't care how they use different grades of GPU's, they just want the products.
> 
> If I look myself, I waited for R9-300 series for friggin half a year longer just to be offered a rehash of old models. Ugh. And so I bought GTX 980. Guess why...



Let's save the Nano decisions for when it actually comes out (i.e. in a million years).

But yes, AMD fucked up pretty seriously when it turned out that we were all just waiting for a pair of rebranded 8GB Hawaii cards. That soured the moods of AMD supporters, then Fury had to follow in close succession. I think AMD hasn't yet realized that their profits diminish the longer that Pitcairn is kept alive.


----------



## 64K (Aug 20, 2015)

About the differences in numbers between the graph in the opening post and what btarunr posted in the news section here. The graph in the opening post is from a game site without a direct link to the graph. Only a general link to the Mercury Research. btarunr linked his info directly to the Mercury Research press release. I would definitely go with btarunr's numbers. I'm not saying Nvidia didn't lie to Mercury but Nvidia is a publicly traded company and does have to present financial info publicly so I imagine Mercury didn't allow them to blow too much smoke up their asses.


----------



## rtwjunkie (Aug 20, 2015)

tabascosauz said:


> Let's save the Nano decisions for when it actually comes out (i.e. in a million years).
> 
> But yes, AMD fucked up pretty seriously when it turned out that we were all just waiting for a pair of rebranded 8GB Hawaii cards. That soured the moods of AMD supporters, then Fury had to follow in close succession. I think AMD hasn't yet realized that their profits diminish the longer that Pitcairn is kept alive.


 
Agreed!  Fury coming before the rebrands would probably have been a much better decision and guarranteed higher market share.


----------



## FordGT90Concept (Aug 20, 2015)

AMD should have quietly launched the rebrands as they were available and saved the press event for just Fury/Nano.  They should have also pushed the event back to when they actually had inventory to sell.


----------



## 64K (Aug 20, 2015)

Part of why Nvidia is doing much better than AMD is that Nvidia engineered the Maxwell architecture to be a good bit more efficient than Kepler even though Maxwell is still on the same 28nm process as Kepler. A lot of people seem to take Maxwell for granted by expecting AMD should be able to do the same thing with their GPUs. Maxwell truly is a very well engineered architecture. If Nvidia does little more than push it out on 16nm with Pascal and HBM then it will still be a hell of a good GPU and should be quite a bit faster than Maxwells due to much better performance per watt. AMD is bleeding red ink and they didn't have the money for R&D that Nvidia had.

With Maxwell you got a GPU for every segment
Entry level 750/ 750 Ti
Mid Range 960/ 970/ 980
High End 980 Ti/ Titan X

With AMD the only new silicon they could bring so far is high end Fury/ Fury X and very few gamers buy high end. Soon they will have a mid range Fiji with the Nano but what they may have to charge due to HBM could hurt them there too.


----------



## yotano211 (Aug 20, 2015)

The only reason I went for Nvidia this time and with a new upgrade is because I have a laptop. I went from 780m sli to 970m sli. AMD doesnt have anything in the high end for laptops. They had the 7970m and then they released the 8970m with a 50mhz graphics core speed increase. 

I know that lots of people dont agree with me that gaming laptops are not real gaming machines and that they cost so much higher but I can guarantee you that my laptop can run with some of the best desktops out there at full detail with any game. And plus my life style now or in the future does not permit me to have a desktop. I had a desktop last month but life interfered and had to sell it for parts. 

AMD really needs to get into the mobile area more. They are getting killed in that area.


----------



## FordGT90Concept (Aug 20, 2015)

Maxwell has no supply problems because 28nm is mature and GDDR5 is available in abundance.  We have to assume Fiji's 28nm chips are also available in abundance so the supply problem stems from either the 65nm interposer and/or the 20nm(?) HBM chips.  You'd think the interposer isn't a problem so HBM is the most likely culprit.  I think the heart of the problem is AMD adopted HBM before it was ready for prime time.  At the same time, what if AMD didn't adopt HBM?  Would HBM2 still have happened?  Would the problems AMD presumably have with HBM have caused problems with HBM2 as well?  AMD took a risk and as far as Maxwell is concerned, they shot themselves in the foot.  The question is whether or not the HBM gamble pays off for AMD when HBM2 comes out because it is undeniably not paying off now.  One can hope...


----------



## 64K (Aug 20, 2015)

I think AMD was a bit premature with HBM. Nvidia doesn't have to cope with the increased cost of HBM or the possible supply shortages caused by HBM. AMD isn't in a position to eat the costs of being an innovator right now unfortunately.


----------



## tabascosauz (Aug 20, 2015)

As a supporter (note that supporter is not synonymous with fanboy when it pertains to me) of Intel, I accept that good business practices have certainly played a part in Nvidia's success and the lack of such practice has contributed to AMD's downfall. However, there are things that cannot go unmentioned when it comes to Nvidia's performance that really tarnishes their supposed reputation as a successful, forward thinking company dedicated to providing quality products for gamers.

1. I would hardly consider GameWorks and TWIMTBP to be conducive to a better gaming experience. The latter, surprisingly, is bordering on the edge of acceptable since it often appears in titles like Borderlands 2 and Far Cry 4, which end up with acceptable performance on AMD GPUs, despite having these GPUs suffer an inevitable performance hit since the game is marketed, essentially, under Nvidia's name. The former, however, warrants a little more debate. It has resulted in games that are utterly broken on AMD's GPUs. If you were AMD and had the Brisbane Athlon X2s on your hands, you could still offer better performance than Intel in games and virtually all applications; you just couldn't get as much OEMs to use your CPUs. You can't even get game developers to begin supporting your GPUs with GameWorks, and don't get me started about how the game technically "works" on AMD hardware when the TPU reviews of the Fury had to have a separate performance summary percentage solely for the omission of Pcars from the score.

2. Nvidia brought quite the interesting and efficient architecture to the table with Maxwell, no doubt about that. On the other hand, I wouldn't find it far-fetched to have others in agreement with me when I say that Nvidia is hardly the innovator. These days, we all talk about how Apple deliberately withholds innovative technology in order to give their consumers motivation to buy the next, "improved" successor. How is Nvidia any different? "Oh, AMD having HBM is nothing special, Nvidia has HBM-like tech too and will bring something even BETTER with Pascal." I don't see Nvidia bringing such a product to the table in the present. In the future, perhaps, but this is the story of Tegra. Tegra 2, Tegra 3, Tegra 4, and the invisible failure that was the Tegra 4i. What about NVTTM? Snagged the attention of every enthusiast with the release of the magnesium alloy-clad GTX 690, then what? Used the same design, then realized that 80°C wasn't enough for hotter GPUs? Bump it to 82°C. Oh, Maxwell is here? Remove the vapor chamber and put a plate of copper in its stead. Oh, that didn't work so well? Put the vapor-chamber back. Oh, still not enough? Bump it to 84°C and forget about it. Let's not mention the nightmarish plastic coolers of the 660, 660 Ti and 670 in combination with the half-length PCB.

Am I saying that Nvidia is doing illegal things? No. Are they anticompetitive in some ways? Of course. Do they "innovate" more with flashy software than hardware? Yes, but that doesn't change the fact that AMD has yet to bring convincing performance to the table *while* following a successful marketing strategy. Keeping the "FX-8300 is 8 cores" alive, rebranding Hawaii so it's hotter and more hungry, and rebranding Pitcairn for the third goddamn round, all _*before*_ the release of the real deal - Fury X and Fury (the latter of which shouldn't have been delayed for so long; AMD can't pull a Titan with the Fury X and just leave it there, expecting people to buy it over the Fury) is not a successful marketing strategy. AMD is trying to distance itself from AM3+, and for a good reason, but that 8-core marketing cannot go away fast enough.

just my $0.02


----------



## rtwjunkie (Aug 20, 2015)

@tabascosauz just a couple minor corrections to your otherwise fine post.  There were some exceptions to the half-length pcb of the 660 and 660Ti.  MSI's Twin Frozr 660 OC was built on the 680 PCB (one of the reasons W1zzard touted it in his review as one of the best 660 models), and the EVGA 660Ti FTW 2GB was also on  full-length PCB.  That one also appeared to use a vapor-chamber inside its plastic shroud, as an interesting footnote.


----------



## RejZoR (Aug 20, 2015)

Nano is totally out of the picture for 90% of people. It's way too late for anything, no one has the slightest clue how it even performs even now, it's all just bunch of vaporware and it's hurting AMD badly.

I was interested in the vanilla R9 Fury and later for R9 Nano, but they were both SOOOOOO late to the party even after existing half a year extra wait I just couldn't be bothered waiting any further. I'm suprised I've waited this long to begin with.

AMD initially said they'll release new gen on March/April 2015. That sounded reasonable. But after that extended to June/July with some stuff not yet released in August I was like are you frigging kidding me!? If R9-390X was released back in 2014 or even january 2015 to counter GTX 970/980, people would object it a lot less even for being a refresh. It performs well and it would be good alternative released as a direct answer. But waiting for so much more and gettinga refresh, that was what disappointed most people the most. I know it disappointed me. And I'm for sure not the only one with such opinion.


----------



## Frag_Maniac (Aug 20, 2015)

This is just wrong on so many levels.

1. Nvidia has in the past touted themselves as wanting what's best for gaming in general. I would say it peeked at Rage's release when they were trying to offer help for not just Nvidia consumers, but AMD as well. OK, fine, but if they're really THAT concerned, why would they be spearheading a study like this and publishing slides of it if not just to kick AMD when thy're down?

2. Nvidia released the 900 series in 2014, which is where they really started pulling ahead. The 970 was one of the best values in a GPU we'd seen in some time. Yet many have found with the strange 3.5GB + 512MB VRAM config it has serious stutter issues in games with mass amounts of VRAM usage.

3. At that point many started reaizing the 290X, is a card that's near equal in performance to a 970, and pulls ahead on the mass VRAM usage games due to no 3.5GB cap.

4. The 390 then debuts. By now a LOT of people are claiming the entire 300 series to be a flop, yet those scrutinizing more carefully, are finding the 390 to be the new 970 killer, and king of it's price range.

Now I'm not saying AMD can't be doing better and that they don't make a lot of poor R&D and marketing decisions, but jeez, give me a break. Where are all the people that cried foul at the 3.5GB+512MB 970 VRAM config? Are they now just content to sit back and soak up the AMD bashing?

It's clear to me that AMD's pricing is STILL more appropriate than Nvidia's, and that it's largely due to people just clinging to the Nvidia brand out of loyalty or some kind of false sense of superiority. It's a kind of sickness that greater financial success exudes an illusion of better product.

We all know there was a surge in Nvidia stock when the 900s debuted, whether they lead by as big a margin as Nvidia claim remains to be seen. I'm looking at this deeper though. I'm thinking about Nvidia vs AMD not just from a business model sense, but from a gaming integrity sense.

Who in their right mind with ALL that money to play with tosses out a crippled mid/high end card, continually releases graphics features that are performance hogs and glitchy, then insults the competition when they slip into financial trouble?

God forbid AMD should go away and leave us with the dark side that is Nvidia with sole control of the GPU market.


----------



## FordGT90Concept (Aug 20, 2015)

Frag Maniac said:


> God forbid AMD should go away and leave us with the dark side that is Nvidia with sole control of the GPU market.


I think I would actually give up video games.


----------



## tabascosauz (Aug 20, 2015)

Frag Maniac said:


> Who in their right mind with ALL that money to play with tosses out a crippled mid/high end card, continually releases graphics features that are performance hogs and glitchy, then insults the competition when they slip into financial trouble?



true dat 

Oh hey look, the GTX 950 came out today with an absolutely nonsensical price. Add the usual premium on top to compensate for the weak Canadian dollar, and you have a card is priced like a GTX 960 but isn't one (which is already shit, I don't care what BS Nvidia spews about its compression technologies + 128-bit bus, it loses to the R9 380, pure and simple). "I can build a decent Nvidia gaming PC with only a 300W generic PSU" is one of the most laughable reasons I have ever heard in support of Nvidia low-end GPUs.


----------



## SonicZap (Aug 20, 2015)

FordGT90Concept said:


> I think I would actually give up video games.


I'd hope Intel (or AMD, _if_ Zen is awesome) actually creates a decent (R9 380-level) iGPU for their CPUs, so I could entirely forget about discrete graphics cards. After seeing what Nvidia did with Kepler optimization ("forgetting" it initially for Witcher 3) and seeing them making everything proprietary, I'd rather not support them.

A huge issue for AMD is their public image of a budget / worse brand. Even here on TPU it's common to see people saying "I want AMD to compete so Nvidia has to make their GPUs cheaper". If AMD can compete, why not buy AMD instead?


----------



## 64K (Aug 20, 2015)

No sensible gamer wants to see AMD gone.


----------



## HumanSmoke (Aug 20, 2015)

Frick said:


> I think AMD has deep cultural issues, and they probably has issues and pressures not visible to the outside. Everone's been moaning about their management for ages, and it keeps repeating. Those people are probably not fools, at least not _everyone_. Why do they keep making mistakes?


The division has been pretty obvious since AMD acquired ATI in 2006. AMD either shied away from vertically integrating ATI's management into AMD, or as seems more likely given the accounts of people that have left since then, ATI's management continued to act with a degree of autonomy. When I was researching background for an article of AMD's history for TechSpot, the common thread that came up in interviews and biographies was that AMD wasn't run as a congruous entity, but as a collection of fiefdoms - each department scheming and battling for their own interests rather than any unified corporate strategy.

To get a full picture you'd have to pore over a ton of literature, but the same general feeling is present in snippet form from sites like Glassdoor. I get the feeling that things have improved since the wholesale corporate changes instituted during Rory Read's tenure, but the damage had largely been done by then. Shoehorning an entity with a different focus and corporate ethos into AMD while leaving ATI's exec's to still what amounted to an independent company structure within AMD created a fundamental disconnect.
AMD acquired ATI for graphics IP, but AMD had little graphics experience - aside from some dabbling in TTL IC's, so pretty much just left ATI to it. AMD's situation wasn't that uncommon, but where divisional rivalry in other companies ( IBM, Motorola, HP etc.) were usually kept in check by a CEO/Chairman/Board with an iron will, AMD got themselves into a position where the division they'd acquired held a substantial amount of power within the (supposedly) unified company....hence the lack of focus as a whole.


----------



## Zen_ (Aug 20, 2015)

_Add in card _share might be a bit misleading, as it doesn't account for integrated / APU market share. The most popular games now like MOBAs, CS:GO, minecraft, and many indie titles run just fine on a higher end APU or very low end dedicated card. PC games that really need high end add in cards are what is dying.


----------



## HumanSmoke (Aug 20, 2015)

Frag Maniac said:


> 1. Nvidia has in the past touted themselves as wanting what's best for gaming in general.


It's called marketing, maybe you've heard of it?
Both sides do it. ATI had a (relatively) successful gaming program (GITG) going to combat TWIMTBP. When AMD acquired ATI, they made the same noises, and starved the program to death - to the point where even lovers of all things AMD/ATI don't even realize that Get In The Game ever existed.


Frag Maniac said:


> 2. Nvidia released the 900 series in 2014, which is where they really started pulling ahead.


That was part an architectural decision on Nvidia's part ( culling FP64, increasing the shader module-to-core ratio) which boosted Nvidia's sales with OEMs ( mobile and desktop vendors could cut the bill of materials for cooling and PSUs while facing decreasing warranty claims by effectively capping power usage), and AMD's stubborn refusal to address the same markets - just look at the discrete mobile parts the company has been fielding for years ( a market sector completely 100% OEM based).

AMD release good kit, and generally always have. What they suffer from isn't hardware, but image. Hardware on its own very rarely sells itself - what sells is its interface with the person using it. The company has never been software orientated, and its endeavours have been chequered to say the least. Enduro's problems managed to drive OEM's away from AMD in droves, and the company still don't present a unified image WRT software - farming out for Raptr for example. Many more people ooh and aah over inconsequential crap like LED lighting bling and colour coordination than actual purpose. Selling a graphics package image (hardware, software, sense of community) just plays to that facile preoccupation.


Frag Maniac said:


> We all know there was a surge in Nvidia stock when the 900s debuted, whether they lead by as big a margin as Nvidia claim remains to be seen.


If it's Mercury Research's figures then you can take the numbers to the bank. The only dodgy aspect of the chart is the Y-axis abbreviated to accentuate AMD's position relative to the baseline - otherwise the numbers gel with what is being said within the industry. ATI and AMD have never really suffered to Nvidia in comparison with hardware - and in many cases offered a much superior product ( the Evergreen series launched against absolutely no opposition for example), but the company - being run by engineers, never really got a handle on marketing to the OEMs that bring in the huge rolling contracts. The one time that ATI did have favour with the OEMs was when the company were quick to market with PCI-E cards in 2004 while Nvidia dithered over the AGP/PCI-E transition. It is no coincidence that ATI's market share during the time skyrocketed on the back of OEM contracts.









Zen_ said:


> _Add in card _share might be a bit misleading, as it doesn't account for integrated / APU market share. The most popular games now like MOBAs, CS:GO, minecraft, and many indie titles run just fine on a higher end APU or very low end dedicated card. PC games that really need high end add in cards are what is dying.


If you're talking about the overall graphics market - APUs included, the news for AMD is actually even more dire considering Intel's increasing stranglehold on the market, and the fact that AMD still trails Nvidia - who don't field any APUs.


----------



## tabascosauz (Aug 20, 2015)

HumanSmoke said:


> -snip-



One thing I left unaddressed was the importance of OEMs for a business like AMD. We all desperately pray that AMD will offer earth-shattering performance, and that's all well and good but won't save the company. The company has declined for so long that it's not so much their inability to produce good products (I'd say *great* products considering that they have taken horrible horrible GCN 1.0 and made it into the relatively efficient architecture that powers Tonga and Fiji) but their ability to sell these products. Take a look at the CPU side of things. For so long, it was all crappy cheese. Marketing is cheesy, but it can be effective. AMD's is the former, not the latter. They've smartened up since Carrizo and actually offered useful information in their slides, but they went from one extreme to another and no one even knows that Carrizo exists because the information in those slides is too much for the average user / enthusiast to understand (not to mention that no OEM is expressing interest in it.

You could run a bakery that produces the best cinnamon rolls in the world, but if it's located deep in the hood, residing on a dilapidated property with a bad reputation, and you don't post any ads or have any connections, you may as well close down the shop. Nvidia enjoys complete impunity in the mobile GPU market, because AMD hardly even exists. Sure, they have a bunch of wins with Apple, but are they really wins if you are essentially offering your GPUs for free? Same with consoles. Freebies don't earn revenue.

Intel knew what they had to do to get out of the Netburst rut. They pulled the OEM card on AMD, with a lot of dirty tricks along the way. No one knows for sure whether Nvidia is pulling tricks where no one can see, but they sure know exactly how Intel felt back in '05. Nvidia knows exactly where they want to put AMD, and that AMD hurts without OEMs. Dell, HP and Acer all suck, but they can keep you afloat.

Now what does AMD have? All I can see at my local store is some weird A10-7800 + R7 240 tower. Did AMD decide that the 860K was a retail-only product? Was Dual Graphics the only thing that they could find to market to OEMs?


----------



## Dieinafire (Aug 20, 2015)

If amd made better products and supported their products better they would do a lot better.  But for years now all they do is drop the ball over and over


----------



## yesyesloud (Aug 21, 2015)

hahah if my company had 18% of the world's GPU market (as one of their products) I wouldn't be that sad

_Oh, we're not making as many billions as some people wish we did, I guess it's a good time to kick the bucket tomorrow at 7pm_

And seriously, "freebies"? As in... Really, for free? Are laptop APUs and GPUs also totally unprofitable _freebies_?

I love eloquent simpletons


----------



## R-T-B (Aug 21, 2015)

yesyesloud said:


> hahah if my company had 18% of the world's GPU market (as one of their products) I wouldn't be that sad
> 
> _Oh, we're not making as many billions as some people wish we did, I guess it's a good time to kick the bucket tomorrow at 7pm_
> 
> ...



Except they haven't posted a profitable quarter for a VERY long time, meaning they aren't making money, but bleeding it.


----------



## yesyesloud (Aug 21, 2015)

R-T-B said:


> Except they haven't posted a profitable quarter for a VERY long time, meaning they aren't making money, but bleeding it.


'tits true. I truly hope AMD doesn't go bankrupt, otherwise I'm quitting PC gaming so that I won't support hardware monopolies.


----------



## anubis44 (Aug 21, 2015)

Once the DX12 benchmarks start coming out, nVidia is the one who's going to be in trouble. They're not going to be able to charge a premium anymore over AMD's cards, at least with the current Maxwell lineup:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=706&v=AFBtGYVnzNY

and here:

http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/2...-singularity-amd-and-nvidia-go-head-to-head/3

AMD's entire Radeon lineup going back to the first generation of GCN 1.0 (7000-series) are going to get a pretty dramatic shot in the arm in performance with DX12, and so will AMD in general  once this starts going viral.


----------



## BiggieShady (Aug 21, 2015)

anubis44 said:


> AMD's entire Radeon lineup going back to the first generation of GCN 1.0 (7000-series) are going to get a pretty dramatic shot in the arm in performance with DX12, and so will AMD in general once this starts going viral.


Viral? You mean once steam surveys start showing equal percentages of DX12 and DX11 systems, so that developers have incentive to support both DX12 and DX11 in their games ... add to that extra couple of years of development cycle for new games.
So, few years of DX11 games with one or two DX12 showcase games, followed by couple of years of supporting both DX11 and DX12 renderer in games ... just like GTA5 nowdays can be run in DX10 mode (yeah Vista). 
The point is AMD should still work on their DX11 drivers, rather than relying on fast adoption of Win10. Don't get me wrong, adoption will be relatively fast compared to DX11, but not fast enough for AMD to allow themselves to forget about DX11.


----------



## RejZoR (Aug 21, 2015)

You cannot judge performance of all graphic cards from one camp based on a single game that has been predominantly developed with AMD graphic cards in mind. Call my biased all you want for owning a GTX, but I've had several generations of AMD cards prior GTX 980 and I was very happy with all of them. So, I'm not being biased, I'm just being realistic. There were and always will be games that favor graphic cards from one or another camp.


----------



## RejZoR (Aug 21, 2015)

BiggieShady said:


> Viral? You mean once steam surveys start showing equal percentages of DX12 and DX11 systems, so that developers have incentive to support both DX12 and DX11 in their games ... add to that extra couple of years of development cycle for new games.
> So, few years of DX11 games with one or two DX12 showcase games, followed by couple of years of supporting both DX11 and DX12 renderer in games ... just like GTA5 nowdays can be run in DX10 mode (yeah Vista).
> The point is AMD should still work on their DX11 drivers, rather than relying on fast adoption of Win10. Don't get me wrong, adoption will be relatively fast compared to DX11, but not fast enough for AMD to allow themselves to forget about DX11.



Also, you can't just forget about existing games. It's not like ythey'll all get magically rewritten for DX12. They'll remain DX11. People still play them. And they play them a lot. Just ignoring them simply because they are not new is not the way to go.


----------



## arbiter (Aug 21, 2015)

anubis44 said:


> Once the DX12 benchmarks start coming out, nVidia is the one who's going to be in trouble. They're not going to be able to charge a premium anymore over AMD's cards, at least with the current Maxwell lineup:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=706&v=AFBtGYVnzNY
> and here:
> http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/2...-singularity-amd-and-nvidia-go-head-to-head/3
> AMD's entire Radeon lineup going back to the first generation of GCN 1.0 (7000-series) are going to get a pretty dramatic shot in the arm in performance with DX12, and so will AMD in general  once this starts going viral.



Um you do know that this is only 1 game that is in Alpha stages? Writing as DX12 is complete and udder AMD win over 1 game is pretty stupid thing to do. Even with Source being out for a year as the dev claimed. The game did source Mantle in to the game so more then likely AMD had the leg up when it came to the DX12 cause of that. So nvidia cards are little slower in early Alpha build, Still a long way to go before that game is released retail and performance between now and they likely will change. AMD fans shouldn't hype this up to much and hope AMD keeps working on things and not rest on 1 small win in a war they been losing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=662&v=Wuv2muF9dZ0

Josh talked about fact game was a mantle game so very possible that is net results you are seeing transferring over.


----------



## BiggieShady (Aug 21, 2015)

RejZoR said:


> Also, you can't just forget about existing games. It's not like ythey'll all get magically rewritten for DX12. They'll remain DX11. People still play them. And they play them a lot. Just ignoring them simply because they are not new is not the way to go.


Of course, existing games matter although patches bringing new api support aren't unheard of (remember crysis 2 with DX11 patch together with huge texture sizes).
What worries me is how developers plan to balance their games during the time they'd need to support both APIs. Will dx12 users get more details up close, more draw distance or simply more frames ... I'd like to see elaborate settings and simply more frames with dx12 : you know, settings that can't be maxed in dx11 for playable frame rates, but they can in dx12 ... this time around dx11 users might even see (at 10 fps) what kind of eye candy they are missing.


----------



## 64K (Aug 21, 2015)

If this is correct then I suspect we will be seeing reviews of the Nano soon

http://videocardz.com/57396/amd-radeon-r9-nano-coming-next-week

It should be a very nice mid range card in performance. The price will have to be right of course.


----------



## RejZoR (Aug 21, 2015)

I really wonder how it'll stack up against ASUS GTX 970 DirectCU Mini. That card is pretty much the same dimensions as R9 Nano...


----------



## anubis44 (Aug 21, 2015)

BiggieShady said:


> Viral? You mean once steam surveys start showing equal percentages of DX12 and DX11 systems, so that developers have incentive to support both DX12 and DX11 in their games ... add to that extra couple of years of development cycle for new games.
> So, few years of DX11 games with one or two DX12 showcase games, followed by couple of years of supporting both DX11 and DX12 renderer in games ... just like GTA5 nowdays can be run in DX10 mode (yeah Vista).
> The point is AMD should still work on their DX11 drivers, rather than relying on fast adoption of Win10. Don't get me wrong, adoption will be relatively fast compared to DX11, but not fast enough for AMD to allow themselves to forget about DX11.



The development cycle has already moved very rapidly to support DX12, as Windows 10 is a free upgrade. According to this source:

http://www.computerworld.com/articl...lmost-a-quarter-of-all-pcs-within-a-year.html

Windows 10 will be on almost a 1/4 of ALL PCs in the world within one year, and that's not taking into consideration new PCs. Let this sink in for a minute. 1/4 of all PCs worldwide are expected to have Windows 10 and DX12 on them within one year. I'm sure I don't need to point out that the number of PC gamers is much smaller than 1/4 of all PC owners worldwide. That means every gamer worth his salt will be running Windows 10 within the next few months, if they haven't already done so. 

This is crucial. The adoption rate of a new Windows OS has traditionally taken a couple of years or more for most gamers because they had to pay for it. With Windows 10, this barrier is removed. I'm already running Windows 10 on all three of the PCs in my home (including my HTPC). The adoption rate speed for Win 10 will dramatically beat every previous Windows adoption rate timeframe going back to Windows 95, so we can't use history as an example of how quickly this is happening--Microsoft has never issued a new Windows generation for FREE before.

As for existing DX11 games, AMD cards already run most of them very well anyhow. Who cares about 10 FPS when you're saving a good chunk of money, and the AMD card is even with or beats the nVidia card that's $50-$100 more expensive in new DX12 games. Only an nVidiot would pay the Green Goblin tax for that.


----------



## rtwjunkie (Aug 21, 2015)

So, one company, Net Applications says so (that 1/4 of OS will be W10 in one year), based on limited website traffic, so it must be so.   You're extremely gullible.


----------



## lilhasselhoffer (Aug 21, 2015)

anubis44 said:


> The development cycle has already moved very rapidly to support DX12, as Windows 10 is a free upgrade. According to this source:
> 
> http://www.computerworld.com/articl...lmost-a-quarter-of-all-pcs-within-a-year.html
> 
> ...



I'll believe it when I see it.

Let's assume that you are 100% correct.  25% of the market will switch from 7/8.1 to 10 during the first year, when it is a free upgrade.  Let's consider that after that Goldilocks transition, that the rest of the market transitions with a half life of 2 years (37.5% in 2 years, 18.75% in 4 years, etc...).  The average development cycle for games is anywhere between 18 months and 36 months, but let's make it easy and call it two years.

Math time.

25% market share year 1, 62.5% year 3, and 81.25% year 5.  That means that the tipping point for 50% of market share is somewhere between year 2 and 3.  Furthermore, you've got two years of development for the software.  Let's not even factor in the variations of what DX12 compatible means (the 7xxx series from AMD is getting love from it, so there's obviously some disparity).  That means that if you want 50% of the market demanding DX12 you'll have to wait a minimum of four years for software to mostly be on board with you.  That's fast adoption, but that's also two generations of GPU.  Speculating that far out on hardware is just insane.


In short, AMD having an 18% market share today won't be fixed by DX12.  AMD needs to have its Arctic Islands GPUs succeed.  They've got the console market pretty much locked, but that market is margin business.  The very thin margins are largely used as a book keeping tool to absorb overhead costs.  Zen is still too far off to matter, and Intel will be a more staunch competitor in the low end (read: integrated graphics and APU) market.  I love AMD products, and demonstrate that regularly by buying them.  At the same time, AMD is making some goofy decisions.  Nvidia prints money only because AMD can't be bothered to conform to their market.  The whole idea of an APU proved they were innovative, but sometimes innovation isn't performance.  Bulldozer adequately demonstrated innovation in failure.  

If the Arctic Islands chips offer the node size reduction performance boost, while running cooler, I'd be hard pressed to not buy AMD hardware.  Right now, AMD is geared towards the future (more VRAM and better DX12 feature support), but Nvidia is rooted better in the present.  My only hopes is that the future arrives before public opinion damages AMD.  Seriously though, try running a VRAM heavy game on a 390 and a 970.  If after that experience you still want the 970 then you are a fanboy.  Of course, if VRAM usage is minimized, the 970 does a lot to endear.  Personally, I like the bells and whistles high, so the more VRAM the better.  When 4k is a gaming standard, the 970 won't even hack it as an entry level offering.


----------



## FordGT90Concept (Aug 21, 2015)

It hasn't even been out a month yet...

Microsoft said "a few months" for GWX to push updates out to people.


----------



## anubis44 (Aug 21, 2015)

Frag Maniac said:


> This is just wrong on so many levels.
> 
> Who in their right mind with ALL that money to play with tosses out a crippled mid/high end card, continually releases graphics features that are performance hogs and glitchy, then insults the competition when they slip into financial trouble?



A very greedy and desparate nVidia, that's who. To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of AMD's death are greatly exaggerated.

A lot of people are going to discover that AMD's Radeon lineup is a refresh precisely because it already performs so well in DX12. The adoption rate of Windows 10 is expected to break all previous records for Windows migration:

http://www.computerworld.com/articl...lmost-a-quarter-of-all-pcs-within-a-year.html

So AMD didn't need to release its next generation chip across its product stack (which is what nVidia's Maxwell is, on 28nm) until it had access to 14nm process size. Their entire product stack competes very, very well with nVidia's when you look at DX12 performance. nVidia has managed to use their money and additional employees to hand optimize their drivers for previous versions of DX, because previous DX versions were so crappy and inefficient (single core only), it was possible for them to find obscure optimizations and tweaks, but DX12 will reveal the strength of GCN and its asynchronous shaders. With DX12, the drivers are much simpler, so AMD doesn't have to have armies of driver programmers to optimize for every single game, and DX12 reveals the strength of the hardware architecture much more readily, an area where AMD is very strong.

It's nVidia that should probably be worrying, as things are liable to get quite a bit worse for them going forward:

1) Intel and AMD are continually releasing faster and faster integrated graphics on their x86 APUs, and by the sounds of the Zen core APU AMD is equipping with integrated Greenland graphics and possibly, onboard HBM, nVidia's (and AMD's) mid-range add-in board business is about to get a whole lot smaller. It's probable that with the Zen APU, many gamers may be able to simply get a good experience with just the integrated graphics for the first time. Since nVidia cannot produce an x86 APU, the writing is on the wall that they will eventually be crushed by Intel and AMD's faster and faster integrated graphics. In 5 years, we might know nVidia as primarily as an automobile ARM chip supplier, and not a gaming graphics chip maker.

2) nVidia has been raking in extra revenues from royalties Intel agreed to pay them until the end of 2016. This has been about $66 million/year. After that, it's by no means certain that Intel will continue with this agreement, potentially cutting off this source of revenue.

3) AMD has the revenues and market presence and relationships with Microsoft and most game software writers through their console sweep.



Frag Maniac said:


> God forbid AMD should go away and leave us with the dark side that is Nvidia with sole control of the GPU market.



Relax. This is extremely unlikely. AMD has nearly a billon in cash and is about to release their first new, good x86 CPU core with Zen next year. This core is aimed not just at consumers, but squarely at data centers/servers, as the powerful AMD Opterons of old used to be, too. This is where the real money is, and AMD should be able to significantly improve its market share in data centers/servers, with this core. Many have expressed some cynicism about whether it will be good. All I can say is that the designer of this new core, Jim Keller, designed the AMD Athlon 64, and has never produced a dud. His track record is exceptional, so it's very likely Zen will be good.


----------



## 64K (Aug 21, 2015)

@anubis44 AMD may have a billion in cash technically but they owe over 2 billion in debt. They borrowed that 1 billion and re-payment with interest is due in 2019. AMD isn't making a profit. They have no way to repay their debt with interest.

AMD is in worse shape than you might think. I don't like it. I wish it was different but they are on the edge.

http://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/081415/advanced-micro-devices-bankruptcy-imminent.asp

http://www.investopedia.com/article...nced-micro-devices-amd-ever-make-comeback.asp


----------



## tabascosauz (Aug 21, 2015)

RejZoR said:


> I really wonder how it'll stack up against ASUS GTX 970 DirectCU Mini. That card is pretty much the same dimensions as R9 Nano...



If preliminary specifications are anything to go by, it really shouldn't be that hard for the R9 Nano if AMD does keep power consumption in check as promised. The DCII Mini's design hasn't changed a single bit since the original GTX 670 DCII Mini. Sapphire's R9 285 Mini is already looking promising, so it remains to be seen if that means anything for Nano.



anubis44 said:


> A lot of people are going to discover that AMD's Radeon lineup is a refresh precisely because it already performs so well in DX12. The adoption rate of Windows 10 is expected to break all previous records for Windows migration:
> 
> AMD has nearly a billon in cash and is about to release their first new, good x86 CPU core with Zen next year.



Hey hey hey hey hey. Didn't people say that prior to the release of Bulldozer? "Phenom X6 1100T is a good competitor for the price but it has growing problems that will surely be remedied by AMD's new Bulldozer architecture."

I'm not saying that Zen doesn't have the potential to turn things around. I'm saying that if AMD wants to make a comeback, they need to offer something that is competitive with Kaby Lake, not Skylake, not Broadwell. In other words, basically Zero to Hero with what they have now, and perhaps taking cues from K10's book because they don't have *that* much money to be designing a *completely brand new core*. Not only do they need to make a strong showing on the hardware side, they need to seriously rethink their marketing approach, or else this is going to be a flop no matter how much of an improvement Zen is compared to Excavator-Bulldozer. I said earlier that Carrizo was not well marketed, thus hardly anyone knew about it. I have to rephrase; Carrizo has virtually died. And if AMD doesn't start turning this around, Zen is going to virtually fade into oblivion.

Scalability is coming afterwards, after we see how Zen is; have patience, fast one. AMD has completely squandered what was left of their server market after the Bulldozer Opterons were not well received and their proposed ARM Opteron just disappeared off the face of the earth.

I also didn't realize that AMD's engineers looked into the future and decided to rebrand based on potential DX12 performance. The reason Pitcairn is still alive, I surmised, is because its Pro and XT configurations just happen to be competitive with what Nvidia has to offer at a specific price point, without considering power consumption. Also, Windows 10 is expected to break records for adoption, but in the enthusiast community, that is not the case. There is a shitstorm going down about Windows 10's privacy issues here in the minority.  Among the eager adopters (who don't care for privacy issues and don't have a sophisticated "gaming rig"), hardly any of them are rocking HD 7970s and HD 7870s. They would be on i5-3210Ms instead and be busy writing word documents or surfing the web, not playing games. Although people don't seem to listen, I cannot stress enough the fact that most games do not look like Ashes of the Singularity.


----------



## rtwjunkie (Aug 21, 2015)

anubis44 said:


> A lot of people are going to discover that AMD's Radeon lineup is a refresh precisely because it already performs so well in DX12. The adoption rate of Windows 10 is expected to break all previous records for Windows migration:
> 
> http://www.computerworld.com/articl...lmost-a-quarter-of-all-pcs-within-a-year.html
> 
> ...


 
Wow, where to start?  So, AMD did a refresh on almost everything BECAUSE they already knew how awesome their cards all would be at DX12 (you have an official reference or citation to back this?), and *not* because poor management has run them into the ground, denying them adequate R&D, adequate marketing, etc? Ok, got it! 

I see you are still preaching the phenomenally optimistic adoption rates for W10, based on almost no data by one company as the reason DX12 is all that will be around. Riiight......  (see post #82  by @lilhasselhoffer and read it carefully).

Oh, and then I see you change your mind on why AMD did mostly refreshes.  I guess it wasn't their foreknowledge of awesome DX12 ass-whooping...now you contend it's because they "didn't need to" until they had access to 14nm.  (again, any official reference?)

re: 2) $66 million a year from Intel is pocket change.  It's not doing alot for Nvidia's bottom line.
re: 3) What AMD revenues from Microsoft?  You mean the chips they put in Xbones that they are practically paying Microsoft to use?  Those?

All I see here in your writing is alot of extreme fanboyism, revisionist history writing, and wishful thinking.  You act as if everybody here is against AMD.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The intelligent people here though, are able to differentiate feelings from fact, and actually point out AMD's deficiencies that have put it in the crapper...things they have done to themselves. Truth many times hurts, but that doesn't make it untruthful.  AMD cannot even repay its debt, which is twice what they have in (borrowed)cash, as @64K pointed out.  Think about that.


----------



## yogurt_21 (Aug 21, 2015)

its been pretty obvious that the console market has attracted alot of AMD's attention. So its not surprising Nvidia took advantage of that to try to push for more market share. What we could be seeing is a total shift in AMD towards mobile, low power,  and consoles only. Intel is making a huge stab into the low power market with the NUC platform and its been really nice. If amd can improve the lowend cpu side they could easily muscle intel out though as the graphics on their apu's are simply better and streamlining their operations would make it even easier. Intel is bigger sure, but lets face it they let the mobile market pass them right by despite former dominance. The NUC and low powered mini descktops look like the future right now. 

graphics may be lacking but they are getting better and an i3 is plenty for gaming. Monolithic desktops will be around but will continue to get more and more pricey. So to be honest. I'm not sure how much the discreet graphics market means to AMD at the moment. Like the highend cpu battle with Intel AMD might just be content to let nvidia have it and simply use it to practice new technologies they want to use on their more mobile platforms and consoles. 

Or did you all really think that HBM was made for discreet? Think about it, AMD already has all the console contracts and suddenly develop a memory system that takes up less space, reduces long term costs, and puts off less heat while offering more performance. It's raw and they needed a platform to test it on so boom here you go discreet market. Now imagine how refined it will be in 4-5 years when the next consoles come out. How much better will AMD be at making consoles then?

For me I'm not worried at all about AMD's future. Will their be a bankruptcy? maybe, but only to purge old debts. They will emerge from it leaner and stronger and you'll see them more focused on the future of the pc. 

Right now Nvidia has had to hedge its bets on the past. They're doing awesome at it but the loss of the consoles to AMD and the fact that every single mobile (non PC) gpu they've put out has failed to attract attention will come back to bite them. Hopefully they'll weather that storm. Because right now Intel + Nvidia look to be the only options that extremists will have 5 years from now. AMD will be around sure, but they won't care about you. Their customers will settle for much less performance in exchange for mobility, power, heat, and size.


----------



## FordGT90Concept (Aug 21, 2015)

Bankruptcy might actually be a good thing for AMD.  They can restructure debt which has been a dark cloud hovering over them since 2006 (ATI overvalued buyout).



yogurt_21 said:


> its been pretty obvious that the console market has attracted alot of AMD's attention. So its not surprising Nvidia took advantage of that to try to push for more market share. What we could be seeing is a total shift in AMD towards mobile, low power,  and consoles only. Intel is making a huge stab into the low power market with the NUC platform and its been really nice. If amd can improve the lowend cpu side they could easily muscle intel out though as the graphics on their apu's are simply better and streamlining their operations would make it even easier. Intel is bigger sure, but lets face it they let the mobile market pass them right by despite former dominance. The NUC and low powered mini descktops look like the future right now.


AMD has no hope here.  In terms of power consumption, 28/32nm can't hold a light to 14nm.


I really hope Intel extends an olive branch to AMD (by way of granting limited access to their 22nm or 14nm fabs).  If AMD goes into bankruptcy, Intel has to deal with unknowns.  Like Microsoft extending an olive branch to Apple in the 1990s, it's better to keep a competitor afloat than deal with the unknown.


----------



## thesmokingman (Aug 21, 2015)

I'm not sure I'd call it an unknown but more aptly to avoid being a monopoly. It's easier keeping the shrimp around than dealing with Uncle Sam.


----------



## tabascosauz (Aug 21, 2015)

yogurt_21 said:


> Intel is making a huge stab into the low power market with the NUC platform and its been really nice. If amd can improve the lowend cpu side they could easily muscle intel out though as the graphics on their apu's are simply better and streamlining their operations would make it even easier. Intel is bigger sure, but lets face it they let the mobile market pass them right by despite former dominance. The NUC and low powered mini descktops look like the future right now.



This isn't happening. Have you seen the abomination that is Carrizo? I was plenty excited for the power improvements, only to find that AMD has hardly done anything except reduce the TDP. It still takes their top FX 35W part to be competitive with a Broadwell ULV i3 on the CPU side of things. Carrizo-L is just painful to read about. NUC and ULV doesn't mean that CPUs are easy to cool.  It's quite the opposite. You don't have the surface area of a laptop, and everything including storage and memory needs to be crammed into that small cube.


----------



## Tatty_One (Aug 21, 2015)

Funny thing is, the desktop market has fallen across the board in Q2 of 2015 (I think Q2 is historically poor in any case), NVidia have also taken a hit, just AMD's hit is bigger, figures adjust when you look at discreet.... notebook etc according to this which has some interesting reading........

http://jonpeddie.com/publications/market_watch


----------



## yogurt_21 (Aug 21, 2015)

tabascosauz said:


> This isn't happening. Have you seen the abomination that is Carrizo? I was plenty excited for the power improvements, only to find that AMD has hardly done anything except reduce the TDP. It still takes their top FX 35W part to be competitive with a Broadwell ULV i3 on the CPU side of things. Carrizo-L is just painful to read about. NUC and ULV doesn't mean that CPUs are easy to cool.  It's quite the opposite. You don't have the surface area of a laptop, and everything including storage and memory needs to be crammed into that small cube.





FordGT90Concept said:


> Bankruptcy might actually be a good thing for AMD.  They can restructure debt which has been a dark cloud hovering over them since 2006 (ATI overvalued buyout).
> 
> 
> AMD has no hope here.  In terms of power consumption, 28/32nm can't hold a light to 14nm.
> ...



You both have no idea what's going on. AMD doesn't have to compete with a 15w unit because no one cares sub 100w. We sell the Nucs as media appliances at my company and 15w is a nice little spec to toss out there for the clients, but no one actually cares. Now being able to game at 1080p vs 720p yeah people care about that just as they care about slide show vs acceptible frames. When you all talk with clients, see what they need and sell thousands of units then you can talk to me. HBM isn't on their current line up so they have to rely on much slower and power hungry ddr, that will change. The fab issues affect all parties so bringing it up is pointless. Not to mention AMD ALREADY HAS THE CONSOLE MARKET. you two are as bad as the media all doom and gloom when the reality is quite different.


----------



## arbiter (Aug 21, 2015)

yogurt_21 said:


> Not to mention AMD ALREADY HAS THE CONSOLE MARKET. you two are as bad as the media all doom and gloom when the reality is quite different.


The Console market isn't that big of a money maker. AMD barely makes anything on the licensing of their apu for them. So might well stop even that up when it doesn't even mean that much money given how much they are losing every quarter.


----------



## FordGT90Concept (Aug 21, 2015)

yogurt_21 said:


> The fab issues affect all parties so bringing it up is pointless.


There's three fabs that matter: Intel (14nm), GloFlo (AMD CPUs; 28/32nm), and TSMC (AMD GPUs and NVIDIA; 28nm).   The fab issues are the reason why GPUs are stuck in a rut and the reason why Intel CPUs are bitch slapping AMD's.  It's far from pointless; it's the crux of the problem.



yogurt_21 said:


> Not to mention AMD ALREADY HAS THE CONSOLE MARKET.


That's actually a negative when the profit margins are so small.  AMD is being pulled in four directions simultaneously (console, discreet GPU, desktop processors, and mobile processors).  They don't have the resources to do even a good job at any of them even if they quit everything else and focus only on one thing.  AMD is grasping at straws because they're literally out of options.



Addendum to my previous post: I think Intel has already thrown a bone to AMD by not getting into discreet graphics cards.  Intel has demonstrated they know how to make GPUs with Broadwell and there's literally nothing stopping them from taking that technology, slapping a few compute units on it, adding memory, and selling it on a PCI Express card.  If AMD is knocked out for good, I'd put money on Intel doing just that so NVIDIA isn't unopposed.  A few years after that, I wouldn't be surprised if regulators come in and trust-bust Intel (Xeon Phi and unnamed graphics cards split off to compete with NVIDIA, Intel's staff and IP split into two separate companies that need to compete with each other, Intel's fabs and assembly plants give to those companies, x86 made public domain, and Havok, McAfee split off into a separate software company).


----------



## ZenZimZaliben (Aug 21, 2015)

If AMD doesn't have a profitable next few quarters they will fall under $1.00 and get delisted. This will be the death blow to AMD...it will also be a death blow to competition. It would be a perfect time for Samsung to buy AMD. I actually think that is more likely to happen...maybe not Samsung but I do think AMD will be purchased if they fall under $1.00...and they are damn close hovering around $1.75.

AMD will probably try a reverse split before they get delisted, unless they get purchased first.


----------



## FordGT90Concept (Aug 21, 2015)

I think anyone looking at acquiring AMD would wait until they file for bankruptcy in 2019.  Don't have to deal with the run on AMD stocks then which means they end up paying pennies on the dollar.  It's not like there's _any chance_ AMD recovers before then.


----------



## tabascosauz (Aug 21, 2015)

yogurt_21 said:


> You both have no idea what's going on. AMD doesn't have to compete with a 15w unit because no one cares sub 100w. We sell the Nucs as media appliances at my company and 15w is a nice little spec to toss out there for the clients, but no one actually cares. Now being able to game at 1080p vs 720p yeah people care about that just as they care about slide show vs acceptible frames. When you all talk with clients, see what they need and sell thousands of units then you can talk to me. HBM isn't on their current line up so they have to rely on much slower and power hungry ddr, that will change. The fab issues affect all parties so bringing it up is pointless. Not to mention AMD ALREADY HAS THE CONSOLE MARKET. you two are as bad as the media all doom and gloom when the reality is quite different.



I wasn't the one getting aggressive, but I'm just going to remind you that NUC is a product of Intel, and AMD has no say in how powerful/power hungry these are. It doesn't matter if a cooling solution can be designed around AMD's 65W A10-7800 or 95W 7870K. Intel's set the standards, and something NUC-esque is (and should be) the last of AMD's concerns at the moment. Good luck getting anything more powerful than AM1 in such a form factor with CMT in the way. That's why Zen is so imperative to everything that AMD is involved in.

AMD is already established in the embedded market. I don't think you understand that. Do you think that NUCs enjoy widespread popularity right now? No. And this is coming from Intel, which sets the standards right now.


----------



## ZenZimZaliben (Aug 21, 2015)

FordGT90Concept said:


> I think anyone looking at acquiring AMD would wait until they file for bankruptcy in 2019.  Don't have to deal with the run on AMD stocks then which means they end up paying pennies on the dollar.  It's not like there's _any chance_ AMD recovers before then.


They know it is coming. Considering they are paying executives like they are as profitable as Intel...This is a clear sign of a dying business - http://www.fool.com/investing/gener...icro-devices-inc-amd-enriches-executives.aspx


----------



## lilhasselhoffer (Aug 21, 2015)

So, let's talk some business here.

AMD owns no fabrication facilities.  AMD basically owns the home console market.  AMD is somewhere between 20% and 25% of the discrete GPU market.  AMD is behind Intel in fabrication technology, because the fabricators they contract out to are a generation or two behind Intel.  These are all facts we can agree to, because they are either incontrovertible, or have statistical backups.

Now, let's consider AMD's position.  They are a publicly traded company, who has functionally no labor costs.  They design chips, test them out, and then have their IP produced by someone else.  This means you've got significantly less of your resources into physical components, but it also makes you beholden to whomever can make your stuff.  

As AMD, I'd look to do two things.  Keep control of the console market, to act as a cost absorption sponge and never turn a profit.



Those with tons of skills are probably looking at me, and getting ready to call me an idiot.  Hear me out first.
Absorption costs on IP are generally going to be huge.  Running small batch fabrication (testing) has very large costs, and justifying the small army of indirect labor would make any company look bad.  If you book all of that cost to a high volume, low margin, business segment the costs vanish.  Sell 1,000,000 units, and that $10,000 expense is only $0.01 per unit.  Yeah, the AMD costs are much higher, but $0.10 per unit is almost a rounding error on a $100 chip.  Turning a profit is fantastic, if you want to remain exactly where you are.  Surprisingly enough, accountants can rather easily hide money as other expenses.  Can you say R&D expenditures kiddies?  Invest the money into research, and suddenly that huge profit was a marginal loss.  Assuming the R&D budget isn't spent, it can be rolled forward into new ventures.  Who's to say that R&D doesn't need to produce a small scale fabrication facility, designed to pump out only the highest end GPU chips?  Investors don't have to be any the wiser, and AMD gets to be profitable without ever being profitable on paper.


So, is AMD in trouble?  Financially speaking, they've gotten into a pickle.  At the same time, pickles are pretty tasty with potato chips.  Chapter 11 restructuring and bankruptcy could be a useful tool.  The US has allowed some crappy airlines, and criminally guilty bankers, to get a pass on this sort of thing.  It's reasonable that the DoD would arrange something to keep AMD afloat, given AMD supplies them hardware.  AMD could shed its debt, restructure, and wait out their foundries being too far behind Intel.  Heck, an 18 month protected restructuring would suck for your average employee, but just imagine the triumphant return of AMD to the CPU game with Zen, a processor one generation behind Intel and designed for heterogeneous computing.  Nothing quite like a phoenix rising from the ashes to inspire Intel to stop popping incrimentaly improved CPUs, with more and more die space cannibalized by a meh iGPU.  At around the same time Arctic Islands successor could be introduced, with the supposed gains of DX12 actually being demonstrable.



AMD isn't out of the fight because Nvidia GPUs are uniformly better.  AMD is out of the fight because their management is "special."  All they need is someone with some chutzpah to show why they are great.  Despite what has been said, Intel cannot release a GPU right now.  Yes, IRIS is great for some things, but even when upped to a full card it'd perform crappy (gotta love GPU patented technologies).  Half of the benefits to IRIS come from being on a CPU.  There's no processing of data over a bus, minimal buffering between CPU and GPU, and no reason to believe that a GPU sized IRIS chip would offer better performance than a similarly sized GPU from Nvidia or AMD.  Just because IRIS doesn't suck, doesn't mean it could be scaled up into something more useful.  Sometimes scaling up something small that works leads to a much larger problem.  If that's an annoying concept to grasp, then tell why Intel doesn't just triple buffer sizes in their chips to allow more data to be readily accessed.


----------



## ZenZimZaliben (Aug 22, 2015)

lilhasselhoffer said:


> So, is AMD in trouble? Financially speaking, they've gotten into a pickle.



Not a pickle, an big steaming pile of debt and with very little investor faith stink pickle. They are F'ed. Restructuring, reverse stock split, or being sold are their options. If they file bankruptcy they are done. The DoD won't care as long as someone picks up the pieces and continues on. Besides once they file bankruptcy all investors will lose faith and even after restructuring no one will buy the stock, especially if the same management/board is place. While it is possible to recover the only similarity will be in the name AMD otherwise it will be a completely different company. They need a hail marry product that is so unbelievable good that it forces the consumer to have to buy their product, and Zen isn't it. They don't have enough time to tread water that long.


----------



## Frag_Maniac (Aug 22, 2015)

lilhasselhoffer said:


> So, let's talk some business here.


Cue MS jumping in claiming to save the day by buying AMD, and AMD's marketing dept goes from dumb to Dumb and Dumber. Thus the entire process starts all over again.


----------



## HumanSmoke (Aug 22, 2015)

lilhasselhoffer said:


> AMD is out of the fight because their management is "special."  All they need is someone with some chutzpah to show why they are great.


Maybe less chutzpah, and more an idea of how strategic goals are planned and executed. I made the observation in another thread that the AMD's BoD have never had a clear vision of what they want to do, and their actions are just reactions to what others are doing (or what they think others are doing) - and reacting rather than acting will put you at a major disadvantage WRT to time to market. The whole ARM microserver fiasco being a prime example:
Intel snaps up Fulcrum in 2011, then pretty much announces what would become OmniPath by grabbing InfiniBand off Qlogic in January 2012, then goes into talks with Cray for their interconnect business. AMD in a knee-jerk reaction hastily acquire SeaMicro in some kind of "me too" gesture and immediately promises Freedom Fabric for all, Seattle ARM microservers and the whole nine yards. So disorganized was the acquisition, that the timetable for Seattle was a year too optimistic, and because Freedom Fabric as originally depicted wouldn't scale/connect past the cabinet level. Fast forward a few months - Seattle's timetable slips, and its major selling point - the Freedom fabric interconnect - isn't part of the spec at all. The high profile clients that had evinced interest (Verizon, HP) are left high'n'dry, and SeaMicro is put to sleep....and companies like Applied Micro - who actually had a clue about the dense server market, reap the rewards.
As a company, if you keep switching gears at a whim because you're reacting to what you think others are doing, you're too late. The market leaders are 2, 3, 4 years of planning ahead by the time the signs are apparent - so you're left with a Herculean effort to catch up, or you hire original thinkers with a track record of success (and Lisa Su's resume doesn't indicate she is the one) - someone like Renée James is - and will be looking for a new challenge, but I suspect it boils down to the same problem AMD have almost always suffered - being able to hire the candidate they need, rather than the one that will settle for AMD.


----------



## lilhasselhoffer (Aug 22, 2015)

ZenZimZaliben said:


> Not a pickle, an big steaming pile of debt and with very little investor faith stink pickle. They are F'ed. Restructuring, reverse stock split, or being sold are their options. If they file bankruptcy they are done. The DoD won't care as long as someone picks up the pieces and continues on. Besides once they file bankruptcy all investors will lose faith and even after restructuring no one will buy the stock, especially if the same management/board is place. While it is possible to recover the only similarity will be in the name AMD otherwise it will be a completely different company. They need a hail marry product that is so unbelievable good that it forces the consumer to have to buy their product, and Zen isn't it. They don't have enough time to tread water that long.



Prove it.  Everyone touting this theory is absolutely full of it, because their proof hinges on a few things.  Let's tick off the boxes:
1) AMD has to be profitable to survive.  Nope.  People seem to forget that profitable, profitable on paper, and operating at a loss are all separate things.  Want a mind f###?  Tell me how an Ikea works.  Their stores are considered non-profits for tax purposes.  This is possible how exactly?  On, that's right.  The Ikea store is charged insane amounts of money by the Ikea conglomeration for naming rights.  Thus, the stores function as non-profits, while the conglomeration walks away with enough money to gold plate their mansions every year.
2) AMD investor confidence matters.  Demonstrably, nope.  AMD is publicly traded, and can do some pretty shady crap to manipulate stock prices.  They wouldn't be the first company to save face with a reverse split.  They wouldn't be the first company to manipulate earning so as to be operating at a loss on paper.  They wouldn't be the first company to go through hard times and restructure under chapter 11 protections.  In case you missed it, Dell is a surprisingly good test case for how a company can be successful, shoot themselves in the foot, fall from grace, restructure under protections, and come back swinging.  AMD isn't in the exact same boat, but they've got even more people counting on them.  Global Foundries needs their business, Intel needs a punching bag that appear capable enough to prevent monopoly accusations, Nvidia is in the same boat as Intel, and most of all the console market is dependent on AMD.  MS, Sony, and Nintendo wouldn't let AMD die, because it would jeopardize the biggest growth market they've got. 
3) AMD will be AMD in name only if they do restructure.  This is the dumbest thing anyone can propose.  Why so dour, because it's like saying water is wet.  A restructuring of AMD would have all its executives deploy their golden parachutes, and someone competent would have to be brought in.  No more 7+ figure bonuses while laying off the engineers developing product, no more marketing promises that can't be delivered on, and most importantly someone new at the helm tasked with making AMD a player in the market again.  Yeah, that's what AMD should be now.  At the same time, it's a publicly traded company.  Executives are risk averse, because simply keeping the lights on is what investors want.  Painful, but necessary, changes are avoided to placate reports.  AMD, in name only, would have to do drastic things to fix itself but it would finally be allowed to do it.
4) AMD needs its next product to be a wild success.  How many years have people been saying this?  I remember it starting back in the days of Thuban, but it may have started earlier than that.  Objectively, it may have started when Netburst was ejected for Core architecture, and AMD began losing the CPU race.  Every time AMD releases something it isn't good enough.  Thuban had 6 true cores and it was respectably priced, but Intel beat that out with per core performance.  Bulldozer offered great overclocking, but the shared resources made single thread performance tank so Intel was better.  Zen is announced, and people are already saying that it's a failure because it'll be beaten by whatever Intel offers, because reasons.  Likewise, ATI offerings have competed favorably with Nvidia in almost every generation, with the exception of the Evergreen series and the current generation.  In the former they basically just die-shrunk their old processors and walked over Nvidia, and in the later Nvidia has spent insane amounts of money on optimization to compensate for crappy manufacturers who haven't node shrank in 3 generations.  Combine that with software stagnation (DX11 is still the standard for the vast majority of gaming), and you've got any improvements AMD could have made obscured by a thick haze of stagnation.


I guess that the short and sweet of it is one question.  Why are you, and other negative people, right this time?  I could expand the question with "Why was your last prediction inaccurate, but this one accurate?' or perhaps "What new insight proves your validity now and disproves past assertions?" but I'll keep it short.  Prove it now.  Nobody can seem to admit that they've predicted the end of AMD for the last freaking decade, without any success.  Full disclosure, five years ago I'd have agreed with you. After another five years of seeing the same story play out, I can't objectively say you have a point.  Being wrong so many times either leads to introspection and review, or further idiocy.  It took me five years to realize this, so maybe I can save you some time.

I don't have faith in AMD.  Faith is belief without proof.  What I have is knowledge.  Big companies don't fail, because they take other companies with them.  Our government, and others around the world, would prefer to bail out almost criminally mismanaged large companies than have them fail.  Airlines, banking, and other industries have proven that rather eloquently.  If a governmental bailout doesn't work, filing bankruptcy is blocked, and a reverse split doesn't happen the other concerned parties will pony up and make AMD a deal.  Consoles may have thin margins, but having to completely redesign them would cost too much money.  While Sony is in dire straights, both MS and Nintendo have enough cash lying around.  They'd loan AMD the money and force drastic but beneficial changes for the loan.  Nothing would make MS happier than being able to shave a few dollars off their consoles, while gaining greater control over their manufacture.

Think I'm still barking up the wrong tree.  One last little bit of information.  Research the comic book empire.  Marvel and AMD have a heck of a lot in common (with surprisingly similarly litigious events).  Marvel went from decent sales, to printing money, to being beaten by DC, to filing for bankruptcy, to becoming a huge financial success.  They even parallel AMD, in that their comics business (CPU in the parallel) is a dying portion of their business overall.  The parallels between the Marvel saga and AMD saga are too numerous to count.  After reading up on that, understanding that Marvel now prints money (despite almost not printing comic books), and seeing AMD capable of following the same trajectory, please tell me how screwed AMD is.  Tell me you see no similarities, and I'll stop pushing the point.  Of course, if you can't see the parallels I'll stop pushing the point because you're incapable of getting it.





HumanSmoke said:


> Maybe less chutzpah, and more an idea of how strategic goals are planned and executed. I made the observation in another thread that the AMD's BoD have never had a clear vision of what they want to do, and their actions are just reactions to what others are doing (or what they think others are doing) - and reacting rather than acting will put you at a major disadvantage WRT to time to market. The whole ARM microserver fiasco being a prime example:
> Intel snaps up Fulcrum in 2011, then pretty much announces what would become OmniPath by grabbing InfiniBand off Qlogic in January 2012, then goes into talks with Cray for their interconnect business. AMD in a knee-jerk reaction hastily acquire SeaMicro in some kind of "me too" gesture and immediately promises Freedom Fabric for all, Seattle ARM microservers and the whole nine yards. So disorganized was the acquisition, that the timetable for Seattle was a year too optimistic, and because Freedom Fabric as originally depicted wouldn't scale/connect past the cabinet level. Fast forward a few months - Seattle's timetable slips, and its major selling point - the Freedom fabric interconnect - isn't part of the spec at all. The high profile clients that had evinced interest (Verizon, HP) are left high'n'dry, and SeaMicro is put to sleep....and companies like Applied Micro - who actually had a clue about the dense server market, reap the rewards.
> As a company, if you keep switching gears at a whim because you're reacting to what you think others are doing, you're too late. The market leaders are 2, 3, 4 years of planning ahead by the time the signs are apparent - so you're left with a Herculean effort to catch up, or you hire original thinkers with a track record of success (and Lisa Su's resume doesn't indicate she is the one) - someone like Renée James is - and will be looking for a new challenge, but I suspect it boils down to the same problem AMD have almost always suffered - being able to hire the candidate they need, rather than the one that will settle for AMD.



I had always seen it a bit differently.  AMD seems to be completely reactionary, and incapable of taking the first step on anything.  Heck, going back to the days of the ATI acquisition results in a company that had too much money, that wanted to buy something and never had huge ambitions.  They paid way too much for ATI, and functionally never integrated it with AMD.  Someone with vision would have had a three division company, that rapidly collapsed into one one company with two core competencies.  Instead, we have a company so fearful of backlash, due to overpaying for an acquisition, that they couldn't make any aggressive moves to make AMD one company.

I could see a world where the days of the CPU were numbered.  If AMD had come out with the APU concept around when Thuban was introduced it would have competed with Core processors and the very first i series processors.  The difference between the CPU technologies would have been minimal, but suddenly we'd have AMD chips that could obliterate the mid to low end computer market.  Intel wouldn't have been able to bribe computer manufacturers to use their product, because AMD could offer a $300 white box computer that actually ran games decently.  In reality, what we got was a waffling management, that didn't seize on a changing market until it was far too late.  I call that a lack of chutzpah, or perhaps change aversion so strong that nothing could be accomplished until the competition did it first. 

Your way of putting it is along the lines of what I believe.  My only differentiation is that I don't believe AMD is incapable of execution, so much as held back by a board that will not take risks.  I honestly view their actions as someone on a sinking ship refusing a life raft ride, because it too might sink.  They've had the opportunities to save themselves, but their aversion to perceived risks is killing their ambitions.



Edit:
So many grammatical errors.


----------



## ZenZimZaliben (Aug 22, 2015)

OMG I am so sorry I quoted you. I literally knew doing it was a bad choice as every one of your responses are like 3 pages long..LOL...look at that wall of text. I'm not reading it man. DO a TLDR please.


----------



## HumanSmoke (Aug 22, 2015)

lilhasselhoffer said:


> I had always seen it a bit differently.  AMD seems to be completely reactionary, and incapable of taking the first step on anything.


Check. I believe I said the same thing.


lilhasselhoffer said:


> Heck, going back to the days of the ATI acquisition results in a company that had too much money, that wanted to buy something and never had huge ambitions.


That has always been the environment at AMD - I believe the phrase is "stupid with money" which goes back to Jerry Sanders. The guy made AMD synonymous with himself (bonus points if you know anything about the other 6 co-founders of AMD):


> For Sanders, regal trappings come with the job. He keeps mansions in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Malibu, Calif., and a chauffer drives him from San Francisco to AMD's headquarters in Sunnyvale, according to sources. While rival Andy Grove, chairman of Intel, works in a cubicle, Sanders' office has marble floors and a private bathroom, sources say. Sanders' 2001 compensation included $465,000 for the use of company vehicles and planes.


For those people that say " that was then, this is now" WRT Jerry Sanders's shopaholic persona when his company was fighting for economic survival, I'd point out that AMD's present officers' compensation packages are totally out of proportion with their performance in comparison with their market rivals.


lilhasselhoffer said:


> They paid way too much for ATI, and functionally never integrated it with AMD.


Check.
They wanted the IP and preferred buying ATI rather than simply licensing the IP...or even haggling over the price, which was nuts considering ATI had basically hung a "Buy Me" notice from its front office when they started falling from grace in 2004.


lilhasselhoffer said:


> Someone with vision would have had a three division company, that rapidly collapsed into one one company with two core competencies.  Instead, we have a company so fearful of backlash, due to overpaying for an acquisition, that they couldn't make any aggressive moves to make AMD one company.


And yet the majority of the BoD that signed off on overpaying for ATI remained board members for years afterwards. The original plan was Fusion and handheld/smartphones ( How forward thinking was that?)


> “The deal puts A.M.D. on more equal footing with Intel," said Samir Bhavnani, director of research at Current Analysis, a market research firm in San Diego. “It completes the puzzle for A.M.D.”
> He said the deal was important because it took A.M.D. beyond PC’s and gave it greater strength for the cellphone and handheld markets.


Fast forward a few months and AMD realize that they've grossly overpaid for ATI and compound the error by throwing the baby out with the bathwater by declaring that smartphones aren't the future, and promptly sells off its handheld IP to Qualcomm for peanuts, who rearranged the letters R-A-D-E-O-N into A-D-R-E-N-O.........O-O-P-S!


lilhasselhoffer said:


> I could see a world where the days of the CPU were numbered. * If *AMD had come out with the APU concept around when Thuban was introduced it would have competed with Core processors and the very first i series processors.


Too short a timeframe IMO. If AMD had decided in 2004-05 on on-die (or even on-package) IGP, then maybe yes. Hard to think that ATI wouldn't have been amenable to a licencing agreement - which would have been a whole lot cheaper, and freed up AMD's cash for R&D and foundry improvements. But for all that, we're still dealing with an AMD with no coherent focus (not helped by a Dick-waving server-first mentality) and slow reactions.


lilhasselhoffer said:


> Your way of putting it is along the lines of what I believe.  My only differentiation is that I don't believe AMD is incapable of execution, so much as held back by a board that will not take risks.


Check. 
My reasoning here would be; If the board won't take risks and handicap themselves by starting way behind in any potential market because of their "follow the leader strategy", how likely is successful execution ( i.e. on time and competitive) likely to be?
I'd also suggest that for any shift to successful strategic management to take place, that they have to at least make a start. So far, we have ARM microservers...then we don't, We have Zen slated for 2016....which becomes 2017, We have SkyBridge.....then we don't. At some stage AMD has to put down a marker and front up - maybe not to Joe Consumer directly (who will buy whatever's placed in front of them if its packaged in the right way), but to the moneybags OEM/ODMs, bankers, and industry in general.


----------



## chinmi (Aug 22, 2015)

RIP AMD 

I still remember the time when I use a 6950, 6970, 6990, r9 290x... it's in the past (using green team now), but those were good times indeed


----------



## lilhasselhoffer (Aug 22, 2015)

ZenZimZaliben said:


> OMG I am so sorry I quoted you. I literally knew doing it was a bad choice as every one of your responses are like 3 pages long..LOL...look at that wall of text. I'm not reading it man. DO a TLDR please.



What makes this prediction any more accurate than the dozens of other times people predicted the downfall of AMD?


As it's cited in the "Too long for me to bother reading:"

I guess that the short and sweet of it is one question. Why are you, and other negative people, right this time? I could expand the question with "Why was your last prediction inaccurate, but this one accurate?' or perhaps "What new insight proves your validity now and disproves past assertions?" but I'll keep it short. Prove it now. Nobody can seem to admit that they've predicted the end of AMD for the last freaking decade, without any success. Full disclosure, five years ago I'd have agreed with you. After another five years of seeing the same story play out, I can't objectively say you have a point. Being wrong so many times either leads to introspection and review, or further idiocy. It took me five years to realize this, so maybe I can save you some time.





HumanSmoke said:


> Check. I believe I said the same thing.
> 
> That has always been the environment at AMD - I believe the phrase is "stupid with money" which goes back to Jerry Sanders. The guy made AMD synonymous with himself (bonus points if you know anything about the other 6 co-founders of AMD):
> 
> ...



Fair points.  I still fundamentally chalk it down to other reasons, but you've made a substantial case to believe it's execution.  As far as the much earlier APU, it's a retroactive desire.  At the time, it would have been insane to propose the idea.  I should have bolded the "if" there, it really did deserve that treatment.

The real question now is whether AMD can get either of these things in place, and whether or not they've learned from past errors.  I keep reading that they learned from Bulldozer, but we've got multiple generations of that failure.  I keep reading that AMD is turning the corner.

When does a reasonable person expect substantive changes to occur?  Right now, I can only see it happening with a toxic event.  It's sad, but I'm hoping for something catastrophic before AMD simply runs themselves into the grounds and winds up on the IP chopping block.


----------



## R-T-B (Aug 22, 2015)

I just gotta say, "tl;dr" is one of the things I hate the most about the latest bit of our internet development.  It's like, if it isn't garbage it will be aparent in the first few paragraphs, and if you started reading it and it isn't causing you pain, finish it.  People should cherish a well thought out post and put in the same effort reading it that the person took to compose it.

I swear, our internet is coming down to the lowest common denominator.  It's like saying "that post looks too educated, can you dumb it down to my reading level?"

Sorry for the off topic rant, but I've encountered that way too much today.


----------



## ZenZimZaliben (Aug 22, 2015)

Just look at this chart I think this expains my reasoning. http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/amd/st...dy=volume&comparison=off&index=&drilldown=off

AMD is  literally at their lowest point in 10 years.


----------



## FordGT90Concept (Aug 22, 2015)

lilhasselhoffer said:


> Why are you, and other negative people, right this time?


AMD only has one option left to raise capital and that's to sell off the graphics division.  Doing so would require AMD to license the graphics IP they use in their APUs from that separate company so it only makes/saves AMD money in the short term--costs in long term (just like splitting off GloFlo).

They are running on borrowed money and they're not making money to pay the debt back.  AMD will not be able to get another loan without first proving they can pay their debtors.  If AMD runs out of cash before 2019, they'll likely have to file for bankruptcy.  If AMD doesn't run out of cash before 2019, the debtors will force them into bankruptcy.  AMD no longer holds the cards.


----------



## HumanSmoke (Aug 22, 2015)

lilhasselhoffer said:


> Fair points.  I still fundamentally chalk it down to other reasons, but you've made a substantial case to believe it's execution.


Poor, or at least conservative, management and bad execution are somewhat linked in this case. AMD and most other people realize that their biggest successes came through purchasing IP ( graphics from ATI, processor and system bus from DEC). When that IP isn't available the onus falls on the board to have an in-house R&D strategy in place - something I don't think AMD mastered too well. Successes with Athlon/Athlon64, AMD64, and Hypertransport ( all originating from DEC IP and DEC ex-employees, Fred Weber aside) and the purchase of NexGen before it tended to paper over the cracks. With no outside inspiration, management went with a "play it safe" strategy of incremental design reworking, and relying on the vision of other companies to show them the way. That strategy almost guarantees that while they wont be first, their risk is lessened since they seem to have more confidence in the vision of others than of themselves. Smaller risk, but little reward, since they will remain in the shadow of the bigger fish, and they also remain at the mercy of the timetables and product cadence of others. Perennially in catch-up mode then places additional and  compounding strain on their development cycle whilst simultaneously eroding their a available R&D funds as stop-start, delayed/repurposed projects chew into budgets with little actual relevant products emerging.

IMO..


----------



## 64K (Aug 22, 2015)

@lilhasselhoffer This isn't the run of the mill "boy cried wolf" scenario of the past. Forget years past. Let's look at the present. What little cash they have left to stay afloat will be gone in a couple of years. They went into the red to the tune of 400 million dollars last year and they are well on their way to bleed even more red ink this year. They will spend what they borrowed to cover losses for the next couple of years and try to borrow more but that is an if.

They owe more than they are worth already and their net income is negative hundreds of millions of dollars. Who will loan them more?

http://www.investopedia.com/stock-a...oblems-facing-advanced-micro-devices-amd.aspx


----------



## rtwjunkie (Aug 22, 2015)

ZenZimZaliben said:


> OMG I am so sorry I quoted you. I literally knew doing it was a bad choice as every one of your responses are like 3 pages long..LOL...look at that wall of text. I'm not reading it man. DO a TLDR please.



Yes it's long, but it is a very well-thought out post, well worth the read. Take comfort in @lilhasselhoffer rarely posting junk.  @HumanSmoke also responded to it with a wall of text, but it also is worth the read.  

One can't read about or write about complex subjects like AMD's cycle from hugely successful to near self-destruction in just a couple paragraphs.  Just my 2 cents. 

Edit: @FordGT90Concept Selling their graphics division would be a huge mistake. It was a great purchase by them (although they overpaid), just poorly implemented.  Their graphics division is the only thing right now keeping them from sinking immediately like a stone.


----------



## R-T-B (Aug 22, 2015)

And I'd like to clarify that the tl;dr rant wasn't directed at you @ZenZimZaliben, though you certainly did use the term.  I had a bad day on reddit, amongst other things.


----------



## jboydgolfer (Aug 22, 2015)

anubis44 said:


> That means every gamer worth his salt will be running Windows 10 within the next few months, if they haven't already done so



i can assure You I am "Worth my salt", and I am NOT running Win10. Do you suggest a deficiency in my salt worth?

my lack of migration, is NOT due to lack of effort though, as i Was running it before its "official Launch", actually shortly after it was available. Then again two more times, but I had issue after issue, and i depend on some of my peripherals on a daily basis, for example, my C-920 lacked proper functionality last time i had Win10 running, this combined with the fact that many of the times I visit the TPU homepage 2-4 of the "recent Posts" in the ticker are along the lines of "win10 will not........properly" or Win10 makes my PC smell like cheese, or whatever. I feel like MANY products, the first year or so will be buggy, this was MY and SOME others experience, I will not likely change over until it is Worth my time, and WONT require Me to AGAIN switch back. Although these are Just My opinions, and experiences.


----------



## Vayra86 (Aug 22, 2015)

R-T-B said:


> And I'd like to clarify that the tl;dr rant wasn't directed at you @ZenZimZaliben, though you certainly did use the term.  I had a bad day on reddit, amongst other things.



Are there good days on Reddit?

ontopic:

I can definitely see lilhasselhoffers points as valid. AMD won't vanish entirely, but I do think that for the past TEN years they have been marginalizing themselves in the market. And that is still continuing. And like I said as well, even if they bring a successful product, that is not a win unless you market it well and get it to sell lots of units, and marketing is AMD's achilles heel and that is never going to change. Even today, even with Fury, and also with Zen, you can be sure they will complete misfire it.

@anubis44: you're wrong on so many levels... DX12 adoption rate is going to be slow as hell. My personal prediction is that it becomes meaningful early 2017 or late 2016, and that is me being optimistic. DX12 at this time is nothing but a carrot to pull enthusiasts into Windows 10 and make them forget about the total takeover of your PC by MS marketeers. History will repeat; we still have lots of Vista users, and I do occasionally come across a Windows  XP too in the year 2015. Windows 10 or DX12 aren't going to suddenly change the behaviour of people, you can trust on that - Windows 8 adoption rate proved this, and then Windows 8.1 proved it again, because there is still not a single inescapable reason to upgrade from 7.


----------



## R-T-B (Aug 22, 2015)

> Are there good days on Reddit?



Hah, believe it or not I usually have a good time there. 



Vayra86 said:


> @anubis44: you're wrong on so many levels... DX12 adoption rate is going to be slow as hell. My personal prediction is that it becomes meaningful early 2017 or late 2016, and that is me being optimistic.



I don't know.  I think it'll likely be a high adoption rate situation with dual render pipelines.  Something in between the doomsday and optimistic predictions, honestly.

As good a guess as any.


----------



## rtwjunkie (Aug 22, 2015)

R-T-B said:


> Hah, believe it or not I usually have a good time there.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Don't forget, Anubis is basing his optimistic prediction on one research company that has 2 weeks of research at a limited number of websites.  That doesn't approach any kind of standards for either responsible polling or research.


----------



## Blue-Knight (Aug 22, 2015)

Spoiler: Off topic






R-T-B said:


> I just gotta say, "tl;dr" is one of the things I hate the most about the latest bit of our internet development.


I think long text in a "non-compacted" way have higher chances of being read completely and comfortably.

The problem is that texts compacted like this: http://pastebin.com/tz8dsCzp Discourages reading a lot... At least for me and my eyes. LOL!


----------



## erocker (Aug 22, 2015)

AMD is done. Execs are looting the coffers, they just need to hang the sign on the door. http://www.fool.com/investing/gener...icro-devices-inc-amd-enriches-executives.aspx


----------



## FordGT90Concept (Aug 22, 2015)

rtwjunkie said:


> Edit: @FordGT90Concept Selling their graphics division would be a huge mistake. It was a great purchase by them (although they overpaid), just poorly implemented.  Their graphics division is the only thing right now keeping them from sinking immediately like a stone.


I never said it was a good idea but AMD doesn't exactly have any other options.


----------



## medi01 (Aug 22, 2015)

AMD is competitive in GPU market, stop spreading BS.
For Fury X whiners, buy non X, if a closed cycle pump somehow disturbs you. (which is one strange reason to complain)
290x wiped the floor with that day Titan and that at a fraction of price. Yet people kept buying that shit.

Back in Fermi times, when nVidia was all three: more expensive, slower, more power hungry, people kept buying its shit en mass, cause, you know, it's nVidia. Yada yada, AMD's fault, yeah. 

And "omg, it's a rebrand" whiners, do you realize that:

1) fabs have been stuck at 28nm, don't you? 
2) And that investing into new chips costs money that, thank you for still buying nVidia Fermi crap, AMD is short of?
3) 3xx card outperform (with a handful of exceptions) 2xx chips?



While at it, can someone explain, why Tom's Hardware has half a dozen of G-Force monitor reviews, but hardly any FreeSync monitor review?


----------



## rtwjunkie (Aug 22, 2015)

medi01 said:


> AMD is competitive in GPU market, stop spreading BS.
> For Fury X whiners, buy non X, if a closed cycle pump somehow disturbs you. (which is one strange reason to complain)
> 290x wiped the floor with that day Titan and that at a fraction of price. Yet people kept buying that shit.
> 
> ...



Fanboi much? This thread is about an objective look at why AMD is in the shape they are in.  Intelligence can accept truths, distasteful though they may be.


----------



## erocker (Aug 22, 2015)

medi01 said:


> AMD is competitive in GPU market, stop spreading BS.
> For Fury X whiners, buy non X, if a closed cycle pump somehow disturbs you. (which is one strange reason to complain)
> 290x wiped the floor with that day Titan and that at a fraction of price. Yet people kept buying that shit.
> 
> ...



You make some good points, however it has nothing to do with how AMD is doing as a company, which unfortunately isn't good at all. For you last question you should probably ask Tom's Hardware.


----------



## patrico (Aug 22, 2015)

are AMD not in all the consoles, i think they will be ok and they have always did well in the mid to high end range and price point ....

yes desktop might be down but they dont have all their eggs in the desktop market ....


----------



## Frick (Aug 22, 2015)

Blue-Knight said:


> Spoiler: Off topic
> 
> 
> 
> ...



http://obsoletetellyemuseum.blogspot.se/

Have fun.


----------



## Blue-Knight (Aug 22, 2015)

Frick said:


> http://obsoletetellyemuseum.blogspot.se/
> 
> Have fun.


I did not understand.


----------



## R-T-B (Aug 22, 2015)

rtwjunkie said:


> Don't forget, Anubis is basing his optimistic prediction on one research company that has 2 weeks of research at a limited number of websites.  That doesn't approach any kind of standards for either responsible polling or research.



No, it doesn't.  Anyone claiming to know anything beyond guesswork (like I fully admitted my prediction is) is pretty much full of BS right now.

EDIT:  But we're still off topic I just realized.  Let me think of a quick on topic post:

Oh yeah, AMD.  They is fucked.  So are we the consumers.  gg guys.


----------



## SonicZap (Aug 22, 2015)

medi01 said:


> AMD is competitive in GPU market, stop spreading BS.
> For Fury X whiners, buy non X, if a closed cycle pump somehow disturbs you. (which is one strange reason to complain)
> 290x wiped the floor with that day Titan and that at a fraction of price. Yet people kept buying that shit.
> 
> Back in Fermi times, when nVidia was all three: more expensive, slower, more power hungry, people kept buying its shit en mass, cause, you know, it's nVidia. Yada yada, AMD's fault, yeah.


AMD *was* competitive in the GPU market. They've been barely competitive since Maxwell (GTX 970) released, with Nvidia having similar performance but much lower power consumption.

Also, yeah, people bought Nvidia despite them being inferior 3-5 years ago. That's largely because Nvidia had
superior marketing, which AMD lacked and now lacks it even more badly. It's sad, but it is what it is. I bet Nvidia fans will enjoy their higher GPU prices once AMD dies.


----------



## the54thvoid (Aug 22, 2015)

erocker said:


> AMD is done. Execs are looting the coffers, they just need to hang the sign on the door. http://www.fool.com/investing/gener...icro-devices-inc-amd-enriches-executives.aspx



Very much looks like asset stripping from the inside. And by that I simply mean, plundering the piggy bank before its liquidated.
It is kind of bizarre the decisions AMD have made in the past few years. The Tahiti gen was great IMO. Hawaii was too but the inadequate stock cooler with that stupid Hawaii launch back fired. Don't argue people, it did. Then Fiji (let's not talk about the rebrands) came out with just lies for PR and was given an unnecessary liquid AIO when clearly a well designed air cooler would have sufficed (Fury, non X).
And the pricing didn't help.  
Even if Fiji turns out to be a beast with DX12, it came out too early to prove it. So the similar priced 980ti offerings look more appealing.
It's nuts. Their gfx designs are sound enough but their execution and implementation are just cocked up. Really does all come back to those guys and gal at the top. 
They're too 'good' to disappear but something has to give.


----------



## BiggieShady (Aug 22, 2015)

rtwjunkie said:


> That doesn't approach any kind of standards for either responsible polling or research.





R-T-B said:


> No, it doesn't. Anyone claiming to know anything beyond guesswork (like I fully admitted my prediction is) is pretty much full of BS right now.


Speaking of polling and research, Steam automatic HW/OS survey updates at the end of the month. Gabe Newell already knows adoption rate, we should ask him


----------



## ZenZimZaliben (Aug 22, 2015)

R-T-B said:


> No, it doesn't.  Anyone claiming to know anything beyond guesswork (like I fully admitted my prediction is) is pretty much full of BS right now.
> 
> EDIT:  But we're still off topic I just realized.  Let me think of a quick on topic post:
> 
> Oh yeah, AMD.  They is fucked.  So are we the consumers.  gg guys.



I don't think we consumers are F'ed. I really do think someone bigger and better will purchase AMD. There is just to much IP there to just sweep under the rug. Under a different company AMD IP might even flourish.


----------



## Blue-Knight (Aug 22, 2015)

ZenZimZaliben said:


> I really do think someone bigger and better will purchase AMD.


Who?


----------



## arbiter (Aug 22, 2015)

SonicZap said:


> AMD *was* competitive in the GPU market. They've been barely competitive since Maxwell (GTX 970) released, with Nvidia having similar performance but much lower power consumption.


I think it started more in kepler as that was 1st step in massive power per watt step.



the54thvoid said:


> It is kind of bizarre the decisions AMD have made in the past few years. The Tahiti gen was great IMO. Hawaii was too but the inadequate stock cooler with that stupid Hawaii launch back fired. Don't argue people, it did. Then Fiji (let's not talk about the rebrands) came out with just lies for PR and was given an unnecessary liquid AIO when clearly a well designed air cooler would have sufficed (Fury, non X).
> And the pricing didn't help.
> Even if Fiji turns out to be a beast with DX12, it came out too early to prove it. So the similar priced 980ti offerings look more appealing.


With Hawaii AMD needed a competeing GPU fast and they pushed it out the door before OEM options were even close to ready. It was 3 months before aftermarket cards came out. AMD got rightfully beat on by reviewers. Can't sell a gpu that less you set it to sound like a jet engine would lose 20% of its performance after 5-10 min.
Fiji could be a DX12 beast, still too early to tell using the 1 game that supports it and that game is still Alpha. Problem is that DX11 games will still make up a majority of games to come out in next 6-12 months which in that same game can see how much slower 390x/fury is vs nvidia.

People say AMD needs a wild winner, even if they get one confidence in AMD from a hardware and driver standpoint is pretty low that even with a massive winner might not be enough.


----------



## ZenZimZaliben (Aug 22, 2015)

Blue-Knight said:


> Who?



I have heard and read about the following companies - Samsung, Microsoft, Apple and Qualcomm have all shown an interest. 

I day trade stocks, well more like week trade but I watch the market pretty close.

Anyways I purchased AMD back when they were around $16, then again at $8 to offset my loss on $16, then again at $2 to offset my loss from $16 and $8...So I very much want AMD to succeed, however off all the stocks on my portfolio AMD is the weakest. I would love a buyout around $2.25. However any smart company is going to wait  for the "train to crash" and then pick up the pieces. I will probably have a nice write off for stock loss in 2017'ish.  lol.


----------



## newtekie1 (Aug 22, 2015)

patrico said:


> are AMD not in all the consoles



Yeah, but they aren't making any money on the console chips(they may even be losing a llittle on each chip). They bid super low just to get the contracts in hopes of doing a die shrink and reducing costs so they could eventually make money on the deal. But they haven't been able to get off 28nm.


----------



## HumanSmoke (Aug 22, 2015)

patrico said:


> are AMD not in all the consoles,


That could be an option. AMD could spin-off the console and other semi-custom business and partner in it with a moneybags company with a vested interest (Microsoft as example). The cash the spin-off brings in could shore up the rest of the company


patrico said:


> i think they will be ok and they have always did well in the mid to high end range and price point ....


1. AMD only have a mid-high end product line in graphics...not processors.
2. Mid-high end graphics doesn't bring in the bulk of sales.
3. AMD is being squeezed from the bottom (Intel's ULV/Core M/ARM), and the top (Intel i5/i7/HEDT/Xeon/Xeon Phi), and historically by Nvidia in the same manner (note the distribution of market segments from the Mercury Research analysis below). What is left is an area in between that carries a lot of variables - mostly contingent upon the features associated with the hardware rather than the hardware itself.


----------



## lilhasselhoffer (Aug 22, 2015)

I've got to say, nothing earth shaking has been posted here, and it seems to agree with what I've been saying.

AMD is screwed, I'm not going to argue that point.  They weren't in a great position when Thuban launched, Bulldozer was an experiment that ended very badly, and they have been stripping value from the company by spinning off their facilities for a long time.  They've traded long term valuables, for a short term boost in the books.  None of that is in question, and none of that can really be debated by even the most staunch supporters of AMD.

Where we differ is the reality of the thing.  What I continue to hear is that AMD is absolutely screwed and won't be coming back this time.  This is what I've been hearing for the better part of a decade, and they've demonstrably managed to make a sinking ship float, without ever actually making moves to prevent the ship from sinking.  Their spin-off of global foundries was obviously a bid to make money short term.  Their desire for the home console market was focused on generating consistent business, and not on raw monetary gains.  The continued "refinement" of bulldozer was a desperate bid to not look like they had their Netburst moment.  I'll give the doomsayers all of these points, because to do otherwise would make me a fanboy and not a reasonable observer.

Here's the problem though, we're reaching a tipping point.  AMD is devaluing quickly, and the executive board is doing what looks to be criminal stripping of company assets.  They absolutely look like a company that knows bankruptcy is around the corner, and they're getting everything out of the mix that has any value prior to activating golden parachutes.  At some point, the debtors will walk in, and ask AMD to collect on their dues.  AMD will likely lose its board of directors that day, and they'll get a third chance at life.  In the short term, that new board will initiate a stock merger, and artificially pump up the stock value.  It will screw with investor money, but it'll keep them afloat.  AMD will announce massive job cuts, which will hurt the company long term but be good for a quarterly profit review.  AMD will then have a substantive choice to make.  Which of our IPs can be sold off, and can we get enough money pooled up to go full gear at something we're extremely competent at.

My proposition is this, AMD courts MS.  It sounds like a Faustian bargain, but hear me out.  If AMD went to Samsung it'd be AMD over a barrel, begging for money.  We might get the next new Galaxy phone with the ability to actually play games competently, but it'd give Samsung enough money and leverage to kill MS in the phone market and significantly weaken the iPhone.  Apple has more money than god, but they've demonstrated that their ego will quash outside deals whenever they aren't in absolute control.  MS is likely to play ball, and AMD will have concessions to make on the front of the console market.  MS floats AMD a loan over a few years, functionally removes royalty payments on the Xbox One, and their phone products get a graphical upgrade which places them in competition with iPhone and Samsung for little to no effort.  Even if AMD went under before the loan was up, the MS legal team would make the technology they had access to work for them perpetually, paying for any losses on the loan several times over.

AMD does still make processors, but that's really just a joke at this point.  Intel has managed die shrinks significantly faster than AMD.  In the best case scenario for AMD, they'd see the Intel die shrinks process slow down even more than it has.  We've long past lost out to Moore's law, and AMD could use that boost.  If they were only one generation behind on their process node, but offered the same performance via overclocking, there'd be plenty of support for a cheaper AMD offering.  Zen, assuming it's one generation behind the Intel offering, wouldn't have to beat it on performance.  All Zen has to do is offer consumers a good value.  Intel has the reputation of being the best performance CPUs out there, but they pay for it with pricing.  Heck, look at these forums for people whining about Intel forcing new sockets every other generation.  If AMD offered Zen, and assured consumers they'd have two subsequent generations of processors on the same socket, there'd be a huge reason for the average gamer to buy their hardware.  Really, AMD only needs to get an effective marketing department, something they've somehow operated without for a surprising amount of time.  



So, AMD can have the ship righted.  It will require huge changes, that we've discussed already.  The proposition that they somehow are uniquely screwed now is, to be frank, missing the forest for the trees.  

If you like computers, you want AMD to live.  If you don't want to be locked into paying too much for hardware, you should be praying for something catastrophically bad going down at AMD, which forces change prior to them grinding away any potential fixes.  @HumanSmoke did an excellent job fleshing out the arguments, and does a dang good job of proving an alternative view on the situation.  

AMD has been mismanaged for a long time.  Their board of directors continues the same traditions of idiocy today, which has been driving the company down for years.  If there is no catastrophe, AMD will do painful things to keep afloat, and not take the hint that drastic actions need to be realized with the painful changes.  What AMD needs is a coup in the board room.  They need new leadership, that will make the hard decisions that hurt today, but will make AMD a success in a decade.  The only way that is going to happen is if there is something drastic.  At the same time, AMD could stay afloat with precious little change for several more years easily.  This isn't the end times, but it definitely isn't a health company that needs a minor course change to fix their problems.  





Time for some blind conjectures, and fun thought experiments.

Personally, I hope TSMC burns down.  They've got a huge segment of the graphics business, and it'll force either a GPU cost bubble or Global Foundries and Intel to offer some capacity to produce GPUs.  TSMC will be back into the game in a few months, with a focus on getting their next generation lines rolled out and running ASAP.  Intel and Global Foundries could come out looking like heroes, and potentially both wind-up with future business.  While producing competitor product sounds stupid, the reality is that by controlling their production you both gain financially and gain understanding of competition.  Intel's smart enough to know that.

Realistically, I think a stock merger will be AMD's wake-up.  The primary stock holders will call for heads, and the insanely wealthy board will engage their golden parachutes.  Middle management, and a hand-full of outside sources will be called in and reform the AMD company, and we'll see a bankruptcy filing.  The Arctic Islands GPU will release slightly behind schedule, and be eclipsed by financial news rather than by how well it competes with Nvidia at everything.  Zen will slip back into middle or late 2017, and by the time is is brought to market it won't even be able to compete with middle range Intel offerings because it's two generations behind again.  AMD will officially shed its CPU market (again), and become a GPU manufacturer.  They'll merge CPU and GPU divisions, and wind up creating some bastardized ARM/GPU combination chip like a PhysX card, that will allow the console market one more generation before it becomes completely irrelevant.  AMD will then spin its x86 processor IP off into another company, and court another larger company to buy it.  Without a failing CPU business, AMD will functionally just be ATI again.  Intel will try to poison the well against the AMD CPU IP sale, but regulations against trusts will allow it to go to a competently managed company.  Once all that is done, we'll see two competing CPU producers again (finally), and two GPU makers.  This will probably take a decade to pass, in the mean time we'll see precious little generational growth, because competition functionally doesn't exist.  That's doom and gloom in a nut shell.  Never thought I'd be hoping for a fire, but here we stand.


----------



## HumanSmoke (Aug 22, 2015)

the54thvoid said:


> Very much looks like asset stripping from the inside. And by that I simply mean, plundering the piggy bank before its liquidated.
> It is kind of bizarre the decisions AMD have made in the past few years.


Engineering the company to fail? I have had the same sneaking suspicion for some time. I had thought that Rory Read's appointment was the opening salvo in stripping AMD down to its foundations (it wasn't a popular viewpoint! )- although my original theory was that Rory was the iron fist to Mubadala/ATIC's velvet glove - since AMD's largest shareholder Mubadala, and Globalfoundries owner, ATIC, are essentially the same entity. In hindsight it seems a little too Machiavellian for the people running the show at Sunnyvale (assuming they are running the show, that is  )


lilhasselhoffer said:


> Realistically, I think a stock merger will be AMD's wake-up.....



Sure beats the "Death by a Thousand Cuts" strategy they are presently engaged in. What's the old football cliche : It the hope that kills you.


----------



## ZenZimZaliben (Aug 22, 2015)

lilhasselhoffer said:


> I've got to say, nothing earth shaking has been posted here, and it seems to agree with what I've been saying.
> 
> AMD is screwed, I'm not going to argue that point.  They weren't in a great position when Thuban launched, Bulldozer was an experiment that ended very badly, and they have been stripping value from the company by spinning off their facilities for a long time.  They've traded long term valuables, for a short term boost in the books.  None of that is in question, and none of that can really be debated by even the most staunch supporters of AMD.
> 
> Where we differ is the reality of the thing.



Not sure what the issue is. If I could tell the future 100% of the time with 100% accuracy I would be a very rich and famous person. Of course there are tons of variables and nothing is for sure. I have seen other companies in the same position go under. Others managed a miracle and pulled out of the dive at exactly the last minute. My feeling, and my opinion, and a moderately educated guess is that AMD has a very high probability of going under. It is Probable that AMD will go under based off other companies that have been in similar positions. It is even more probable seeing the AMD road map. It is a fact (because numbers don't lie) that the consumer market has lost faith in AMD's over hyped marketing.

TLDR: There is a greater chance of AMD going under than there is of a financial turn around.


----------



## broken pixel (Aug 22, 2015)

Samsung expects graphics cards with 6144-bit bus, 48GB of HBM memory onboard http://www.kitguru.net/components/g...with-6144-bit-bus-48gb-of-hbm-memory-onboard/


----------



## FordGT90Concept (Aug 22, 2015)

patrico said:


> are AMD not in all the consoles, i think they will be ok and they have always did well in the mid to high end range and price point ....
> 
> yes desktop might be down but they dont have all their eggs in the desktop market ....


If it were AMD's console, we wouldn't be having this discussion.  AMD is as much a pawn of Microsoft and Sony as the BD-ROM manufacturer is.




SonicZap said:


> AMD *was* competitive in the GPU market. They've been barely competitive since Maxwell (GTX 970) released, with Nvidia having similar performance but much lower power consumption.
> 
> Also, yeah, people bought Nvidia despite them being inferior 3-5 years ago. That's largely because Nvidia had
> superior marketing, which AMD lacked and now lacks it even more badly. It's sad, but it is what it is. I bet Nvidia fans will enjoy their higher GPU prices once AMD dies.


I don't think it is marking as much as NVIDIA is much more committed to brokering backroom deals with OEMs like HP, Dell, and Lenovo.  AMD is too stretched to not only approach the OEMs, but also beat NVIDIA in bargaining.  People place way too much stock in NVIDIA and AMD brands when the only one that really has any hardware component brand recognition is Intel (thanks to ads, lots of ads, everywhere).

It should be noted that AMD successfully courted Apple but Apple, in the discreet graphics card market, is small fry.



ZenZimZaliben said:


> I don't think we consumers are F'ed. I really do think someone bigger and better will purchase AMD. There is just to much IP there to just sweep under the rug. Under a different company AMD IP might even flourish.


AMD only needs two things: better fabs and a cash infusion.  Samsung has fabs; Microsoft has cash.  I think Microsoft might do it just to spite Sony.


----------



## lilhasselhoffer (Aug 22, 2015)

ZenZimZaliben said:


> Not sure what the issue is. If I could tell the future 100% of the time with 100% accuracy I would be a very rich and famous person. Of course there are tons of variables and nothing is for sure. I have seen other companies in the same position go under. Others managed a miracle and pulled out of the dive at exactly the last minute. My feeling, and my opinion, and a moderately educated guess is that AMD has a very high probability of going under. It is Probable that AMD will go under based off other companies that have been in similar positions. It is even more probable seeing the AMD road map. It is a fact (because numbers don't lie) that the consumer market has lost faith in AMD's over hyped marketing.
> 
> TLDR: There is a greater chance of AMD going under than there is of a financial turn around.



One paragraph is too much to read?  Perhaps you should try watching videos then.


On a more serious note, your entire argument is negated by a rather simple word.  That word is Marvel.  If Marvel was a technology firm, rather than a comic book company, they'd have laid the exact road map for AMD.  They were amazing, fell due to management making immensely stupid mistakes, entered bankruptcy, and emerged from it as a new kind of powerhouse.  AMD is too big to just close up shop one day, and they've got too much dependent on their IP.  If they fail in the traditional sense it will impact too many parties.  That's the only logical argument against closing the company, because every other argument begins with a self-interested party covering their backside.  Intel and Nvidia don't want anti-trust cases, Sony doesn't have the option to have the PS4 fail because the main chip can't be sourced, MS and Nintendo both have substantial slush funds, but don't want to invest in a console redesign.  All of these interested parties will keep AMD on life support, rather than potentially compete against a giant like Samsung.  The enemy you know is infinitely preferable to allowing a new enemy which could beat you.

Businesses know AMD is a hollow competitor, but competing against a cardboard stand is more profitable than somebody offering a genuinely better product.





broken pixel said:


> Samsung expects graphics cards with 6144-bit bus, 48GB of HBM memory onboard http://www.kitguru.net/components/g...with-6144-bit-bus-48gb-of-hbm-memory-onboard/



From that article:
"So far, neither AMD nor Nvidia have demonstrated even hypothetical product implementations (which are used to showcase potential future uses of technologies) of GPU-based solutions featuring six HBM memory chips. Intel Corp.’s Xeon Phi co-processors use HMC [hybrid memory cube] DRAMs as 'near memory' and are not expected to support HBM any time soon."
"Samsung expects HBM memory to be used for consumer graphics cards and high-performance computing accelerators based on AMD 'Arctic Islands' and Nvidia 'Pascal' graphics processors next year. Sometimes in 2017, network products will also take advantage of the new memory type. Three years from now other applications could employ HBM, according to Samsung"

Is this new information?  I was under the impression that we knew HBM2 would offer more and faster memory. 

The bit about Intel foregoing HBM is kinda interesting, but that's just because they want to display their new co-developed memory technology on their new products.

Edit:


FordGT90Concept said:


> ...AMD only needs two things: better fabs and a cash infusion.  Samsung has fabs; Microsoft has cash.  I think Microsoft might do it just to spite Sony.



Agreed!  MS lost so much ground with the Xbox One.  First their online only plans were rolled back, then the games were forced back to the traditional physical medium, and all the while Sony slipped crap out at E3 and "won" just because they weren't MS.

Honestly though, Sony is kinda screwed.  Yeah, the Playstation division is doing well, but the electronic and entertainment divisions are going down the plug hole faster than AMD.  If MS wanted to, courting AMD as a strategic partner could deal them the death blow they've been asking for during the last few years.  It would only take a small bit of preferential treatment for the Xbone to come to parity with the PS4, and with a bit of financial incentive to be cheaper for MS to produce.    

If I loved console gaming any more this would be raising alarm bells.


----------



## arbiter (Aug 22, 2015)

newtekie1 said:


> Yeah, but they aren't making any money on the console chips(they may even be losing a llittle on each chip). They bid super low just to get the contracts in hopes of doing a die shrink and reducing costs so they could eventually make money on the deal. But they haven't been able to get off 28nm.


I am pretty sure AMD does make money on them, I am sure they just license the IP to sony and MS and making the chips is left to MS and Sony. They don't make much off the IP but they do make a small amount but it isn't much.


----------



## qubit (Aug 23, 2015)

newtekie1 said:


> Yeah, but they aren't making any money on the console chips(they may even be losing a llittle on each chip). They bid super low just to get the contracts in hopes of doing a die shrink and reducing costs so they could eventually make money on the deal. But they haven't been able to get off 28nm.


Sounds painful.


----------



## R-T-B (Aug 23, 2015)

arbiter said:


> I am pretty sure AMD does make money on them, I am sure they just license the IP to sony and MS and making the chips is left to MS and Sony. They don't make much off the IP but they do make a small amount but it isn't much.



Pretty sure that's not how it works from what I've heard.  Making the chips would be the fabs responsibility, and I doubt MS/sony is footing that bill when AMD has arrangements with GloFo.


----------



## arbiter (Aug 23, 2015)

R-T-B said:


> Pretty sure that's not how it works from what I've heard.  Making the chips would be the fabs responsibility, and I doubt MS/sony is footing that bill when AMD has arrangements with GloFo.


it can work that way, arm works that way.


----------



## R-T-B (Aug 23, 2015)

arbiter said:


> it can work that way, arm works that way.



But my point is I think AMD is able to strike the better deal because of arrangements with GloFo, of course I could be wrong.


----------



## HumanSmoke (Aug 23, 2015)

arbiter said:


> I am pretty sure AMD does make money on them, I am sure they just license the IP to sony and MS and making the chips is left to MS and Sony. They don't make much off the IP but they do make a small amount but it isn't much.


Yes, around $15-18 per APU chip according to AMD's financials (hoping to grow to ~$20 with a die shrink according to Devinder Kumar, AMD's CFO) depending upon which console chip you're talking about (XB or PS4), if you take the $100-110 estimates that seem to be agreed upon for the chips as valid.
If the screenprinting on the chip is any indication, TSMC deliver straight to Sony.


----------



## Dieinafire (Aug 23, 2015)

Amd wouldn't even be missed they haven't done anything in years besides slow fade into nothing.  We all would be better off if someone took over that actually put up a fight against Intel and Nvidia.


----------



## R-T-B (Aug 23, 2015)

Dieinafire said:


> Amd wouldn't even be missed they haven't done anything in years besides slow fade into nothing.  We all would be better off if someone took over that actually put up a fight against Intel and Nvidia.



If they were to dissapear entirely they would most definitely be missed.  The current management style won't be missed though...  to the extent that a buyout would probably be a positive thing.


----------



## HumanSmoke (Aug 23, 2015)

Dieinafire said:


> Amd wouldn't even be missed they haven't done anything in years besides slow fade into nothing.


Nothing except lighting a fire under Microsoft in order to get a more versatile graphics API front and centre, moving OpenGL into the 21st century with Vulkan, which will likely find a huge audience once SteamOS and Android get geared up for it, keeping graphics prices somewhat in check by their competitive presence, providing some impetus for adaptive sync monitors, and in all probability, some credit for making DisplayPort a more widely adopted interface in a faster timeframe than it would have been otherwise.

You're either trolling, have Alzheimer's, or are very new to technology in general.


----------



## Folterknecht (Aug 23, 2015)

Afaik in case someone (e.g. Samsung or god forbid Apple) would buy AMD they wouldnt get the x86 license. According to what I ve read, there is a clause in the Intel-AMD x86 license agreement that prevents that.

That in itself leaves an interesting point to chew on. While the AMDs GPUs are still somewhat competitive the CPUs are just to far behind Intel, who are nowdays also trying their best to make AMDs APUs irrelevant. 

The rumored 40% IPC improvement for Zen - even if AMD mamages to execute that, I ve my doubts (just look at the Fury PR stunts) - would bring them roughly to the level of Ivy-Bridge. Is that really good enough in late 2016/ early 2017???

Now where will that leave Intel if AMDs makes the Dodo? The legeslative in the US doesnt like monopolies, that are to obvious.

---------------------------------------------------------------

Can some mod please ban this Anubis Clown?


----------



## rtwjunkie (Aug 23, 2015)

@Folterknecht why ban? Let him speak freely. A far more fitting option is to allow him to continue to open mouth and insert foot, LOL.    Anyway, I've not seen anything from him in a couple pages.


----------



## micropage7 (Aug 23, 2015)

i think the case its like their processor, on processor they face to face with intel and intel hits them at the crown
and on vga card, nvidia just do the same

they should move their point and create their own environment, anything that they have better points than their competitors
i think its better if they just enter low and mid level but offer products that really good and could challenge their competitor than entering all level but the result is bad

personally i want to see AMD try mobile market like tablet and phones, if they have the right chip


----------



## AsRock (Aug 23, 2015)

> According to the NVIDIA slide below, it's very bad news for AMD.



Funny they send this out just around the time of the 950 spam.


----------



## the54thvoid (Aug 23, 2015)

HumanSmoke said:


> Nothing except lighting a fire under Microsoft in order to get a more versatile graphics API front and centre, moving OpenGL into the 21st century with Vulkan, which will likely find a huge audience once SteamOS and Android get geared up for it, keeping graphics prices somewhat in check by their competitive presence, providing some impetus for adaptive sync monitors, and in all probability, some credit for making DisplayPort a more widely adopted interface in a faster timeframe than it would have been otherwise.
> 
> You're either trolling, have Alzheimer's, or are very new to technology in general.



And to think you get tagged as an Nvidiot sometimes... We ought to save this post as an instant retort to the blazin' crazies.


----------



## qubit (Aug 23, 2015)

Dieinafire said:


> Amd wouldn't even be missed they haven't done anything in years besides slow fade into nothing.  We all would be better off if someone took over that actually put up a fight against Intel and Nvidia.


While I agree that they have been fading for years and should be bought out, it's completely wrong to say that they wouldn't be missed. Weak as they are they are still providing _some_ competition to Intel and NVIDIA in particular. Without them, watch Intel and NVIDIA stitch up their customers with overpriced and underperforming products even more.

If AMD simply die then you'll see this for sure and regret making that statement.


----------



## R-T-B (Aug 23, 2015)

the54thvoid said:


> And to think you get tagged as an Nvidiot sometimes... We ought to save this post as an instant retort to the blazin' crazies.



Heck, I got called an nvidiot sometimes, despite owning a R9 290X less than 3 months ago.  I feel like screaming "Friendly fire!  Friendly fire!"


----------



## SonicZap (Aug 23, 2015)

qubit said:


> While I agree that they have been fading for years and should be bought out, it's completely wrong to say that they wouldn't be missed. Weak as they are they are still providing _some_ competition to Intel and NVIDIA in particular. Without them, watch Intel and NVIDIA stitch up their customers with overpriced and underperforming products even more.
> 
> If AMD simply die then you'll see this for sure and regret making that statement.


Intel has already done that for years, Nvidia has tried but it was difficult for them because of AMD. For example, the GTX 780 cost $650 at release, after the release of the R9 290X and R9 290 Nvidia was forced to cut it to $500.

Partially I think that AMD has often went too far into the price war, far enough to hurt themselves long-term. They could've priced the R9 290X and 290 a bit higher and still sold almost as many of them, they would've just gained more profit. I think they recently realized this themselves as well, looking at the not-so-aggressive pricing of the 300 series Radeons.


----------



## qubit (Aug 23, 2015)

@SonicZap That's a good example with Intel and NVIDIA. Speaking of Intel, you can be sure that those improvements are going to be even more incremental without AMD there to chip away at the low end. This is what I was alluding to with "Weak as they are they are still providing _some_ competition to Intel and NVIDIA in particular".

I don't know about the price war though. They had to compete on price since the performance wasn't there. What I think really hurt them is their awful marketing as others have said on here. This is especially true when they give their underperforming products evocative names such as Bulldozer and Fury, leading people to think that they will be very powerful and then hyping them up before launch, only to see them flop at review time. Looks like some moron over there still hasn't received the memo.  That'll be top management, then.


----------



## SonicZap (Aug 23, 2015)

qubit said:


> I don't know about the price war though. They had to compete on price since the performance wasn't there.


It was there with my example, the R9 290X. What wasn't right however, was the stock cooler. Without that abomination Hawaii would've been much, *much* better received. It was a great way for AMD to shoot itself in the foot, building a great GPU and then making it look bad by saving a few dollars from the cooler.

The history of AMD is full of similar screw-ups.


----------



## qubit (Aug 23, 2015)

Oh yeah, that cooler was bloody awful. I couldn't believe that that they crippled their product like this. Ridiculous.


----------



## FordGT90Concept (Aug 23, 2015)

qubit said:


> @SonicZap That's a good example with Intel and NVIDIA. Speaking of Intel, you can be sure that those improvements are going to be even more incremental without AMD there to chip away at the low end. This is what I was alluding to with "Weak as they are they are still providing _some_ competition to Intel and NVIDIA in particular".


Intel can't grow if they're just selling the same old stuff; moreover, the lesson of Moore's Law isn't just about transistor account, it is also about economics: by shrinking the process, Intel's profit margins improve.  Of course Moore's Law is starting to collapse because process improvements are getting more expensive but, still, margins are margins.

AMD really hasn't had any impact on Intel's decisions since Core 2 and the first generation of Core I#--we're coming up on a decade.


----------



## SonicZap (Aug 23, 2015)

FordGT90Concept said:


> AMD really hasn't had any impact on Intel's decisions since Core 2 and the first generation of Core I#--we're coming up on a decade.


I'm sure Intel was looking closely at the first Phenom and possibly Phenom II as well, possibly also Bulldozer. After BD they haven't got a single reason to care though.


----------



## AsRock (Aug 23, 2015)

R-T-B said:


> Heck, I got called an nvidiot sometimes, despite owning a R9 290X less than 3 months ago.  I feel like screaming "Friendly fire!  Friendly fire!"



Should not matter still, because you have one brand than the other don't make you a fan of that brand.

So if i did not get my 290X back when it was released which would mean i would of had a 980\TI now would make me a nvidia fan.

A lot of people have reasons to what they buy and back then when the 290X was released was memory amount.  Like i said if i did not get the 290X i would of had a 980\TI due to the HDMI and memory amount and not a Fury.


----------



## BiggieShady (Aug 24, 2015)

There is no sense bringing fanboyism into this when balance is so skewed ... we are long past rooting for "our" team anymore, at this point let's just hope game keeps going, I'd hate to see nvidia playing with themselves.


----------



## rvalencia (Aug 24, 2015)

qubit said:


> According to the NVIDIA slide below, it's very bad news for AMD.
> 
> Right, so the research has been carried out by apparently independent outfit Mercury Research, but take something like this from a competitor with a pinch of salt. Still, there's no doubt that NVIDIA now has a much bigger market share than AMD, whatever the actual numbers are.
> 
> ...


They don't include fleet PC APU's IGPs and semi-custom OEM customers such as Microsoft's Xbox One and Sony's PS4.

AMD APU's 8 CU IGP has reduce the need for any GPU with less than Radeon HD 7750 (8 CU) level power. Next year's 14 nm AMD APU may impact R9-285 level GPU e.g. using chip area size of FX-8800p APU, one could fit in 32 CUs into the same area space with 14 nm process tech.

To minimize missing in action (MIA) issues during a competitor's upgrade cycle (and users spending $$),  AMD should have released R9-390X (or as R9-290 XTX) against 980 non-Ti. R9-390X rivals 980 non-Ti. This is a defensive move to minimize users spending $$$$ on  competitor products, by offering alternative product with similar performance.


AMD could have released Fury X later as with NVIDIA's 980 Ti. My MSI R9-290X OC is already at 1040Mhz which is 10Mhz from R9-390X.

AMD doesn't understand there's an amount of users with $$$$ to spend and if these users spent on non-AMD products, they wouldn't be moving to AMD products until the next upgrade cycle with sufficient performance gap.  AMD is being mismanaged i.e. poor product re-positioning and poor defensive marketing tactics.

With AMD being MIA at a certain important CPU segment, Intel's mass high performance segment i7-quad core/ 8 threads configuration has stayed for quite some time.


----------



## HumanSmoke (Aug 24, 2015)

rvalencia said:


> AMD APU's 8 CU IGP has reduce the need for any GPU with less than Radeon HD 7750 (8 CU) level power. Next year's 14 nm AMD APU may impact R9-285 level GPU e.g. using chip area size of FX-8800p APU, one could fit in 32 CUs into the same area space with 14 nm process tech.


Unfortunately, AMD's APUs seem to be cannibalizing their own low end market to a much greater extent than that of Nvidia ( whose entry-level GT 700 series are still quite prevalent in OEM systems). in Q1 2013, AMD shipped 5.32 million discrete graphics cards, two years later (a reasonable timespan which saw APUs gain favour) they shipped 1.69 million. During the same period, Nvidia shipped 9.37 million and 7.7 million respectively, while Intel's own "APUs" are chewing up the entry level that AMD's APUs were supposed to take advantage of.

AMDs APU revolution seems to be the very definition of a Pyrrhic victory.


----------



## rvalencia (Aug 24, 2015)

HumanSmoke said:


> Unfortunately, AMD's APUs seem to be cannibalizing their own low end market to a much greater extent than that of Nvidia ( whose entry-level GT 700 series are still quite prevalent in OEM systems). in Q1 2013, AMD shipped 5.32 million discrete graphics cards, two years later (a reasonable timespan which saw APUs gain favour) they shipped 1.69 million. During the same period, Nvidia shipped 9.37 million and 7.7 million respectively, while Intel's own "APUs" are chewing up the entry level that AMD's APUs were supposed to take advantage of.
> 
> AMDs APU revolution seems to be the very definition of a Pyrrhic vistory.



From http://www.marketwired.com/press-re...uarter-amd-slipped-17-nvidia-fell-2020479.htm

AMD:  12.9%  (these are just PC APU and PC GPU products not including XBO and PS4)
NV: 14.9%
Intel: 72.2%

AMD's poor PC CPUs are impacting PC APU sales.

Another problem is lack of the supply with the latest A10-8700p/FX-8800p APUs.

Blue Team is winning.


----------



## HumanSmoke (Aug 24, 2015)

rvalencia said:


> AMD's poor PC CPUs are impacting PC APU sales.


And?
That doesn't actually contradict what I said about AMDs entry level/low-end discrete GPU sales being eroded by their (and Intel's) APU sales to a greater extent than those of its competitor in the same discrete market.

If you're saying that AMD hasn't generated significant APU sales in the last two years to affect the discrete graphics market then you'll have a hard time reconciling how AMD managed to shed 68% of its discrete market (units shipped) while their APU sales increased. Indeed, AMD's desktop APU unit sales increased 25% last quarter, while during the same period discrete sales dropped from 2.54 million to 1.69 million.


----------



## yogurt_21 (Aug 24, 2015)

HumanSmoke said:


> And?
> That doesn't actually contradict what I said about AMDs entry level/low-end discrete GPU sales being eroded by their (and Intel's) APU sales to a greater extent than those of its competitor in the same discrete market.
> 
> If you're saying that AMD hasn't generated significant APU sales in the last two years to affect the discrete graphics market then you'll have a hard time reconciling how AMD managed to shed 68% of its discrete market (units shipped) while their APU sales increased. Indeed, AMD's desktop APU unit sales increased 25% last quarter, while during the same period discrete sales dropped from 2.54 million to 1.69 million.



which mirrors what I was saying earlier. The market is simply going  SOC.  Gamers might soon find themselves paying more and more for discreet solutions, some of which may simply be stripped down versions of professional series gpu's we had to wait a full year from professional series launch for. (a reverse from the current norm) 

But Laptops are more and more becoming the goto with desktops being relegated to mini machines will very little room or power for discreet graphics solutions. Or of course you can pay workstation prices. Either way we ar going to see the market shift away from upgrade-able desktops and more towards full replacements. In that scenario I'd go amd apu over intel because I can live with slightly lower cpu performance, but if my games look like a pixelated slide show I'll be pissed.


----------



## lilhasselhoffer (Aug 24, 2015)

Anyone getting a strange sense of deja vu?


I can remember a few years back, Intel and MS partnered up to push for the death of the PC. They conjectured that most of the world would be switching over to tablets, so they announced the surface (at the end of the tablet boom) and declared the traditional PC dead.  Years later, smart phones had the gaming prowess of tablets.  MS bought up a smart phone developer, and announced that windows 8 would be their OS to make touch devices kill the traditional computer. Years later, MS back tracked, and basically has admitted to touch devices not being the only future for computers.


The only difference between these developments, and the future, is that now you've got competent low level offerings (APUs) that don't suck.  Even today, these things are trading off CPU power for graphics.  In ten years, they'll still be doing the same thing.  Until we've got a magical die shrink that, is more than halving linear dimensions, you'll never be able to boost the CPU and GPU at once. When one lags, it creates a market for the other.  This is why tablets and other low level devices aren't replacing the traditional PC, they're carving out their own niche markets.  You can't undersell the value of the APU, but it isn't valuable enough to replace the traditional PC.  The APU is a nice little development which makes a traditional PC capable of doing new things.

Considering how many times the PC was predicted to die, and how many times we've been told that discrete graphics were going to die, what should you trust.  Surely we've heard this before, and been through the dance.  PCs are dying, PC gaming is dying, AMD is dying, How many times do we hear this crap, before we start taking it all with a huge grain of salt?


----------



## BiggieShady (Aug 24, 2015)

lilhasselhoffer said:


> Surely we've heard this before, and been through the dance. PCs are dying, PC gaming is dying, AMD is dying, How many times do we hear this crap, before we start taking it all with a huge grain of salt?


Indeed. AMD being an IP company without fabs is exceptionally easy to keep afloat by all co-dependent players - Sony and Microsoft need one die shrink on 14nm node for thinner versions of their consoles. Also, owners of majority of AMD shares are swimming in oil money. Logic dictates that AMD should survive, after all it's the only way to make use of dat x86 licence. It seems those money grubbing execs realized that when they were making their deals.


----------



## Frick (Aug 24, 2015)

This might have been said, but AMD seriously did a mistake when doing those super low end systems, like the laptop I'm currently typing on which has a E1-6010 APU in it. It's slow, which is not so strange as it's a 1.35Ghz dual core and it's a €200 laptop, but what will happen in a case like this? Someone buys it cheap, realizes it is, with all the bloatware, ads on the web etc, actually not a functioning computer. Or it's functioning, but it's ... painfully slow. The only branding it has is Lenovo and AMD. If they buy something new they'll get something more expensive and end up with something Intel and they'll say "I had something AMD and it was soooo slow but this new thing is much nicer" which we know is not strange, but the consumer will see it as an AMD fault. The new system is a Lenovo and it's much faster and it has an Intel something in it. That's how many people think (and no, it's not even stupidity, just disinterest).

Intel got away with the Atoms because they're ubiqutous.

EDIT: Not to mention even I am super confused with the mobile naming schemes AMD has. Intel's are confusing too, but AMD is even worse.


----------



## yesyesloud (Aug 24, 2015)

Frick said:


> This might have been said, but AMD seriously did a mistake when doing those super low end systems, like the laptop I'm currently typing on which has a E1-6010 APU in it. It's slow, which is not so strange as it's a 1.35Ghz dual core and it's a €200 laptop, but what will happen in a case like this? Someone buys it cheap, realizes it is, with all the bloatware, ads on the web etc, actually not a functioning computer. Or it's functioning, but it's ... painfully slow. The only branding it has is Lenovo and AMD. If they buy something new they'll get something more expensive and end up with something Intel and they'll say "I had something AMD and it was soooo slow but this new thing is much nicer" which we know is not strange, but the consumer will see it as an AMD fault. The new system is a Lenovo and it's much faster and it has an Intel something in it. That's how many people think (and no, it's not even stupidity, just disinterest).
> 
> Intel got away with the Atoms because they're ubiqutous.
> 
> EDIT: Not to mention even I am super confused with the mobile naming schemes AMD has. Intel's are confusing too, but AMD is even worse.


I'm typing on an A10-5750M laptop (acer) and it's awesome, I paid about €350 for it a couple of years ago.

E-series mobility APUs are serious crap though...


----------



## arbiter (Aug 24, 2015)

yesyesloud said:


> I'm typing on an A10-5750M laptop (acer) and it's awesome, I paid about €350 for it a couple of years ago.
> 
> E-series mobility APUs are serious crap though...


Yea i know someone has a 17inch e series laptop. My god that cpu is slow, his laptop i think was 1-2 years old when i last messed with it and my laptop is like 8-10 years old and my cpu in my laptop is faster. AMD e series vs Intel Core Duo (core 1 not core 2)


----------



## Hawkstream (Aug 24, 2015)

NVIDIA's market cap is *11.49B*
AMD market cap is *1.38B*

AMD will stay around but we are kind of talking apples and oranges in terms of the two companies.  Its more likely that AMD will be purchased by someone.  Maybe Apple or Sony.

Edit" actually MS may buy them - http://www.kitguru.net/components/a...erested-to-buy-advanced-micro-devices-source/


----------



## yesyesloud (Aug 24, 2015)

God, not ms... I hope qualcomm takes over amd if it comes to that


----------



## ShiBDiB (Aug 24, 2015)

Hawkstream said:


> View attachment 67526
> 
> NVIDIA's market cap is *11.49B*
> AMD market cap is *1.38B*
> ...




You could look at it another way tho. The reason for the disparity in the market cap is because of the performance of the business. AMD hasn't performed well in CPU or GPU markets in years. They have their loyalists that continue to buy the products but in all reality they've been a step behind intel and nvidia for awhile now. A company that can't compete will die, just because AMD is smaller (because they've been "shit") doesn't protect them from that reality.


----------



## yesyesloud (Aug 25, 2015)

Oh, no one had looked at it the easiest way yet. thnx


----------



## rvalencia (Aug 30, 2015)

HumanSmoke said:


> And?
> That doesn't actually contradict what I said about AMDs entry level/low-end discrete GPU sales being eroded by their (and Intel's) APU sales to a greater extent than those of its competitor in the same discrete market.
> 
> If you're saying that AMD hasn't generated significant APU sales in the last two years to affect the discrete graphics market then you'll have a hard time reconciling how AMD managed to shed 68% of its discrete market (units shipped) while their APU sales increased. Indeed, AMD's desktop APU unit sales increased 25% last quarter, while during the same period discrete sales dropped from 2.54 million to 1.69 million.


Perhaps AMD is clearing their TSMC built chips and getting ready for GoFlo fab'ed GPUs.


----------



## HumanSmoke (Aug 30, 2015)

rvalencia said:


> Perhaps AMD is clearing their TSMC built chips and getting ready for GoFlo fab'ed GPUs.


What GloFo (yes, its GloFo. GoFlo sounds like a feminine hygiene product) GPUs ? and when are you expecting them?
So you're saying AMD has been clearing inventory for the last two years? If that's the case then they are in much worse position than even the analysts think because they will be reducing TSMC orders and clearing inventory through 2018 , y'know, since TSMC is contracted to fab AMD's Arctic Islands GPUs on their 16nmFF+ node


> While securing a portion of Apple's A9 chip orders, TSMC with its 16nm FinFET node has also obtained orders from *AMD*, Avago, Broadcom, HiSilicon Technologies, LG Electronics, MediaTek, Nvidia and Xilinx


and...


> *Next year*, AMD will reportedly contract *TSMC to build the high-end models of its Arctic Islands family of chips using 16nm process*, and Globalfoundries to make the low-end types using 14nm process.



For AMD's sake I hope you're wrong. If your assumption is that AMD is reducing TSMC orders for a high-end series that hasn't even begun production is correct, the company may as well just concentrate on semi-custom console chips and  save themselves and us from a slow death.


----------



## rvalencia (Aug 31, 2015)

HumanSmoke said:


> What GloFo (yes, its GloFo. GoFlo sounds like a feminine hygiene product) GPUs ? and when are you expecting them?
> So you're saying AMD has been clearing inventory for the last two years? If that's the case then they are in much worse position than even the analysts think because they will be reducing TSMC orders and clearing inventory through 2018 , y'know, since TSMC is contracted to fab AMD's Arctic Islands GPUs on their 16nmFF+ node
> 
> and...
> ...


Against *"Globalfoundries to make the low-end types using 14nm process."*


----------



## FordGT90Concept (Aug 31, 2015)

If AMD can put out 14nm processors in 2016, there is still hope that AMD can be competitive again; however, the likelihood that GloFo doesn't deliver is very good and the window of opportunity is small because Intel will push to 10nm in 2017 (at the earliest).


----------



## HumanSmoke (Aug 31, 2015)

rvalencia said:


> Against *"Globalfoundries to make the low-end types using 14nm process."*


Which doesn't contradict what I just said - I believe I just included the same information regarding GloFo supplying 14nm low end GPUs
It also doesn't bolster your argument that AMD has supposedly been dropping orders *for the past two years* to clear inventory for low end parts _in 2016_.


rvalencia said:


> Perhaps AMD is clearing their TSMC built chips and getting ready for GoFlo fab'ed GPUs.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


You're saying that AMD started cutting GPU orders in 2013 because Zen was arriving 3 years later*? Even though it is common knowledge, and well documented that, AIBs refused to take more AMD product because it wasn't selling.


> AMD's graphics card market share took a hit towards the end of last year with consumers choosing to lean more towards Nvidia. The underlying narrative for that trend has been consumer preference for newer products from Nvidia, such as the highly popular GeForce GTX 970, rather than AMD's equivalently-priced offerings.
> With a disappointing year drawn to a close for AMD its partners are bracing for a shaky first half to 2015 before things improve. _Digitimes _report that *AMD add-in board partners (AIBs) have reduced their orders of AMD GPUs to prevent inventory build-up*.



Not sure if you're attempting to re-write history, or making an attempt at AMD fantasy fan fiction. There's some pretty decent plot holes either way.


*(Zen isn't slated to arrive in any form until mid-Q1 2016 - which is AMD-speak for Q2 or Q3 on recent evidence)


----------



## Vayra86 (Aug 31, 2015)

Honestly, (roadmap) slides are worth just about as much as game developer release dates.

I've stopped looking at them, they worked OK until 22nm but no more. The only thing you can count on these days are official product announcement notations / inventory updates from suppliers.

And AMD even manages to fool them, looking at Fury/Nano. So yeah  Smaller nodes are a b*tch.


----------



## micropage7 (Aug 31, 2015)

AMD like to add features and features but like forgot to give some better performance than their competitor

if MS really buy them, i hope MS would give some performance boost


----------



## yogurt_21 (Aug 31, 2015)

yesyesloud said:


> God, not ms... I hope qualcomm takes over amd if it comes to that


like we'd ever be that lucky. They only double their performance while reducing overall battery impact each year. Then they're like "we just made it possible for you to play on your phone twice as long while the device itself is twice as fast. Did you all notice? No? Apple and Samsung get the credit again? Sigh..."

But seriously Qualcomm with an X86 license is a PC wet dream...which is exactly why Intel will never let it happen. Qualcomm is big enough to absorb AMD's debt without jeopardizing itself while still being able to compete with Intel. A combination that haunts Intel's nightmares. 

No the Microsoft buyout is more likely and then we'd see AMD become a subsidiary of their Xbox division. And microsoft will be all like "Gaming PC? wtf is a Gaming PC?, and bing will automatically start auto correcting it to XboX"


----------



## 64K (Aug 31, 2015)

yogurt_21 said:


> bing will automatically start auto correcting it to XboX"



That's funny.


----------



## qubit (Sep 10, 2015)

Just as it's looking all doom and gloom for AMD, I see this article that tells of AMD selling 20% of itself to an investment company, which might be the shot in the arm that it needs:

www.fudzilla.com/news/processors/38694-private-equity-to-get-20-percent-of-amd


----------



## FordGT90Concept (Sep 10, 2015)

I don't see that as a good thing; there are always strings attached.


----------



## qubit (Sep 10, 2015)

Of course there are, but it might just get them out of this death spiral they're in.


----------



## FordGT90Concept (Sep 10, 2015)

I...highly...doubt...it...

Zen is really the only thing on the horizon that can stop the "death spiral."  Even if it were epic, I think "too little, too late" is inevitable.


----------



## the54thvoid (Sep 10, 2015)

qubit said:


> Of course there are, but it might just get them out of this death spiral they're in.



When you sell a large chunk (of a struggling company) to a private investor, that is a very telling moment.  

I'm not doom and gloom about AMD but this does change things.  Here come the asset strippers.


----------



## qubit (Sep 10, 2015)

FordGT90Concept said:


> I...highly...doubt...it...
> 
> Zen is really the only thing on the horizon that can stop the "death spiral."  Even if it were epic, I think "too little, too late" is inevitable.


Personally, I wouldn't write AMD off if they started being managed properly, as other companies, much more on the brink have been rescued this way. Just my opinion, though. I don't think anyone knows for sure, so time will tell.



the54thvoid said:


> When you sell a large chunk (of a struggling company) to a private investor, that is a very telling moment.
> 
> *I'm not doom and gloom about AMD but this does change things.  Here come the asset strippers.*


No don't say that!  Unfortunately you could be right.


----------



## siluro818 (Sep 10, 2015)

Yeah well I don't know how it always happens, but when I start looking for a new card, which is usually in the ~200 euro range, AMD always have had the better offer, all the way back to a certain GeForce 2, which was the last NVidia hardware I've ever used.
My next is going to be R9 380 and considering that a good Freesync display (like that 27" Iiyama I'm gonna get) is under 400 euro, compared to similar G-syncs which are priced well above 700 (seriously wth is wrong with these ppl?) it is a total nobrainer.
I really couldn't care less about the whole "who has the biggest dick" competitions *shrugs*


----------



## FordGT90Concept (Sep 10, 2015)

G-sync is proprietary.  Probably $200-300 of that purchase price is going straight into NVIDIA's wallet.  That frames out why NVIDIA is rolling in cash where AMD isn't.  NVIDIA makes a fortune off of brand loyalty.


----------



## ZenZimZaliben (Sep 12, 2015)

I just have to be petty and say "itodaso!!!"  








http://www.thestreet.com/story/1328...oft-buyout-report.html?puc=yahoo&cm_ven=YAHOO

You wanted to know whats different this time. Well their stock is in the garbage can and as I an many stated AMD is in prime buyout position. Nail - Coffin.


----------



## Xzibit (Sep 12, 2015)

ZenZimZaliben said:


> I just have to be petty and say "itodaso!!!"
> 
> 
> 
> ...



AMD stock has been this low before more then once.

To entertain the idea of a buyout by Microsoft. I'll say this, AMDs work with Mantle/LiquidVR will compliment Microsoft developments on Hololens


----------



## FordGT90Concept (Sep 12, 2015)

AMD had more assets when it was low before.  That was also probably on DJIA which required AMD to leave for NASDAQ because their stock price was too low to be traded on DJIA.



ZenZimZaliben said:


> I just have to be petty and say "itodaso!!!"
> 
> 
> 
> ...


It sources Fudzilla.  'Nuff said.


----------



## ZenZimZaliben (Sep 12, 2015)

FordGT90Concept said:


> It sources Fudzilla.  'Nuff said.



Not the strongest source. haha. Still I do agree that someone is going to buy them.


----------



## 64K (Sep 12, 2015)

FordGT90Concept said:


> AMD had more assets when it was low before.  That was also probably on DJIA which required AMD to leave for NASDAQ because their stock price was too low to be traded on DJIA.
> 
> 
> It sources Fudzilla.  'Nuff said.



And AMD thought that they would be lent some credibility by being listed on a tech exchange like NASDAQ. AMD could do a negative split possibly but as it stands if their shares drop below $1 and in risk of being delisted from NASDAQ then that is just a brief postponement from the inevitable irrelevance of AMD as an investment. Maybe shorting them for a few dollars profit? I certainly wouldn't bother and it's risky imo.


----------



## qubit (Sep 12, 2015)

Microsoft might buy AMD! Looks like they would be able to make x86 CPUs too, despite the current licencing restrictions.

Finally, it also looks like Intel is interested in buying AMD. What was I saying about Intel possibly competing in the high end graphics card market? 

www.fudzilla.com/news/graphics/38725-microsoft-interested-to-acquire-amd


----------



## FordGT90Concept (Sep 13, 2015)

...fud...zilla...

If CNN Money, Bloomberg, or Forbes reports it, then I'll believe it.  Until then...


----------



## Pill Monster (Sep 13, 2015)

Lol DSO Gaming, say no more.  The Kings of clickbait  




> According to *our Power Point slide* *Mercury Research’s latest data*, NVIDIA has jumped from 77% of the discrete GPU market in Q4 2014 to 82% in Q2 2015.






> *This basically means that AMD has dropped from 23% to 18% (of the discrete GPU market). In other words, 4 our of 5 PC users prefer NVIDIA’s graphics cards over AMD’s.*






A dubious claim followed by pure speculation....sounds about right for DSO  



Nvidia always had the market share...


----------



## yesyesloud (Sep 13, 2015)

FordGT90Concept said:


> ...fud...zilla...
> If CNN Money, Bloomberg, or Forbes reports it, then I'll believe it.  Until then...


Bloomberg is generally the best source for that sort of info, but forbes is fudzilla evolved... And CNN imho is kind of on the same level as FOX news, which's been legally rendered just an entertainment channel


----------



## Pill Monster (Sep 13, 2015)

yesyesloud said:


> Bloomberg is generally the best source for that sort of info, *but forbes is fudzilla evolved..*. And CNN imho is kind of on the same level as FOX news, which's been legally rendered just an entertainment channel


 Yeah I dunno what happened to Forbes, they used to be credible in my opion.  Def not anymore though  lol.

Now they seem worse than Inquirer......


----------



## terroralpha (Sep 20, 2015)

now that the ape... i mean steve balmer is out of the picture, i wouldn't mind MS buying AMD. Oracle may want to buy them as well. They'll become a one stop shop for cloud computing overnight if they do. it's possible these and other companies are waiting for AMD's price to fall even more to get them cheap. until further notice, we can only speculate. 

but the one thing that I hope that will not happen is AMD getting bought out by a holdings company or a deep pocket patent troll.


----------



## FordGT90Concept (Sep 20, 2015)

Yeah, now is not a buyers market with everyone's shares taking a hit.  AMD also still has too much cash on hand.  In a year or two, I suspect there will be more activity on this.


----------



## qubit (Sep 20, 2015)

terroralpha said:


> but the one thing that I hope that will not happen is AMD getting bought out by a holdings company or a deep pocket patent troll.


Yeah, couldn't agree more. That would be an unmitigated disaster.

Let's hope they get bought out by a decent company and receive the investment that they so desperately need.


----------



## FordGT90Concept (Sep 20, 2015)

I think their dismantling themselves decreases the risk of being bought out by a holdings company.  There's not much left for them to break up and sell.  As for patent troll, I think worse case scenario is AMD itself becomes a patent troll not unlike what Nokia did having sold their phone development to Microsoft.


----------

