Seems strange that AMD would keep the desktop market stale for a year.
Will really get anyone on the fence to look into Intel.
Kaveri sounds interesting don't get me wrong but just seems like they are trying to play "copy cat" rather than improving on their current architecture which has been struggling to me.
I know it is still to early to tell if this is the case but what does everyone think about the lack of desktop in 2014? If this happens would it push AMD even farther behind should Kaveri not take off?
It isn't really early to tell, that's part of what I was attempting to be clear about. AMD produces road maps to set expectations for the press and investors (and internal staff so they know the plan). These road maps are executed against and they are accurate to the company's actual plans - this is the same for any tech company. If anything changes with the roadmap, it would be the release date - often times items on road maps slip months back due to delays. Nothing meaningful is ever added though.
I think its basically a concession that AMD no longer sees itself as a viable competitor in the desktop space going forward. I don't think its the sort of thing where they skip a year and come back next year... They have been consistently working on it for years yet the gap has been widening further from Intel, so investing more resources elsewhere couldn't do anything but make that gap accelerate further. I expect this boils down to the economics... If you have a wafer you can make a bunch of chips from, do you invest that wafer in building chips in a market you aren't competitive in and have no price power, or do you invest that wafer in building chips in a market where you have an advantage and have greater price power (the ability to dictate price, rather than being forced to discount in order to appear competitive).
Basically, AMD had to sell Bulldozer/piledriver at lower end Intel prices because that's where its performance levels were at - if they tried to sell it for more then review sites would pulverize the product. If APUs don't have stronger competition in the market, AMD has the power to dictate their price... They don't have to devalue their product to make it a good deal.
I don't like the way things worked out, however ultimately the speed of processor technology development is a product of monetary investment. AMD started by imitating Intel products on the cheap (at a time when processors weren't too complex to reverse engineer), and ended up being a really good option at times - but this locked them into playing Intel's game. At that point, all Intel had to do was throw money (engineers/research) at it until they advanced at a rate that drove AMD out of direct competition - AMDs only hope was getting enough market share so they could invest in staying competitive. They were never able to get their stuff together on that front, some of it due to the market, much of it due to business and management mistakes.
At this point, I don't think there is any meaningful future in AMD CPUs - not in the sense of new traditional desktop processors worth getting excited about. But the APU stuff could go somewhere, they are doing stuff in this area that exploits an advantage... If they execute well enough they could be able to continue investing in and improving it fast enough that they aren't squashed by an APU competitor as well.
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