The Loyalty to AMD’s GPU Product Among AMD CPU Buyers Is Decreasing

Also, as far as I understand the open source driver is only included with Linux Kernels 4.7+ while Ubuntu 16.04 is on 4.4 (16.10 is on 4.8). So if you want to use the open source driver you have to pick your distribution carefully.

I'm glad they're increasingly open, and it's good to see the excellent work happening in the radeon drivers et al. I've just been burned enough by them that my aversion has become quite deep seated. That and so many things favour CUDA instead of OpenCL for acceleration, which is incredibly annoying (especially as it's possible to leverage even inbuilt Intel GFX for that in addition to the main GFX card)

My last rig was all AMD, and while it was really powerful for the time it was built, it was basically a space-heater. The power supply on my current machine wouldn't even run my old computer at idle. I have a philosophical issue with the way that Nvidia and Intel handle their Linux drivers and interact with the open-source community, but after 7 years with a computer that sounded like a jet engine, I just wanted silence.

I know it seems disingenuous to compare a 7 year old computer to a modern one, but the TDP of AMD products has not improved much during that time. Plus, my computer spends most of it's time near-idle, and Intel and Nvidia look better the lower the utilization. The fans in my new rig don't even spin up unless I'm doing something rather resource intensive, like playing game.

So, despite my misgivings about Intel, there was no chance I was going to with AMD. The Bulldozer architecture is terrible. Bulldozer hasterrible performance, regardless of whether you measured actual performance, or performance per watt. The only reason I considered AMD was because they enable virtualization on all of their processors (or at least the ones I was considering), whereas Intel only allows virtualization on Xeon and K-series processors.

My biggest issue right now is that Nvidia takes steps to prevent their non-Quadro cards from working in VFIO passthrough. I could have just as easily gone AMD, which I understand works much better with VFIO; the main reason I went with Nvidia for graphics was because I got the 970 for a song. Plus, after years of using AMD with Linux, I don't really trust AMD drivers to work. Nvidia drivers might be closed-source, but they work as long I wait a week to upgrade after a new driver is released.

The Zen architecture seems like it will hit all the right notes for me, as long as AMD maintains their welcoming approach to virtualization.

The electricity cost will in itself mean in maybe a year or so they'll cost more than an equivalent Nvidia/intel card.

Also not sure how the hotter-running AMDs affect their life, but it's possible it's considerable...

Being honest, AMD disappointed me, it was my first AMD GPU, that I purchased after all the pain of nVidia Optimus, and... AMD managed to outdo nVidia in how shitty they are.

* All cards and models have terrible power usage and heat.

* Drivers, both on Windows and Linux still aren't decently stable, on my Windows I had to switch drivers SEVERAL times depending on what game I wanted to play, because with each game it had a different serious bug.

* AMD software (not just drivers) crash a lot on my machine. No other software behave like that.

* AMD tried to "pretend" they don't have too much power usage, on the 380X case they just put a tiny TDP limit for a beastly GPU, so it all the time keeps throttling due to power limits (even when increasing them... I am looking now for information on how to edit the TDP beyond the card defaults), the 380X TDP is the same as the 380, despite it having double the RAM and having more transistors to power.

* AMD RX480 "tdp cheat" instead was to add only a single cable, pretend the card didn't had too much power usage, and let it melt people's PCI-e slots by pulling 7.7A from slots rated to 5.5A

* AMD distribution network is terrible, they make zero effort to sell around the world, meanwhile nVidia and Intel trounces them, not only in marketing, but by reaching local companies to do distribution deals, for example I paid for my 380X the same price as a GeForce 970... (this was one month before RX480 launch). When nVidia launched the 1080 they called the local media, and told them what price the retailers were supposed to sell the 1080 (even if they ran out of stock), a price that was slightly cheaper than AMD Fury cards...

* AMD and partners support just suck, I asked the SIZE of my card, and their support instead told me to "RMA" it, I tried to explain I wanted information, not an RMA, and they refused to help... when I asked about the TDP, then thigns got worse, they got even more staunch that I should just return the card (and eat the shipping costs to US myself!)

* AMD official forums has employees spouting bullshit (like claiming in a huge thread of people complainign about the 380X, that it was the hardware on the complainers machines that was defective, withotu realizing that he just accidentally painted the whole 380X product line as shitty, since there is lots of people complaining of common issues, and if lots of people have the same issues, and is a hardware issue, then the hardware that is crap... also, on the forums making ANY negative comment about AMD, get you attacked, people claim you are nVidia shill or worse, I even got banned from AMD chat after I asked how to circunvent a driver bug that was preventing me from setting my CRT resolution correctly, because they didn't wanted me talking in public about negative things).

The new architecture may change things, but for now, that's it. They might have started losing market due to shady tactics from the competitors, but the nail in the coffin was the botched bulldozer. that had consequences felt on every series down the road, including unrealistic power consumption per unit.

I ended up going with Intel, but if I had decided to go with AMD, I would have spent a while figuring out which CPU to go with.

I hope AMD simplifies its product line when Zen comes out and gets rid of the confusing nomenclature and the low-end crap that clutters everything up.

Maybe there was a pattern of brand-loyal, sufficiently rich gamers who made a hobby out of building a new system at the very top end of AMDs offerings whenever a new generation Radeons came out. Those would not find an excuse for an upgrade this year because the latest generation of Radeons tops out lower than previous generations.

But this explanation attempt breaks down completely when I try to back it up with the numbers from the article. The way I understand them, the average AMD/AMD system has actually become more expensive, suggesting that AMD lost more at the low end. But I have similar problems with the main conclusion of the article: what I see in those tables is that the Radeon fraction has dropped faster on Intel machines than on AMD CPUs. With this in mind I would rather conclude that brand loyalty is even more important for AMD than it used to be, it's just that with shrinking general popularity of Radeons, the CPUs get less of a helping hand.