What's inside AMD's life-support machine? A big pile o' PlayStation 4s and XBox Ones

We owe a lot to AMD .. but there's a limit

AMD had a great run. The K6 and K6-2 were great (though I never owned one .. I kept a Pentium Pro 200 Linux machine for quite a while).

I built an Athlon 700 in early 2000. And then a few years later in early 2004 an Athlon 3200+. Both matched or beat Intel's chips at the time, and for less money.

And then AMD saved us all from Intel's vision of 32 bit x86 forever (and the awful Pentium4 at that) and Itanic if you wanted 64 bits.

I never did own a true AMD64. The Core 2 Duo was just as fast in a laptop and on the desktop, and by the time that felt slow my best option seemed to be (in Jan 2010) building a quad core i7 and overclocking it.

And I've just this week built an i7-4790K box (reliably doing 4.6 GHz on 4 cores, 4.9 GHz single core) that should see me for the next few years.

AMD doesn't have anything to touch the i7, and certainly not for $400. (they're ok if you want a low end box, but I don't)

It's very very sad. I'd buy AMD by preference if they were at all close.

Osborne effect

I have been in the market for a new AMD gaming laptop for months. I'm an AMD fanboi, and have briefly considered the Richland-infused MSI GX60, but have been holding back since the Kaveri Mobile announcement. Unfortunately, laptops featuring said chip have not yet materialized, and thus they have not gotten my money.

I think this is called the Osborne effect?

The World (still) Needs AMD

Like Bruce said, we owe a lot to AMD. An Intel without AMD is a very scary scenario from a consumer value standpoint, but everyone (surely) knows this already. ARM is a fortunate counterpoint to the duopoly.

AMD doesn't need to compete with Intel, it's been good since the early 2000's at delivering measurable value purely by differentiating. Nintendo learned that early on with the Gamecube (using, then, ATi), MS and Sony have since figured it out. AMD need to market that message to the rest of the world to be successful.

My biggest complaint of AMD is similar to the first commentard's. I can't buy the AMD solution that I want!

(although I suspect it's more a case of shite motherboard makers lacking imagination in my case - I want small form factor AM3+ for steroidal linux virtualisation)

As for whether or not their processors are good for the average consumer, I think the reflex is to compare them to the older approach of making a PC where the thing is large, noisy and has to have a discreet video card and mechanical disk - that is not what new consumer PC deployments look like. They want small, they want quiet, they want 3D and they want it to playback their pirated TV and movie files without skipping or distorting. This is AMDs exact strength with their APU line of processors, there's no technical reason they can't profit on those use cases.

And I like AMD's new C-level guys. Having Papermaster (Apple's doomed antenna-gate patsy) and Read (who doesn't like an ex-IBMer?) driving the direction of the company sounds like a really good start. Any time I read an interview with either man they just reek good sense. Hopefully this important computing company survives well past the post-PC era.

*in full disclosure: there is not a single AMD processor active in my house at the moment (I'm ignoring my Geode powered firewall). I'm not a fanboy. I just respect that they seem to make some really good shit - Sony/Nintendo/MS seem to agree

Unique

AMD, by being licensed to make x86 chips, has a unique advantage that other microprocessor makers do not; it can make chips that people want to buy, because they can be used to run Windows. Therefore, this ought to be something close to a license to print money.

Yes, Intel is much bigger, and so competing head-to-head with Intel is difficult, because Intel has the ability to make the best and most powerful CPUs that anyone can make, given the much larger amount of money it has to spend on the most advanced fabs. I'm surprised Intel isn't trying to pick up the loose change lying around by making better PowerPC chips than IBM and better SPARC chips than Oracle... or, at least, I would be if those markets were worth pursuing. As it is, Intel already has the Itanium to keep it busy.

The good news is...

...that AMD continues to deliver excellent products at fair prices. Intel can't compete with AMD's APUs as Intel's graphics are very poor. On the desktop the Vishera CPUs offer a considerable improvement in performance over the PII CPUs. For overclocker's Vishera is a ton of performance for a very low price. Don't be duped by talking heads and bogus benches, test and see for yourself.

As far as AMD's Biz turn around they are doing pretty well. The only reason for a small loss this quarter is the debt they incurred to buy themselves out of exclusive production by GloFo. Otherwise they would have had a profit again this quarter. If you don't understand Biz you really should not be commenting on AMD's execution or future. The stock market doesn't in any way represent the current or future success of a company. The stock market responds primarily to rumors.