Poor AMD...people keep talking about power consumption

This ought to make AMD crawl even further into the hole...Sunnyvale's got even cloudier skies in the forecast

I have no sympathy.

In my professional life I've talked with AMD about power consumption on GPU's...they just pretend it doesn't exist as an issue (or as a potential competitive advantage). I am not joking when I say that they will not even discuss Hybrid power in written form...they only talk of Hybrid Crossfire (when IGP and weak discrete GPU combine forces). I've made no friends at AMD when I tell them how idiotic they sound by ignoring the question...my last description was along the lines of "it's like some kangaroo press conference held in a communist dictatorship."

To be clear, asking AMD to talk GPU power consumption is like asking North Korea to talk nukes...sometimes you get weird statements and sometimes just sullen hostility. Of course, just like Il, Kim Jung, money talks - so while developers are shafted, AMD will mention power consumption to a safe audience of analysts.

IMHO, AMD has so lost it on Hybrid Power (discrete graphics shutdown) and Fusion (GPU/CPU on chip) that they will no longer be a viable competitor to Intel by 3Q - and the news gets worse for AMD by the day.

Unfortunately for AMD, there's no amount of corporate restructuring or product development that AMD can perform which will put them in a position of not competing with Intel. Pity, if Nvidia was their only competitor then they could have a chance.

Wait, did I just say pity? Excuse me. Given the way that AMD has neglected power consumption on the GPU (Nvidia as well) and mobile platform, I should say they deserve it. For what it's worth, I expressly advised AMD personnel (engineers and Product Managers) that someone will jump in Transmeta-style to shake things up regarding GPU power consumption.

The real problem for AMD is that Intel is jumping into mobile and GPU power consumption with two giant feet...

What was pitiful was watching AMD pull a disdainful routine on the netbook market...remember their 'we don't want that'. Seems like AMD's forgetting it's promise to be forthright...the truth would be 'we can't compete in that market because power consumption is not our forte'. Unfortunately, that's the forte of the market.

comparable to ARM then

so they just might, at 45nm, start to come close to what ARM does. Good for them and it's about time. So well will we see these and at what price?

Cool. Unless these gains are offset by losses at the IGP

The interesting question is what is the TDP of the new IGP?

Call it BBC?

If they call it BBC, then they'd need to be a version that you build yourself.

What a surprise...

I always thought Atom was a way for Intel to get right back to its core model of releasing a new chip every 6 months. It's gone nearly as far as it can with the heavy metal-so now lets jump back in time and start again.

@comparable to ARM then

"so they just might, at 45nm, start to come close to what ARM does."

...at 120nm

7W is miserly?

In my book, 7W is still way too much power draw for a handheld device and only barely acceptable for a small netnook-style device.

Intel trying to compete with Via

Via's integrated northbridge/IGP/CPU (Luke) has been out a while (search for ITX UK if you want to buy one). There is a choice of mini-ITX mainboards with Nano (Via's alternative to Atom), but I have yet to see a laptop with one (there are rumours that HP will sell one). This is a pain because a Nano based computer gets similar bench mark scores to Atom and uses far less power than Atom's power hog north bridge.

Last year a mini-ITX case cost more than a mini-ITX mainboard + CPU + heatsink + memory + PSU. Now that cases are a reasonable price, I can put together a good SILENT mini-ITX machine for less than the price of a cheap Intel/AMD ATX box.

Cheap mass market CPU's get the R&D funding to beat expensive server CPU's. That is how x86 wiped out technically better (but more expensive) competitors and how Itanium got where it is today. I can see why Intel wants to compete with Via, and why AMD want to stay clear until the other two have have a long mutually destructive price war.

I have always like AMD - they kept the price of Intel CPU's down. By the time AMD is ready to produce a small cheap X86+IGP, ARM and MIPS will own the market.