Intel CPU Prices Stagnate As AMD Sales Decline 252
crookedvulture writes "Over the past few years, AMD's desktop processors have struggled to keep up with Intel's. AMD has slashed prices to make its chips more appealing, but Intel has largely held firm. Three years of historical data shows that Intel CPU prices have remained stagnant, especially for models that cost $200 and up. AMD chips, on the other hand, tend to fall in price steadily after they first hit the market. Some drop by up to 43% in the first year. This trend is a byproduct of the unhealthy competitive landscape in the desktop CPU arena, and it's been great for Intel's gross margin. Unfortunately, it's not so good for consumers."
AMD needs some high profile support (Score:5, Interesting)
If I were them, I would be kissing Tim Cook's ass so hard that he couldn't turn around without slapping me with his junk. AMD needs some high profile names to adopt AMD processors. I mean, they've always been kind of fringe players, but in this tablet/notebook/smartphone age, they've become more fringe than ever. They could easily turn it around with serious support from just one big player like Apple, Motorola, Samsung, Google, etc. But it doesn't seem to be happening. And every time AMD has tried to court a big name [zdnet.com] or even merge with one [benzinga.com], they seem to come up short.
Maybe they should try sending flowers.
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Have AMD solved their capacity issues, because that was why Apple went with Intel originally - AMD couldn't supply the quantities Apple wanted guaranteed, while Intel could.
Re:AMD needs some high profile support (Score:5, Interesting)
It's never really a capacity issue. With enough money you can always build new fabs or you can have someone else produce for you. AMD spun off its manufacturing business into GlobalFoundries now, which aims to sell foundry capacity to anyone, so that changes the situation a bit.
AMD processors aren't as good as intel ones. At least not right now. They're worse performance, performance per watt etc. Apple is big enough they don't need to deal with the #2 anything. For the same reason McDonalds doesn't sell presidents choice or pepsi. Apple, for all of its many, many faults thinks a lot about the user experience, and frankly Intel CPU's produce a better experience right now than AMD parts.
AMD kinda sorta has the right idea on combined CPU-GPU packages. Unfortunately nVidia cards are a bit better (support for PhysX) which AMD doesn't, and 'eyefinity' while cool isn't a product most people can manage, and Intel CPU's are better performance if you want performance, or better performance per watt if you just want battery life, overall leaving AMD a rough place in the market. For Apple, who are married now to portable devices, and don't care so much about windows gaming API's AMD just isn't making a good enough product. When Intels previous generation (sandy bridge) parts are still wiping the floor with new AMD stuff it's just not a good move to commit your business to the losing team.
*I'm talking about Apple adopting AMD processors across an entire product line. Not individual home use. For whatever problem a particular person has AMD setups can certainly be competitive. But Apple has a brand and a certain user experience it wants, and for them adopting AMD processors is not a good plan.
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Unfortunately nVidia cards are a bit better (support for PhysX) which AMD doesn't
Unless you really need PhysX (which is a niche feature), my opinion is that AMD video cards are better. The 7770 and 7870 have excellent price/performace ratios and no major weaknesses. In particular, thermals and power consumption are better than on corresponding nVidia cards.
You're right about AMD's uncompetitiveness against Intel in the CPU market, though.
Re:AMD needs some high profile support (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately nVidia cards are a bit better (support for PhysX) which AMD doesn't
Unless you really need PhysX (which is a niche feature), my opinion is that AMD video cards are better. The 7770 and 7870 have excellent price/performace ratios and no major weaknesses. In particular, thermals and power consumption are better than on corresponding nVidia cards.
You're right about AMD's uncompetitiveness against Intel in the CPU market, though.
AMD video cards are significantly better than NVIDIA ones when it comes to raw computation power and when it comes to performance/watt and when it comes to performance/price; especially now that the 7xxx series has overcome the only weakness of the old series, the VLIW instruction set and architecture. Where AMD sucks big times is in software support. NVIDIA has pushed immensely CUDA, to the point that people now think that GPGPU = CUDA; and it has immensely pushed in creating a software environment around CUDA, including tons of external libraries that depend on CUDA. AMD has lost of a lot of ground with their CTM -> CAL -> OpenCL transitions, that have effectively prevented their technology to gain any significant traction, and they are just now starting to go back and getting some visibility. Their APU offering is probably the last chance they get in doing a significant breakthrough. Let's hope they don't bust it.
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Unless you really need PhysX (which is a niche feature)
I'm not aware of any game in the market that actually *needs* PhysX to run (although perhaps one exists?) And until a game absolutely mandates support as a minimum requirement all PhysX gets used for is making more crap happen on the screen that doesn't have any direct impact on gameplay. On Borderlands 2 setting PhysX to high will result in tons of shrapnel being thrown all over the ground from explosions, but those objects are all non-clipping, so it doesn't matter beyond the fact that sometimes you hav
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Battery life, yes, but Apple isn't about performance. Both Intel and Nvidia GPUs perform worse on OSX than even on Linux, according to a plethora of benchmarks. That minute difference in performance, though, has never scared an Apple customer, so I don't think Apple would mind trading an i3 for an A10 in terms of x86 alacrity. Even considering their more demanding customers, like video editors, image manipulators and other stereotypical mac owners, those are areas AMD chips currently excel at, being threade
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That is half the problem actually. The other half is inferior designs. AMD had the shit when the 64 came out. The only way Intel could compete in benchmarks was to stick with 32bit software. Hector the Sector Director (as they alleg
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Re:AMD needs some high profile support (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, Apple might be about the last company that AMD has a decent shot with:
Like it or loath it, Apple adores thin-'n-light, caters to a less cost-sensitive customer segment, and has a fairly tightly polished ARM+hardware decode device strategy when it comes to HTPC type applications...
AMD has products that are quite cheap for the punch, but they tend to run a bit hot for the performance you get, and much of their virtue lies in comparatively strong IGPs, perfect for the light gaming and HTPC markets that Apple either doesn't much care about or would prefer you use an iOS device for.
AMD's features, particularly the comparatively strong GPU showing on even cheap parts(Intel has gotten better; but, because they don't have to care, they still tend to tie their best IGPs to their best CPUs, so you need to order some damn expensive CPU silicon to get the full punch, which still is fairly tepid, though not downright laughable, as historically), are an excellent fit in cost-sensitive laptops, all-in-ones, and desktops that aren't likely to get a discrete GPU upgrade. Unfortunately, those are niches that command serious volume; but not much in the way of margins.
Honestly, AMD might have much better luck cuddling up to Corporate IT. They don't, presently, have 'VPro'(but they could probably put a whole damn ARM SoC on their 'enterprise' motherboard reference model for half of what Intel charges for a CPU and chipset that doesn't have most or all of those management features lasered off, if the market demands it); but Team Corporate burns through generic good-enough beige boxes by the palletload, and pays somewhat better for them than does Joe Bestbuy. They'd have a hard time cracking CPU-intensive workstation applications; but the zillion desktop typenboxes, computationally unstressed servers that need huge slabs of RAM, and similar absolutely infest enterprise IT...
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If I were them, I would be kissing Tim Cook's ass so hard that he couldn't turn around without slapping me with his junk.
Geez, dude, that's a hell of an analogy (at least you didn't suggest they give him a rusty trombone). :P
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Re:AMD needs some high profile support (Score:5, Informative)
Problem is I think AMD would be in even more dire straits if Apple adopted them.
One thing that Intel has that AMD doesn't is fab headroom. When Apple chooses the processor for their next computer, Apple will buy it in the millions. If Apple wants it customized to do X (e.g., in the early days, Apple insisted on having CPUs with VT-x in them, even though Intel didn't make any in that class), Intel can happily oblige.
For AMD, it could easily be a struggle, especially if demand for a top end low-yield processor surprises Apple.
You also have to remember that AMD has always had supply issues. Apple had problems with its G5 supplier, IBM, not being able to provide enough top-end G5s that its customers kept ordering (likewise, Motorola kept ignoring Apple to focus more on the military and commercial networking sectors for its PowerPC chips). So Apple was looking for a supplier who wouldn't be under such constraints, and would be able to ramp up production quickly.
AMD at the time was struggling to supply CPUs for the enthusiast sector - they probably had tons of the low end CPUs but likely Apple wasn't too keen on that - they wanted a range, and if they wanted high-end, it would mean the top end chips would end up with Apple, and everyone else gets the dregs.
AMD may be in trouble, but Intel will be in more trouble if AMD folds (think anti-trust and monopoly accusations, and possibly scrutiny and breakup). Intel's probably doing what it can to shore up AMD without directly investing in it. By keeping the price of Intel's chips high, they're letting AMD take the niche on the low end stuff to at least move product (Intel could easily lower prices and still make a profit).
Hell, Intel's probably got a AMD rescue plan in case AMD should really get into a bad spot (but not directly - through piles of third party investment companies).
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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AMD has a long history of poor managment decisions.
Back in the late 1990s AMD's CPU busines was a money pit, and the company was kept afloat by their profitable NOR flash joint-venture, but they spent way too much money on their CPU business (for example, those two huge fabs in Dresden that they just divested), and there was nothing left to foster new flash technologies. In the 2000s, NAND became the flash architecture of choice, and since AMD was caught without spare cash, they couldn't afford a crash-cou
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it wouldn't have been unthinkable for Apple to buy 100%. that's the apple way with many production runs(be it initial ipod hd's or whatever).
after all, they were pretty much buying all desktop chips produced in g3/g4/g5 form since pretty much nobody else was buying them.
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And another rational reason: By going with Intel, Apple knew that at most 10% of competitors would have better chips than the Macs. By going with AMD, Apple risked having 9
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Yes, but don't forget the profit margin which Apple is famous for. Using AMD would mean more money in their own pockets. It's probably not a clear-cut decision.
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Using AMD would mean more money in their own pockets.
Would it? Intel chips are priced higher, but with the current process being ahead of AMD's it should be cheaper to produce per chip (basically Intel has a high margin on their chips). Had Apple started going in the direction of AMD I'm sure Intel would have met or beat prices and still would have been making a profit.
Well, DUH. (Score:5, Interesting)
Ten years ago if your PC was more than 2 years old, new software wouldn't run. Now? I'm running five year old boxes that run everything fine... as long as they have enough memory.
The fact is, you no longer have to replace that PC and its CPU every other year.
Re:Well, DUH. (Score:4, Interesting)
More like, AMD haven't been making enough of a difference for long enough to justify buying them over Intel.
Back in the 486/Pentium days I saved a LOT of money by buying AMD - I got better performance for less money, and virtually perfect compatibility.
Nowadays? There's so little difference between the specs of processors that I might as well just buy Intel. There's no compelling reason to go AMD any more, so nobody's buying them.
Sure, they get an "advantage" for a few months on their top-of-the-line gaming processors of a few percent, but by the time those chips are available in any pre-fab computer you might pick up in a shop, that difference means nothing at all and the price difference isn't worth straying.
Not to mention that since buying ATI (which was an absolute DOG for hardware compatibility and drivers), AMD seemed to have followed suit and there are problems reported with certain games and AMD processors / chipsets / ATI cards that aren't present in similar Intel / nVidia setups.
Honestly, it's nothing to do with people lacking upgrades. It's everything to do with there just being no compelling reason to go with one or the other, except that everyone's HEARD of Intel and they've been making x86 chips before AMD even existed.
Re:Well, DUH. (Score:4, Insightful)
Nowadays? There's so little difference between the specs of processors that I might as well just buy Intel. There's no compelling reason to go AMD any more, so nobody's buying them.
An Athlon 64 X6 may have half the performance of the most expensive i7, but it's a quarter the price and the motherboard is half the price. If it'll run everything you want to run, you win. Or in my case, I win. When I built it, the intel chips had higher power requirements, too.
Re:Well, DUH. (Score:5, Informative)
An Athlon 64 X6 may have half the performance of the most expensive i7, but it's a quarter the price and the motherboard is half the price. If it'll run everything you want to run, you win.
The problem is that a Phenom II X6 (I assume that's what you meant as that's the only X6 CPU AMD make, and even that's a generation old now), costs the same as an i5 3450, and is significantly slower than it. This is why Intel is winning now –same price, higher performance. Comparing everything to an i7 is dumb when the i5 and i3 are faster than what you're comparing.
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No an x6 is cheaper and has 6 cores. Not everyone is only interested in single threaded performance.
Re:Well, DUH. (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is, the i5 is faster for multithreaded performance too [anandtech.com] (and that's even an older, slower i5 than the one I asserted)...
If you cared only about the single threaded performance, an i3 would do [anandtech.com], and be half the price.
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Er yes, I meant the Phenom II. I actually started with an X3 720 at $110 and upgraded when I could get an X6 used for cheap ($110) to replace my X3. The motherboard was $100 as well, as opposed to $200 and up for comparably-featured intel boards, which also required more exotic power connectors, for which I would have had to buy a new power supply.
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Hmm? Even Z77 overclocking boards cost all of $130-150. Standard H77 boards with all the features under the sun cost $100, cheepies cost $50-60... This is constant with AMD and Intel. Neither of them use exotic power connectors, they both use 20+4 ATX power and 4+4 ATX CPU power.
Re:Well, DUH. (Score:4, Informative)
no, that intel chip will not run the multiple VMs I use, core count and memory not clock speed are the big considerations for me. For an average desktop user, maybe one or two core is all they *can* use, but for me buying an AMD chip and motherboard is a no brainer and saves hundreds of bucks
Re:Well, DUH. (Score:4, Informative)
yeah, same here - phenom II x6 is a great sweet spot for scaling horizontally.
As a bonus, the AMD chip has a HT bus to the memory and in theory should be able to handle ECC memory directly, even on the low-end chips.
But, finding a BIOS to support it is all of the battle. If AMD wanted to take that market, they'd work with motherboard vendors to get their chips' features supported by the BIOS. With EFI BIOS'es becoming prevalent, this shouldn't be as hard a task as it used to be. I'm using ASRock currently, but just because it's well-priced and stable, not because it's all-that in terms of features.
As to why they're not doing this already? - hey, they're AMD!
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The problem is, Intel's 4 core chips are faster at very parallel workloads than the X6, and even AMD's "8 core" (really also 4 core + hyperthreading, just with int/int instead of int/fp) bulldozers.
Multiple VMs will run better on an i5 3450 than on an X6 1100T or an FX-8150, in the same way as single threaded tasks would work better on an Athlon XP 2.5Ghz than on a Pentium 4 3.6Ghz (because core count, just like clock speed is just a number, and doesn't directly reflect performance, even at parallel tasks).
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The X6 1100T has averaged £150-160 [skinflint.co.uk] for the last good long time... The i5 3450 started at about that price and is now down to about £130 [skinflint.co.uk]
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Uhhh, the AMD system with motherboard for $90 there is an FX 4100... Which is slower than a Pentium G630. So yes, you can get comparable intel systems for the same price ($50 G630 + $40 crappy board), even without retarded sales.
The 3450 starts at $145 because it's faster than an FX 8150, which costs $160, even without the board.
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Sorry
Intel Core i5-3450 @ 3.10GHz - score 7052.
So yes, you pay for higher performance. The point is though to get best value. Once you count in the motheboard you have 2x cost for 1.4x performance.
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The point being that the X6 only costs $90 including mobo because that retailer still happens to have some left, and is massively discounting an old CPU to get rid of them. Also, CPUbenchmark.net is not an indication of CPU performance in any way shape or form. Their error bars are about 20% either side, as can be seen by the fact that a Xeon E5-2670 scores 20% more than a Xeon E5-2680, despite being the exact same chip at a lower clock.
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Nowadays? There's so little difference between the specs of processors that I might as well just buy Intel. There's no compelling reason to go AMD any more, so nobody's buying them.
Depends on the market. For example, when I built my NAS I was originally looking at Atom. Intel, however, cripples the chipsets and so the only way of getting a decent number of SATA connections on a mini-ITX system was to go with an AMD Fusion board.
Re:as long as they have enough memory. (Score:3)
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I work at a non-profit charity and many of our machines are donations from various companies. Many of these machines are 10 years old! (Granted 10 year old machines are at least 1.8GHz P4's now days) As long as I can get 512MB ram on XP or 1GB for Win 7, these machines perform common tasks such as web browsing and document writing just fine, though extra ram helps a lot if running antivirus.
I understand that capital availability is a tough spot in non-for-profits but please consider buying a Kill-A-Watt and evaluating whether this strategy is costing you more money in power bills than it would be to buy a more modern efficient machine.
For light-duty machines that you can ensure are put to sleep when not in use, this almost never helps. On the other hand, for labs that run 10 hours a day, saving 200W by switching from a old 300W desktop to a modern 100W one saves you 1KWH = $.50 a day and so a
Re:as long as they have enough memory. (Score:5, Informative)
Another IT guy working at a nonprofit (we have over 100 staff) - we did get the Kill-A-Watt. Most of our machines are asleep when not in use via Faronics Powersave, which actually tracks the times when the computers are on and off on a server, and you can set policies, and if you input what you pay for power it will generate a report for you.
We also have machines that are around ten years old. We just replaced one last week that was from 1998. All staff here do are email and writing reports. Things that need more power (like accounting packages) have newer machines.
Last I checked we are saving over $1000 in power costs due to this power management software. We aren't going to replace 100+ machines to save $2 in power per machine per year. Governments might, as they can't seem to do math or ROI, but we won't. We'll let them live out their useful life.
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Yes, sorry, I saw that but it didn't register until after I posted. Sigh...
The Faronics Powersave utility I've installed is the best I've seen so far. Centralized power policies and detailed reporting, not to mention it uses wake-on-lan so if you need to do an update or change a policy you can tell the workstations to wake up, apply the policy, and go back into standby. If you
Re:Well, DUH. (Score:5, Insightful)
Namely the PS3 and XBox 360.
When the new consoles start popping up you can bet that your old rig will need updating.
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Bingo. Though considering developers are still fleeing the console market, and PC's are the new golden egg again. This might be changing all for the better. 10 years ago, 12 years ago, 14 years ago, it was gaming that drove PC hardware sales. Remember the near constant CPU wars over speed, scaling, battle to reach 1ghz with air cooling? Yeah. The near constant battle for 3d accelerators, slap a couple of pci voodoo 2's in SLI mode with your matrox card and awayyyyy we go! Then it got dirty, ugly, and
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Depends on the software.
Games right now are mostly pegged to the consoles, so if you have a reasonable capable Dx9 machine or anything upgraded after that (Dx10 or 11) you can run pretty much anything. Next year or so when we start seeing new consoles we'll see if the next major upgrade cycle needs Directx 12 class hardware (not yet in existence) or if the current crop of dx11 will be good enough.
Lets have a quick glance at the system requirements for borderlands 2:
OS: Windows XP SP3
Processor: 2.4 GHz Dual
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SSD's, and hardware that takes full advantage of an SSD is awesome, but it doesn't completely transform what you can do on a computer.
It may not change what you can do, but a SSD definitely changes how much you can do and how quickly you can do it. In better than 21 years of being a computer nerd, I can't remember another single hardware upgrade that could change the perfomance of an average computer by so much as even a budget SSD can.
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The fact is, you no longer have to replace that PC and its CPU every other year.
Now you have to replace your smartphones instead.
Whats unhealthy about that? (Score:4, Insightful)
AMD chips, on the other hand, tend to fall in price steadily after they first hit the market. Some drop by up to 43% in the first year. This trend is a byproduct of the unhealthy competitive landscape in the desktop CPU arena
Whats unhealthy about that? Virtually no CPU purchasers are going to be CPU limited, if a 5 year old CPU currently does everything the average user needs, then a 6 month old one for half the price should be massive overkill. So your best economic move seems to buy a 6 month to 1 year old AMD processor for half price and spend the savings on something that actually matters to the user experience, like graphics card or high res (higher than clunky 1080) monitor, or a decent keyboard like my model M, or larger SSD, or ...
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Re:Whats unhealthy about that? (Score:4, Funny)
Until you bump into an unoptimized game that barely can use two cores.
Yap, they are still out there. SC2, Total War series, WoW, ......
To be fair, Star Control 2 is pretty old and back then dual CPU setups were mostly limited to server situations. I think the fan recompile [sourceforge.net] might be better about threading.
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Whats unhealthy about that?
Not unhealthy for you .. unhealthy for AMD. Those fancy 6 month old CPUs don't design and build themselves - well at least not until after the singularity.
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It's unhealthy that AMD is forced to do so while Intel is not under such pressure.
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I think you're putting the cart before the horse here, AMD isn't lowering prices to give you a great deal they're lowering prices because consumers don't think it's worth the price AMD is asking for. Right now AMD doesn't have a CPU they can charge $200+ for except their server line Opterons. That's not good for AMD and in the long run it's not good for the consumers either. Their APUs are quite okay but I think AMD is setting themselves up for a squeeze as Intel and ARM clash in battle for domination of th
Changing World. (Score:4, Insightful)
The PC landscape is changing.
Your chips need to be fast, or they need to be small and mobile.
Back in AMD good days, People bought PCs for different reasons, You had the Power User who got as big and fast as they can afford, you got the budget PC where you buy a PC not for its speed but because you need a cheap Computer. Laptop/Notbook computers were the ultra mobile devices, and they were much more expensive than a PC.
That isn't as much the case anymore.
If you are going to get a cheap Computer, you are going to get an iPad, or a netbook, that gives you mobility, you are going be less likely to buy a cheap Desktop. If you are going to power you are going to get it with the fastest chips. AMD has been lagging so they can't compete there either.
Cheap Desktop CPU that under perform are not going to sell well, because the new Ultra Mobile Devices are at a price point where it competes with the cheap PC.
Re:Changing World. (Score:4, Insightful)
I have a llano laptop and it has been working great for me. I have gone back to school to become an engineer and I run various engineering programs that are GPU accelerated. On battery power this thing stomps on the intel chips since it can do GPU acceleration on battery power. In some operations it is hundreds of times faster while still having good battery power.
Also with web browsers and other office types apps getting gpu accelerated a decent igp is good for performance and battery life. Sure you can turn on a dedicated gpu while on battery power but your battery won't last long doing that.
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Depends on the consumer. (Score:3)
Bad for some consumers, but not others. The others being those who can figure out to buy AMD machines.
You can get cheap, high peforming AMD machines which is great.
Have you seen the price of a Quad socket 6100 or 6200? You can get 48 or 64 decently performing cored and 1/t TB of ram for about £8000, with top end cores. Backing off a bit, you can get one for aroung 5 06 6k.
The value is astonishingly good.
Maybe marketing could help some (Score:2)
unhealthy (Score:5, Insightful)
There's an "unhealthy competitive landscape" throughout our economy. It's because ineffective and insufficiently-enforced regulations have created an economy that is tilted toward the top.
First we need a Justice Department that will bust some balls. The entire Fortune 500 should be facing anti-trust prosecution, and those cases could easily be made to stick. CEOs and entire boards of directors should be facing criminal prosecution.
Ah, but none of that is going to happen as long as corporations are "super-citizens" that have unlimited ability to influence, not just elections, but legislation at every level of government. Now we have corporations sponsoring voter suppression laws ("This Law has been brought to you by the fine people at Massey Energy"). How clear can it be?
Why isn't it good for consumers? (Score:3)
Intel CPU prices have remained stagnant, especially for models that cost $200 and up. AMD chips, on the other hand, tend to fall in price steadily after they first hit the market. Some drop by up to 43% in the first year.
Surely that's the market working. You can pay more and go with a market leader or pay less for an alternative. This gives you a reasonable choice in the lower price market between a newer Intel budget design or an older AMD one that has decreased in price - or an AMD budget CPU and change for a flat-panel screen!
OK - I understand now (Score:5, Insightful)
Intel CPU prices have remained stagnant, especially for models that cost $200 and up. AMD chips, on the other hand, tend to fall in price steadily after they first hit the market. Some drop by up to 43% in the first year.
Surely that's the market working. You can pay more and go with a market leader or pay less for an alternative. This gives you a reasonable choice in the lower price market between a newer Intel budget design or an older AMD one that has decreased in price - or an AMD budget CPU and change for a flat-panel screen!
Having read TFA I see that what happening is that AMD processors are not living up to expectation, which is why they reduce in price quickly. This means that Intel has little competition and has no incentive to reduce its prices, which is why it is bad for the consumer. I understand and would like to redact my previous comment!
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For example the Q9550s released at $369 [anandtech.com] and now sells for around $300 [google.com].
I guess you could argue the high resale value makes it very cheap to own so long as you remember to sell it a few years later.
is Apple the largest CPU maker now? (Score:2)
Even if Intel still beats Apple, it is not growing as fast as Apple. Intels anemic Atomic chips arent that great.
I never write Intel off. Like Apple both have immensely clever hardware engineers.
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"Their iPads and iPhones together outsell every other brand of computer"
And you don't see why that's a false comparison?
AMD is the best value (Score:2)
I buy and use AMD simply because it is the best value for the money
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_available.html [cpubenchmark.net]
Microcenter or Fry's throws is also cheap motherboard. For $90 you can get top performing AMD CPU and motherboard. My 4 core AMD supports 3 way multiseat and runnning 4 X11 sessions on Ubuntu 12.04 just fine. Match that Intel.
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I do look at power, my CPU isn't the big eater of it. everything else is.
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A) that's at least 3 KW a month.
B) Multiply by millions of chips.
Protip: You aren't the only person on the world.
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I don't mind paying more to a company that puts so much money into RnD, uses less power, and supports so many of the sciences.
People talk about RnD and Science, but talk is cheap.
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AMD has a few different CPU sockets on the market currently:
The AM2/AM3/AM3+ series (each of which is a backwardly-compatible MB - an AM2 board can't take an AM3+ CPU) , the FM2 socket and the G34 socket.
Your comment implies that an older MB could take a newer processor - well, sort of - if you bought a plain-old AM2 MB, no, but if you bought a multi-standard AMD MB (AM2/AM3/AM3+ yes) - it isn't as simple a question as you seem to want to make it.
Intel is currently selling:
Socket 775, 1155, and 2011 - the 1
Intel increases performance-per-dollar (Score:2)
Hardcore AMD fans like to point out that Intel hardly ever reduces prices on chips, and they always conveniently ignore the fact that Intel is constantly increasing the performance-per-dollar at every price point. For example, the desktop "around $200" price point has seen the following since 2007:
2007 - Core 2 Duo E6300 - 1.87 GHz
2008 - Core 2 Duo E8400 - 3.0 GHz
2009 - Core i5 750 2.6 GHz - upgrade to quad core and turbo boost!
2010 - Core i5 760 2.8 GHz
2011 - Core i5 2500 3.3 GHz - major increase, also ge
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AMD is also the king of Multicore. Try finding a sub-$200 six or even 8 core processor from Intel. For those of use who care about multiprocessing and parallelism over single core performance, AMD is pretty much the only game in town.
Re:Intel increases performance-per-dollar (Score:4, Insightful)
And benhmark after benchmark shows the reason for that: the AMD quad-core is nowhere near powerful enough to compete with the Intel quad core (this goes for both Stars AND 'dozer). Just see here where the A10-5800K (their best quad core right this second) gets bested by the Intel 2500 (priced at around $200) in their best test [anandtech.com]. It just goes downhill from there.
AMD is offering 8 cores at $200 not because they're nice guys and want to share the love - they're offering them because they can't compete wth just 4 cores at the same price point. If they did have that ability, you can bet they would be charging a premium price for that.
So, what is the result of the $200 showdown? Pit the 2500 versus the 8150 (their best 8-core chip)! In this one test the 2500 wins the first pass by 30%, and the 8150 wins the second pass by 25%. Now, the second pass takes much longer, so the 8150 still wins (by about 15%), but it's a small win in a sea of disappointment.
h.264 video transcoding is AMD's BEST BENCHMARK, and they barely scrape by with twice the cores. Add Hyperthreading to the mix (i7 3770K), and they get blown away once again.
People wonder idly why Intel charges so much money for their quad-core parts, but the reason is obvious if you see the test results - they're almost twice as fast in single-threaded tasks!
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Those that use platitude instead of actual understanding the subject are doomed to look like an idiot.
I just saw the opposite (Score:2)
I have an old, first-gen Mac Pro (and no, I didn't pay for it - it was free, secondhand; I made it an explicit goal to get it back up and running without giving a cent to Apple, and I succeeded).
I recently looked into upgrading it. Xeon processors seem to *plummet* in price after a few years. Processors that once cost upward of $2000 now cost $40 on Newegg, with free shipping. Some go down to $20 if you count dodgy-looking Amazon prices.
Now yes, Xeons are only "desktop processors" for myself and a few other
Apple should buy AMD (Score:2)
They can get AMD for chump change right now. Fits well with their model of being vertically integrated. They could pump some money into AMD and get them to improve their x86 processors, and then dump Intel. They could get the GPU division of AMD to make a mobile GPU for their mobile products. And AMD's CPU engineers would come in very handy for custom ARM CPU design for mobile.
As a data point to consider (Score:2)
Intel does a lot more RnD, and spends a lot more on cutting edge fabs.
Also, the cost per transistor per sqr. cent. isn't really declining like it used to.
AMD SHOULD be doing better... (Score:2)
The biggest issue for AMD is that consumers don't understand the market, and there's little AMD can do to change the opinion at this point. Are Intel processors, as a whole, faster than AMD? You bet. They're also pretty efficient as well. People know this, they're not dumb. But what they don't understand is that when they're buying that low end $400-500 laptop, it's not all about processor power. AMD's line of APUs are a phenominal value to the consumer. It gives the low end buyer all the CPU they need and
Windows 8 (Score:2)
"Waiter, three Dead Cat Bounces, please."
Re:Not enough price difference between AMD and Int (Score:4, Informative)
I've been using AMD for well over a decade and I've never once seen a program that would work fine on an Intel CPU but malfunction on an AMD. I call FUD.
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I've been using AMD for well over a decade and I've never once seen a program that would work fine on an Intel CPU but malfunction on an AMD. I call FUD.
It happens (and vice versa), but it's so few and far between it's not even worth noting.
Re:I call FUD. (Score:2)
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I can give you an easy example. On Lego Star Wars II for PC, in coop mode, if you are using an AMD CPU and both players change screens at the same time, it will lock up the entire game. This does not happen on Intel chips.
I have a lot of friends that work as game testers at gaming companies and they HATE AMD chips. In fact, they don't even test the AMD until the Intel work perfectly and then they only fix about half the AMD-specific bugs.
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Interestingly a recent serious virtual machine security vulnerability affected Intel but did not affect AMD:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/qubes-devel/JIpZoQUP6dQ/g6TvtpUHzBQJ [google.com]
Re:Not enough price difference between AMD and Int (Score:5, Interesting)
For 64 bit you have it the wrong way around - it's Intel who are AMD-compatible (that's why many operating systems still call the architecture amd64, since the x86-64 architecture was from AMD, and not from Intel - Intel being forced to follow AMD when their bet on Itanium failed). So if you want the genuine article for 64-bit, then you ought to be buying AMD.
Re:Not enough price difference between AMD and Int (Score:5, Funny)
when their bet on Itanium failed.
But ... my HP rep tells me it is a fine architecture with a long future!
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So many people forget about how AMD changed the game more then once, It would be a shame for them to go under.
x86-64, on CPU northbridge and memory channel.
And ITX motherboards with e350 have like 4 sata3 ports - I have one of the beasts running a storage server... you have to buy some expensive motherboard from Intel to have that.
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Well, this is another reason: FUD.
In 64 bit world, AMD *are* the real thing.
There are no AMD compatibilities that I've ever heard of, except perhaps for the lack of a F00F bug.
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FUD.
I can't think of ANY time when an AMD chip could not run any x86 software. Nice try, Intel Shill.
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Seriously? Is this really a problem anymore? I know in the 80's you could experience issues like that, I'm not sure I even had problems in the 90's. I am asking honestly and without sarcasm, are compatability issues still an issue today?
Buy AMD (Score:2)
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And yet the most powerful supercomputer in Europe, which is built by IBM, uses... Intel processors. That said, I'll grant you that IBM has an edge in high-performance processor power consumption, but Apple didn't ditch IBM processors because they had a burning desire to switch the x86, they ditched IBM processors because IBM consistently failed to put out anything that could fit in the power envelope required by a laptop.
A more useful comparison might be to benchmark the performance per watt of Apple's A6 v
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Five are in the first
Seven are in the second
Five are in the third
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yes and they did not really do well with the 7xxx roll out of the video cards,
they are really good on integer GPU programming but Nvidia beat them with FP GPU programming.
if you want games perforce then it's down to NVidia
if you want bitcoin then it's down to ATI video - though this is going be be hit BIG time by asic mining in the next 6 months - AMD need to take note on this as they will not get more sales on this unless someone can come up with a good Multiscaler general GPU programming solutions [and ta
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AMD has re-introduced the "Clustered Integer Core" micro-architecture, an architecture developed by DEC in 1996 with the RISC microprocessor Alpha 21264.
Rather, what I would like to see is a detailed analysis of why the 256 bit floating point math is being done. Is this necessary? For what kind of work? Are some just using it due to its being there? Is this maybe solved now due to AES being hardware accelerated, or am I way off track...
Two symmetrical 128-bit FMAC (fused multiply–add capability) floating-point pipelines per module that can be unified into one large 256-bit-wide unit if one of integer cores dispatch AVX instruction and two symmetrical x87/MMX/SSE capable FPPs for backward compatibility with SSE2 non-optimized software