The beginning of the end for AMD?

[Khan]

Just because one person buys one product over the other really means nothing here.

Also OEMs are the issue here not builders.

Intel has always had a much more robust OEM market, they actually advertise, I used to sell PC's back in the day when circuit city was still in its prime, and 3 out of 4 people would chose that P4 over and A64 becuase they "trust" intel no mater what I said, this is a trend that continues to this day. "its all about the pentiums"

 

[freeagent]

You've already voted with your wallets which company you want to survive, AMD just does not make a product you want, so no use mourning thier loss if they do go under now, but if you look on the bright side if they do go under you'll still always have the fastest cpu since no one else will be making them.

Thats not true. The real reason why I gave up on AMD is because their n-Force 4 boards clocked great, but they died. I went through 5 boards before I switched to Intel. I was just going to try them.. I bought a top end board and lowend cpu and bunk ram and had a ton of fun. Ive been lucky and only had 1 board die on me, and no other real problems. I do try and keep that old AMD 'feel' by running fast mems and high uncore for supreme low latency to have the best of both worlds

Anyways, point being, AMD ocing was great fun, and I have many fond memories of spanking some fast Intels with relative ease. When you become acustomed to a certain amount of CPU power, it really is hard to go back.. So I continue to root for em

 

[Soulcatcher668]

Intel has always had a much more robust OEM market, they actually advertise, I used to sell PC's back in the day when circuit city was still in its prime, and 3 out of 4 people would chose that P4 over and A64 becuase they "trust" intel no mater what I said, this is a trend that continues to this day. "its all about the pentiums"

There was always THIS , which really hurt market share and therefore customer perception.

 

[mjw21a]

What happened to my signiture rig? My last rig was a Thuban 1090T, current is and FX-8120..... My old chip was faster though

 

[mjw21a]

Thats not true. The real reason why I gave up on AMD is because their n-Force 4 boards clocked great, but they died. I went through 5 boards before I switched to Intel. I was just going to try them.. I bought a top end board and lowend cpu and bunk ram and had a ton of fun. Ive been lucky and only had 1 board die on me, and no other real problems. I do try and keep that old AMD 'feel' by running fast mems and high uncore for supreme low latency to have the best of both worlds

Anyways, point being, AMD ocing was great fun, and I have many fond memories of spanking some fast Intels with relative ease. When you become acustomed to a certain amount of CPU power, it really is hard to go back.. So I continue to root for em

Dude, nForce has nothing to do with AMD other than they're being chipsets for AMD CPU's. You have nVidia to blame for those. The only decent chipsets they ever brought out were the nForce2's. Everything else was cr@p.

Only get AMD chipsets for AMD, or Intel for Intel. Anything else sucks period.

 

[hafa]

The only decent chipsets they ever brought out were the nForce2's. Everything else was cr@p.

I don't know about that. I have fond memories of great overclocks on EPoX Nforce 4 chipset boards w/Socket 939.

 

[mjw21a]

I loved the audio on the old nForce2 boards. Sound quality was awesome. nForce3 & 4 chipsets had a glitch which consistently killed SATA hard drives..... Likewise, nVidia killed off their awesome integrated audio in the 3's and 4's

 

[hafa]

I loved the audio on the old nForce2 boards. Sound quality was awesome. nForce3 & 4 chipsets had a glitch which consistently killed SATA hard drives..... Likewise, nVidia killed off their awesome integrated audio in the 3's and 4's

Agreed on the audio, but haven't experienced any undo drive failures on these boards. We sold hundreds back in the day and many are still in service today...

 

[YoshiMon]

Here is a little bit of news that paints a bit less doom and gloom for AMD:

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/new...-by-october-25th2c-brighter-future-ahead.aspx

What I took away, with the normal dose of anti-PR spin salt, was that there was a culture in AMD that needed to be changed as viewed by the new CEO. Thus the need to 'remove' the CFO and other high level managers/sales staff. (Along with whatever lackeys those managers had backing them and I'm sure a number of innocent bystanders as well.)

And then in tandem with doing that consolidate the rest of the staff and resources and look to restructure. Overall in theory a pretty sound plan. Of course again the truth is a very slippery thing and all the more so in big business so:

a) It remains to be seen if this is an actual move to try to restructure the company to remain an independent business.

b) A move to try to restructure the company to partner with another company that would then allow them access to more capital but still remain somewhat autonomous. (A tricky thing with any business.) Some names like Samsung have been thrown around.

c) A move to prop the company up as best as possible in a move to eventually sell it off in a way that would benefit the majority stockholders 1st and foremost as well as those in charge. Effectively destroying the company.

Time will tell.

 

[Soulcatcher668]

Here is a little bit of news that paints a bit less doom and gloom for AMD:

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/new...-by-october-25th2c-brighter-future-ahead.aspx

Nice article.

 

[freeagent]

Dude, nForce has nothing to do with AMD other than they're being chipsets for AMD CPU's. You have nVidia to blame for those. The only decent chipsets they ever brought out were the nForce2's. Everything else was cr@p.

Only get AMD chipsets for AMD, or Intel for Intel. Anything else sucks period.

That sounds good, except AMD either didnt make their own chipsets at that point. or if they did, they were junk. Ive only used nf2 and nf4 and I thought they were pretty decent..

 

[TeknoBug]

I still have an MSI nForce board in a box, it was flaky at best if I remember and I think I used a Sempron or Athlon II in it.

 

[Archer0915]

Intel has always had a much more robust OEM market, they actually advertise, I used to sell PC's back in the day when circuit city was still in its prime, and 3 out of 4 people would chose that P4 over and A64 becuase they "trust" intel no mater what I said, this is a trend that continues to this day. "its all about the pentiums"

And that is bad business on the part of AMD. They did not get the marketing done properly.

 

[5n4p]

You will see a lot of this across the board with all mid to high end companies

Every company is going to need a restructuring - it's the sign of the times.

Things need to change for more than just AMD - a new way of life approaches

 

[Buddywh]

...
Things need to change for more than just AMD - a new way of life approaches

That's what i'm reading also... sounds like full featured desktop PC's will be a niche market within the next 5 years... maybe sooner.

 

[Archer0915]

That's what i'm reading also... sounds like full featured desktop PC's will be a niche market within the next 5 years... maybe sooner.

Actually they will not be replaced. They will be complimented and perhaps only one real PC will be used in a home. The form factor is evolving though and I expect that the split will come and it will de SFF vs full PC.

AMD is at an advantage here and they need to capitalize on it or they are going to be pretty bad off.

 

[Alaric]

Then there is this take on it
http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/10/analyst-calls-amd-un-investable-downgrades-rating/

 

[freeagent]

Un-investible doesnt sound good. Way to drive a great company into the ground

 

[Buddywh]

... will de SFF vs full PC.

AMD is at an advantage here and they need to capitalize on it or they are going to be pretty bad off.

That's what I meant by 'full-featured': ATX size with discrete graphics.

I suspect most home "PC's" will be all-in-one's. But even that won't be common as laptops are the exclusive home-processing device of every recent (and many not-so-recent) college grad I work with... i think they are far more likely to migrate down to touchpads than up to all-in-ones, much less SFF, since they game exclusively on xBox's or PS3's.

They think of and use their smart phones like I used to a laptop and if I send them something they can't open on it they think I'm the goof ball. This is typical of recent grad's of large universities... Penn, Penn St., Drexel. That's what schools are raising the students to do... compute on the run.

AMD's got a great APU so the all-in-one should be their's except for the marketing. But where they seem to be hurting is a good portable processor for pads and phones: like ARM. AMD has been saying, and the market environment is certainly supporting their guidance: top-end discrete processors just won't matter anymore. The market will be continue to shrink and the cost will be high to very, very high to develop. Not a place for an historically small player like AMD.

 

[TeknoBug]

Yup laptops are turning into the "main home PC" for most people, I have 2 laptops (and a netbook) yet I still have a full PC since I have been building PC's since the mid 90's. If Laptops catch up to the processing power of a full PC, I think we'll see laptops as a standard (if it isn't that far already) and a full fledged laptop is usually cheaper than a full fledged PC and still capable of most tasks including games. My year old Toshiba Satellite (AMD P360 2.4GHz) isn't top notch but can play most games except BF3 and Planetside 2 but can do and run everything else I throw at it. There's a Toshiba Satellite L870 with a 2.7GHz A6 4400M, 8GB ram and a 7520D graphics IGP that should be a great above average gaming laptop, granted it's no alienware but I don't think it even breaks $1000.

This is where AMD can pick up their game since the APU is perfect for that, not sure when we'll see 4 core laptops, there's been some 3 core laptops and they're not that great.

EDIT- well I just stumbled across an A10 4600M Toshiba that is quad core, interesting and it's under $700.