AMD smacked by channel slump in Q2 The bean counters at AMD have done a first pass on the company's second quarter, and it is not looking so good. The company said in a statement after Wall Street called it a day on Monday that revenues in the second quarter ended in June would fall by approximately 11 per cent sequentially from the first quarter. AMD had …
We've seen plenty of presentations, roadmaps and analysis of AMD's APU concept. Sounded great...
But when you get to tests looking into actual performance, all the ones actually used in new notebooks this year suck... you get some '62xx' Radeon equivalent that can't even beat Intel's HD-4000, or just barely, so you'd still need a dedicated GPU.
AMD competes at the lowest end of the market, basically in a range of notebooks that are trying to be slightly better than netbooks without costing more. And netbook sales are declining... There can't be much profit in selling computers to people who can't afford a good one, when the market is shrinking too.
Nvidia seems to be mopping up the market for lower and midrange dedicated GPUs in notebooks with their 620M, 630M, 640M, 650M. This may not be so much because Nvidia's Kepler architecture surprisingly topped AMD's dedicated GPUs on both TDP and performance, while using a narrower memory bus, but in good part because their Optimus works way better than AMD's Enduro (which gives the impression its not actively being worked on). Nvidia's 3D tech is marketed better and more convenient for punters to know what they need, even though I don't think its better than AMD's, open "you-hook-up-whatever-you-want" approach, once you got it running.
I haven't seen an AMD APU in anything over 400 bucks, they have nothing to make a decent multimedia notebook with capability for casual gaming. The whole APU line can't be marketed if there isn't at least one powerful version to gain some street cred. If AMD has one, nobody seems to be using it. I can imagine the faces at AMD when Acer announced their M3.
The aggravating factor of AMD's failure to compete at a higher level is, that Intel can keep its prices sky high.
Makes you wonder if Intel is paying AMD to stick to netbooks, or if AMD folk are just spread too thin?
Someone in a high place at AMD must be fouling up things. They fired the last CEO cause he had turned a blind eye to the mobile market... maybe that wasn't such a good idea, things seem to be getting worse.
In that the Llano chips are seen purely as a way of reducing cost (i.e. cheaper motherboards without dedicated graphics) and thus they go into low end laptops without much thought to design.
Take the new Piledriver based Trinity chips. Which do outperform the intel 4000 Graphics chips, now add a dedicated AMD GPU and you can crossfire the APU with the GPU which will outperform most mobile GPUs.
I recently came back to AMD and I'm pretty impressed with my HP Laptop equiped with AMD A8 quad core processor and Crossfire graphics. Yes it doesn't perform great when running benchmark tests, but its doing a grand job of converting all the HD family movies where my older intel unit clunked to a halt.
In blind test most folks can not tell the difference between an AMD or Intel powered PC/laptop. In fact testing showed that many preferred the AMD desktop even with a CPU that in (bogus) benches optimized for Intel CPUs, doesn't show as well. This is why it's important for consumers to educate themselves and buy the product that delivers the best performance and value for their use, which more often than not is AMD. In fact AMD's APUs have been so impressive they have been adapted to servers - which they were never intended for nor designed for.
BTW, Intel also missed their sales projections for this quarter due to the continuing worldwide economic meltdown that looks to continue for another 5+ years...
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
