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When did it go wrong for AMD?
- Thread starter O-P-M
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stealthy123
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I don't understand the people bitching about socket 939, an x2 939 was competitive with the am2 chips all the way till phenom.
It was pretty much the same chip with ddr2 support.
I had an x2 3800+ clocked at 2.8ghz and was perfectly happy with it.
Then in the last year I upgraded to am2+ and ddr2 ram because the prices were dirt cheap.
AMD didn't screw up with 939, people who thought a new socket meant an upgrade did.
the benchmarks didn't make "upgrading" compelling at all, that was why I stuck with my socket 939 for so long. And I gotta say that isn't even close to a mistake by AMD, if anything it was a testament to just how good 939 really was.
It was pretty much the same chip with ddr2 support.
I had an x2 3800+ clocked at 2.8ghz and was perfectly happy with it.
Then in the last year I upgraded to am2+ and ddr2 ram because the prices were dirt cheap.
AMD didn't screw up with 939, people who thought a new socket meant an upgrade did.
the benchmarks didn't make "upgrading" compelling at all, that was why I stuck with my socket 939 for so long. And I gotta say that isn't even close to a mistake by AMD, if anything it was a testament to just how good 939 really was.
Not really. I've heard that AMD has rattled some lawyers to try and change or re-negotiate the agreement. They have to, if they expect to be bought-out. I think they've given up on that.
alg7_munif
Supreme [H]ardness
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Yes, the 60-day ultimatum given by Intel is long gone and AMD is still here selling their CPUs
The problem is exactly what you said. AMD didnt give people an upgrade path. People expecte new CPUs and a new socket to be faster... and it wasn't.
While you were good with your 2.8ghz chip a lot of enthusiasts want more and upgrade more often. I usually do an upgrade of a core part once a year, cpu or videocard, sometimes both. And when needed, new mobo/ram for the new cpu. AMD didn't offer anything to a person like me looking for performance..
While Intels new offering was much much faster. So people left AMD infavor of the C2D chips.
My brother-in-law is a good example, he had a 3800 x2 on an nforce 4-sli board, and he went to a q6600, because he had no upgrade path.
Since there was no 939 x2 5000, or any others, there was no way to upgrade, other then swapping out a whole system rebuild, and if you do that, might as well go for the top.
Atleast with the am2 socket, to am2+ to the am3, the chips have largely been compatible, assuming the board is able to provide the power needed for the Phenom II's. People who have an AM2+ board, and say a 5000 Black edition, can throw in a Phenom II 940 or 955, and get a significant processor upgrade, and keep the rest of the hardware.
Everyone acts butt hurt over the whole socket AM2 thing, but really that had little to nothing to do with the fact that AMD's Athlon X2's got raped by the Core 2 Duo and the Phenom was lack luster to say the least. That also had nothing to do with the fiasco that was the B2 stepping of the CPU.
sirmonkey1985
[H]ard|DCer of the Month - July 2010
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i completely agree.. hell i almost jumped ship to intel after the bs fiasco that the phenom I's were.. but then i ended up not having enough money to rebuild an entire system.. and when i did the phenom II's had come out.. so i ended up sticking with AMD.. was cheaper to buy a phenom II 940 and throw it on my 780g mobo then it was to build an entire system just for a q9650..
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That's always going to happen. Even at the peak of AMD's Athlon 64 production, when AMD had the performance crown uncontested, Intel kicked AMD's ass in sales and revenue.
and I have to lol at saying the Am486 was 386-based. So was the i486.
Gaiden133
[H] Ninja
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IMO, it's when Intel released Conroe and AMD had no answer to it with their lineup of Athlon X2's.
It got even worse with Intel's C2Q outperforming AMD's Phenom.
All in all, I felt like their timing was really horrible. Intel was pushing stuff out consistently and AMD kept delaying, & getting errors on their initial Phenom launch didn't help.
It got even worse with Intel's C2Q outperforming AMD's Phenom.
All in all, I felt like their timing was really horrible. Intel was pushing stuff out consistently and AMD kept delaying, & getting errors on their initial Phenom launch didn't help.
There seemed to be a lot of confusion about the AM486. Some sites have that it was "the same core and microcode" as the Intel 486DX. It was not, but was an effort at a clone based on the AM386*. AMD cobbled together various micro codes it had access to (i386 and i287, plus it's own), and built around that. With the addition of an integrated cache, it had similar performance while running i386 integer code. Floating point lagged significantly, but that's no big surprise pre-Athlon.
* The K5 was AMD's first in-house x86 design and was another disaster, if you want to go into that (summary: very late, prone to overheating and unacceptably buggy). There was no all-new AMD 486 design and AMD did not have access to anything beyond the i386 from Intel. The AM386 and AM486 are a lot closer than the i386 and i486.
SixtyWattMan
Supreme [H]ardness
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Intel's anti-competitive acts while AMD had the performance crown and the release of conroe were definitely their downfall.
I'd say it was getting complacent during the A64 era. They were pricing the A64s/X2s too high for too long, they split the user-base between sockets 754 and 939, which set them up perfectly to getting blind-sided by Conroe.
The embarrassing performances of R600 and Barcelona just solidified things, and the purchase of ATi from a financial perspective came at arguably the worst time for the company.
The embarrassing performances of R600 and Barcelona just solidified things, and the purchase of ATi from a financial perspective came at arguably the worst time for the company.
But I believe that superpi favors intel chips. I don't think it is a fair benchmark when comparing Intel with AMD.
As for my opinion, if I were going to build a new computer today that is powerful enough, and on the cheaper side, I would definitely go Phenom II. Fact of the matter is that for gaming, i7's and Phenom II's are very close. i7 does win, but by a marginal amount. That doesnt justify the additional cost that an i7 will run you. For everything else, yeah, i7 wins but for most people it doesn't make a lick of difference.
Also, as a whole, i7 hasn't been that successful. Among enthusiasts it has, but to the average joe, they only know the word "Intel", which is the majority of the market. Intel is still busy depleting their Core 2 supplies and doesn't even need to push i7 right now.
AMD could have been more successful, not because they had or didn't have the superior chip, but the way they marketed themselves. Intel is a marketing giant, you see commercials everyday so that's what gets engraved into people's heads. You or I may have known that the Athlon64 was the superior chip in every which way, but people who didn't know would not buy it simply because it was not an Intel. It's stupid, but it's reality.
As long as amd is backwards compatible with am2+ and am3 then amd is off to a good start. No one likes to keep switching motherboards for every new chip that comes out. I think in the future with amd we might see dual gpu on 1 pcb as becoming standard later on like how dual cpus are and quads and stuff. Hopefully we see a major boost in power in the next cpu. Won't probably be for awhile.
Well all of you are bitching that the Intel chip is better then the AMD alternative you all forgot you realize that with out AMD being right behind or in rare case's on top of Intel CPU performance the CPU market prices would be totally out to lunch. In short if you own the market you can charge what ever and people still will buy.
So then that would now make AMD worth wile of every one (AMD or Intel users) because they keep Intel on a competitive edge and further more maybe AMD has to work harder for there product to be superior, maybe they will come threw with a break through you never know, and that can't all be necessarily dictated on how much R&D money is spent remember thoughts are free.
Now that brings me to the quote of the day:
really the truth of AMD's failure to capture the market like Intel, you look around on different games and in the first few mins you see : Runs Great on the Intel 4 Extream Edition CPU: and so and so...
Well anyway I was just crying out to say appreciate the fact the Intel actually has decent competition to keep that competitive price in parts and you never know one day AMD may have the performance crown once more as long as they keep pumping out CPU's.
BTW I moved from a 3000+ XP to a Core Duo E8400 but the price was right, thanks AMD
-Kato
So then that would now make AMD worth wile of every one (AMD or Intel users) because they keep Intel on a competitive edge and further more maybe AMD has to work harder for there product to be superior, maybe they will come threw with a break through you never know, and that can't all be necessarily dictated on how much R&D money is spent remember thoughts are free.
Now that brings me to the quote of the day:
really the truth of AMD's failure to capture the market like Intel, you look around on different games and in the first few mins you see : Runs Great on the Intel 4 Extream Edition CPU: and so and so...
Well anyway I was just crying out to say appreciate the fact the Intel actually has decent competition to keep that competitive price in parts and you never know one day AMD may have the performance crown once more as long as they keep pumping out CPU's.
BTW I moved from a 3000+ XP to a Core Duo E8400 but the price was right, thanks AMD
-Kato
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There seemed to be a lot of confusion about the AM486. Some sites have that it was "the same core and microcode" as the Intel 486DX. It was not, but was an effort at a clone based on the AM386*. AMD cobbled together various micro codes it had access to (i386 and i287, plus it's own), and built around that. With the addition of an integrated cache, it had similar performance while running i386 integer code. Floating point lagged significantly, but that's no big surprise pre-Athlon.
* The K5 was AMD's first in-house x86 design and was another disaster, if you want to go into that (summary: very late, prone to overheating and unacceptably buggy). There was no all-new AMD 486 design and AMD did not have access to anything beyond the i386 from Intel. The AM386 and AM486 are a lot closer than the i386 and i486.
Actually the AMD AM486 gave you the same performance for like 25% less in cost
Upgraded more Deskpro 33s than I could shake a stick at.
ETA: God I remember I think it was something Tach, like WinTach that we benched everything with back then.
FPU may have been rubbish already back then, the benches we ran didn't show it.
I even remember some dual socket 3 board we pulled out of a server. It had Intel chips in it, we tried AM486s and 5x86s, I don't think they worked. That board had some crazy glue logic in between the chips.
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You do understand that the AM486 came out 4 years after the i486 was introduced, right? Intel was already shipping the first Pentium when the AM486 was launched and the i486DX-50 shipped almost 2 years before the AM486DX-33/40 was launched. And no, the AM486DX-40 chips were not competitive with the Pentiums. It took until the 5x86-133 (a relabeled AM486) over 2.5 years later to pass the by then ancient Pentium-66.
The AM486DX-40 was hardly a competitive chip at launch. It was slower than the 2 year old i486DX-50, and was priced reflecting that. It's exactly what I posted above and you initially responded to:
pxc said:
Newsflash: AMD undercuts prices on uncompetitive chips against an older generation of the competition. Wait, that's not news.
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You realize I was pretty much agreeing with you the whole time? But hey, straw man away.
Heh, I guess half my life ago kinda blurs things. I just remember with the money I had, AMD was what I bought, gave me a significant performance boost form what I replaced, and was inexpensive, (and we'll not mention the K5... EVER!)
Still, I grant you they were late, have been late, and continue to be late when it comes to CPU performance.
Still, I grant you they were late, have been late, and continue to be late when it comes to CPU performance.
stealthy123
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I don't know, I spent my money on ram and hard drives and other stuff, an x2@2.8 was plenty fast for anything I did or do, including gaming.
Hell, I only game at 1600x1200 anyways. For my usage, it wasn't until i7 or phenom II that I could honestly look at it and say it is time to upgrade.
I quit the whole upgrade just to upgrade thing when I had kids, now it needs to be compelling and a need for me to upgrade stuff.
Don't get me wrong, core2 was badass, but it wasn't worth building a whole new system for the performance, not for me anyways. It just wasn't 1000 dollars faster, and it woulda took that much to upgrade when it came out.
maybe if I had a bunch of disposable income I would sing a different tune, I don't know.
TheScavenger
Limp Gawd
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Your situation is the same situation a lot of us are in...ie would like to upgrade for the fun factor but the performance gain doesn't justify the expense. Although it would be fun to tweak I really don't think I would see a performance difference if I upgraded the system in my sig to a i7 setup.
Cheers to a low expendable income
Cheers to a low expendable income
I bought a 5200+ for like 140$ and I bought a E2160 for like 67$ on the same day. 2.5 years later I sold my 5200+ for 45$ that is all I could get hustling on ebay. I sold the E2160 at the same time for 60$ SO you have to ask what is value, To me the E2160 is more valuable.
I overclocked the E2160 nearly 100% and I could go from 1.8 to 3.2 on stock volts~! I could barely get the 5200+ to go from 2.6 to 3.0 and be stable and it was the F2 stepping model wich was supposed to be the good overclocker.If 300 to 400 mhz is a good overclcock according to amd then sure I guess it was.....
Simply I will not ever buy amd again as its not a good value for me.
When people talk back and forth about intel and amd it reminds me of the whole PC and mac argument. THe discussion goes here and there and usually changes subject as soon as Intel throws out some numbers that are big really big vs the amd then its yada yada and the end of the discussion they mumble something about amd is better for gaming with no real numbers etc to back it up and that is the end of the discussion because they dont want to hear anything else. The same with Pc vs mac discussions, the subject gets changed when people say PC can do this and do that, more powerful, less limmiting, can do more, upgradable, cheaper etc etc. and the mac person mumbles something about final cut pro and photoshop etc. and thats it. No matter what you say to a mac fan AKA an AMD fan the discussion always goes off topic when its undenyable that intel has them beat at every single turn every single turn!
So amd is cheaper and so its better..... wait a minute you mean if you buy an amd chip for 150$ when it first comes out you are gauranteed in a year or two its going to be almost worthlesss then yes amd is cheaper, at times... but to a person who wants a new amd chip it sucks as the value drops quickly and to tell you th etruth they start thinking why did they get an amd chip anyway when the intel chips at the time blow them out of the water, and if they invested 40$ more dollars when they bouth the chip and went intel the resale value when they are looking to upgrade will be mor ethan the difference when they bought it.
Sorry there is really no argument as to amd is better they just are not.
I overclocked the E2160 nearly 100% and I could go from 1.8 to 3.2 on stock volts~! I could barely get the 5200+ to go from 2.6 to 3.0 and be stable and it was the F2 stepping model wich was supposed to be the good overclocker.If 300 to 400 mhz is a good overclcock according to amd then sure I guess it was.....
Simply I will not ever buy amd again as its not a good value for me.
When people talk back and forth about intel and amd it reminds me of the whole PC and mac argument. THe discussion goes here and there and usually changes subject as soon as Intel throws out some numbers that are big really big vs the amd then its yada yada and the end of the discussion they mumble something about amd is better for gaming with no real numbers etc to back it up and that is the end of the discussion because they dont want to hear anything else. The same with Pc vs mac discussions, the subject gets changed when people say PC can do this and do that, more powerful, less limmiting, can do more, upgradable, cheaper etc etc. and the mac person mumbles something about final cut pro and photoshop etc. and thats it. No matter what you say to a mac fan AKA an AMD fan the discussion always goes off topic when its undenyable that intel has them beat at every single turn every single turn!
So amd is cheaper and so its better..... wait a minute you mean if you buy an amd chip for 150$ when it first comes out you are gauranteed in a year or two its going to be almost worthlesss then yes amd is cheaper, at times... but to a person who wants a new amd chip it sucks as the value drops quickly and to tell you th etruth they start thinking why did they get an amd chip anyway when the intel chips at the time blow them out of the water, and if they invested 40$ more dollars when they bouth the chip and went intel the resale value when they are looking to upgrade will be mor ethan the difference when they bought it.
Sorry there is really no argument as to amd is better they just are not.
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^
Ouch. Bummer price on the resell value on the AMD 5200+
But you also have to consider that at the time the e2160 was Intel's low end and the AMD 5200+ was AMD's high end.
I'm no marketing expert or anything but I do notice that the high end components will lose value much faster than the low end components prices. Not only that but if the low end is already dirt cheap it doesn't really budge much.
That is what I try to tell people who ask me to build them computers with the highest end components.
If you had bought like an Intel e4xxx or e6xxx you can see their value as drop as well. I see them in the for sale section often below $80.
At the time when you bought your 5200+ I do agree it wasn't a good value. AMD wasn't pulling the right moves with AM2. However today would be a different story.
I think if you want to buy a CPU with a good resell value then it should be a CPU within the low end, mid end, or higher mid end range. You can always count on new CPUs coming out and driving the last high end CPUs prices to drop.
Ouch. Bummer price on the resell value on the AMD 5200+
But you also have to consider that at the time the e2160 was Intel's low end and the AMD 5200+ was AMD's high end.
I'm no marketing expert or anything but I do notice that the high end components will lose value much faster than the low end components prices. Not only that but if the low end is already dirt cheap it doesn't really budge much.
That is what I try to tell people who ask me to build them computers with the highest end components.
If you had bought like an Intel e4xxx or e6xxx you can see their value as drop as well. I see them in the for sale section often below $80.
At the time when you bought your 5200+ I do agree it wasn't a good value. AMD wasn't pulling the right moves with AM2. However today would be a different story.
I think if you want to buy a CPU with a good resell value then it should be a CPU within the low end, mid end, or higher mid end range. You can always count on new CPUs coming out and driving the last high end CPUs prices to drop.
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stealthy123
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I am sorry you think that way, but I disagree completely.
and I think the whole thing was more an error on your part than it was something wrong with AMD.
I can get a ton for my 939 stuff now that it is pretty rare and people want to keep their older systems.
hell I sold off my 939 extras and ended up making enough to build an entire am2+ system from scratch. Re-used the PSU, but ended up buying a new hard drive too. And when I buy a phenom II for next to nothing in the next month or so, I am going to end up with a hell of a system for what ended up being peanuts.
There is no way to spin that negatively.
Again, I am sorry you think you got screwed, but buying smart with AMD has served me immensely well.
One thing amd does has right though is the price/performance ratio. I could get a better videocard, hard drive, ram, or anything else on top of the cpu and it would most likely come out less than a intel. A lot of stuff on intels side is doubled the price.
I believe nothing really went wrong with AMD, it is just Intel delivered with a great processor line(the Core 2 series) that out performed the best what AMD had availible. If AMD could create a better processor than Intel's, I'm sure people would be more than happy to switch back to AMD like they did before with the AMD 64s came out.
vanilla_guerilla
Supreme [H]ardness
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it was way before that. it was when the athlons and then xp's came out. and all intel had was p3 that could/would not run faster than 1ghz. and then, of course, p4.
Something went wrong. Losing $4.25 billion dollars in two years is neither normal nor sustainable. They lost another $308 million in the first quarter of this year, to total more than $4.5 billion dollars in the last nine quarters.
And nothing's really gone wrong?
And nothing's really gone wrong?
Tualatin P3s came out around the same time as the P4 and had versions up to 1.4GHz, definitely in the AXP era.
Good thread. Haven't upgraded in a few years but looking closely to go Phenom II. Hoping the differential price won't be much as I plan to sell a few of my socket 939's systems... 2 are x2 4200's and 2 are Opteron (165 & 170). Also have 12 gigs of *unused* GSkill HZ DDR2 memory purchased 2 years ago, lol.
Would you guys sell the boards & cpu's as a bundle or go separate? The boards are becoming much more scarce than the cpu's.
Would you guys sell the boards & cpu's as a bundle or go separate? The boards are becoming much more scarce than the cpu's.
Eva_Unit_0
[H]ard|Gawd
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anyone who is saying that the k6-2 was competitive with the Pentium II is either blatantly biased for amd, or never had both. I had a 400mhz k6-2 and a 400mhz PII. The pentium 2 absolutely demolished the k6-2 in anything that involved floating point calculations. The PII had a monster (for the time) FPU, while the k6-2's wasn't even pipelined. Sure, the k6-2 could compete in things like games that were pretty much just graphics card limited, but as soon as the FPU came into play the k6-2 was an embarrassment.
Then of course we have to consider the platforms: would you rather have a PII + 440bx setup, or a k6-2 + shit-tastic super 7 motherboard setup?
Then of course we have to consider the platforms: would you rather have a PII + 440bx setup, or a k6-2 + shit-tastic super 7 motherboard setup?
From what I've been told (from friends working at both companies as Ph.D. engineers), Intel began hiring talent away from AMD in earnest about six years ago. AMD had cash, but was simply slow to react or disinterested in doing so. Intel also began to leverage more engineering talent abroad, something AMD could not or would not do.
The problem has gotten worse, many of the best and brightest at AMD are now GlobalFoundries.
The problem has gotten worse, many of the best and brightest at AMD are now GlobalFoundries.
Which is ironically chaired by none other than Hector Ruiz.
AMD did react: by buying ATI to try and unseat Intel in the graphics chip market. History shows us they failed.They never had a great amount of cash; the highest reserve I see is during 1FQ2006, where they had about 2.6 billion. This is a big number, but it's also about as much as they post for a loss each year. They wouldn't be able to keep the company running for more than a year on those reserves.
Actually I did... and what I said was...
Note I did mention the FPU also.
Yes, I had a 350, 450 and the K6-3+ 450, on probably had the shittiest SS7 board out there, the FIC 503+ (I'm sure Dan_D will tell you horror stories about this thing, but we went through that in another thread.) It served me well until august of '02, and I have a lot of good memories with my setup.
If I sound like I'm defending AMD, I'm not. I think they've made poor choices and that is abundantly clear given the position they find themselves in now. I AM defending the choices I made when it comes to PC hardware that has served me, personally, well in the past. I have dealt with incompatibilities, OS patches, 3DNow! drivers, & lackluster performance... which ironically, was what brought me to [H] in the first place. I honestly learned more about computers with that machine that I have prior or since.
Eva_Unit_0
[H]ard|Gawd
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Oh I certainly agree with that. AMD, especially in the pre-k8 days, had one clear advantage: price. You could get a chip that was almost as fast as intel's offerings for a lot less money. I sound like I'm bashing AMD but that's not the case; in fact, 2 of my 3 main systems use AMD chips (an X2 4000+ and an Athlon XP 2000+) and I've always been very happy with them. But ultimately, AMD has always been a "bargain" company. The K8 vs. Netburst era is really the only part of AMD's history where they had a decidedly superior product (with a small caveat: the early athlons were faster than the early P3's, but the crappy chipsets made it not worth the trouble).
Also, I had the VA-503+ too. It sucked every bit as much as you've said. I actually never had too many stability issues as far as cpu/ram went, but it had horrible agp issues for me. Only a few select agp cards would work at all, and even then I had to disable pretty much all of the agp features to get working 3d acceleration. I think the best card I ever got to work was a 16MB TNT.
I did have a SS7 board that I really liked, though. It was an engineering sample board that I salvaged from a friend's parent's company (they were restructuring and they had to get rid of a lot of stuff) that I think was supposed to go into some sort of set-top multimedia box or something. It was ATX (yes! An ATX SS7 board!) and used the SIS 530 chipset. It didn't have an agp slot, which kinda sucked, but at the time you could still get decent pci cards. That board rocked. It was surprisingly bug-free and stable.
I can't speak to the hiring situation currently at AMD, but one of the big reasons AMD make such great leaps over K6 with the Althon lines was they inherited a lot of the engineers from DEC Alpha when Compaq sold them for scrap.
Very possibly for the reasons you state, AMD has not been able to make that leap forward again since Athlon64 showed up. Rather they've spent several generations iterating on a good, but somewhat dated architecture.
TheCommander
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Since AMD is now Global Foundries, is that the same for ATI?