End of the Road For AMD's Geode Chip 123
An anonymous reader writes "AMD has no replacement planned for the aging Geode low-power chip, creating uncertainty for its use in products like future XO laptops made by One Laptop Per Child. There won't be a Geode successor and the company has no core microarchitecture planned to replace the chip, AMD executives said. The comments end speculation about the future of Geode, an integrated chip used in netbooks like OLPC's XO laptop, ultramobile PCs and devices like set-top boxes."
Why oh why... (Score:2, Insightful)
is no one interested in VIA's most recent offering here in this market. From what I've read it's a much better solution than the Intel Atom.. Does anyone make a system with the VIA processors though? I haven't seen any.
Re:Intel Atom (Score:3, Insightful)
It makes me think that this is really just misdirection to make Intel complacent. While not a great strategy most of the time, with the current economic situation the stock price isn't going to take much of a hit. Then, when they announce a new low power CPU, their stock should get a nice boost and Intel will need to redouble their R&D to catch up.
Re:Intel Atom (Score:3, Insightful)
On the other hand, demand for chips like the Atom in netbooks is so high at the moment, AMD must be mad to be pulling out of this market.
Think less about units sold and think more about gross margins, and you'll see why a company with limited R&D resources like AMD may not be mad to let the netbook market go. Despite their popularity, the actual amount of money to be made selling netbook processors isn't that big.
Though I wouldn't expect them to be out of it forever. As the size of the netbook market grows, it will make more sense to try to take a chunk out of it. Right now, though, getting whatever 10-20% of the market they could get would not result in enough revenue to warrant large expenditure of R&D.
Re:Intel Atom (Score:3, Insightful)
That's a big deal since the Geode doesn't need even a heatsink. That puts the Geode and Atom into separate use segments.
Re:Intel Atom (Score:3, Insightful)
Processor + host chipset + GPU, on the other hand, is a bigger chunk of cash. If AMD don't have a competitive CPU, then that market will go to Intel at the low end and Intel + Nvidia at the high end.
That's really only one extra chip since the GPU will be integrated on the chipset, still with razor thin margins. That's really not any better, since what's important is the margin they can get for a given piece of silicon. Selling an extra hunk of silicon with a tiny margin makes no more sense than selling just the CPU.
And there's no such thing as a 'high end' netbook. That would just be a mainstream laptop, and AMD is competing there.