Has AMD's Clock Run Out?

Times are tough, but I sure hope not. First to 64bit, first to multicore x86, first to on-chip memory controller, first to APU. We need them to keep pushing the envelope.

I'd love to see AMD at a 22nm process with Intel and then compare them. They've managed to stay close even two process generations behind(The chip that just came out today is at 32nm).

Sad.

If AMD wasn't there in 2004, forcing Intel to (effectively) drop the Itanic and do what customers actually wanted - the AMD64 platform - we'd either be much farther back now in terms of x86; Or would be much farther in terms of ARM; (or both).

AMD's gut to do AMD64 helped us all.

I am planning on building a mini-itx system with a 65watt A10 chip sometime soon, but AMD's trinity didn't launch with mini-itx mobo's and the 65 watt chips aren't on newegg yet.

The small form factor gaming/htpc market could be a good one for AMD, but they haven't been able to get any other companies to build them in volume. Usually you get the eeeBox or something underpowered using an E-350. Heck, HP is sticking those in full desktop cases which is absurd.

All the innovation left in the PC market seems to be on tablets and ultrabooks, not on the desktop at all. AMD hasn't pushed as hard on either form factor and it's hurt.

Also, why hasn't AMD done what nvidia did and become an ARM chipmaker? Tegra has sold well enough for nVidia and an ARM desktop box could be quite competitive in the next few years for the average user.

I don't know if AMD has anyone to blame but themselves. Over the past few years, I kept listening to the statements of their CEO's, and I got the impression that they "don't get it", and aren't very visionary.

When they were supposed to do something about the mobile market, they said they will "wait and see". That was even after Nvidia did the right move and created Tegra. Nvidia was clearly a more visionary company than AMD, and Nvidia will survive because of this. It might even out-survive Intel because of their move to ARM. AMD won't. They'll be crushed by both Intel and ARM chip makers.

If games consoles do well in the next few years AMD will do okay. The Wii U has AMD graphics, the PS4 will and the XBOX successor is rumored to have AMD too.

I wonder what the market effect will be if AMD exits the picture entirely. Once Intel has near-total market share for PC chips, wouldn't they become a prime antitrust target?

The thing about AMD is that for every advantage it has two or more disadvantages. For example, Trinity rocks but the number of laptop models available with it is staggeringly low and in most cases you have to make due with lowend specs like crappy screens, no SSD option and a case which feels like it was made from recycled Compaq PCs from the 1990s.

Which is ironic since Trinity could drive a retina-like display without a discrete GPU on the side, yet I could only find a handful of Trinity laptops with optional 1080p displays and two weren't available stateside. The only performance unit I could find was made by MSI.

There's nothing like the Zenbook or the ENVY15 available, so at the end the problem isn't a compromise on CPU power alone but on nearly everything else too. So you have to choose: either you get a good laptop or an AMD laptop, and that's not fair.

I guess AMD should start working more closely with OEMs to make sure its APUs are available on products that are not all bargain-bin units but at least some mid-to-high end units with good features and build quality.

That or do like MS with the Surface and make their own highend laptops and tablets.

I don't buy this story at all, mainly because AMD never could fight Intel in a straight up fight. AMD is at least an order of magnitude a smaller company than Intel, so much so that Intel spent more money on R&D (http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2011...) than AMD makes in total revenue (http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=74093&p=irol...) last year.

That isn't even about monopolistic business practices, decisions, or market forces. You are comparing two companies operating on effectively different planes of existence. Intel owns the instruction set, has the most advanced silicon fabs in the world (and still makes their chips in house) and spends more on R&D than AMD even makes. And all Intel does is make CPUs.

Meanwhile, AMD bought ATI and took a tremendous gamble on APUs. They are just starting to mature their APU line with Trinity in the last few weeks, and are still reeling from integrating two large companies together like that. They had to sell their own fabs off and couldn't even make their most recent generation of GPUs at Global Foundries because they aren't keeping up anymore. On that front, the 7000 series graphics cards (from my objective viewpoint) basically crushed Nvidia for the first time in a while. They were first to market, as a result didn't have major shortages, and price cut at the appropriate times to keep their products competitive. It took Nvidia almost half a year to have their GPU line out after AMD, and their chips, at competitive prices, are almost exclusively openGL / graphics devices, being beaten in GPGPU operations by the old 500 series and easily by the 7000 series because they tried going many core limited pipeline over more generic cores in the 500 or 7000 series that were better at arbitrary GPU compute tasks.

So they are doing really well in graphics. And their APUs are really good graphics chips too. The only flaw in AMD right now is that they are floundering on the cpu fabrication front as badly as Nvidia did with their graphics line (only with their cpus). They eat power, they are effectively 1.5 generations of fab tech behind, and the bulldozer architecture is weak in floating point and serial operations.

That doesn't ruin a company. Hopefully next year is the year they really start moving forward, because I really think AMD is the company to finally really merge gpu and cpu components into some kind of register / pipeline / alu soup that can really revolutionize the industry (imagine SIMD instruction extensions to x64 that behave like opencl parallel operations and have the normal processor cores work on register ranges and vectors like a gpu, rather than just having a discrete gpu and cpu on one die).

Even barring that kind of pipe dream, Steamroller is shaping up to be sound. It finally gets a die shrink AMD desperately needs to stay competitive, if only to 28nm, and finally puts GCN into their APU graphics instead of the 6000 series era VLIW architecture.

They can't really stand up and fight Intel head on anymore, because Intel got on the ball again, and their cpus are crushing AMD in a lot of use cases, especially power usage. But AMD still has significantly better graphics, and are leveraging it, and they are finally getting over the ATI growing pains, so I'd wager they are still in the game, if only barely. They have a lot of potential still.

Footnote: I really think market is a big reason AMD is falling behind. The Ultrabook campaign is stealing wealthy pc buyers from them, and that is where chip makers get a majority of their profits (look at the high end mobile i7 chips selling for a thousand bucks). Desktop sales are abyssmal besides OEM systems or businesses. Intel wins at getting business contracts just by size alone, they just have more reach. Desktop enthusiasts can bank on AMD being a cost effective platform, but the wow factor lies in Intel chips, even at the premium, and they steal that market too. AMD doesn't even do well in the cheap HTPC market because their chips burn so much power. They are in a crossroads where all their target markets are either becoming obsolete or they are losing ground, and not because they have bad products, but because their perceptions and influence are growing worse.

Right now, AMD is really strong in mid ranges. Mid range laptops with a trinity APU are really good and extremely cost effective (I had a friend buy an A8 based Toshiba because it was $500 cheaper than a comparable Intel machine that could run League of Legends). Piledriver is good enough in the desktop space to recommend one of the 4 or 6 core variants to friends looking for a budget PC gaming experience, because they are pretty much more than enough with a proper overclock for anything major. But AMD has (from my experience) a bad image right now as a dying company and as a maker of budget goods, even when their GPUs kick butt and their desktop CPUs can (at least according to the recent Phoronix Piledriver FX benchmark) hold ground against even Intels best Ivy Bridge offerings in some cases at almost half the price.

TLDR: I guess after graduating college I had withdrawal on writing essays. This is a really long wall of text, holy bacon.

Perhaps, but we don't know yet. We don't know if "Hondo"(AMD) will compete with "Clover Trail"(Intel) for Win 8 tablets because they might really be competitively priced. Further we don't know why those two are Windows 8 only currently. There might be a Linux tablet in the future for "Hondo" but "Clover Trail" might not because of the PowerSGX graphics core.

Also I've spent most of my evening reading reviews of the new AMD CPU they released and it is looking good for budget enthusiasts.

I agree with this article, I don't even consider buying AMD-equipped machines these days whereas in the past I always bought AMD.

I hope not, I just purchased an AMD FX-8150 8 Core Processor, Gigabyte Motherboard and 16GB of RAM for $399. So far seems like a good machine. Performance is not as good as an i7, but it's quite a bit cheaper.

Did Athlon and opteron really do well or did net burst do really bad?

I want AMD to continue to compete and push but one bad architecture takes a while to overcome. Bulldozer++ needs to deliver.

This is great news - clockless architectures are the way of the future.

Another way of looking at it is that AMD was always David to Intel's goliath. Intel screwed up big time with the Pentium 4; they designed the architecture for an extremely high clock rate, and ran headlong into a thermal dissipation brick wall. The Itanium, Intel's strange attempt to kill the x86 architecture which had brought them so much money, was another huge blunder. AMD exploited these opportunities. But unless Intel makes another big mistake, capitalism will do its thing and force AMD out of the market.

There was an announcement that AMD will make ARM-based chips in the near future. That niche might have some more air supply than the one they're in currently. However, they'll have a lot of competitors in the ARM space, so who knows.

I see what you did with that title.