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Comment by qeternity | Hacker News Reader

AMD really needs to start competing on price. Match Intel and Nvidia performance, at 75% TCO.

Given early benchmarks are showing that the Ryzen 7 1700X ($390) is performing similarly to the Intel Core i7-6900K ($1050), they definitely are going in that direction.

http://hothardware.com/news/amds-ryzen-7-1700x-delivers-i7-6...

If that's true they are vastly under cutting the market and I do see these cheap prices staying for the next gen.

I could be AMD trying to steal market share.

Which is what they need to do. They need a "rapid" increase in both market share and relevance, and the two are tied together. They can delay making a lot of profits until later. But it looks like AMD's architecture is significantly more cost-effective than Intel's, so even if they have to sell the chips at "only" 70% of Intel's price later on, for the same performance, they could still make significant profit on those chips.

I think they could carve out a niche by being the chip maker that produces a trustworthy computing environment that supports blob-free computing without the equivalent of Intel Management Engine.

That plus your point about TCO could be a nice way of competing with Intel.

That's not a big enough niche to pay for fabs.

AMD are also pushing their custom fabrication. I believe all the current gaming consoles use custom AMD chips.

Although I'm sure there is little profit in that business model, but it would keep the workers busy.

Isn't this essentially the direction they're going? They've been very friendly to open source lately and there new processors and graphics cards are hitting the 75% TCO.

AMD has their own thing called TrustZone[1].

If you read past the marketing speak it is made to allow software to run without the user being able to poke at it. I assume this is for DRM, but who knows what is running there.

[1] https://www.amd.com/en-us/innovations/software-technologies/...

Yes indeed. The current landscape (at least as I glean from the Core Boot people) is that AMD is at least as bad if not worse than Intel.

That's pretty much what they do.

What do you mean by "start"? They already do so and their FX CPUs are cheaper than equivalently performing Ibtel CPUs.

This is exactly what AMD has done for the past decade on their CPUs.

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