- Joined
- Dec 1, 2007
- Location
- Near Toronto Canada
There was a time when AMD and Intel were neck and neck, back in the 486 days. Then, for a while, several years later, in the hey day of single cores, AMD pulled ahead. And for awhile you could get 1Ghz AMD chips that were just as fast as 1.4Ghz Intel chips. Things were good. Competition was real, and chip prices were kept in check accordingly.
Ever since the end of the original FX chips, though, AMD has been lagging behind. When Intel came out with Conroe, AMD was effectively left in the dust. With chips becoming more and more complex to design and manufacture, and more and more challenges popping up as we increase miniaturization, AMD has been falling further and further behind.
Case in point- Intel puts out new chips every year or so (2014 being an exception on the mainstream front, though we did get X99 on the enthusiast side) and they always have an increase in performance per clock. Sometimes it's huge (Pentium D to C2D, C2Q to i7, i7 1st gen to i7 2nd gen) and sometimes it's minor (Ivybridge to Haswell), but Intel never puts out a new CPU that's worse than their previous CPU, or "the same". There is always improvement.
Let's compare that with AMD, who haven't been able to improve over the per-core performance of Phenom II. Now we have Intel releasing 14nm chips while AMD is still selling 32nm chips.
This situation is tragic, sad, and frightening. What happens when AMD goes from their current position of slightly laughable competition to a future position of no competition whatsoever? What will happen to us as end users? I predict that the AMD exodus will continue. Tons more people than already have made the switch will come over from AMD to Intel. Eventually AMD will be left with almost no market share. Prices for Intel parts will go up, because people will have no viable alternative to Intel, and we will all suffer.
I foresee AMD not only bowing out of the enthusiast market where they currently have their FX processors, but also out of the entry level market where they have their APUs. Intel iGPUs are getting better all the time. What happens when they meet or exceed what you can get out of an AMD APU? Surely, if Pentium G3258's had the same graphical prowess as an A10, A10's would stop selling.
So we will end up with AMD being exclusively a graphics company, and thank goodness for their purchase of ATi, or they wouldn't even have that to fall back on. There will never be another genuine competitor to intel. At least not until RISC stuff gets super advanced and starts to eat the X86 market, and that's a ways off.
Is anybody else worried about AMD's mediocrity leading to their ultimate demise, and what that will mean for us Intel people?
Ever since the end of the original FX chips, though, AMD has been lagging behind. When Intel came out with Conroe, AMD was effectively left in the dust. With chips becoming more and more complex to design and manufacture, and more and more challenges popping up as we increase miniaturization, AMD has been falling further and further behind.
Case in point- Intel puts out new chips every year or so (2014 being an exception on the mainstream front, though we did get X99 on the enthusiast side) and they always have an increase in performance per clock. Sometimes it's huge (Pentium D to C2D, C2Q to i7, i7 1st gen to i7 2nd gen) and sometimes it's minor (Ivybridge to Haswell), but Intel never puts out a new CPU that's worse than their previous CPU, or "the same". There is always improvement.
Let's compare that with AMD, who haven't been able to improve over the per-core performance of Phenom II. Now we have Intel releasing 14nm chips while AMD is still selling 32nm chips.
This situation is tragic, sad, and frightening. What happens when AMD goes from their current position of slightly laughable competition to a future position of no competition whatsoever? What will happen to us as end users? I predict that the AMD exodus will continue. Tons more people than already have made the switch will come over from AMD to Intel. Eventually AMD will be left with almost no market share. Prices for Intel parts will go up, because people will have no viable alternative to Intel, and we will all suffer.
I foresee AMD not only bowing out of the enthusiast market where they currently have their FX processors, but also out of the entry level market where they have their APUs. Intel iGPUs are getting better all the time. What happens when they meet or exceed what you can get out of an AMD APU? Surely, if Pentium G3258's had the same graphical prowess as an A10, A10's would stop selling.
So we will end up with AMD being exclusively a graphics company, and thank goodness for their purchase of ATi, or they wouldn't even have that to fall back on. There will never be another genuine competitor to intel. At least not until RISC stuff gets super advanced and starts to eat the X86 market, and that's a ways off.
Is anybody else worried about AMD's mediocrity leading to their ultimate demise, and what that will mean for us Intel people?
