Is Qualcomm the New AMD? 331
colinneagle writes "It's a darned shame, but the writing is on the wall for AMD. The ATI graphics business is the only thing keeping it afloat right now as sales shrivel up and the company faces yet another round of staffing cuts. You can only cut so many times before there's no one left to innovate you out of the mess you're in. Qualcomm, on the other hand, dominates this space, and it has the chips to back it up. The Snapdragon line of ARM-based processors alone is found in a ridiculous number of prominent devices, including Samsung Galaxy S II and S III, Nokia Lumia 900 and 920, Asus Transformer Pad Infinity and the Samsung Galaxy Note. Mind you, Samsung is also in the ARM processor business, yet it is licensing Qualcomm's parts. That's quite a statement."
If AMD Dies... (Score:2, Insightful)
If AMD folds Intel will bend the consumer over and stuff them even harder than they are now. But if you like being penetrated by cement-filled pringles cans....
(Intel does make good stuff, but they gouge you for the brand and they behave very unethically).
We NEED Processor Competition (Score:4, Insightful)
This is not an option. We MUST have somebody to compete with Intel.
Re:anti competitive? (Score:2, Insightful)
And you want them to triple their CPU prices? That would affect the entire world. Of course it would mean that others would try harder to compete but it would take ten or twenty years.
Re:If AMD Dies... (Score:4, Insightful)
Only in tech would someone consider a gross margin of 37% abysmal.
Re:anti competitive? (Score:2, Insightful)
Allow me to counter your drivel: people like you should be dragged out into the street, kicking and screeming, then hanged from the nearest light-post.
You sing the praises of paying virtually no taxes, while benefiting from the wonderful things those taxes provide: a stable economy, powerful defensive force, extensive critical infrastructure, political influence in international dealings, etc. You go on to further sing the laurels of leaving the country to avoid tax hikes in the form of loophole elimination, effectively scamming your fellow countrymen into picking up the tab for services that you have far-and-above benefited from orders of magnitude more than others. And to top it all off, you have the gall to label other people "parasites", emphasizing your lack of remorse for the struggles of those less fortunate.
You are human trash. You are the worst possible kind of pond scum, and you will eventually be served your comeuppance. Wherever you go, you'll create the very same problems and eventually cultivate the very same kind of social upheaval. One day, you'll run out of places to hide, or you'll pick the wrong haven, and then you'll be the one singing a different tune. I hope I'm there to see it.
Re:anti competitive? (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree. Without Intel's backroom dealings AMD would have made enough money to weather the idiocy of Hector the Sector Wrecker (as muh ex-Motorolla buddies call him).
The whole reason that GloFo had to be spun off is because AMD invested in huge new fabs because they were fab-limited, but then found out they were Intel-limited, their marketshare didn't increase and their fab capacity was unusued. That's crippling for a silicon manufacturing company, so AMD had to stop being one.
Hector was no help, that's for sure, but I really think it was Intel that crippled AMD at the worst/best time.
Re:anti competitive? (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess you're just unaware of when AMD had the superior product, but couldn't get OEMs to sell products at the volumes such price and performance superiority would have suggested, because Intel, still the dominant player, had made deals with them not to sell AMD parts. Their market share was growing, necessitating a new fab, but then they hit the artificial limits defined by Intel, a crippling blow after investing billions in a new fab.
There's only been several verdicts against them by the regulatory authorities of multiple governments, and a lawsuit settled between Intel and AMD in AMD's favor with a 1.75 (iirc) billion payout. A pittance compared to what was lost, of course, but still heavily in the news.
I suppose it would have been easy to miss if you only just started following the CPU industry.
Re:If AMD Dies... (Score:2, Insightful)
So, a few years ago the high-end processors from Intel cost $1000 a pop. Today, the high-end chips like the 3770 cost roughly $300... and that's probably their fastest consumer chip, except maybe last generation's hexacore sandy bridges... This seems like a pretty big improvement in price to me. Intel's pricing is better than it has been for many years. I certainly can't ever remember a time before the i-series era where Intel's fastest chips were selling for $300!