Friday, December 2nd 2011
AMD Bulldozer A Surprisingly Sell-Out Sales Success. Victims: Phenom II & Athlon II
AMD's new Bulldozer "FX" series of processors may be very lacklustre performers in reviewer's benchmarks and have garnered considerable scorn in enthusiast circles, but they're a very good performer for AMD's bottom line. Incredibly, they are selling out as soon as shops get them in stock - and they are not even priced very competitively against Intel's offerings, so perhaps the "It's an 8 core CPU!!" marketing is working well on the uninformed "enthusiast" after all? Mind you, what enthusiast, however uninformed, wouldn't know exactly how these products perform? Every tech website and computer magazine has covered these chips by now. The mind boggles.
Unfortunately, the victims of this unwarranted success are the decent Phenom II & Athlon II processors, which have always been priced very well, giving good value for money and are good sellers. The reason is that the manufacturing plants share equipment between these old 45 nm products and the new 32 nm ones, creating a conflict between them, so one must go. It therefore makes sound business sense for AMD to discontinue selling the old product in favour of the new, expensive one which is flying off the shelves. AMD will stop shipping all Athlon II's and Phenom II's to distributors, but with one exception. The "Zosma" 6 core Phenom II X4 960T will continue to be available until stocks run dry. This has two cores disabled, making it a "quad" core CPU, but with luck they might be unlockable. To state the obvious, if one is considering buying one of these discontinued chips, then they'd better not wait long.
Source:
Nordic Hardware
175 Comments on AMD Bulldozer A Surprisingly Sell-Out Sales Success. Victims: Phenom II & Athlon II
To reiterate what do you classify as a bad product? Does bulldozer not accomplish the task that a computer is designed for? Does it fail in droves? Is it overly expensive? In all reality you could consider it a stepping stone. Phenom II's were still outperformed by Intel yet they were considered a "good" product, what makes Bulldozer different? It clocks well, power consumption is high, but I feel that is a first gen bug and will get worked out with new steppings, just like Phenom I and II. When someone points out a legitimate reason that Bulldozer is a "bad" product I will retract what I said, but until that point whats actually wrong with BD?
Just to throw it out there Intel has had plenty of other "bad" products other than P4. They had there own TLB bug with i7, the 6 series chipsets, socket 423, the list goes on. Every company has fuck ups and in all honesty less the spectacular performance doesn't make a bad product in my book.
An fx8120 is £25 more or so than a 1100t, sure the 1100t is 10% faster clock for clock but bulldozer overclocks 10% further even if you don't try hard, if you're patient you can get 20% higher clock speed than 1100t max overclock at a lower voltage.
So if you're an over clocker you're just paying for 2 extra cores really and the pricing is reasonable in that regard.
the FM1 socket has plenty of power in it for the average joe that uses it for school, general usage. AMD is smart for putting more focus into these markets- it is already paying off and demand is only going to grow
to me with my recent loss of my quad and mobo to disease( ok 1.55 volts on cpu might a killed it eventually) 476english pounds would buy me a crosshair v fx8150 and mem with enough slots for xfire a pcie ssd and the bonus gt240 for physx in one pc that should rock (needs 4xpciex though) if i go intel id have to spend a lot more just for enough pciex slots and marginal game bench increases
In the beginning of the year, I was in doubt : AMD/Intel. I finally bit the bullet and bought a core i2600K system. I haven't regretted it, my system hardly lost any value: it would cost you almost the same to buy a similar PC now, 9 months later. That's exceptional I think ;-)
Yeah it could be better but it's not shite.
its not a lacklustre performer, as other people have noticed, it was able to beat intel's 2600k in some benchies, am i not right? you can only justify that it as a bad CPU if in every benchmark it performs under intel's 2600k, but to tell you, no they dont.... and those benchmarks are only in the reviewers point of view..
and another thing, why you seem so sad dear author?? why you not like it bro?? do you like amd to sink and be bankrupt?? to tell you if that will happen, all hell will break lose.... be happy with it, it should result positively for amd.. more R&D budget=more competetion, dont you like it???
peace out!
APUs have literally no competition in the market.
I have fx 6100@4,6 (H2O) in Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD7 with crossfireX4@HIS HD5750.
AMD rules my rig :)
I mean really, there's about 1% of the CPU buying population that gives two shits that Intel has a super high end 1k dollar chip that's faster than everything else out there. Which makes a difference...never in the average users life.
European Union
www.economist.com/node/13649063
seethirty.wordpress.com/2009/05/13/intel-found-guilty-of-criminal-sales-tactics-against-amd/
www.fastcodesign.com/1280059/microsoft-and-intel-fight-eu-lawsuits-just-as-antitrust-policies-in-the-us-get-tougher
www.osnews.com/story/21468
New York Attorney General
money.cnn.com/2009/11/04/technology/cuomo_sues_intel_antitrust/index.htm
www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/new-york-ag-files-antitrust-charges-against-intel-alleges-bribery-coercion/26903
South Korea
www.usatoday.com/tech/products/2007-09-11-270351916_x.htm
www.telecomseurope.net/content/regulators-charge-intel-antitrust-violation-south-korea
that is probably about half of it but it is a good start... you need to learn to look up some facts before going all out with assumptions...
2 billion transistor bulldozer = epic fail.
1.2 billion transistor bulldozer = only slightly under performing.
Pretty much puts it precisely in line with phenom architecture ( I.E phenomx6 + two more cores is 1.26 billion)
The main problem is the IPC loss and crazy power draw. Hopefully both if which get fixed further down the line.