Hacker News Reader

Comment by kpil | Hacker News Reader

The last time AMD was competitive, they delivered really good value for money. Yet they were only available in the "enthusiast" market segment as Intel were able to give all OEM strong incentives to not buy AMD.

Is there any chance that they are not having all OEMs by the balls this time too?

View on HN

> Intel were able to give all OEM strong incentives to not buy AMD.

They were bribing and blackmailing OEMs.

If you look around, you can find AM4 platform in prebuilts from some of the biggest PC OEMs. Intel is still the majority of the lineup, of course, but APU systems have given AMD leverage here that they didn't have the last time they had competitive performance. It makes the OEMs offer the platform for an energy efficient/SFF build option, while also giving leeway to do an upgrade down the road.

it's not even that, but in the OEM and server market, there's more than delivering 90% of perforamnce for 50% of the price - there's reliability, driver support and all other costs which means that a higher Intel CPU price might only translate to <5% higher TCO or something like that, in which case I'd have gone with Intel myself (no one got fired for buying IBM/Intel)

The consumer market was also forever growing at the time. Now companies are shipping less and less. Different situation I suppose.

I beg to differ. The last time AMD was competitive, my employer was buying AMD server hardware from HPaq for their VMware environment. Granted, all our desktops/laptops were c2d or early core i-whatever.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com