http://news.softpedia.com/news/AMD-Not-Competing-With-Intel-Anymore-Goes-Mobile-237103.shtml


Well, monopolies are never good. Intel is pretty much the only desktop CPU manufacturer leftover for the mainstream population.

But but but but, AMD owns ATi now!

And I AM NOT buying an Nvidia card when it's time to upgrade my PC.

Hipster.

It's about time, really. The only thing AMD had going for it in processing is the budget price range. I'm afraid of what this is going to do to Intel's prices, because despite AMD's failings they were surely helping to hold them back a little.

Why?

That said, I doubt AMD is going to ditch the GPU game where they're still very competitive. :shrug:

Just great, this can't be good at all for the computer industry.

I never used an AMD processor..

Call me elitist but every machine I've ever owned have had Intel CPUs and ATi GPUs.

Never used an AMD CPU, like CD above me, but I have used ATI cards with success. We'll see how this pans out. Maybe someone else will boldly try to enter the CPU market?

My last two CPUs have been Intel, but before that I had a pretty long run with AMD CPUs back when they were actually faster than Intel's offerings. My latest GPU is ATI/AMD, but the two I had before that were nVidia, and the one before that was ATI. Don't make me go back further...I've been building PCs since well before nVidia existed and ATI (a little Canadian semiconductor company that even most techies had never heard of) left the 3-D graphics up to 3dfx. I don't believe in brand loyalty...I only believe in "whatever product gets me what I want at the time."

Only problem with this is Intel also wants to go mobile....

There's also no mention of them doing ARM in there... which means they are going to do Mobile x86... exactly what Intel is trying to do?

Well this won't be good for Intel processor prices. Hopefully they won't gouge us too bad though.

I expect they'll still keep at least a toe in the water (regarding desktop/server market). Unless they're making a loss, I don't see much reason for them to ditch it completely.

This could actually be beneficial for desktops, since good efficiency (performance to energy consumption/heat) is essential in mobile computing. To be successful in that market they'll have to surpass or at least match Intel, and at least match ARM chips (x86 may have enough advantages to lure people away from the more established platforms... if there's negligible performance loss).

Looks like it is time for them to shutter up the factory...

Wow. The Bulldozer chips were really that bad in the end?

Shame. I was hoping for the competition to drive down Intel's prices after the release, but I guess now that's not going to happen.

Craaaap. I hate Intel CPUs...because of how the heatsink/fan gets put on. I thought AMD's was ingenious.

Oh, yeah, also AMD had the price-power ratio thing.

Bulldozers don't appeal to the enthusiast crowd because most games will not make use of all those cores, and the Bulldozer's pricing does not appeal to the casual crowd.

If they could convince developers to make use of all 8 cores they might have a chance, to a point where less cores is a performance hit, but I don't see that ever happening.

Wonderful. I remember the days of the horribly stale and ineffective Pentium 4; I'm sure Intel would love the excuse to slash its R&D budget and this is just the cue it needs. That sort of nostalgia I can do without.

On the bright side, gamers won't need more than Sandy Bridge for a while :glare:

I haven't used an AMD processor for a few years now, and it seems i never will again Hopefully this doesn't contribute to development stagnation.

This... doesn't look good for the CPU market. Hopefully AMD at least tries in some way to put something on the market so Intel's prices don't skyrocket to $1000+ for an i3.

Huh, the future looks interesting now.

I'm running with AMD this will be interesting indeed.

I'm with you on this one. Intel has always been about price gouging and attempting to monopolize the market. AMD caving in is not going to be good for anyone.

I don't know about anyone else, but spending $1,000 for a CPU just because it has Intel's name on it is stupid. Yet that's what we'll be expecting should AMD really be trying to exit the desktop market. When you can get an AMD chip for $300 that has exactly the same clock specs as an Intel chip selling for $1200 the choice is pretty easy.

Maybe something has changed in the last 6 months I haven't been paying attention, but this simply isn't good at all.

Yeah, that was a pretty silly marketing tactic. They knew that consumers used clockspeed to decide which processor was the most powerful, so they came up with an architecture (Netburst) that would allow for high clockspeeds at all costs. One of the many problems with that design was that they had to use a stupid-long pipeline to get those clockspeeds, so when a branch-predict failed a lot of work had to be dumped. Kinda like trying to make your water buckets lighter by cutting holes in them.


Well, it's not as simple as convincing developers. Multi-threading many single-user applications to the point that you'd see a gain with 8 lower-power cores over 4 more powerful ones is not easy. Depending on the type of application it can be REALLY challenging to design software to run across that many processors without threads needing to wait for other threads (to sync on shared data and such). By the time all of the pulsing, waiting, and syncing is done between threads you oftentimes get little advantage from having 2 or 3 cores, much less 8. It's not a matter of wanting to do it...it's a matter of it being pretty difficult. The story with servers (especially request-response/transaction-based services like web and database servers) is different because many separate sessions and processes are running simultaneously and can easily be balanced among processing cores, but single-user apps like games are another animal altogether.


1. The price differences are nowhere close to that. Most of Intel's CPUs that are popular with gamers are in the $250 - $350 range and aren't much more expensive than their AMD counterparts.
2. You can't tell how fast a processor is by its clockspeed unless you're comparing the same series of processors. You have to look at benchmarks. Otherwise a Pentium D 3.4 GHz would be faster than a Core 2 Duo 2.8 GHz, and it's not by a long shot.

I assume this only means the end of AMD CPUs, not ATI GPUs, which still sell fine as far as I know. A Nvidia GPU monopoly would be bad.

Neither is an Intel monopoly good for anyone. Their stuff might be cheap right now (my, how things change in 6 months time) but if AMD drops out they'll just go back to charging $1000 for a 3.2GHz processor like they were before and then you won't have a choice but to feed them the money if you want an upgrade.

what's also bad is that existing AMD procs could also become more expensive if Intel starts jacking up the price (higher demand, limited supply)