# AMD Now Almost Worth A Quarter of What it Paid for ATI



## btarunr (Jul 17, 2015)

It's been gloomy at the markets in the wake of the European economic crisis. This along with a revised quarterly outlook released by the company, hit AMD very hard over the past week. The AMD stock opened to a stock price of 1.87 down -0.09 or -4.59% at the time of writing this report, which sets the company's market capitalization at $1.53 billion. This is almost a quarter of what AMD paid to acquire ATI Technology, about a decade ago ($5.60 billion). Earlier this month, AMD took a steep fall of -15.59%, seeing its market cap drop by a quarter.

Intel is now worth $140.8 billion (92 times more), and NVIDIA $10.7 billion (7 times more). Among the issues affecting AMD are decline in PC sales and stiff competition. However, reasonably positive earnings put out by Intel disproves AMD's excuse that the market is to blame for bad performance, and the company could slide even further, hitting its all-time-low at the financial markets. The company will host an earnings call later today.





*View at TechPowerUp Main Site*


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## THE_EGG (Jul 17, 2015)

:'(

I guess their accounting team must be FURYious.


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## cyneater (Jul 17, 2015)

AMD needs to make products people want to buy....

And processors that can perform well and are priced well....

The Athlon 64 was released over 10 years ago It was a Pentium 4 killer...

AMD needs another Athlon 64.... Or they could go the way of mips and SGI


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## de.das.dude (Jul 17, 2015)

sad


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## The Von Matrices (Jul 17, 2015)

Considering how AMD overvalued ATI in 2006, I don't think the disparity in assets is as bad as the 4x difference in market capitalization would suggest.


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## Frick (Jul 17, 2015)

I'm seriously considering buying stock for the heck of it.


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## HumanSmoke (Jul 17, 2015)

The Von Matrices said:


> Considering how AMD overvalued ATI in 2006, I don't think the disparity in assets is as bad as the 4x difference in market capitalization would suggest.


Indeed. A year after the acquisition, the combined company was worth half its combined (pre-acquisition) value, thanks to AMD's gross over-valuation of ATI worth, and the $2bn worth of debt AMD saddled itself with buying ATI. Having said that, AMD's BoD and execs have been continually rewarded for underperformance. The occasional Chief [insert title] Officer gets the golden parachute treatment as a sacrificial lamb for the combined assent of the BoD's signing off on whatever strategies are in vogue at any given time, but generally it's business as usual.


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## Caring1 (Jul 17, 2015)

Frick said:


> I'm seriously considering buying stock for the heck of it.


Hahaha, did you know shareholders are responsible for debt? You have a few spare billion?


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## Frick (Jul 17, 2015)

Caring1 said:


> Hahaha, did you know shareholders are responsible for debt? You have a few spare billion?



I have no idea how it works, I just figured it would be nice to have like two shares of AMD.


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## natr0n (Jul 17, 2015)

They need to pull shit out of there hats quick cause this show is almost finished.

We keep waiting for something to happen and let down over and over.

Intel already has an answer to anything AMD can think of at this point.


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## Xaled (Jul 17, 2015)

They had some excellent cards right in time, 79xx and 29xs, but their marketing-pricing management were the worst it could be, i really start to think that AMD's managers since 7970s time are some nvidia guys who did almost every thing possible just to kill excellent series like 7xxx and 29x by horrible marketing and pricing


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## Easo (Jul 17, 2015)

Damn... Well, the less they cost, the sooner someone realy might buy them.


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## de.das.dude (Jul 17, 2015)

Frick said:


> I'm seriously considering buying stock for the heck of it.


same XD


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## john_ (Jul 17, 2015)

The period after the Lehman Brothers collapse, AMD's valuation was under a billion if I remember correctly. They are still alive.

They have enough money to survive the next year until Zen arrives and they will also probably see an increase in their income from GPUs in the next one or two quarters. The fact that TSMC is lowering the prices of 28nm by 10% will help them to make a little extra profit. Intel is also slowing down, so the only question mark is Zen's IPC performance and efficiency. If they come out with something at least as good as Intel Haswell(too optimistic, probably Ivy Bridge would have been closer to reality), their share price and valuation will go much higher, because their products will become much more competitive than they are today.


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## Assimilator (Jul 17, 2015)

john_ said:


> The period after the Lehman Brothers collapse, AMD's valuation was under a billion if I remember correctly. They are still alive.
> 
> They have enough money to survive the next year until Zen arrives and they will also probably see an increase in their income from GPUs in the next one or two quarters. The fact that TSMC is lowering the prices of 28nm by 10% will help them to make a little extra profit. Intel is also slowing down, so the only question mark is Zen's IPC performance and efficiency. If they come out with something at least as good as Intel Haswell(too optimistic, probably Ivy Bridge would have been closer to reality), their share price and valuation will go much higher, because their products will become much more competitive than they are today.



AMD can't keep haemorrhaging cash by selling CPUs and APUs at a loss or minor profit. They need a product that they can make high % of profits on. Unless Zen beats Skylake, it won't be that product, and AMD's CPU division will be done.


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## HumanSmoke (Jul 17, 2015)

Assimilator said:


> AMD can't keep haemorrhaging cash by selling CPUs and APUs at a loss or minor profit. They need a product that they can make high % of profits on. Unless Zen beats Skylake, it won't be that product, and AMD's CPU division will be done.


You'd think that at this stage, AMD need Zen to do a Conroe on Intel. Even performance parity (and that is a huge ask) with Intel's current line-up will still see Intel outselling AMD in every market that counts. AMD not only have to wait for Zen to arrive (hopefully) in Q3 2016, but to remain big enough, and to retain enough R&D finances and personnel in the meantime to take advantage when it arrives.
I'm guessing that AMD will have to deliver unequivocally - performance as advertised, on time, and fully supported (feature set, firmware, drivers, production ramp) for OEMs to hitch their wagons to AMD's star....and hope like hell Intel slip up.


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## TheLostSwede (Jul 17, 2015)

cyneater said:


> AMD needs another Athlon 64.... Or they could go the way of mips and SGI



You do know MIPS is still around and are in fact on the rebound with some help from Imagination Technologies who bought them a couple of years ago, right?


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## eroldru (Jul 17, 2015)

With fanboys all over the place and wrong information given by reviewers and review sites, AMD is taking heavy shots.

I'm always very careful not to make the wrong judgement, but Intel has been playing with the desktop customer for more than 2 generations. Crappy CPU assembly and minimal performance gains are very bad for their name, but people still buy them like candy. Just yesterday I was testing an i7-4770 on stock speeds and priming temps were more than 100C with an air conditioned room, while in the same room an 8350 @ 4.5GHz did not even reach 60C, while gaming performance was identical. and the price is 3 times less.


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## Dent1 (Jul 17, 2015)

eroldru said:


> With fanboys all over the place and wrong information given by reviewers and review sites, AMD is taking heavy shots.
> 
> I'm always very careful not to make the wrong judgement, but Intel has been playing with the desktop customer for more than 2 generations. Crappy CPU assembly and minimal performance gains are very bad for their name, but people still buy them like candy. Just yesterday I was testing an i7-4770 on stock speeds and priming temps were more than 100C with an air conditioned room, while in the same room an *8350 @ 4.5GHz did not even reach 60C, while gaming performance was identical. and the price is 3 times less*.



Don't waste your time, everyone here will conveniently ignore the fact that your AMD performs identical to your Intel for cooler and cheaper.


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## the54thvoid (Jul 17, 2015)

Dent1 said:


> Don't waste your time, everyone here will conveniently ignore the fact that your AMD performs identical to your Intel for cooler and cheaper.



Fanboys aside, the share price drop is indicative of the mass perception and market belief that AMD are no longer delivering a solid product.
The geeks here are an insignificant minority in the global market. AMD's decline can only be blamed on fanboys if you are one yourself.  Stocks don't listen to fanboys, they listen to market presence and profitability.  
It's brutally naive to assume AMD's decline is anything other than lack of product and lack of product perception, combined with possible major mismanagement.
This is not a third party fault. Similarly, Intel do just enough to stay far out in front.  AMD's lack of product threat means they can work on minimal R&D expenditure with minimal product improvement.
Don't get me wrong (if you do you're illogical) I don't want AMD to disappear.  Competition is required for better service and product. I want to see AMD taken over and used properly to create segment desirable products, across a whole range of applications.
They're not done yet but they're getting really close to it.


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## FordGT90Concept (Jul 17, 2015)

natr0n said:


> Intel already has an answer to anything AMD can think of at this point.


Except high-end GPUs.  I'm beginning to think AMD should either sell or drop its CPU business and focus exclusively on GPUs where they can compete.


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## 63jax (Jul 17, 2015)

omg, green and red fanbois must be really ecstatic now! this is all they want, with AMD gone will have world peace, no more abortions, Kim will move to US, etc, keep it up fanbois!


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## HumanSmoke (Jul 17, 2015)

Dent1 said:


> Don't waste your time, everyone here will conveniently ignore the fact that your AMD performs identical to your Intel for cooler and cheaper.


...and yet even AMD help Intel's cause by using Intel system builds for their GPU press deck benchmarks. If AMD don't have faith in their own platform, should you expect OEMs to?


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## the54thvoid (Jul 17, 2015)

FordGT90Concept said:


> Except high-end GPUs.  I'm beginning to think AMD should either sell or drop its CPU business and focus exclusively on GPUs where they can compete.



Come back ATI!


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## SK-1 (Jul 17, 2015)

They had all the deals with console vendors? WTF? Did they give their GPU's away?


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## FordGT90Concept (Jul 17, 2015)

john_ said:


> The period after the Lehman Brothers collapse, AMD's valuation was under a billion if I remember correctly. They are still alive.


AMD was plummeting long before the 2008 subprime mortgage bubble burst.  I said back in 2006 that buying out ATI was the dumbest thing AMD could do.  Proven correct, I was.

AMD was a good company from about 1997-2005 (K6 to K8).  Before and after, not so much.



SK-1 said:


> They had all the deals with console vendors? WTF? Did they give their GPU's away?


They likely only make pennies on the dollar for every unit shipped and Global Foundries probably gets most of the profit margin.  AMD killed itself when it was forced to sell its foundries.


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## Caring1 (Jul 17, 2015)

SK-1 said:


> They had all the deals with console vendors? WTF? Did they give their GPU's away?


The person that wrote that licensing deal was probably a mole from Nvidia


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## buildzoid (Jul 17, 2015)

SK-1 said:


> They had all the deals with console vendors? WTF? Did they give their GPU's away?



The reason Nvidia refused the console deal was due to it being very very low profit.


On a side note. It's odd but I'm slowly moving away from intel products even though the performance gap is getting steadily larger, I've come to realize that I don't play enough new games to care about single threaded performance on the other hand I do stream and edit video on occasion and that's something an FX8370 at 4.8Ghz can do better than an i5 4XXX.


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## thevoiceofreason (Jul 17, 2015)

the54thvoid said:


> (...)  Stocks don't listen to fanboys, they listen to market presence and profitability.
> It's brutally naive to assume AMD's decline is anything other than lack of product and lack of product perception, combined with possible major mismanagement.
> (...)


I'd attribute it to the Intel marketing machine (reality check: Intel's tagline is Intel Inside, what's AMD's?), their close relationships with OEMs and industry's poor benchmarking standards that still make recommendations on purchasing CPUs based on how quickly they calculate Pi or transcode mp3s (I transcode mp3 maybe once a month for a total of two minutes when I buy a new CD, how often do you?).

The reality is that for a regular consumer who spends most of their time browsing reddit, watching Netflix, maybe fumbling with formulas in Excel or playing games, the choice of a CPU makes very little difference. But people are not some perfect, rational consumers and will gladly pay double because the guy at the computer shop read a review and the prime95 numbers were better so they end up getting the Intel i7.

What fairly few people here realize (the54thvoid being one of them) is that there is much more to running a profitable business than just having the best product, and that marketing is not just buying advertisements.

For the record, I have i5-3350P myself.


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## Basard (Jul 17, 2015)

Frick said:


> I have no idea how it works, I just figured it would be nice to have like two shares of AMD.



I'm not sure how it works either, but I remember their stock was at ten bucks a share before the original Athlons came out.  Shortly after it was at seventy a share.


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## Assimilator (Jul 17, 2015)

eroldru said:


> With fanboys all over the place and wrong information given by reviewers and review sites, AMD is taking heavy shots.
> 
> I'm always very careful not to make the wrong judgement, but Intel has been playing with the desktop customer for more than 2 generations. Crappy CPU assembly and minimal performance gains are very bad for their name, but people still buy them like candy. Just yesterday I was testing an i7-4770 on stock speeds and priming temps were more than 100C with an air conditioned room, while in the same room an 8350 @ 4.5GHz did not even reach 60C, while gaming performance was identical. and the price is 3 times less.



Conveniently ignoring the massively higher power consumption of the AMD CPU for that "identical" performance, and the chipsets for that "high-end" CPU that haven't been updated since 2011 (so no USB 3), to name two factors.

You're also ignoring how Intel has prioritised power efficiency over performance since Sandy Bridge, so that their CPUs can be put into even more devices and make even more money. This is called a "successful business strategy" and is something that AMD has not yet heard of.


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## Basard (Jul 17, 2015)

Assimilator said:


> Conveniently ignoring the massively higher power consumption of the AMD CPU for that "identical" performance, and the chipsets for that "high-end" CPU that haven't been updated since 2011 (so no USB 3), to name two factors.
> 
> You're also ignoring how Intel has prioritised power efficiency over performance since Sandy Bridge, so that their CPUs can be put into even more devices and make even more money. This is called a "successful business strategy" and is something that AMD has not yet heard of.



My GA-970A-UD3 has USB 3...


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## john_ (Jul 17, 2015)

buildzoid said:


> The reason Nvidia refused the console deal was due to it being very very low profit.


That's what Nvidia wanted everyone to believe. They lost the consoles because they couldn't make an x86 APU. They didn't had x86 cores. On the other hand Intel didn't had a good GPU. So Microsoft and Sony gone with the only company that had an x86 CPU AND a good GPU. The fact that AMD is not in a posision to negotiate higher prices, was also a nice bonus for both Microsoft and Sony.


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## cyneater (Jul 17, 2015)

TheLostSwede said:


> You do know MIPS is still around and are in fact on the rebound with some help from Imagination Technologies who bought them a couple of years ago, right?


Mips are but they are nothing like they use to be... THey might be in tablets phones and other devices but they are not used in workstations anymore.

SGI sold them...


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## Constantine Yevseyev (Jul 17, 2015)

Basard said:


> My GA-970A-UD3 has USB 3...


Not really. I mean, it's a 3rd party chip (Etron EJ168). They do have their in-house USB 3.0 controller (goes with every single chipset they have for 2015, present in both ULV and mainstream category devices), but they have yet to start equipping their performance segment products with it.


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## nunyabuisness (Jul 17, 2015)

thevoiceofreason said:


> I'd attribute it to the Intel marketing machine (reality check: Intel's tagline is Intel Inside, what's AMD's?), their close relationships with OEMs and industry's poor benchmarking standards that still make recommendations on purchasing CPUs based on how quickly they calculate Pi or transcode mp3s (I transcode mp3 maybe once a month for a total of two minutes when I buy a new CD, how often do you?).
> 
> The reality is that for a regular consumer who spends most of their time browsing reddit, watching Netflix, maybe fumbling with formulas in Excel or playing games, the choice of a CPU makes very little difference. But people are not some perfect, rational consumers and will gladly pay double because the guy at the computer shop read a review and the prime95 numbers were better so they end up getting the Intel i7.
> 
> ...



I have to agree. 
I had a 4690 (non K) which my friend's CPU kicked the bucket so I gave that to him. and I had a pentium G3260 laying around. and I honestly couldn't tell the difference with basic stuff. 
I even played CS go on the integrated GFX no joke! 

This last week I got a I7 4790K as my Final CPU till the end of next year when Zen etc come out. and I can not notice any diff. except AAA games that need the HP and then multitasking apps. 
The i7 is total overkill and thats cool id rather have it than not have it and need it. 

if I had the pentium I woudnt be able to play battlefront etc. or I could but with less Ai etc. just like BF4 if you had a dual core you got less AI in the single players etc.


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## the54thvoid (Jul 17, 2015)

thevoiceofreason said:


> ...What fairly few people here realize (the54thvoid being one of them) is that there is much more to running a profitable business than just having the best product, and that marketing is not just buying advertisements.
> 
> For the record, I have i5-3350P myself.



EDIT: - I'm an arse and need to read properly, keeping this post for humility.  My following reply is because i *misread* @thevoiceofreason's post

What I said.....



> the share price drop is indicative of the *mass perception* and *market belief* that AMD are no longer delivering a solid product



_Perception _and _belief_ are key to this, whether or not their products stack up.  If you can't get it across to the consumer that your product is the best (even if it isn't, _iphone_ for example) then you fail at changing opinions and perceptions.  The same way that LG have problems shifting lots of their flagship G4 smartphone despite it being pretty damn good.  Samsung and Apple hold the market perception amongst the masses as being the best (and they are good mind).  AMD while delivering solid products are seen as lesser.  That is a failure of AMD's own marketing strategy and it's business direction.  AMD need to prove they have a viable alternative to Intel and/or that it fits a better pricing model.  This product then has to be delivered to the consumer at a profitable margin.

As for your whimsical fairy tale that it is Intel's fault, that's because AMD has failed to counter the industry's perception.  Your general statement about using the tech for mundane purposes is irrelevent as I can also use a low cost Intel or even a SoC for that.  AMD are a business and if they cannot change perceptions - they have failed as a business, irrespective of the market forces around them.

FTR, for you to simply state "fairly few people realise..." shows a staggering level of arrogance and ignorance.  Even if i knew jack shit about business, there are a whole heap of folks here that do.


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## thevoiceofreason (Jul 17, 2015)

the54thvoid said:


> What I said.....


Yeah, and what I said you said, including you in people who realize that brand perception is a powerful force. In other words, you seem to have launched into a tirade thinking I disagree with you, but I don't. You were "quoted for truth", as they say.




the54thvoid said:


> _Perception _and _belief_ are key to this, whether or not their products stack up.  If you can't get it across to the consumer that your product is the best (even if it isn't, _iphone_ for example) then you fail at changing opinions and perceptions.  The same way that LG have problems shifting lots of their flagship G4 smartphone despite it being pretty damn good.  Samsung and Apple hold the market perception amongst the masses as being the best (and they are good mind).  AMD while delivering solid products are seen as lesser.  That is a failure of AMD's own marketing strategy and it's business direction.  AMD need to prove they have a viable alternative to Intel and/or that it fits a better pricing model.  This product then has to be delivered to the consumer at a profitable margin.
> 
> As for your whimsical fairy tale that it is Intel's fault, that's because AMD has failed to counter the industry's perception.  Your general statement about using the tech for mundane purposes is irrelevent as I can also use a low cost Intel or even a SoC for that.  AMD are a business and if they cannot change perceptions - they have failed as a business, irrespective of the market forces around them.


Yeah, we just both mentioned this above. However, I never said it's Intel's _fault_, if anything, they are better at it, and rightly reap the benefits. And I do maintain that the TPU comment section usually ends up circlejerking about performance and efficiency numbers as if they were all matters.

For those unfamiliar with how businesses work, it's the marketing's job to perform market analysis and communicate the value of the product to the customers, including business customers. And the fraction of high-end consumer grade CPUs (that is i7s rather than Xeons) that are actually used for number crunching as opposed to idling in office PCs is minuscule. They might as well be APUs, but AMD failed to convince anyone about that. After all, they are slower in Prime95, and the benchmarks don't lie.


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## de.das.dude (Jul 17, 2015)

AMD needs to fire their current PR and Marketing and hire new ones. They suck. Not only do they not work enough, but their adverts and ideas are weird and creepy.
what happned to the good ol days when you could slap on a naked chick and a product would sell?


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## 64K (Jul 17, 2015)

SK-1 said:


> They had all the deals with console vendors? WTF? Did they give their GPU's away?



Pretty much.

Mismanagement seems to be the biggest problem AMD has had over the years. It has brought them to the point of ruin and I don't think Lisa Su can turn things around now even though she is trying. Their debt increases at alarming rates and they probably can't borrow too much more because they are having trouble servicing the debt they already have.

In the last 10 years AMD has fallen from $40 a share to $1.87 a share. A market cap of 32.5 billion dollars to a market cap of 1.5 billion dollars. That's a staggering 2,140% loss for shareholders. In the last month alone AMD's market cap has fallen another 24%.


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## GhostRyder (Jul 17, 2015)

64K said:


> Pretty much.
> 
> Mismanagement seems to be the biggest problem AMD has had over the years. It has brought them to the point of ruin and I don't think Lisa Su can turn things around now even though she is trying. Their debt increases at alarming rates and they probably can't borrow too much more because they are having trouble servicing the debt they already have.
> 
> In the last 10 years AMD has fallen from $40 a share to $1.87 a share. A market cap of 32.5 billion dollars to a market cap of 1.5 billion dollars. That's a staggering 2,140% loss for shareholders. In the last month alone AMD's market cap has fallen another 24%.


 
Its a mix of mismanagement and poor business practices all around.  They sat on their hands, failed to deliver on promises (CPU market wise), and were essentially shoved to the side by unscrupulous business practices by their competition (Namely Intel) which has essentially shoved them to the side lines where they have a very limited number of OEM's.  OEM's are what will make them some money back but essentially they are having to paddle up a water fall that they were pushed down with only a few paddles.  Not much they can do except offer low margin deals with the companies which results in no profits and hurts them even more.  Its a no win situation, the only way they can do anything is to hopefully win over enough OEM's that when they release new products they will hopefully start being able to negotiate more margins in the furutre but they need some products that can really wow people more than mobile APU's which are the only area they have any pull (CPU wise) and that is mostly because of the GPU on it.

Well there is only the hope that they will make some money with the GPU sales that are happening now.  Other than that they are not doing much until 2016...


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## ZoneDymo (Jul 17, 2015)

john_ said:


> That's what Nvidia wanted everyone to believe. They lost the consoles because they couldn't make an x86 APU. They didn't had x86 cores. On the other hand Intel didn't had a good GPU. So Microsoft and Sony gone with the only company that had an x86 CPU AND a good GPU. The fact that AMD is not in a posision to negotiate higher prices, was also a nice bonus for both Microsoft and Sony.



ermmm how exactly, if AMD is the only one they can turn to as you state, is AMD not in a position of negotiate? that seems to me to be the most perfect position to negotiate.....


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## ensabrenoir (Jul 17, 2015)

eroldru said:


> With fanboys all over the place and wrong information given by reviewers and review sites, AMD is taking heavy shots.
> 
> I'm always very careful not to make the wrong judgement, but Intel has been playing with the desktop customer for more than 2 generations. Crappy CPU assembly and minimal performance gains are very bad for their name, but people still buy them like candy. Just yesterday I was testing an i7-4770 on stock speeds and priming temps were more than 100C with an air conditioned room, while in the same room an 8350 @ 4.5GHz did not even reach 60C, while gaming performance was identical. and the price is 3 times less.




............... sounds like you were doing something wrong.


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## ZeDestructor (Jul 17, 2015)

Assimilator said:


> AMD can't keep haemorrhaging cash by selling CPUs and APUs at a loss or minor profit. They need a product that they can make high % of profits on. Unless Zen beats Skylake, it won't be that product, and AMD's CPU division will be done.



Yup. AMD really, really needs a proper server CPU lineup to make back some real cash. Consumer devices have tiny margins compared to server parts.



eroldru said:


> Just yesterday I was testing an i7-4770 on stock speeds and priming temps were more than 100C with an air conditioned room, while in the same room an 8350 @ 4.5GHz did not even reach 60C, while gaming performance was identical. and the price is 3 times less.



What coolers? What case? What fans in your case and where?



63jax said:


> omg, green and red fanbois must be really ecstatic now! this is all they want, with AMD gone will have world peace, no more abortions, Kim will move to US, etc, keep it up fanbois!



Oh HELL no! I do NOT want an Intel-only x86 world, or an nVidia-only high-end GPU world for that matter.



SK-1 said:


> They had all the deals with console vendors? WTF? Did they give their GPU's away?





buildzoid said:


> The reason Nvidia refused the console deal was due to it being very very low profit.



So they hint. Nothing explicit was said as I recall.



buildzoid said:


> On a side note. It's odd but I'm slowly moving away from intel products even though the performance gap is getting steadily larger, I've come to realize that I don't play enough new games to care about single threaded performance on the other hand I do stream and edit video on occasion and that's something an FX8370 at 4.8Ghz can do better than an i5 4XXX.



Or you could spend the big bucks and get a high-core-count Xeon and see what Intel has really been up to.



Assimilator said:


> You're also ignoring how Intel has prioritised power efficiency over performance since Sandy Bridge, so that their CPUs can be put into even more devices and make even more money. This is called a "successful business strategy" and is something that AMD has not yet heard of.



The flipside of aiming so hard on power consumption (and die-size) is that they can make absolutely huge processors - E5-2699v3 is at 18 full blown Haswell cores already. At that end of the spectrum AMD has got absolutely nothing in their Opteron lineup to compete. Lower down the range, the Opterons are all too power/space-inefficient (for a given amount of work, you need more AMD servers, or if AMD servers are good, they use up and exhaust more heat for the same work) compared to the Xeons. The result is that AMD-based servers are simply not selling, and that's hitting AMD's profits hard.



john_ said:


> That's what Nvidia wanted everyone to believe. They lost the consoles because they couldn't make an x86 APU. They didn't had x86 cores. On the other hand Intel didn't had a good GPU. So Microsoft and Sony gone with the only company that had an x86 CPU AND a good GPU. The fact that AMD is not in a posision to negotiate higher prices, was also a nice bonus for both Microsoft and Sony.



Interface options are irrelevant: if if was profitable enough, they have BUILT a completely new interface for the consoles, as Nvidia has for the Summit and Sierra supercomputers (NVLink).


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## Constantine Yevseyev (Jul 17, 2015)

de.das.dude said:


> AMD needs to fire their current PR and Marketing and hire new ones. They suck. Not only do they not work enough, but their adverts and ideas are weird and creepy.


This, this so much. Honestly, a single person with knowledge of DTP tools and some background in illustration can do better then their whole freaking team. Just bloody awful, everything they spawn.

This is definitely one of the reasons they're not doing very well lately. It's not 2005 anymore, people need quality stuff. Nice art, some social media interaction, a couple Microsoft-style ads (no, not with Balmer having a stroke). Just putting a triple-tittied lady on the box of your Fury XXX GPU isn't gonna be enough.


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## GhostRyder (Jul 17, 2015)

Constantine Yevseyev said:


> This, this so much. Honestly, a single person with knowledge of DTP tools and some background in illustration can do better then their whole freaking team. Just bloody awful, everything they spawn.
> 
> This is definitely one of the reasons they're not doing very well lately. It's not 2005 anymore, people need quality stuff. Nice art, some social media interaction, a couple Microsoft-style ads (no, not the with Balmer having a stroke). Just putting a triple-tittied lady on the box of your Fury XXX GPU isn't gonna be enough.


 Hmm, I don't *Recall* that being on one of their boxes   But that may get some interest in some form!

They need to focus on winning over OEM's, get their products in the market and maybe show off that they are in every console.  That would at least help them get their names out a bit more which is part of their problems currently.


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## the54thvoid (Jul 17, 2015)

thevoiceofreason said:


> Yeah, and what I said you said, including you in people who realize that brand perception is a powerful force. In other words, you seem to have launched into a tirade thinking I disagree with you, but I don't. You were "quoted for truth", as they say.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Yes, my mistake, please accept my apologies. Long week at work and completely misread your post.

Whoopsies!


----------



## RCoon (Jul 17, 2015)

de.das.dude said:


> AMD needs to fire their current PR and Marketing and hire new ones. They suck. Not only do they not work enough, but their adverts and ideas are weird and creepy.





Constantine Yevseyev said:


> This, this so much. Honestly, a single person with knowledge of DTP tools and some background in illustration can do better then their whole freaking team. Just bloody awful, everything they spawn.



Hate to say this, but I'm pretty sure they already laid off their entire marketing department a couple of years ago and replaced it with a whole new one.



GhostRyder said:


> They need to focus on winning over OEM's



In order to win over OEM's, you must offer them large subsidies to incorporate your hardware into theirs. AMD can't really afford to do that as much as Intel. Add to that that OEM's prefer to have Intel's hardware inside their laptops and stuff, simply because it's a globally consumer trusted brand. If you're designing a new car and get approached by Hyundai and Audi, both offering their engines with significant subsidies, you're going to go with the one consumers trust the most.


----------



## Easy Rhino (Jul 17, 2015)

Why doesn't the board break the company up? The leadership at AMD is just simply awful.


----------



## GAR (Jul 17, 2015)

No one is to bum but Amd here, they have junk CPUs, at I is the only good thing to come from them right now and even that is not that great


----------



## Sempron Guy (Jul 17, 2015)

Marketing plays a role in this also. I remember back when AMD was kicking Intel with their Athlon line-up and even with that I couldn't find a single Athlon being sold like in a thousand mile radius. Even this past few years, if not for their APUs which clicks to the masses and coin operated PCs w/c is quite common here, you have to dig for AMD CPUs or purchase it online.


----------



## AsRock (Jul 17, 2015)

Easo said:


> Damn... Well, the less they cost, the sooner someone realy might buy them.



That has a estimated ( my guess  ) 95% chance that Intel be over the moon with 0% competition.




john_ said:


> The period after the Lehman Brothers collapse, AMD's valuation was under a billion if I remember correctly. They are still alive.
> 
> They have enough money to survive the next year until Zen arrives and they will also probably see an increase in their income from GPUs in the next one or two quarters. The fact that TSMC is lowering the prices of 28nm by 10% will help them to make a little extra profit. Intel is also slowing down, so the only question mark is Zen's IPC performance and efficiency. If they come out with something at least as good as Intel Haswell(too optimistic, probably Ivy Bridge would have been closer to reality), their share price and valuation will go much higher, because their products will become much more competitive than they are today.



TSMC lowering 10% helps nothing really as the chances are nVidia will lower their price there fore AMD will have to, peanuts anyone ?.

And wtf is with these anti fanboy posts i keep seeing,  AMD goes down this shit hits everyone regardless if a fanboy from either side or not even one at all.


----------



## Rauelius (Jul 17, 2015)

cyneater said:


> AMD needs to make products people want to buy....
> 
> And processors that can perform well and are priced well....
> 
> ...




They already do, the problem is the prices are insane.  Imagine if in 2008/2009 AMD priced the Radeon 4870 at the same $450 price as the GTX260, they'd be out of business already. Instead they launched the 4870 at $300, got a TON of good press, saw brisk sales, and embarrassed nvidia bad enough that nVidia had to send refund checks to people who bought the GTX280/GTX260 AND lowered their prices. This AMD victory was due to using an older die process in combination with a brand new up and coming type of RAM that provided insane memory bandwidth at the time. The 4870 was in reality just a cleaned up 3870 with GDDR5, but the improvements made were HUGE.

The Fury-X would have been the perfect 2015 parallel to the 2008 Radeon 4870, were it a $550 graphics card. Fiji is a cleaned up and improved Hawaii using an older die process, much like the 4870 did. The Fury-X uses a new type of ram, much like the 4870. The Fury-X for the most part matches the performance of nVidia's #2 graphics card, again much like the 4870 matched the GTX260.  

Where AMD screwed up is pricing. Had the Fury-X launched at $550 it would have made both the 980Ti and Vanilla-980 pointless. Figure for $50 more than a 980 you get much more performance, and for $100 less than the 980-Ti you get close enough performance. 

I don't think that a $550 Fury-X and $450 Fury would have helped in the short-term, but positive press would generate greater interest and sales. Like I said, had AMD looked for the same $450 that nVidia was asking for the GTX260, and offering the same performance, I know most would have gotten nVidia. Because it was much less expensive and was either equal or faster than the GTX260 AMD had a great few years because of one wise decision to price the 4870 at $300. I wish AMD still had a shred of common sense left.


----------



## profoundWHALE (Jul 17, 2015)

AMD is seriously suffering in the 'other OS' department right now. If you take two GPUs that are on equal footing, like say the 290 and the 970, and play a game on Linux, the 970 will beat it easily. We only just got OpenCL 2.0 with the Official AMD drivers.


----------



## ShurikN (Jul 17, 2015)

Rauelius said:


> Where AMD screwed up is pricing. Had the Fury-X launched at $550 it would have made both the 980Ti and Vanilla-980 pointless. Figure for $50 more than a 980 you get much more performance, and for $100 less than the 980-Ti you get close enough performance.
> 
> I don't think that a $550 Fury-X and $450 Fury would have helped in the short-term, but positive press would generate greater interest and sales. Like I said, had AMD looked for the same $450 that nVidia was asking for the GTX260, and offering the same performance, I know most would have gotten nVidia. Because it was much less expensive and was either equal or faster than the GTX260 AMD had a great few years because of one wise decision to price the 4870 at $300. I wish AMD still had a shred of common sense left.


$600 for Fury X is reasonable imo, considering that it's faster at 4K than 980Ti in majority of games, plus a couple of driver updates would boost it slightly.
And since the regular Fury is not that far behind, I would guess a $535-550 would suffice for the non X.



profoundWHALE said:


> AMD is seriously suffering in the 'other OS' department right now. If you take two GPUs that are on equal footing, like say the 290 and the 970, and play a game on Linux, the 970 will beat it easily. We only just got OpenCL 2.0 with the Official AMD drivers.


Number of peple who buy high end cards to game on Linux is negligible.


----------



## Basard (Jul 17, 2015)

Constantine Yevseyev said:


> Not really. I mean, it's a 3rd party chip (Etron EJ168). They do have their in-house USB 3.0 controller (goes with every single chipset they have for 2015, present in both ULV and mainstream category devices), but they have yet to start equipping their performance segment products with it.



Oh... i see.... figured it was something like that....


----------



## Iceni (Jul 17, 2015)

I love that everyone is ranting about high end product. It's not high end stuff that makes any of the companies money. It's the low end consumer stuff. 

Amd had been hit hard by the tablet/phone market making a huge dent on low end laptop sales, and driving down laptop costs. They never had a big market share in the corporate business machine market that has always been dominated by Intel. AMD is trying to make ends meet with the APU laptops but with everything else that goes into them, and in an attempt to keep prices as low as possible they suffer in profits. There also struggling against Intel's very strong i series branding. And while the APU's offer more in a lot of cases the cheap red and black logo against the more mature Intel logo is a no brainier to those that buy without knowledge.

What AMD need is a break into the business machine market. And a product that businesses want to use. They already have it with the APU but it needs to be brought into a format that offers more than what Intel are offering. And currently both companies are offering the same deal, Powerful base chip with excellent power saving features. AMD really need re-badging for the business sector with a mature image. The current red and black doesn't have that mature business feeling to it.


----------



## Aquinus (Jul 17, 2015)

Iceni said:


> What AMD need is a break into the business machine market. And a product that businesses want to use. They already have it with the APU but it needs to be brought into a format that offers more than what Intel are offering. And currently both companies are offering the same deal, Powerful base chip with excellent power saving features. AMD really need re-badging for the business sector with a mature image. The current red and black doesn't have that mature business feeling to it.


This couldn't be any more of a true statement. The business market is where a lot of money in the industry is made and Intel has a chokehold over it. That's workstations, laptops, and servers alike.


----------



## SonicZap (Jul 17, 2015)

Rauelius said:


> The Fury-X would have been the perfect 2015 parallel to the 2008 Radeon 4870, were it a $550 graphics card. Fiji is a cleaned up and improved Hawaii using an older die process, much like the 4870 did. The Fury-X uses a new type of ram, much like the 4870. The Fury-X for the most part matches the performance of nVidia's #2 graphics card, again much like the 4870 matched the GTX260.



The problem with comparing Fury (X) and HD 4870 is that the 4870 had a small, energy-efficient GPU that was easy and inexpensive to manufacture. Because of that AMD was able price the 4870 at $300 and still make significant profit on it. However, Fiji is a big chip (much bigger than GM204), and with the complicated manufacturing process that involves HBM and the interposer, AMD would likely get little profit if they sold full Fiji at $550 and the cut-down version at something like $450. Plus, if the price was lower than it is right now, demand would be much higher, and AMD is already completely unable to meet the demand for their Furies (they're all out of stock everywhere). In other words, a lower price right now would just get a bit of good publicity for AMD at the cost of getting less profit. And as evidenced by these Q2 results, AMD needs more revenue badly.

I personally believe that AMD is going to die. It's sad, but I see very little chance of them getting out of this alive, AMD has nothing to challenge Intel with and Nvidia knows that AMD is weak and will continue the bloody price war that they started with the GTX 970, with the final objective of forcing AMD out of the discrete GPU space.

After that, (high-end) PC gaming will get more expensive as Nvidia will continue slowly increasing the price of graphics cards. GTX 780 Ti, 980 and now 980 Ti have all gone for $650, beginning with Volta (or Pascal if AMD dies before it) I'm expecting Nvidia to start slowly increasing the price of their most powerful non-Titan graphics card closer to $1000, just because they can.


----------



## Agentbb007 (Jul 17, 2015)

Caring1 said:


> Hahaha, did you know shareholders are responsible for debt? You have a few spare billion?


WRONG - Simply owning the stock in a corporation does not make the individuals liable for the corporation's debt.


----------



## john_ (Jul 17, 2015)

AsRock said:


> TSMC lowering 10% helps nothing really as the chances are nVidia will lower their price there fore AMD will have to, peanuts anyone ?.


Considering that Nvidia was already thinking of lowering prices at the hi end, this is exactly what AMD needed. I don't expect Nvidia to do a huge price cut after these news. They will do the price cuts they where thinking and stop there. Also the prices affect all the cards not just the hi end and at the low/mid range AMD is more than competitive. Also the price redaction affects console processors.



ZeDestructor said:


> Interface options are irrelevant: if if was profitable enough, they have BUILT a completely new interface for the consoles, as Nvidia has for the Summit and Sierra supercomputers (NVLink).


 Nvidia would have offered to make console chips even with zero margins. The reason is simple. All console games would be using PhysX and GameWorks by now. AMD gpus would have been considered faulty at best today with many bugs all over the place and poor performance. I think Nvidia tried, but both Sony and Microsoft where having cheap x86 consoles in their minds that would start bringing profits from day one.

And what exactly is the link you show me? I don't find it relevant with consoles or x86 and even if it is, this article is from 11/2014. PS4 and Xbox One where introduced at the end of 2013. So the question is what did Nvidia had to offer at 2012? Looking at wiki, Tegra 3 and that's not an x86 SOC. x86 on all platforms (Xbox One, PS4, PC) makes game development cheaper and faster. The latest rumors say than Nintendo NX will also use AMD's chips, which makes sense because the biggest problem for the Nintendo consoles today is the lack of third party games.



ZoneDymo said:


> ermmm how exactly, if AMD is the only one they can turn to as you state, is AMD not in a position of negotiate? that seems to me to be the most perfect position to negotiate.....


 I think Sony and Microsoft know how to negotiate a deal. Also AMD was with its back on the wall. And both those companies knew it. So I am pretty sure they explained to AMD that they had many alternative options for their next gen consoles, and all those options where bad for AMD. So AMD would have to offer them a great deal from the beginning, to guaranteed that Sony and/or Microsoft would not turn to Nvidia and/or Intel for the main parts. I don't think AMD was willing to gamble it's future just so it can secure a better deal.


----------



## n-ster (Jul 17, 2015)

63jax said:


> omg, green and red fanbois must be really ecstatic now! this is all they want, with AMD gone will have world peace, no more abortions, Kim will move to US, etc, keep it up fanbois!



Ummm... You seem to be complaining about fanbo*y*s, yet you are the one coming out with this kind of comment. Even Intel fanboys would hate it if AMD goes out, they aren't idiot enough to forget Intel is a business that could control market price and tech advancement if that happened


----------



## Aquinus (Jul 17, 2015)

n-ster said:


> Intel is a business that could control market price and tech advancement if that happened


Intel already does this with the x86 market. It's better for Intel if AMD doesn't go under and remains in a crippled state than for it to go under. For legal reasons, it's good for Intel for AMD to not go under but be incapable of competing well.


----------



## buildzoid (Jul 17, 2015)

ZeDestructor said:


> Or you could spend the big bucks and get a high-core-count Xeon and see what Intel has really been up to.


Or I could buy 2 12 core Opterons for the price of a single 10 core Xeon overclock the 2 opterons (praise be to AMD's ancient FSB) to 4Ghz and get almost the same single threaded performance as the Xeon and 2x the multithreaded performance. Too bad there aren't any proper overclocking boards for Opterons.


----------



## newtekie1 (Jul 17, 2015)

buildzoid said:


> On a side note. It's odd but I'm slowly moving away from intel products even though the performance gap is getting steadily larger, I've come to realize that I don't play enough new games to care about single threaded performance on the other hand I do stream and edit video on occasion and that's something an FX8370 at 4.8Ghz can do better than an i5 4XXX.



Almost all my low-end office workstations I build are AMD based.  There performance is more than enough and the price is better.


----------



## buildzoid (Jul 17, 2015)

john_ said:


> Nvidia would have offered to make console chips even with zero margins. The reason is simple. All console games would be using PhysX and GameWorks by now. AMD gpus would have been considered faulty at best today with many bugs all over the place and poor performance. I think Nvidia tried, but both Sony and Microsoft where having cheap x86 consoles in their minds that would start bringing profits from day one.



The current gen consoles have PhysX support.


----------



## GhostRyder (Jul 17, 2015)

buildzoid said:


> The current gen consoles have PhysX support.


CPU side PhysX not GPU accelerated PhysX (Unless something has changed) which we can all do.



Aquinus said:


> Intel already does this with the x86 market. It's better for Intel if AMD doesn't go under and remains in a crippled state than for it to go under. For legal reasons, it's good for Intel for AMD to not go under but be incapable of competing well.


Yep, if they went under then there is the chance they would be considered a monopoly even with ARM, IBM and what not.  That would be worse for them.


----------



## mroofie (Jul 17, 2015)

eroldru said:


> With fanboys all over the place and wrong information given by reviewers and review sites, AMD is taking heavy shots.
> 
> I'm always very careful not to make the wrong judgement, but Intel has been playing with the desktop customer for more than 2 generations. Crappy CPU assembly and minimal performance gains are very bad for their name, but people still buy them like candy. Just yesterday I was testing an i7-4770 on stock speeds and priming temps were more than 100C with an air conditioned room, while in the same room an 8350 @ 4.5GHz did not even reach 60C, while gaming performance was identical. and the price is 3 times less.



Air Cooling ???

if its Liquid don't bother typing back



*"With fanboys all over the place and wrong information given by reviewers and review sites, AMD is taking heavy shots." - * Irony


----------



## HumanSmoke (Jul 17, 2015)

ZoneDymo said:


> ermmm how exactly, if AMD is the only one they can turn to as you state, is AMD not in a position of negotiate? that seems to me to be the most perfect position to negotiate.....


The alternative was obviously to stay with IBM's POWER architecture. It is pretty obvious that IBM was keeping its old fab at East Fishkill (where the Cell processor is fabbed) ticking over just in case. As soon as AMD were awarded the contract, IBM began shopping its East Fishkill and Essex Junction plants - which ended up being offloaded to GloFo with a cash incentive after no one evinced interest for almost two years.


ZeDestructor said:


> So they hint. Nothing explicit was said as I recall.


Devinder Kumar, AMD's CFO, actually mentioned last year that AMD were looking at (finally) breaking $20 per console with the APUs die shrink. Assuming AMD's oft-quoted revenue per unit is $100-110. Their actual profit after manufacturing has been in the $15-$18 range.


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## EarthDog (Jul 17, 2015)

Dear AMD,

Invest less in your marketing and more into (enthusiast level) substance for your products.

- Consumers




eroldru said:


> With fanboys all over the place and wrong information given by reviewers and review sites, AMD is taking heavy shots.
> 
> I'm always very careful not to make the wrong judgement, but Intel has been playing with the desktop customer for more than 2 generations. Crappy CPU assembly and minimal performance gains are very bad for their name, but people still buy them like candy. Just yesterday I was testing an i7-4770 on stock speeds and priming temps were more than 100C with an air conditioned room, while in the same room an 8350 @ 4.5GHz did not even reach 60C, while gaming performance was identical. and the price is 3 times less.


Wow... with respect, you really have no idea.

(I'd elaborate this second, but, I'm mobile and it will take more than I want to give to hash it out on my phone.. sorry to be so terse)


----------



## buildzoid (Jul 17, 2015)

EarthDog said:


> Dear AMD,
> 
> Invest less in your marketing and more into (enthusiast level) substance for your products.
> 
> - Consumers



What marketing? Most people don't even know that AMD exists. Even IBM is more famous than AMD and IBM hasn't been in the consumer business for years now. Most consumers would be perfectly ok using an AMD APU. However they don't even know that AMD APUs exist. Unless you play video games you are very very unlikely to ever hear a thing about AMD.


----------



## qubit (Jul 18, 2015)

AMD are a dead man walking and it's all their upper management's fault.


----------



## OneMoar (Jul 18, 2015)




----------



## MrGenius (Jul 18, 2015)

AMD Reportedly Making Nintendo NX Processor



> AMD, without quite saying it, has practically confirmed it is making the processor for the Nintendo NX game console. Lisa Su, AMD's chief executive, has said the company is working on its third custom contract and *reports claim that contract is worth $1 billion in sales.* Pair that statement with previous hints that AMD is making custom chips for the gaming market and it seems AMD's processor will power the NX.



Do da...do da... 

Game over is it? Time to get that stock while it's still affordable is more like it.


----------



## HumanSmoke (Jul 18, 2015)

MrGenius said:


> AMD Reportedly Making Nintendo NX Processor
> Do da...do da...
> Game over is it? Time to get that stock while it's still affordable is more like it.


$1bn in sales doesn't mean a great deal in relation to the net profit per unit, and the length of time the sales are spread over. AMD already has the PS4 and Xbone contracts - and while they provide a revenue stream, they are hardly causing the company to be awash with cash.


----------



## Arjai (Jul 18, 2015)

I am gonna look into buying some AMD stock. Long term, I think they can't possibly sink much lower, without going away. Which at current pricing means a small loss if they do die off.

If they weather the storm, I think a pretty penny can be had in say, 5-10 years time?

I will discuss this with my Broker, Tuesday. He's the smart one with the money. I come up with ideas and he figures out how to make me money. I didn't do what he said, once. Lost my hat.

Since then, he's made me some money back. I will let you all know, perhaps,  what he says.


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## Assimilator (Jul 18, 2015)

MrGenius said:


> AMD Reportedly Making Nintendo NX Processor
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Sigh. There are only 2 reasons why AMD is manufacturing console hardware:

1. it gives them a steady income source so their bottom line doesn't look as horrible as it actually is
2. it gives AMD's directors something to distract shareholders with when the hard questions about profitability start coming in

Neither of these imply that the console deal is anything but barely profitable. That is why nVIDIA told the console companies to take a hike - because nVDIA knew it could make more money selling discrete graphics cards. And they have.

AMD on the other hand, were essentially forced to take the console deal to stay in business - in exactly the same way they had to sell their fabs to stay in business. Neither of those decisions were best for the business long-term, but they were required if there was to be a business at all.


----------



## Shambles1980 (Jul 18, 2015)

cyneater said:


> AMD needs to make products people want to buy....
> 
> And processors that can perform well and are priced well....
> 
> ...




lets be fair here.. 
A pentium 3 was a pentium 4 killer..


----------



## FordGT90Concept (Jul 18, 2015)

In the form of Core, yeah.  While Intel USA was focused on Pentium 4, Intel Israel was working on Pentium M which was based on Pentium 3.  Core was a direct descendent of Pentium M then they brought it back to desktops as Core 2.

The first generation Core i7 was a hybrid of both (had longer pipes than Core but not as long as Pentium 4).


----------



## john_ (Jul 18, 2015)

Assimilator said:


> Sigh. There are only 2 reasons why AMD is manufacturing console hardware:
> 
> 1. it gives them a steady income source so their bottom line doesn't look as horrible as it actually is
> 2. it gives AMD's directors something to distract shareholders with when the hard questions about profitability start coming in
> ...


3. Most important. It keeps Nvidia out of the consoles, and considering that many top games are ports from consoles, it keeps AMD's gpus alive.
That's also the reason why Nvidia would kill to be able to supply an x86 APU like chip, even with zero margins. But they can't.

We can all see the effects of PhysX and GameWorks on AMD GPUs. We can even see the effects of GameWorks on older Nvidia GPUs. If Nvidia was controlling GPUs in consoles, then it's proprietary techs would have been already a de facto standard. Every game programmed on consoles would have PhysX and GameWorks in it's core. It would have been close to impossible for AMD to create drivers that would be performing without problems and bad performance even on the simplest console game ports. Every game would have been a Project Cars AT BEST.

PS Freesync support in the next Nintendo console? I believe so.


----------



## Aquinus (Jul 18, 2015)

I would personally like to see a less restrictive X86 license. That could mean very bad things for AMD but, if another company can put Intel in its place, I would like to see it happen.


----------



## john_ (Jul 18, 2015)

Intel gave x86 license at Chinese Spreadtrum to make cheap x86 SOCs, so it can compete with cheap ARM SOCs. Other than that I don't think they will be willing to give an x86 license to anyone with deep pockets like Samsung, or huge ambitions like Nvidia.


----------



## Aquinus (Jul 18, 2015)

john_ said:


> Intel gave x86 license at Chinese Spreadtrum to make cheap x86 SOCs, so it can compete with cheap ARM SOCs. Other than that I don't think they will be willing to give an x86 license to anyone with deep pockets like Samsung, or huge ambitions like Nvidia.


Of course not. It would only hurt Intel. My point is that such a move would be good for the market if it were forced through legal action for whatever reason may come to light. They're stifling competition and that isn't good for the free market.


----------



## Agentbb007 (Jul 18, 2015)

Arjai said:


> Long term, I think they can't possibly sink much lower, without going away. Which at current pricing means a small loss if they do die off.


Definitely speak to a broker before buying this stock, analysts ratings have it at .4 out of 10... Amd could easily drop under $1 once rates rise and you would be out 50% of what you invested.  Doesn't matter if the stock is cheap, losing 50% of a cheap stock is the same as losing 50% of an expensive stock, the money is gone.
If you want to gamble go to Vegas, if you want long term stability buy index funds.


----------



## Aquinus (Jul 18, 2015)

Agentbb007 said:


> Definitely speak to a broker before buying this stock, analysts ratings have it at .4 out of 10... Amd could easily drop under $1 once rates rise and you would be out 50% of what you invested.  Doesn't matter if the stock is cheap, losing 50% of a cheap stock is the same as losing 50% of an expensive stock, the money is gone.
> If you want to gamble go to Vegas, if you want long term stability buy index funds.


The point is that AMD's stock hasn't been lower. Last time this happen it dipped to 2.00 and 9 months-1year later was up as high as 4.50. I suspect value won't go much lower and there is a high probability that you can make more than 25-50% off AMD when it rebounds like it has in the past. Stocks are always a gamble but there is some level of predictability to certain conditions. I wouldn't be surprised if it gets back up to 4 dollars a share again in a year's time.


----------



## TheGuruStud (Jul 18, 2015)

Aquinus said:


> The point is that AMD's stock hasn't been lower. Last time this happen it dipped to 2.00 and 9 months-1year later was up as high as 4.50. I suspect value won't go much lower and there is a high probability that you can make more than 25-50% off AMD when it rebounds like it has in the past. Stocks are always a gamble but there is some level of predictability to certain conditions. I wouldn't be surprised if it gets back up to 4 dollars a share again in a year's time.



Wasn't it up to 10 bucks at one point? That's a gamble worth taking.


----------



## buildzoid (Jul 18, 2015)

If the stock drops you can just wait for it to go back up.


----------



## Aquinus (Jul 18, 2015)

TheGuruStud said:


> Wasn't it up to 10 bucks at one point? That's a gamble worth taking.


Not in the last few years. It got a lot higher back when their CPUs could actually compete.


buildzoid said:


> If the stock drops you can just wait for it to go back up.


I suspect Intel would go out of their way to keep AMD afloat just because it's bringing in so much money for them, so investing might not actually be a bad idea. There are very good chances it will go back up if recent (few years,) stock history is any indication.


----------



## 64K (Jul 18, 2015)

If AMD shares fall below $1 for a period of time then they will be delisted from NASDAQ. They can delay it by making promises that they probably can't keep though. On the other hand if you buy some stock now and a Corp like Samsung comes along and scoops them up and pumps some cash into them and properly manages them then your shares will no doubt skyrocket. It's a gamble. I stick with Mutual Funds because I'm risk averse.


----------



## HumanSmoke (Jul 18, 2015)

john_ said:


> Intel gave x86 license at Chinese Spreadtrum to make cheap x86 SOCs, so it can compete with cheap ARM SOCs. Other than that I don't think they will be willing to give an x86 license to anyone with deep pockets like Samsung, or huge ambitions like Nvidia.


That x86 licence was predicated on Intel acquiring a 20% stake in Tsinghua Unigroup - Spreadtrum's parent company. I'm pretty sure that if Samsung or Nvidia were willing to relinquish a major stake in their company to Intel, they might also get some degree of x86 IP licencing.


----------



## HisDivineOrder (Jul 19, 2015)

john_ said:


> 3. Most important. It keeps Nvidia out of the consoles, and considering that many top games are ports from consoles, it keeps AMD's gpus alive.
> That's also the reason why Nvidia would kill to be able to supply an x86 APU like chip, even with zero margins. But they can't.
> 
> We can all see the effects of PhysX and GameWorks on AMD GPUs. We can even see the effects of GameWorks on older Nvidia GPUs. If Nvidia was controlling GPUs in consoles, then it's proprietary techs would have been already a de facto standard. Every game programmed on consoles would have PhysX and GameWorks in it's core. It would have been close to impossible for AMD to create drivers that would be performing without problems and bad performance even on the simplest console game ports. Every game would have been a Project Cars AT BEST.
> ...



Your argument amounts to, "If you control the GPU in the consoles, you control the GPU tech of PC gaming."  An argument that is historically untrue.  If what you said were true of nVidia, then when AMD invented Mantle, it would have become the defacto API for all games coming off the fact every current console includes an AMD GPU.  Instead, that didn't happen.  Money won out.

Money always wins out.  Unfortunately, the real problem AMD has it doesn't have the money to outspend nVidia in terms of marketing partnerships.  They blew most of their money on an ill-fated Mantle push that should have instead been focused on improving their DirectX 11 drivers in obvious (multithreaded drivers) and not-so-obvious (ShaderCache) ways.  Mantle did not make DX12 happen.  Windows 10 made DX12 happen.  Mantle did help the OpenGL committee speed things along for Vulkan because it is the base of it, but OpenGL would have built something if AMD hadn't.  Not sure how AMD wasting money on Mantle to help make Vulkan really helps the AMD customer, though, in the short term with their DX11 deficiency.

And that's the sad part.  The early benchmarks of DX11, DX12, etc, have proven the incredible gains that happen when multithreaded drivers happen.  Something AMD users could have had for years now had AMD actually bothered to work on it.

But anyway.  I just don't think it'd work the way you think.  AMD wouldn't be locked out of the game as long as they have money to buy companies to make games with their technology.  And they'd probably have more money to do so if they weren't losing money on selling GPU's at far less cost than they wish and making an API that next to no company ever intended to use without being paid.

Money talks.  API's or special SDK's don't sell themselves and when they show up in a game, it's because someone paid someone something.  It may be marketing.  It may be money.  It may be swag.  Someone gave someone something and if you look at the industry, AMD ain't giving enough people enough stuff.

It's sad because like two years ago they were on top of this and it looked very likely they'd maintain it.  But nVidia noticed and corrected the imbalance in a huge way.  There's your great conspiracy.  It has less to do with who owns consoles.  Hell, way back when the 360 reigned as the place to port from, that didn't hurt or help nVidia users (360 had an ATI GPU).  Ports were still often focused on nVidia.  Why?

Because nVidia paid the publishers more money.  That's why.


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## john_ (Jul 19, 2015)

HisDivineOrder said:


> Your argument amounts to, "If you control the GPU in the consoles, you control the GPU tech of PC gaming."  An argument that is historically untrue.  If what you said were true of nVidia, then when AMD invented Mantle, it would have become the defacto API for all games coming off the fact every current console includes an AMD GPU.  Instead, that didn't happen.  Money won out.



Consoles where not x86 PCs before this generation. Also Nvidia didn't had almost 80% of the discrete graphics cards market on PCs. Not to mention that it was not aggressively pushing proprietary techs like GameWorks, PhysX, GSync etc. as they do today. Games for PCs also where not ports from consoles. All these combined with the deeper pockets of Nvidia and the stronger relations they have with the game developers would give them the absolute advantage over AMD. And Mantle couldn't become the de facto standard for many reasons. No money, no market share, competition had much bigger influence on game developers, I also think consoles don't use Mantle anyway.



> Money always wins out.  Unfortunately, the real problem AMD has it doesn't have the money to outspend nVidia in terms of marketing partnerships.  They blew most of their money on an ill-fated Mantle push that should have instead been focused on improving their DirectX 11 drivers in obvious (multithreaded drivers) and not-so-obvious (ShaderCache) ways.  Mantle did not make DX12 happen.  Windows 10 made DX12 happen.  Mantle did help the OpenGL committee speed things along for Vulkan because it is the base of it, but OpenGL would have built something if AMD hadn't.  Not sure how AMD wasting money on Mantle to help make Vulkan really helps the AMD customer, though, in the short term with their DX11 deficiency.



You have to realize something first. Mantle was not meant to give a big advantage to AMD's GPUs. It was made to make that awful Bulldozer architecture look better at games. It was meant to close the gap between Intel cpus and FX cpus. To give an extra push to APU's performance. That's why AMD gave Mantle to Khronos, that's why they stopped developing it when Microsoft announced DX12. The day Microsoft announced DX12, AMD's plan succeeded. Windows 10 could have come without DX12 like Windows 8. You don't know that Microsoft was going to come out with DX12. I don't know that. The only company that needed DX12 yesterday, was AMD, with it's mediocre DX11 drivers and that useless Bulldozer architecture(Thuban at 32nm you morons. Thuban at 32nm). Intel, Nvidia, even Microsoft was happy with the situation. No one from those three cared if DX12 would come out or not. On the other hand AMD was desperate for a low level API. Mantle was the best wasted money AMD had spend.



> And that's the sad part.  The early benchmarks of DX11, DX12, etc, have proven the incredible gains that happen when multithreaded drivers happen.  Something AMD users could have had for years now had AMD actually bothered to work on it.




Those benchmarks did show AMD's problem with the DX11 drivers. But I guess the core of their drivers couldn't change. They should have fixed that problem the day they decided to follow the "more cores" route on the cpu front.



> But anyway.  I just don't think it'd work the way you think.  AMD wouldn't be locked out of the game as long as they have money to buy companies to make games with their technology.  And they'd probably have more money to do so if they weren't losing money on selling GPU's at far less cost than they wish and making an API that next to no company ever intended to use without being paid.
> 
> Money talks.  API's or special SDK's don't sell themselves and when they show up in a game, it's because someone paid someone something.  It may be marketing.  It may be money.  It may be swag.  Someone gave someone something and if you look at the industry, AMD ain't giving enough people enough stuff.
> 
> ...


I am not going to repeat my self here. We just see a few things complete differently


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## 64K (Jul 19, 2015)

Hypothetical situation:

Right now AMD stock is trading for $1.79 If Samsung were to offer between $3 and $5 a share and buy 51% of AMD shares for a controlling interest and either force Lisa Su, or replace her with a Samsung employee as CEO, to give the boot to the street whatever inept managers need to go and then pump a few billion dollars into R&D and marketing over the next couple of years making their APU an incredible buy and making their GPUs beat Nvidia from entry level through high end for the same price and advertising these facts properly to customers and pressuring PC manufacturers to use their chips. That would be an initial investment of between 1.2 and 1.9 billion dollars for the stock (pocket change for Samsung). AMD would still be AMD so the x86 license would not be in jeopardy. Samsung dwarfs Nvidia. There is no way Nvidia could compete. Return AMD to profitability and the stock price would soar well past whatever Samsung paid to gain controlling interest and possibly even partially covering the money spent investing in R&D and marketing. Lay the groundwork right now to compete with Intel's i3 i5 and i7 and though it would take a few years of R&D to achieve that it would make AMD a very profitable company, possibly even regaining  their former glory days and maybe that stock could go back up to $40 a share one day. At this point Samsung could sit back and collect the dividends on it's stock or sell the stock for a huge profit.


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## cyneater (Jul 19, 2015)

64K said:


> Hypothetical situation:
> 
> At this point Samsung could sit back and collect the dividends on it's stock or sell the stock for a huge profit.



Then Samsung could buy Imagination Technologies and SGI and remake high end graphics workstations and severs....

Anything could happen but there have been so many huge tech companies die lets hope AMD isn't another one...


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## Aquinus (Jul 19, 2015)

cyneater said:


> Anything could happen but there have been so many huge tech companies die lets hope AMD isn't another one...


I think we can safely say that AMD won't die off. Intel wouldn't allow it because that would mean potentially huge anti-trust litigation against Intel.


cyneater said:


> Then Samsung could buy Imagination Technologies and SGI and remake high end graphics workstations and severs....


Honestly, I would rather see AMD focus on something. They don't have the money (never did,) to compete with Intel and nVidia at the same time. I personally would like to see a company like Samsung produce GPUs and be able to dump money into GPU R&D while AMD could focus on integrating those GPU cores (as they are now,) into APUs and focus on the CPU R&D. AMD was doing a half decent job until they bought ATI and tried to bite off more than they could chew. We all (hopefully by now,) know that AMD's X86 license isn't transferable in an acquisition and how it plays in the case of a merger is another story as well. I'm not so sure about shader technology though, as AMD bought ATI and all of the IP seemed to go with it.

So I would like to see more focus out of AMD. In all seriousness, I think AMD needs help; a partner that could offer assistance in one market so they can focus on the other and since X86 isn't transferable and shader tech seemingly is. Imagine a world where Samsung has access to shader tech. I think that would make both nVidia and Intel shudder because of the amount of R&D that could get dumped into it.

This is a case where Samsung can't get into x86, but they could partner with AMD to produce and develop the GPU side of APUs which would give huge benefits to both sides I would imagine. I also hear that Samsung's fabs aren't too shabby.


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## Shambles1980 (Jul 19, 2015)

amd should probably licence out the gpu part of the company to some one.
Really they should licence out the CPU part but they cant really do that due to x86 

but if they found some one that had the money to pay for licencing for the ati stuff. they could recoup what they pay intel for x86 and concentrate on APU/cpus maybe even just for the mobile/console market untill they stabilize


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## geon2k2 (Jul 19, 2015)

Shouldn't this x86 license/patent expire at some point. Does anyone know how it works?
We have x86 since 35 years ago. 
True its not the same as today, but at least older versions should be public property by now isn't it?


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## buildzoid (Jul 19, 2015)

geon2k2 said:


> Shouldn't this x86 license/patent expire at some point. Does anyone know how it works?
> We have x86 since 35 years ago.
> True its not the same as today, but at least older versions should be public property by now isn't it?


X86 is expired the extensions for it that are necessary to build a modern CPU aren't.


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## micropage7 (Jul 19, 2015)

btarunr said:


> However, reasonably positive earnings put out by Intel disproves AMD's excuse that the market is to blame for bad performance, and the company could slide even further, hitting its all-time-low at the financial markets. The company will host an earnings call later today


^^ this, i dunno, AMD looks like make excuse for their self for that condition
like AMD is drunk, over confidence with their products
they like has no 2nd tier products that could help them to get more market and more money
look at their processor, i dont say their processor is bad but they should realize that they should put something better than adding more cores and more cores
later they pack the processor with better graphic processing, its good but their processor cant fight their competitor

simply, they cant fight in intel arena, if they wanna get something better make their own arena
like mediatek, blackberry


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## R-T-B (Jul 19, 2015)

buildzoid said:


> X86 is expired the extensions for it that are necessary to build a modern CPU aren't.



Which is part of the reason both AMD and Intel are so fond of extending the instruction set regularly.  There is absolutely no efficiency reason to do so, it just adds complexity to the chip from a performance per watt perspective.


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## ensabrenoir (Jul 19, 2015)

I like the idea of a samsung merger/buyout.......but samsung probably sees


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## Ferrum Master (Jul 19, 2015)

Holy Crap... 100 comments about nothing 

WHO CARES... As long they are afloat with their design team, they will sell their own product, just as ARM does.


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## Casecutter (Jul 19, 2015)

buildzoid said:


> If the stock drops you can just wait for it to go back up.


Exactly, where would you be had you bought Apple stock just before the BOD brought back Steve Jobs in 1997?  Those where grim days and remember it took like 7 years to see stock begin to march up.  You just buy some, and kiss good-bye that money, only to revisit it after 10-15 years (or those who live on) to judge.  At such point you're presently surprised, or like those that gamble several hundred, kiss it good-bye the moment it left your hand.  Folk that loose 500-1k on Blackjack don't normally go on about 10-15 year later a say that was stupid... is it any different?  Well other than the instant gratification if you win (some peg it at ~18%) and that's if you walk away right then.  What are the odds that AMD can move beyond this, and double your money, IDK.


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## HumanSmoke (Jul 19, 2015)

Aquinus said:


> I think we can safely say that AMD won't die off. Intel wouldn't allow it because that would mean potentially huge anti-trust litigation against Intel.


Unlikely. Anti-trust litigation applies to wrong doing. Intel can't be held directly responsible for the failure of a company based on their own mismanagement - if it were, AMD's board of directors would have carte blanche to throw money away like used Kleenex........oh, nvm.
In the event of AMD going under (extremely unlikely since the company could exist - in an extreme situation- as a design house drawing revenue solely from IP), all that would happen is that Intel would be forced to operate under a Consent Decree to ensure that the company did not take advantage of their position. Consent Decree is basically the only thing that kept IBM in check for decades when it could quite easily have squeezed the "seven dwarfs" out of the mainframe market.


Aquinus said:


> Honestly, I would rather see AMD focus on something. They don't have the money (never did,) to compete with Intel and nVidia at the same time.


It would have been better if AMD themselves had come to this same decision voluntarily, rather than having it forced upon them in a series of painful amputations - although I'm not sure AMD's BoD have the stones to set a long term goal based upon core competency. AMD have a tendency to follow trends, not set them.


Aquinus said:


> I know that AMD's X86 license isn't transferable in an acquisition and how it plays in the case of a merger is another story as well. I'm not so sure about shader technology though, as AMD bought ATI and all of the IP seemed to go with it.


A merger is still ownership change (as an entity) as far as the agreement is concerned. Section 5.2 of the agreement has the relevant clauses. You're right about the IP complications - and it isn't just ATI. A large part of ATI's IP originated from 3DLabs - who in turn had acquired Dynamic Pictures, Chromatic Research, and Intergraph's graphic division. All these companies has IP sharing in place with other companies that ended up being subsumed other players ( Nvidia's acquisition of SGI's graphics IP for example) - in addition Nvidia and ATI had a very non-adversarial relationship once they'd seen off the other graphics players (S3, 3Dfx, Matrox, Rendition etc.)


Aquinus said:


> This is a case where Samsung can't get into x86, but they could partner with AMD to produce and develop the GPU side of APUs which would give huge benefits to both sides I would imagine


Graphics and parallelization is where its at (or will be). As far as x86 is concerned, I doubt anyone would actually want it - imagine how far behind a potential "new" player would be. Intel is too entrenched in the high margin x86 enterprise markets, and the low end is a dogfight for the lowest pricing/power envelope for a limited feature set between x86 and ARM on razor thin margins.


Aquinus said:


> So I would like to see more focus out of AMD. In all seriousness, I think AMD needs help; a partner that could offer assistance in one market....


Basically you're saying is that AMD need management vision and a defined strategic plan that can be augmented by new technologies/markets, and not waver from it at the first sign of something shiny distracting them? Taking the decision making out of AMD's BoDs hands? I fully agree if that is the case, although just bringing in someone with a proven track record of success and understanding of strategic planning might suffice (Lisa Su's previous work experience doesn't indicate that she is the ONE). Renée James will be looking for a CEO position next year, and would be a great catch for AMD - whether AMD could tempt her is another matter entirely.


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## ZeDestructor (Jul 20, 2015)

R-T-B said:


> Which is part of the reason both AMD and Intel are so fond of extending the instruction set regularly.  There is absolutely no efficiency reason to do so, it just adds complexity to the chip from a performance per watt perspective.



Haha. No. There are absolutely both efficiency and performance reasons. Have you seen any of the AVX performance boosts compared to non-AVX code doing literally the same thing? Around 100% improvement as I recall with around 305 higher power usage, and you can be damn sure there's a few patents on that.

If you want to go older, MMX and SSE are basically the backbone of modern multimedia (high-quality music and graphics) being a thing at all on PCs by and large (you could probably do it all using plain old i486 binary-compatible code with how highly-clocked CPUs are now, vut the speed boosts from using MMX and SSE are real), or if you go even older, the math comprocessor/FPU "extension" is why 3D games are a thing at all, being absolutely needed for the id1 engine powering Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM.

If you want more recent widely-used stuff, just compare an AES-NI-enabled AES encryption program vs x86 AES - even with the full complement of MMX, SSE and AVX extensions, x86 is nowhere near AES-NI.

If you want more essential, look at the various virtualization extensions across the whole CPU industry (VT-x/AMD-V, VT-d/IOMMU, similar stuff on ARM and POWER) that made "the cloud" a thing at all by making fast x86 virtualization possible at all.

So please, do tell me again how instruction set extensions don't add to efficiency, or improve performance per watt, or improve all out performance.

I still maintain, AMD's biggest issue is that they have utterly and completely lost the big x86 server market (Bulldozer and Thuban being unscalable being why such is the case, and has remained unchanged since 2012!) and have essentially zero GPGPU compute presence compared to the sheer amount of of Tesla deployments in the wild. Combine CUDA being decently well-known and loved by the scientific community, as well as Xeon Phi's x86 nature, and going AMD using only OpenCL can be a hard pill to swallow to many. Plus AMD GPUs run hot and use a lot power. Fine for a desktop, deal-breaker when you're trying to fit a few hundred in a single room and have to pay the ills. Oh, and the Fury X is hopeless as a compute card: the radiator is impossible to fit in most servers.

If, and I really mean IF AMD can become competitive again in the server market, they will see a return to profitability. If they are unable to do so, their future is looking pretty bleak.


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## Fx (Jul 20, 2015)

john_ said:


> That's what Nvidia wanted everyone to believe. They lost the consoles because they couldn't make an x86 APU. They didn't had x86 cores. On the other hand Intel didn't had a good GPU. So Microsoft and Sony gone with the only company that had an x86 CPU AND a good GPU. The fact that AMD is not in a posision to negotiate higher prices, was also a nice bonus for both Microsoft and Sony.



I have always tended to believe that was a BS statement by Nvidia as well for the same reasons. Those were legit wins for AMD.


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## ZeDestructor (Jul 20, 2015)

john_ said:


> That's what Nvidia wanted everyone to believe. They lost the consoles because they couldn't make an x86 APU. They didn't had x86 cores. On the other hand Intel didn't had a good GPU. So Microsoft and Sony gone with the only company that had an x86 CPU AND a good GPU. The fact that AMD is not in a posision to negotiate higher prices, was also a nice bonus for both Microsoft and Sony.





Fx said:


> I have always tended to believe that was a BS statement by Nvidia as well for the same reasons. Those were legit wins for AMD.



I disagree. Why would Nvidia bother with $20 per console when they can sell Tegra for automotive purposes for way more, and then add on massive service contracts for their machine-learning stuff? There's a reason they exited mobile even though they have very interesting chips and could force the industry, and much like IBM with PCs, and recently x86 servers, it amounts to profit margins.

The x86 CPU is a red herring argument: if they wanted to, all the console makers could have easily moved to ARM or (more likely) used POWER again (especially when you factor that Nvidia is one of the founding members of OpenPOWER together with IBM, Mellanox (high-bandwidth, low-latency networking provider), Google and Tyan (mobo manufacturer)). And if the hint isn't obvious enough: Nvidia could have made both an ARM or POWER-based APU for the console people, they declined to do so citing too small margins. As for the software side.. software will compile for both.. more owrk is spent of porting engines to each console's API/ABI than fiddling with the compilers, cause compilers are genuinely good enough, besides, outside of MS, pretty much everyone uses GCC or LLVM-Clang, so support is just as good all around.


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## john_ (Jul 20, 2015)

ZeDestructor said:


> Why would Nvidia bother with $20 per console


I already posted why, posts #80 and #92.


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## Fx (Jul 20, 2015)

Fx said:


> I have always tended to believe that was a BS statement by Nvidia as well for the same reasons. Those were legit wins for AMD.





ZeDestructor said:


> If, and I really mean IF AMD can become competitive again in the server market, they will see a return to profitability. If they are unable to do so, their future is looking pretty bleak.



Agreed. The server business is the real profit in both healthy margins and numbers.


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## ZeDestructor (Jul 20, 2015)

john_ said:


> I already posted why, posts #80 and #92.



Thanks for partially quoting me and removing all the context I guess? My point was that Nvidia can make much more with Tegra in automotive than they can with consoles, nit that they consider $20 too little (else they wouldn't have bothered with things like the GT 720)

Now, onwards to your posts:



john_ said:


> 3. Most important. It keeps Nvidia out of the consoles, and considering that many top games are ports from consoles, it keeps AMD's gpus alive.
> That's also the reason why Nvidia would kill to be able to supply an x86 APU like chip, even with zero margins. But they can't.
> 
> We can all see the effects of PhysX and GameWorks on AMD GPUs. We can even see the effects of GameWorks on older Nvidia GPUs. If Nvidia was controlling GPUs in consoles, then it's proprietary techs would have been already a de facto standard. Every game programmed on consoles would have PhysX and GameWorks in it's core. It would have been close to impossible for AMD to create drivers that would be performing without problems and bad performance even on the simplest console game ports. Every game would have been a Project Cars AT BEST.



Keeping nvidia out of consoles is an incredibly minor win for AMD compared to nvidia completely and utterly dominating AMD in the HPC and server space: $20 per chip shipped vs $1000s per Tesla card, more in support contracts and even more in fully built solutions by Nvidia like GRID.

PhysX works partially even on AMD systems, and is the bigger risk of the two for vendor lock-in than anything else.

Gameworks on the other hand is a much more traditional closed-source code licensing affair, with no restrictions on running it with non-Nvidia hardware. It runs slow on everything because it's heavy (you know, a bit like Crysis back in 2006... except now it has a pretty marketing name instead of being nothing more than a meme). Why does it run particularly slowly on AMD GPUs? Well, quite simply because AMD GPUs are designed quite differently from Nvidia. If most games had gameworks, AMD would simply respond by desoigning a new GPU that looks a lot more like the Fermi/Kepler/Maxwell evoutionary family than GCN. No more, no less.

Much the same happenned with the GeForce 8000 and Radeon HD 2000 when Direct3D 10 changed the rendering pipeline completely: the industry as a whole moved from pixel pipelines to much more general-purpose shader processors instead.

Much the same also happens in the CPU side of things, with how Intel and AMD have vastly different CPU designs that perform vastly differently based on different workloads, the current one being Bulldozer vs Haswell/Broadwell, before that NetBurst vs K8, and even further before that, K6 vs Pentium 2/P6.

Nothing to see here in Gameworks/Physx, so move along and stop bringing it up unless you're ripping apart AMD's driver teams' excuses, in which case, do bring it up as much as possible.

Now, if you say that Gameworks is bad from a more conflict of interest point of view, then remember, TressFX is also around, as well as various other AMD-centric stuff under AMD Gaming. Besides, Gameworks has always existed, albeit less well-marketed under the "The way it's meant to be played" program from way back, but you don't see people whining about it after the first 3-4months of being suspicious, and even then, much less loudly than now.



john_ said:


> Consoles where not x86 PCs before this generation. Also Nvidia didn't had almost 80% of the discrete graphics cards market on PCs. Not to mention that it was not aggressively pushing proprietary techs like GameWorks, PhysX, GSync etc. as they do today. Games for PCs also where not ports from consoles. All these combined with the deeper pockets of Nvidia and the stronger relations they have with the game developers would give them the absolute advantage over AMD. And Mantle couldn't become the de facto standard for many reasons. No money, no market share, competition had much bigger influence on game developers, I also think consoles don't use Mantle anyway.
> 
> You have to realize something first. Mantle was not meant to give a big advantage to AMD's GPUs. It was made to make that awful Bulldozer architecture look better at games. It was meant to close the gap between Intel cpus and FX cpus. To give an extra push to APU's performance. That's why AMD gave Mantle to Khronos, that's why they stopped developing it when Microsoft announced DX12. The day Microsoft announced DX12, AMD's plan succeeded. Windows 10 could have come without DX12 like Windows 8. You don't know that Microsoft was going to come out with DX12. I don't know that. The only company that needed DX12 yesterday, was AMD, with it's mediocre DX11 drivers and that useless Bulldozer architecture(Thuban at 32nm you morons. Thuban at 32nm). Intel, Nvidia, even Microsoft was happy with the situation. No one from those three cared if DX12 would come out or not. On the other hand AMD was desperate for a low level API. Mantle was the best wasted money AMD had spend.
> 
> ...



As I said before, the CPU architecture is an irrelevant argument. Console makers would have been just as happy with ARM or POWER or even MIPS. Obviously nobody besides AMD found it profitable enough to bother custom engineering the silicon for the console makers.

Mantle was a push mostly from DICE (Johan Andersson, specifically, probably also why he/DICE got the first Fury X, ahead of reviewers ), not from AMD, though AMD was the more responsive company by far, likely because it would make CPUs less of an argument in games. And sure, while Microsoft was happy with D3D11 as it was with no real plans for major re-architecting in the works, Nvidia, AMD and game devs would keep pushing new features, and MS and Khronos (OpenGL/Vulkan) would oblige by extending the APIs as neeeded, as they largely have since D3D10/OGL4. Before Johan pushed and AMD noticed, AMD was happy to coast along and extend D3D10-11/OGL4.x just like Nvidia.

Oh, and no, given where it came from, it's blindingly obvious that Mantle was all about getting better 3D performance. Propping up Bulldozer and Jaguar were just excellent side benefits as far as Johan (DICE) was concerned, but excellent marketing material for AMD if they could make it stick. And try they did, getting a decent amount of support from all corners and whether intentional or not, spent a fair bit of time keeping it closed-source despite their open-source claims.

AMD then  gave Mantle to Khronos because not only was Mantle's job as a proof of concept was done, and they had finally sanitized the code and manuals enough it could be both handed over and made open-source. Besides, D3D12 was on, Khronos had started NGOGL to look into lower-level API for OpenGl users - suddenly Mantle was not something AMD could use as a competitive advantage anymore, so they handed it over.

However, it is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things: AMD failed to scale Bulldozer and GCN, partly because basically everyone besides Intel failed to deliver 22/20nm, but mostly because they made foolish bets: On the CPU-side, they tried to build a better, lower-clocked, wider, higher-cored NetBurst and smacked right into the same problems Intel failed to solve over 4 (FOUR!) whole manufacturing nodes, and on the GPU side.. GCN is basically AMD's Fermi, their first truly compute-oriented card, and runs similarly hot, rather amusingly.

Still irrelevant in the scheme of consoles by and large though: all three consoles run modifed version of various existing APIs, all with very low-level access to things, effectively they already had Mantle, and whatever Nvidia would have cooked up if they had accepted.


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## john_ (Jul 20, 2015)

ZeDestructor said:


> Thanks for partially quoting me and removing all the context I guess?


Are you serious? Everyone can read your post. It's directly over mine! The same is true with this one. Your post is DIRECTLY OVER THIS POST. I just wanted to inform you that I already posted about this. There where two more posts by me that YOU WHERE TOO LAZY TO READ BECAUSE THEY WHERE IN THE 4TH PAGE.

You also never explained why that link you posted in the second page was even relevant to the consoles. I quoted on page three about that, you never answered. Probably you could add post #61 to my other two posts, but never mind.

Next time try to be polite and not incorrectly accuse others. I read that post of yours, I have NO intention in reading your last post after the way you started it. Have a nice day.


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## xenocide (Jul 21, 2015)

Nvidia said after the PS3 they were done with consoles because the razor-thin margins were not worth the overhead in R&D and arguing with Microsoft\Sony over costs.  Nintendo has used AMD\ATi for years so it's not surprising they stuck with them.  I have no doubt MS\Sony would have done an Intel\Nvidia setup if the cost wouldn't have been astronomical and both companies were willing.  Microsoft had already done such a setup in the original Xbox and the costs nearly destroyed their entry into the market (Nvidia was basically ripping them off).

AMD happened to have APU's that fit the bill, but I think a Intel\Nvidia setup could have easily worked.  Using a cut down 4-core Intel CPU and something like a cut-down 960 would have resulted in quite the efficient and powerful console.  On paper the consoles seem great with 8-cores but those cores are horrible so it would probably be better to go with less cores that are a lot more powerful.

AMD getting the contracts for the consoles was not necessarily about making a lot of money, they knew they wouldn't.  It was about fattening up their revenue stream to increase their perceived value for a potential buyer.


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

ZeDestructor said:


> Haha. No. There are absolutely both efficiency and performance reasons. Have you seen any of the AVX performance boosts compared to non-AVX code doing literally the same thing? Around 100% improvement as I recall with around 305 higher power usage, and you can be damn sure there's a few patents on that.
> 
> If you want to go older, MMX and SSE are basically the backbone of modern multimedia (high-quality music and graphics) being a thing at all on PCs by and large (you could probably do it all using plain old i486 binary-compatible code with how highly-clocked CPUs are now, vut the speed boosts from using MMX and SSE are real), or if you go even older, the math comprocessor/FPU "extension" is why 3D games are a thing at all, being absolutely needed for the id1 engine powering Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM.
> 
> ...



You do realize you could probably clock the snot out of the generalized chip were it not for the additional die complexity added by these precious extensions?

More than 200% I'd dare wager.

You are basically arguing a cisc over risc design philosophy...   And it's been well established the gains in higher clocked simple processors are usually more than lower clocked complex ones.  All without having to code for anything special.

There is far more to the goal of extensions than performance.  It actaully has almost nothing to do with that.  If anything, it's about catering to a select application...  And locking code in.


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## ZeDestructor (Jul 21, 2015)

R-T-B said:


> You do realize you could probably clock the snot out of the generalized chip were it not for the additional die complexity added by these precious extensions?
> 
> More than 200% I'd dare wager.
> 
> ...



At low-core counts, sure. At high core counts, not really: scaling frequency leads to requiruring scaling voltage, and put together, you get anywhere from quadratic (^2) to quartic (^4) scaling. Scaling die area on the other hand, is a little bit more than linear, so while games have too short development cycles to do the massively threaded thing, other stuff like scientific computing, databases, virtualization and the like have much longer development cycles, and thread out as needed to fully fill highly-threaded CPUs.

RISC vs CISC is entirely irrelveant: any modern *high-performance* core does not execute the instruction directly - they decode it into their own internal instructions, called micro-ops and execute them instead. Combine that with out of order processing, simultaneous multi-threading (HyperThreading is an implementation of that with 2Threads oer CPU), branch predictors and the like, and you get way more from extensions than you do from scaling clockspeeds.

If you don't believe me, compare Broadwell-M to a 1.3GHz Pentium 3. The broadwell M will kick the crap out of the P3 while running slower, in single-core mode, just from having better x86 + SSE.. and then you turn on AVX and it just flies.

Even RISC cores are not immune to such effects: the ARM ISA has grown from ARMv1 to ARMv8, and has had extra instructions added every new release, and much like x86, specialised instructions as the market demands, since they are much faster than the general-purpose stuff. The difference is that on x86 I have core x86 (binary compatible back to at least the 486 CPU)+ a bajillion extensions, while on ARM I have 8 versions of ARM, plus custom stuff if I tweak the core to add custom stuff.


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

> If you don't believe me, compare Broadwell-M to a 1.3GHz Pentium 3. The broadwell M will kick the crap out of the P3 while running slower, in single-core mode, just from having better x86 + SSE.. and then you turn on AVX and it just flies.



Of course it would, it's doing much more via the additional space wasted on implementing those instructions but if that Pentium M core was built on a the same process it could likely clock beyond 6Ghz.  At least from my understanding of it.

I'll conceed I am not certain about this, as my knowledge comes from the old days when IBM was doing research into this.  IBM now only makes extremely high end servers, and even they have made the PowerPC instruction set pretty beefy.  My main point was not that you should not use propietary extensions at all, but rather that they have a limited benefit vs keeping the instruction set propietary.  Now, there may be SOME benefit in select instances (vector math and AVX are a great example of specialization), but they certainly keep x86 patents from expiring in a useful way and don't underestimate intels evaluation of that.


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## Dent1 (Jul 21, 2015)

HumanSmoke said:


> ...and yet even AMD help Intel's cause by using Intel system builds for their GPU press deck benchmarks. If AMD don't have faith in their own platform, should you expect OEMs to?



This has nothing to do with the fact that Eroldru's AMD performs identical to his Intel for cooler and cheaper.



the54thvoid said:


> Fanboys aside, the share price drop is indicative of the mass perception and market belief that AMD are no longer delivering a solid product.
> The geeks here are an insignificant minority in the global market. AMD's decline can only be blamed on fanboys if you are one yourself.  Stocks don't listen to fanboys, they listen to market presence and profitability.
> It's brutally naive to assume AMD's decline is anything other than lack of product and lack of product perception, combined with possible major mismanagement.
> This is not a third party fault. Similarly, Intel do just enough to stay far out in front.  AMD's lack of product threat means they can work on minimal R&D expenditure with minimal product improvement.
> ...



I would agree overall but there are so many variables that influence a share price. AMD have made poor business decisions along the way.


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## HumanSmoke (Jul 21, 2015)

Dent1 said:


> This has nothing to do with the fact that Eroldru's AMD performs identical to his Intel for cooler and cheaper.


So what? This thread is about AMD and its financial position, which is predicated upon its marketing, its brand, and its products.
If AMD had the same mindset, why would they use Intel systems to benchmark their graphics cards for public consumption? Are you saying AMD have an Intel bias? AMD don't know how to get the best out of their own graphics benchmarking? Why use a competitors product to showcase your own, and by inference, indicate that the system used would provide the best results?

So you are basically asking me to believe a random forum member over the company that makes the hardware. So either Eroldru is correct and AMD don't know what they're doing in giving Intel free publicity and torpedoing their own enthusiast platform, or AMD did some comparative benchmarking and went with the system that provided the best numbers. I guess only Eroldru and AMD know for sure...oh, and the reviewers of course:
GTA V CPU performance
Battlefield Hardline CPU performance
Evolve CPU performance
Far Cry 4 CPU performance
Dragon Age: Inquisition CPU performance

as the54thvoid intimated, perception is reality in business - and AMD highlighted a competitors product over its own in every flagship graphics launch event of the past few years.
Now, what kind of perception does that engender amongst potential customers?


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## ZeDestructor (Jul 21, 2015)

(FF autoscrolled too far and I missed john_'s post... time to fix that!)



john_ said:


> Are you serious? Everyone can read your post. It's directly over mine! The same is true with this one. Your post is DIRECTLY OVER THIS POST. I just wanted to inform you that I already posted about this. There where two more posts by me that YOU WHERE TOO LAZY TO READ BECAUSE THEY WHERE IN THE 4TH PAGE.
> 
> You also never explained why that link you posted in the second page was even relevant to the consoles. I quoted on page three about that, you never answered. Probably you could add post #61 to my other two posts, but never mind.
> 
> Next time try to be polite and not incorrectly accuse others. I read that post of yours, I have NO intention in reading your last post after the way you started it. Have a nice day.



If you wanted to only partially quote me, you should have quoted at least the comparison part. as it is, no matter how close my post is, people (myself included) won't scroll up, and see just a blank statement of Nvidia not caring for consoles because the revenue is small, not that teh revenue is small compared to something else. Welcome to twisting people's words to mean something else. I'll be nice and give you tyhe benefit of doubt and take it as being accidental.

I read the two posts you mentioned specifically at the time. I also read the rest of page 4 many hours earlier, and that's well and truly gone off the stack. If you wanted post #61 included, you should have included it when giving specific examples, since I treated every other post as not part of your reponse. Welcome to how references work.

As for relevance to consoles, the only relevant bit is how Nvidia decided not to pursue consoles and AMD did. All I did was explain ways in which Nvidia could have provided a competing chip (either by integrating POWER or ARM with GeForce in a SoC, or by using an extremely wide link combined with an existing external CPU, which is where the link to an article about Sierra and Summit are relevant, since, due to needs, they built a really wide, high-bandwidth link)

Now, let's have a look at the fames post #61:



john_ said:


> Considering that Nvidia was already thinking of lowering prices at the hi end, this is exactly what AMD needed. I don't expect Nvidia to do a huge price cut after these news. They will do the price cuts they where thinking and stop there. Also the prices affect all the cards not just the hi end and at the low/mid range AMD is more than competitive. Also the price redaction affects console processors.
> 
> Nvidia would have offered to make console chips even with zero margins. The reason is simple. All console games would be using PhysX and GameWorks by now. AMD gpus would have been considered faulty at best today with many bugs all over the place and poor performance. I think Nvidia tried, but both Sony and Microsoft where having cheap x86 consoles in their minds that would start bringing profits from day one.



Nvidia controlling console GPU would not have resulted in gameworks and physx being everywhere, and even if it were, studios would still have ported them over anyways - remember Gameworks works on any GPU, not just Nvidia, and AMD would have launched a GPU that looked a lot more like Maxwell 2 than GCN. if PhysX became commonplace, AMD and game devs would've found a way to replicate the functionality on non-GeForce platforms. It just hasn't been necessary so far.



john_ said:


> And what exactly is the link you show me? I don't find it relevant with consoles or x86 and even if it is, this article is from 11/2014. PS4 and Xbox One where introduced at the end of 2013. So the question is what did Nvidia had to offer at 2012? Looking at wiki, Tegra 3 and that's not an x86 SOC. x86 on all platforms (Xbox One, PS4, PC) makes game development cheaper and faster. The latest rumors say than Nintendo NX will also use AMD's chips, which makes sense because the biggest problem for the Nintendo consoles today is the lack of third party games.



x86 vs blah , as I have explained several times now, is irrelevant: programmers in all industries no longer work in assembly, and will not do so again outside of a bit of hardware init and hand-optimizing certaing HPC and crypto programs, though even that is falling out of favour. So now you're coding in C/C++ because that's what the SDKs like by and large for fast games, and, well, C/C++ and most of it's various libraries and OSes have been ported to all the major platforms (x86, ARM, POWER, MIPS).

The only, and I mean ONLY relevant part of x86 being in consoles is that it makes porting to PC minorly easier (Especially from XBOne or PS4-OpenGL). The bulk of the effort is still cross-API/ABI compatibility/translation layers/shims, as has been since the X360/PS3 generation.



john_ said:


> I think Sony and Microsoft know how to negotiate a deal. Also AMD was with its back on the wall. And both those companies knew it. So I am pretty sure they explained to AMD that they had many alternative options for their next gen consoles, and all those options where bad for AMD. So AMD would have to offer them a great deal from the beginning, to guaranteed that Sony and/or Microsoft would not turn to Nvidia and/or Intel for the main parts. I don't think AMD was willing to gamble it's future just so it can secure a better deal.



Based on how Nvidia walked away from all three, I think AMD managed to raise the price of their SoC by being the only viable platform left. Intel doesn't have the GPU power, neither do Qualcomm (Adreno), ARM (Mali) or Imagination (PowerVR), and then you have the driver state of the latter three... which is just hopeless from what we can see on Android. Based on HumanSmoke's link, AMD is charging $100-110 per unit, with 20% margin (hence the $20 number). If AMD were not the only choice, MS and Sony would have pushed for a race to the bottom and dropped that price even lower.

This is pure speculation though, so it's probably wrong, though I suspect the truth isn't that far away based on NV's public statements.



R-T-B said:


> Of course it would, it's doing much more via the additional space wasted on implementing those instructions but if that Pentium M core was built on a the same process it could likely clock beyond 6Ghz.  At least from my understanding of it.
> 
> I'll conceed I am not certain about this, as my knowledge comes from the old days when IBM was doing research into this.  IBM now only makes extremely high end servers, and even they have made the PowerPC instruction set pretty beefy.  My main point was not that you should not use propietary extensions at all, but rather that they have a limited benefit vs keeping the instruction set propietary.  Now, there may be SOME benefit in select instances (vector math and AVX are a great example of specialization), but they certainly keep x86 patents from expiring in a useful way and don't underestimate intels evaluation of that.



I meant Broadwell M at the same frequency as a P3, running identical code would be faster, but that the extensions would be even faster.

IBM server CPUs are actually the last really high-frequency chips out there. If they could push for even more cores and lower the speeds, they would be outperforming Intel's Haswell-EX platform, but they can't - simply because no fabs can make chips bigger than they're already shipping (each POWER8 core is bigger than a Haswell x86 core), then you have the monstruous memory config of the POWER8 chips. And that's on 22nm SOI, not 22nm FinFET CMOS+High-K (what Intel is using), which allows for the much higher clock speeds, at the cost of absolutely insane power consumption: Tyan's lower-clocked POWER8 CPUs are 190W-247W TDP, IBM's higher-clocked parts go even higher (300W is a pretty conservative estimate by AT), meanwhile Intel's E5-2699v3 and E7-8890v3 are a "mere" 165W.

Keeping the ISA proprietary while a bit of a nasty thing to do, is a status quo neither Intel, AMD or anyone else really wants to change: they get to quash any upstart competition without needing to lift a finger. And if you think  AMD is nice about it, think again - Intel sued AMD for AMD64 because AMD did not want to license it, and why would they.. Opteron with AMD64 had single-handedly smashed into the datacenter and cleared out MIPS and SPARC and was well on it's way to clearing POWER from everything but the highest of the high-end systems. Meanwhile, Itanium (Intel and HP's 64bit CPU.. probably one of the nicest architectures built, ever.. with no compiler ever built to use it properly) was floundering hard, and was later killed off by GPUs doing the only thing Itanium ended up being good for: fast, very parallelisable math. Eventually, after a lot of counter-suiing, AMD and Intel settled and cross-licensed a lot of stuff, and continue to do so with all the new ISA extensions.


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

I can't really disagree with that.  My main point that I was trying to make (though we got on a bit of tagent there due to my misunderstanding of modern tech) was that Intel/AMD/whoever loves keeping extensions in house if possible, and we seem to have reached agreement there.


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## ZeDestructor (Jul 22, 2015)

R-T-B said:


> I can't really disagree with that.  My main point that I was trying to make (though we got on a bit of tagent there due to my misunderstanding of modern tech) was that Intel/AMD/whoever loves keeping extensions in house if possible, and we seem to have reached agreement there.



The patents are a by-product of the extensions, not really the true objective. Mind you, as I said, Intel and AMD are more than happy to keep it nice and closed .


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## 64K (Jul 27, 2015)

Ferrum Master said:


> Holy Crap... 100 comments about nothing
> 
> WHO CARES... As long they are afloat with their design team, they will sell their own product, just as ARM does.



Shareholders care I assure you and probably people buying AMD GPUs may be wondering if AMD will be around to update drivers for their GPU.

AMD shares are down 36% in the last month.

2015 Q2 Net Profit Margin

Intel 20.51%
Nvidia 11.64%
AMD -19.21%


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## Dieinafire (Aug 3, 2015)

Amd rip 2016 :-(


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## 50eurouser (Aug 11, 2015)

Customers were buying intel cpu's even when AMD had better products out there not only value for money wise. Back in the ~2004 when P4 was just as FX cpu are now press/reviewers was not that vicious against intel products.  Check reviews from 2012 etc and read of how horrible FX cpu's and their architect is. Not only that intel got a nice 1.4b from EU for antitrust and other similar cases. Let along the famous case when "
*Intel finally agrees to pay $15 to Pentium 4 owners*" etc. In fact even if we could be back at 2005 when Athlon x2 were rolfstomping the room-heaters p4 amd would not gain that current 80% market of intel's. Cause customers are not all that informed and real life performance. People pay 400$ for a i7 when its production cost let along the innovation from 2011 Sandy is minimal. . Intel are good at many things but they are the best if they want to run u dry of money, chipsets / new sockets / tiny updates ... call it whatever. From 1156 to 1151 in ~4.5 years ... LGA775 lasted more that all these sockets together. Even if zen comes and can compete against intel products, we may not have CPU price wars, might be the other way around amd zen being overpriced and i5 becoming the new vfm king cpus while still being over ~200$. Sometimes customers have to say no to overpriced recycled tech with just fancier I/O and +/- 1pin each year.


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## ZeDestructor (Aug 11, 2015)

50eurouser said:


> Customers were buying intel cpu's even when AMD had better products out there not only value for money wise. Back in the ~2004 when P4 was just as FX cpu are now press/reviewers was not that vicious against intel products.  Check reviews from 2012 etc and read of how horrible FX cpu's and their architect is. Not only that intel got a nice 1.4b from EU for antitrust and other similar cases. Let along the famous case when "
> *Intel finally agrees to pay $15 to Pentium 4 owners*" etc. In fact even if we could be back at 2005 when Athlon x2 were rolfstomping the room-heaters p4 amd would not gain that current 80% market of intel's. Cause customers are not all that informed and real life performance. People pay 400$ for a i7 when its production cost let along the innovation from 2011 Sandy is minimal. . Intel are good at many things but they are the best if they want to run u dry of money, chipsets / new sockets / tiny updates ... call it whatever. From 1156 to 1151 in ~4.5 years ... LGA775 lasted more that all these sockets together. Even if zen comes and can compete against intel products, we may not have CPU price wars, might be the other way around amd zen being overpriced and i5 becoming the new vfm king cpus while still being over ~200$. Sometimes customers have to say no to overpriced recycled tech with just fancier I/O and +/- 1pin each year.



That was 2004, today it's 2015, and there's a lot less of that nonsense going on. Remember Nvidia and ATi taking their turns at faking 3DMark results too? Or AMD raising not licensing AMD64 to Intel? ALL of the companies were raked over the coals good and proper and/or sat through some protacted legal wrangling for that nastiness, and it's just not there anymore, not since VIA bowed out and Transmeta got glomped by Nvidia (who still has an x86 license they agreed to not use in exchange for a very large sum of cash from Intel).

Why Intel is winning? Well it's simple: Nobody can in good conscience recommend anything AMD right now CPU-side to anyone: Intel simply has the better performance at near enough price on the consumer side, and nothing competitive server-side. Oh, and let's not forget, AMD has never managed to build a decent mobile CPU to compete with Pentium M and Core. You can say what you want, but not showing up means you lose.

As for the constant socket change, I for one do NOT want a redux of LGA775, where you had to match chipsets to VRMs and BIOS in order to figure out which CPUs you could run. No thanks, I'll take constant socket changes where I can blindly dump a matching CPU/socket combo over that particular mess.

Why Intel isn't releasing the big 30% improvements anymore, it's quite simple: they've run out of the big improvements, and as a result, are scaling core counts and power instead, because that's what they can do at all by and large. You can read up more if you want on my posts here and here, as well as my conversation with @R-T-B in this very thread a few posts above your own.


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## tabascosauz (Aug 12, 2015)

ZeDestructor said:


> That was 2004, today it's 2015, and there's a lot less of that nonsense going on. Remember Nvidia and ATi taking their turns at faking 3DMark results too? Or AMD raising not licensing AMD64 to Intel? ALL of the companies were raked over the coals good and proper and/or sat through some protacted legal wrangling for that nastiness, and it's just not there anymore, not since VIA bowed out and Transmeta got glomped by Nvidia (who still has an x86 license they agreed to not use in exchange for a very large sum of cash from Intel).
> 
> Why Intel is winning? Well it's simple: Nobody can in good conscience recommend anything AMD right now CPU-side to anyone: Intel simply has the better performance at near enough price on the consumer side, and nothing competitive server-side. Oh, and let's not forget, AMD has never managed to build a decent mobile CPU to compete with Pentium M and Core. You can say what you want, but not showing up means you lose.
> 
> ...



Spot on. In addition, AMD could not build a CPU to keep up with the evolution of Core. It was clear that K10 was falling behind, but Bulldozer just went and beheaded K10 in a bloody mess. Now, because of the limitations of Bulldozer, Opteron has virtually died. And all companies from IBM to AMD and Nvidia and Intel have all played in shady dealings in the past. Intel's are simply the only ones that are well-known because everyone attributes AMD's recent failures to Intel.

Also, a wonderful argument regarding sockets. LGA775 was a gong show. DDR2 and DDR3, FSB 800, 1066 and 1333 all existing on one socket made for a hell of a mess. The current socket strategy makes it much easier for less-knowledgeable consumers to get something that works.


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## medi01 (Aug 13, 2015)

cyneater said:


> AMD needs to make products people want to buy....
> 
> And processors that can perform well and are priced well....
> 
> ...



AMD created Carrizo I want to buy.
No notebook manufacturer gives a damn.

Even before Carrizo, I'd rather go with AMD's APU than Intel's overpriced CPUs that suck at gaming, but alas, neither that was possible.

Both Microsoft and Sony had good reasons to go with AMDs APU in their current gen consoles.

So, no, it's not really about the product.


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## medi01 (Aug 13, 2015)

HumanSmoke said:


> Indeed. A year after the acquisition, the combined company was worth half its combined (pre-acquisition) value, thanks to AMD's gross over-valuation of ATI worth, and the $2bn worth of debt AMD saddled itself with buying ATI. Having said that, AMD's BoD and execs have been continually rewarded for underperformance. The occasional Chief [insert title] Officer gets the golden parachute treatment as a sacrificial lamb for the combined assent of the BoD's signing off on whatever strategies are in vogue at any given time, but generally it's business as usual.



AMD couldn't produce APUs, and would not be used by Microsfot/Sony if they didn't buy ATI.


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## medi01 (Aug 13, 2015)

Assimilator said:


> Sigh. There are only 2 reasons why AMD is manufacturing console hardware:
> 
> 1. it gives them a steady income source so their bottom line doesn't look as horrible as it actually is
> 2. it gives AMD's directors something to distract shareholders with when the hard questions about profitability start coming in
> ...



Console deal is more than it looks like.
It's hard to even imagine how on earth it is in any way negative for AMD.
It brings profit.
It forces game developers to go multi-threaded (AMDs greates weeknes and Intel's greatest advantage is single thread performance)


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## FordGT90Concept (Aug 13, 2015)

AMD's Jaguar CPU in the consoles is extremely weak (think Intel Atom processor).  The GPU and RAM are the only powerful components of those consoles.  AMD's experience with GDDR5 particularly helped with the design of PlayStation 4's hybrid memory architecture.


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## ZeDestructor (Aug 13, 2015)

tabascosauz said:


> Also, a wonderful argument regarding sockets. LGA775 was a gong show. DDR2 and DDR3, FSB 800, 1066 and 1333 all existing on one socket made for a hell of a mess. The current socket strategy makes it much easier for less-knowledgeable consumers to get something that works.



Even for the more experienced among us, it just makes life easier, simpler and faster.



medi01 said:


> AMD created Carrizo I want to buy.
> No notebook manufacturer gives a damn.
> 
> Even before Carrizo, I'd rather go with AMD's APU than Intel's overpriced CPUs that suck at gaming, but alas, neither that was possible.
> ...



AMD has been for a very long time uncompetitive in terms of absolute power consumption at low loads. This shuts them out of the bulk laptop market that doesn't give a shit about GPUs besides making youtube/netflix play smoothly.



medi01 said:


> Console deal is more than it looks like.
> It's hard to even imagine how on earth it is in any way negative for AMD.
> It brings profit.
> It forces game developers to go multi-threaded (AMDs greates weeknes and Intel's greatest advantage is single thread performance)



As I explained earlier in this thread, it's an incredibly minor win. If Nvidia, Intel, IBM, Qcomm, etc wanted the miserly margins of consoles, they'd be on at least one of the consoles. All of them walked away instead, and that's very telling of the state of the console hardware side.


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## EarthDog (Aug 13, 2015)

> The current socket strategy makes it much easier for less-knowledgeable consumers to get something that works.


Less knowledgeable consumers buy OEM. Most of those users only upgrade HDDs or SSDs/Optical/and Videocards. 

Intel just can't win... You have a long lived socket and people complain that there are too many options for it. They have their standard fare now lasting ~2 years and its not long enough... I dont get it.


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## ZeDestructor (Aug 13, 2015)

EarthDog said:


> Less knowledgeable consumers buy OEM. Most of those users only upgrade HDDs or SSDs/Optical/and Videocards.
> 
> Intel just can't win... You have a long lived socket and people complain that there are too many options for it. They have their standard fare now lasting ~2 years and its not long enough... I dont get it.



Intel doesn't care. They decided after the clusterfuck that was LGA775 to go for the current one socket per generation approach, nice and easy, and on the server and laptop side, have never cared.


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## EarthDog (Aug 13, 2015)

Me either. Educated consumer FTW.


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## Dent1 (Aug 23, 2015)

cyneater said:


> AMD needs to make products people want to buy....
> 
> And processors that can perform well and are priced well....
> 
> ...



Yeah and people still bought the clapped out Pentium 4. So obviously you have no clue what you're talking about.


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## ZeDestructor (Aug 27, 2015)

Dent1 said:


> Yeah and people still bought the clapped out Pentium 4. So obviously you have no clue what you're talking about.



Largely irrelevant: AMD sold Opterons by the tray. Server is where the real money is made.


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## HumanSmoke (Aug 27, 2015)

ZeDestructor said:


> Largely irrelevant: AMD sold Opterons by the tray. Server is where the real money is made.


Very true.
While Intel's overall growth has been pretty much flat, since AMD failed to successfully update their C32/G34 based platforms, Intel's enterprise revenue and profit lines is clear for all to see, while AMD's dithering, slow reactions, and lack of focus have ceded the ARM-based market to companies like Applied Micro and Cavium.





[Source]
Makes me wonder if AMD's enterprise division cringe every time they look back on their bold claims of the past. They'd better pull their finger out if they intend to get that 25% market share - presently they are looking down the barrel at 1.5% of x86, and well under 1% total taking into account RISC and ARM.


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## ZeDestructor (Aug 27, 2015)

HumanSmoke said:


> Very true.
> While Intel's overall growth has been pretty much flat, since AMD failed to successfully update their C32/G34 based platforms, Intel's enterprise revenue and profit lines is clear for all to see, while AMD's dithering, slow reactions, and lack of focus have ceded the ARM-based market to companies like Applied Micro and Cavium.
> 
> 
> ...



Right now AMD is stuck on 32nm Bulldozer/Vishera/Steamroller. Intel meanwhile is sampling 14nm and has been shipping 22nm for a while, on a superior microarchitecture with more cores and hyperthreading on those increased core numbers. Zen/K12 need to succeed. Of the two, I expect K12 to be the more immediately successful one of the two (mainly because it will go up to the rather less experienced AppliedMicro/Cavium in the server space), but if Zen delivers... Man, we really need more than just comparing current Intel server power usage and IO vs new Intel server power usage and IO on the server end, given IBM's horrendous POWER8 pricing and ARM's overall laughable high-end performance. Sure, ARM is lower in absolute power, but in performance/W, Intel rules the roost, with IBM's POWER8 (barely) being the party popper to industry-wide domination.


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