AMD gives up?

William Muriithi william.muriithi-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
Fri Mar 23 16:57:35 UTC 2012


Hugh,

Top posting as I am not responding to any particular paragraph.

That was a very good update on what has been happening with AMD.  Wish
I read last month, I picked up an Intel netbook, I should have shopped
around for an AMD netbook.

Hope they will stay in the market, else Intel plan for Itanium will be
fulfilled, which would be a sad thing.

That being said, I think they would not get too comfortable either way
because of ARM effect.  That company actually seem to be what is
influencing their strategies these days

Regards,

William

>
> [Note: I have no inside knowledge.  This is guesswork on my part.]
>
> If they didn't price their chips so low, nobody would buy them.  But they
> price them so low that they don't make money.  Not a game that can be
> played forever.
>
> They tried to "pivot" with fusion: OK processors fused with decent video.
> Good idea.  It just hasn't been enough.  And it came after too long a
> delay.
>
> - for Linux users, there have been annoying driver problems.
>
>  + It took a year before the open driver code could handle sound over
>    HDMI.  It took reverse engineering rather than the promised AMD
>    disclosure.
>
>  + the closed source driver has not been updated to match kernel
>    changes in a timely way.
>
>  + on Ubuntu, my go to distro for closed source driver support, some
>    Ubuntu bug has prevented loading the AMD driver on my HTPC box
>    for many months (six?).
>
> - There is a reasonable HTPC niche that Atom + ION filled but the
>  E-350 could have replaced with ease.  Didn't happen.  Is it because
>  that niche is more apparent than real?  Even the Atom + ION
>  offerings seem to have shrunk.
>
> - Ditto for the netbook world: the C-60 is a great chip and isn't
>  hobbled by restrictions placed by Intel to protect the market for
>  their higher-end chips.
>
>  But the netbook market seems to be disappearing.  I don't understand
>  why.  Perhaps because regular notebooks have become so inexpensive.
>  Maybe they never sold well but vendors pushed them as the next big
>  thing.  Perhaps because the mindshare has been taken over by
>  tablets.  This one is a real puzzle to me.
>
>  You really had to look for a C-50 or C-60 based netbook.  I bought
>  one last summer.  It only cost $229 because the mainline stores
>  (Best Buy / Future Shop, Staples) didn't realize that this was
>  actually a premium device and could not wait to drop it (unlike
>  ordinary netbooks, this had 1280x720 screen, HDMI-out, decent video
>  chip).
>
>
> - One success: a lot of low-end notebooks have E-350 or even E-300
>  processors.  This surprises me since I don't think that they are
>  powerful enough for what I expect of a notebook.
>
> - Most scary: Intel's built-in graphics HD-3000 seems quite powerful
>  enough for most ordinary tasks.  In a couple of months Intel will
>  introduce new chips with much improved built-in graphics.  So AMD's
>  particular edge is going to be diminished.
>
> - apparently AMD has had a lot of trouble with the chip foundries.
>  Global Foundries, spun out from AMD years ago, hasn't delivered chip
>  volumes in a timely fashion nor with decent yields.  TSMC has had
>  troubles too.  AMD just spent a small fortune totally cutting the
>  cord with GF.  Intel has their own fabs and is considered to be the
>  industry leader.
>
> I feel that we really need an x86 source other than Intel.  I think
> that x86's success is due to how AMD and Intel have pushed each other
> to greater and greater performance.
> --
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