why is amd falling behind?

Because they bought ATI, and have other things to catch up with... Like Video cards...

My whole fleet of PC's are all AMD... except my gaming rig... as they proved to be better than the Prescott nuclear reactor...

Its a shame, AMD is starting to be a Citrix CPU....

mmmmmmm, thats funny, when i built mine, about 5 yrs ago nvidia was the **** for cards and amd cpu was for gaming, now it seems ati is starting to surpass nvidia in gpu and intel is starting to surpass amd in cpu.............. i guess amd thought it would fair better in the carding aspect of things?

wasp9166 said:

mmmmmmm, thats funny, when i built mine, about 5 yrs ago nvidia was the **** for cards and amd cpu was for gaming, now it seems ati is starting to surpass nvidia in gpu and intel is starting to surpass amd in cpu.............. i guess amd thought it would fair better in the carding aspect of things?

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Nvidia surpassed ATI in the GPU market a while ago, and is only widening that margin. Some of ATI's top cards come in at a few bucks cheaper then a comparable Nvidia card (3870 to 8800GT), but if you want the best performance , it is no doubt in Nvidia, and nothing is hinting at that changing.

wasp9166 said:

http://computershopper.com/shoptalk/2007/09/18/intel_to_release_first_penryn

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Since they have been behind for a while now they feel they dont have to be the fastest. At least for now.

I think they are trying to get more market share in the mid range area to make some money. They valued ATI a lot more than they should have so they are having problems now.

i always think of situations like this like say WoW.
People say there catering to the average gamer. The mid ground is always the majority usually. The high end is usually only 10% of people or less then that.
If you rule the middle to low end you rule the roost money wise.
Maybe not yet but maybe thats what there going to start aiming for.

At the job i work at currently and the last one (in sort of a marketing type position) we always aim for the average people. Because they make up 60%+ or more of sales. The hardcore always were 10% or less.

AMD has publicly admitted defeat, and will be concentrating on mid-level cards...

Have you've noticed that AMD has not made a video card to contend with the 8800GTX?

Not necessary. Have you seen the FireGL card from ATI. That is a big money maker for them and it beats nvidia. Also ATI has the support of the p35 and x38 chipset which clocks further than a 680i SLI chipset. Also if you are on high resolution you don't see too much of a difference between these cards in gaming from what I have seen with the reviews. Not to mention two of these cards is better than a gtx and it comes out cheaper with more options like quad display etc. It is not bad. I think the only thing holding AMD up right now is actually their GPU.

The CPU is in a stink. They would need at least a 2.6ghz BE Phenom priced at around the 300 mark to make sales in around 2 months. And even at that price they are still overshadowed by penryn because it can overclock higher and is faster clock for clock on most things.

My uncle used to work for intel and was very high up in the company (making over $1 million a year). He recently quit the job to become vice-president for another company, but that's a different story.
My uncle has said repeatedly that since the release of Conroe, AMD is dead. They don't have the money to compete with intel and don't have the R&D necessary to compete either.
He said what kept them afloat before was that they were constantly innovating, etc., but they stopped. And once you stop with a giant like intel close on your heels, you're dead. Period.

Computer Shopper and others like that can kiss my ***. my dad reads that crap and tries to show me stuff. there full of crap most of the time. example they where talking about video cards and they said a 3870 and a 3850 was equal to a 8600GT.
there so full of crap. every time i read that crap they have no idea whats really going on and when they do get it right its 3 months later.

AMD was always a underdog compare to Intel, even when they had faster CPUs. I remember people called Intel's EE(Extreme Edition) as "Emergency Edition", but strong brand name does not wear off fast. Somehow AMD couldn't keep that status long enough to make everyone on the planet to know that fact. Now it is old news.

Does anyone know exactly market share of AMD and Intel before the launch of Core 2 Duo?


As for video cards, since when Nvidia started to beat ATI so badly?
Back in 2004, ATI had 55% market share of stand alone video cards. While Nvidia had only 42%. ATI matched Nvidia's every new release, and their cards sometimes performed much better, such as good old Radeon 9800Pro. What happened? And when?


Why did AMD buy ATI? I thought they might want to put some graphics technologies into their CPUs, so they can beat Intel to ground on gaming? It does not look like the case.


By the way, why are AMD's CPUs slower clock by clock now? They used to be faster clock by clock. I know Intel has improved. But just a thought, would an increase of cache size make the difference? The 512kbx2 cache chips requires extra 200MHZ to match the performance of 1MBx2 chips. Imagine how much performance an extra 2MB cache would do for them? Shouldn't it equal to extra 400MHZ performance? Since Intel's Core 2 Duo has 4MB cache.

It's a matter of $ for R&D; Intel has lots, AMD doesn't. Intel got itself into some trouble when it picked the high megahertz path and ran into a blockade due to unexpected high leaking currents. That let AMD surge ahead somewhat because Intel had to backtrack. But now Intel has a new path which obviously has conquored the leaks and a new architecture which is working very well.

But AMD is not dead, they are now teamed up with IBM. AMD will be back once they start to move to IBM technoglogy. AMD will let IBM do the fabs which won't make as much money but will be a lot cheaper for AMD.

In the mean time, Intel and IBM are working together on ways to replace transistors with crossed wires. That technologiy will be shared so AMD will benefit from Intel's research as well. The games if far from over.

Hear Hear orion! Amd may be down for the moment, but do not count them out! If AMD can pull out of this nose dive they've been on (and there's no reason to believe that they can't) then they'll stand in a very powerful position. The acquisition of ATI hasn't yet shown the benifits as it's still to early into that game. Right now we're just seeing what ATI would have released without the merger. Just because AMD is now in charge doesn't mean those last few years of design work and prototypes of ATI's are suddenly worthless. No, AMD had to put that stuff out even though it wasn't what they truly wanted. The next TRUE new ATI chip (and by that matter AMD processor) should be much more interesting as at that point ATI will have worked with AMD on the integracies of making a Video Card / Processor / Motherboard Chipset solution that works extremly well with one another.

Lets just hope that they havn't shoved their names so far into the ground by then that they truly are considered the new Cyrix chip by that time. I've no problem with going Intel, but I like AMD and hope to stay with them for a long time to come.

Well, for one they obviously had to make that ATi purchase (or Nvidia) or else they'll be dead when Nehalem comes out. Although, there's not much that we know about Fusion so far so one would wonder how they're doing. Look at Jon Peddie's, as far as exclusive GPU manufacturer is concerned, Nvidia is leading by a huge percentage over DAAMiT with their some 34% market share and DAAMiT only possess roughly 19% of the share. I wonder what will happen if out of all the blue, Intel and Nvidia merge and with Intel's 38% hold in graphics it'll be doomsday for DAAMiT. Luckily, that's unlikely to happen.. perhaps .

But even with Intel keep on going solo, I don't think it will make much difference. If Intel and Nvidia keep gaining ground, I guess DAAMiT best bet is hoping for Nehalem to flop . In any case, I am particularly curious as of what will be Nvidia's answer to Nehalem and Fusion.. .

OC101 said:

As for video cards, since when Nvidia started to beat ATI so badly?

By the way, why are AMD's CPUs slower clock by clock now?

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Yeah, the 9800 Pro was great, I was even using one up until a few weeks ago. Nvidia's competition to the Radeon 9600/9700/9800 was the GeForce FX line. I think that's when Nvidia started going putting a lot of time into chipsets, and their video cards suffered. From there ATI gained ground and took the next step with the X800 which was a great card. I think Nvidia did ok with the 6800, but not enough. I loved my 7800GT, I think that's when they started winning again. However, my current card is ATI, I prefer them...But if I was going for absolute best performance with money not being a deciding factor, it would be Nvidia now.

Why are they performing worse clock per clock now? Ever since socket 478 we've been on an architecture called "Netburst". Everything from the Northwood, Prescott, Presler, all of it has been Netburst. For comparison, the Pentium-Mobile line(Centrino, for the laptops) has been a different architecture. And of course AMD has their own. Now, Netburst is gone, and we're using "Core" architecture with the Conroe and later CPUs. This new architecture performs better than AMD clock per clock, and clocks higher than AMD. Win Win.

I am no expert, but I do not think that cache can be the deciding factor when it comes to CPU power. It may effect some things, but it might just be faster to get the data you need out of the RAM. Of course it helps, but making a 32mb cache CPU wouldn't necessarily kill your competition. Also, there are heat/power problems with all that extra cache. I think it's a fine balance.

Hope my outdated two cents helped! (look at my sig, I'm an old timer!)

When I was younger and more naive, I thought that Intel was the only serious CPU out there, I thought that AMD was slower due to the slow clock speed, but as we all know (were talking about P4's) AMD was much faster. People still think that way and they gained alot of ground and trust from customers by doing that.
I will always buy AMD's because they are not a sleezy company as Intel is.

Well, now AMD has had the highest clockspeeds for more than a year, i dont see them gaining much ground from that. The high clockspeeds was what destroyed consumers trust to Intel, high clock and low performance didnt make sense for most users.

I bet some of you guys would be interested in hearing an interview with Scott Wasson on the podcast, http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?p=5440681#post5440681.

He gives a good take on AMD's troubles and how they can "get out of the hole" so to speak. Check it out.

Matt

th3 said:

Well, now AMD has had the highest clockspeeds for more than a year, i dont see them gaining much ground from that. The high clockspeeds was what destroyed consumers trust to Intel, high clock and low performance didnt make sense for most users.

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Intel did the high clock and lower gaming performance forever and i could not help my self, I was like everyone else I like to see the big clock numbers more than performance that's what made intel a giant.