Ailing AMD battered by goodwill, inventory charges AMD emerged from a bloody fourth quarter of its fiscal 2014 on Tuesday, reporting revenues down and profits sapped by painful one-time accounting charges. The chipmaker's total revenues for the three months ending on December 27, 2014 were US$1.24bn, a 22 per cent year-on-year decline. And the figure for the full year was …
Actually the Bobcat and Puma chips are great, its just Win 8 is a big old pile of suck. I have one of the weakest ones they made, the first gen Bobcat E350 netbook, and its a GREAT chip in Windows 7,I can even do 720P over HDMI (can do 1080P as well, although it will dip below 30FPS in heavy action scenes).
But AMD knows something you apparently do not, which is Windows 10 also runs great on Bobcat through Jaguar. I've got it running now on the above E350 and its damned snappy, all I had to do was kill the start menu live tiles and its even faster than Win 7!
But of course the rotting elephant in the room is how long Intel is gonna be allowed to keep rigging the market before they get busted. It has come out Cinebench was rigging their benches against AMD for their buddy Intel and you can watch the Tek Syndicate podcast "Intel admits to rigging" where they straight up admitted that they "gave incentives" for benchmark software to use the Intel Cripple Compiler, which puts out code that gimps AMD chips.
You can't have a fair fight if one side is allowed to bribe the ref, and that is what they have been doing. If they win on merit? Fine and dandy, but don't forget the reason we got stuck with tens of millions of lousy power hogging P4s was Intel decided the way to win when they were behind is just to rig the fight, we need to demand that this isn't allowed to keep happening!
I'm not sure there was really any trick missed - the ARM market is well served by competent chip designers and it is a cut throat market where a poor chip design may result in a lot of unsold inventory. Look at nVidia's ARM products - as far as I am aware they have been losing money on them for 5-6 years trying to become an established player.
It may change with 64-bit ARM chips for servers, but I'm not convinced as adding IO performance to ARM chips to improve server performance will result in higher power usage and cost, Atom isn't that far away due to process advantages, and there are other potential competitors such as MIPS in the AP market.
Intel may have all the cards in the x86 market, but at least it tolerates AMD to avoid any monopoly issues that might cause the US government to intervene.
It's a pity that AMD have taken their eye off the ball in terms of innovation on x86 side of things, especially in the server space.
No new Opterons with greater core density, no revamp new FX processors with the enhancements they made to the APUs in terms of per CPU core performance.
Yes they realise that they went down the wrong path with the modular cores but they could have at least tried to keep up.
I'm surprised revenues are still so low though given the XBOX and PS4 deals.
AMD were such an innovative company starting with the various extensions (3Dnow), on chip memory controllers, multicore, x86-64 extensions.
Personally I think they should drop the Ax processors for the Laptop/Low end PC market, take the FX line and add GPU functionality and bring the price down, at least they will be able to compete with the i3 and low end i5 range.
Innovation was the main thing they had going for them years back, I was quite a fan boy of theirs from around the K6 onwards, and each upgrade/rebuild always meant a new AMD, as they were so close to Intel performance (occasionally better) at the time, but so, so much cheaper. Which usually meant I could fit a better GPU than I'd have been able to afford if I'd gone the Intel route, and the GPU was normally the bottle neck, not the CPU.
I think they were the only company ever to force Intel into backing a rivals instruction set (x86-64). basically having to adopt AMDs way of doing 64bit, as it was obvious they'd had the better idea, and of course AMDs method allowed backwards compatibility with 32bit, which meant you didn't really need 32bit CPUs anymore.
Unfortunately that time seems to be over, such as shame.
My last rebuild about 3 years back had me jump ship from AMD to an i7 3770K, as a gamer, single thread performance was, and still is key* and the i7 just thrashed the AMD processors at that time (and presumably still do?), and 15 years on from my K6/K7s days, budget wasn't really the issue it had been.
* This is starting to change, but for now, a faster clocked 4 core, still beats a slower clocked 8 core for gaming.
So far, 3 years on, I've yet to find a single game that can use all 4 cores flat out in the i7 (it's also overclocked to 4.3Ghz), so whilst the GPU has been upgraded since then, I've seen no reason to switch away from my now old model i7. (The only tool I have that does use all 4 cores at 100%, is a video encoder).
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
