Damn. Soon its going to be just.. Intel and Intel. who as we all know have at least 30 years worth of tech boxed up and ready to be put into mass production, over the past few years AMD have forced them to occasionally skip one or two cycles of 'filler' technology which is basically a crippled version of something they invented in the early 90's.
Most of intel's R&D spending probably goes to finding ways of crippling more advanced technology and presenting it in such a way so that it doesn't appear crippled. yea Intel probably has a few quantum processors lined up but first they are going to bore us with the Core 3 Duo and Core 2 Trio and the likes so they can spread it out over as much time as possible
Yeah, I am actually afraid that if AMD were to go under that intel would have no reason to up the ante anymore, and would basically just do what they were doing pre-amd64 days- putting out the same chips with tiny incremental clock speed changes and making us all pay for it and limit other technologies to their will.
I think it would just be best if AMD were to all of the sudden start doing really well. It's not like it would do very much financial damage to intel because of how deep their pockets are and how widespread their chips are in the electronics industry. WE THE CONSUMER need AMD to do well so that prices come down, and new technologies and efficiencies are introduced in the heat of competition.
@cellular. Then a lot of people need to ante up and buy AMD machines... I just bought an AMD based laptop. Any other takers?
Unfortunately a quick search of Dell seems to indicate that you can't get an AMD powered Dell any more, not that I would ever recommend anyone buy a Dell, but for a company their size to stop offering AMD processors is gonna hurt AMD
No kidding. Intel was just putt-putting along until the Athlon 64 came around and demolished P4. And boy, did they. That was brutal. These things happen in cycles- Intel is ahead for this cycle.
The difference, of course, is that Intel had been around for long enough that they had the piles of cash to weather the beating they were taking. AMD, on the other hand, does not, as far as I know. I think that the Phenom is getting an amount of bad press that is not exactly fair- in order to really school the Phenom, you're looking at a MUCH pricier Intel chip.
I do think that AMD still has the technology advantage- HT 3.0 is a screamer, and although the intel's use less power and run cooler, it's because intel has the money on hand to suddenly switch out to a 45nm process. I hope AMD can handle this, but I think I will build my next system on and AMD (again) since they do keep prices down for all of us, and they keep technology driving forward, which a company, left to itself, has no reason to do.
@JD: you don't need to go too far up the Intel range to start handing out beatings...
'The Core 2 Quad Q6600 is around 6% faster than the Phenom 9900, 10% faster than the Phenom 9700, and almost 16% faster than the Phenom 9600 which is its closest price competitor throughout the rest of 2007.' - http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=3153&p=6 Ok, it's a little old now but highlights AMD's woes in great detail.
@CraigJ: I just bought an all AMD/ATI lappy as well,(Gateway T-1625) it's kind of nice to have 0 Intel content in this new machine... but I'm not giving up my Q6600 desktop any time soon.
It's not looking good for AMD. Remember the Cyrix 686? When they first came out, their chips were faster and cheaper than Intel chips. Very quickly, they became nothing more than inferior products.
Then AMD came out. Same thing but they lasted much longer. For many years they've always had superior chips when compared to similarly priced Intel chips. The smart money was always to go with AMD (as long as you weren't stuck with some crappy mobo chipset like the early ones from VIA).
All that changed when the Intel Core 2 came out. Intel released a superior product that AMD cannot match. Being "almost as fast" isn't going to cut it unfortunately. The underdog competitor has to have a superior product. Not something people settle for in order to save a few bucks. I'm a bit worried this may be the beginning of the end for AMD. Combining this problem with the terrible ATI deal (ATI also now suffering inferiority issues to Nvidia). Maybe IBM will get back in the game.
2G of Ram, a 250G HDD, ATI X1270 graphics, a 14” screen and a DVD burner for $650... I've owned my AMD lappy for about 3 weeks now and I couldn't be happier with it.
The newest ATI cards are more than adequate competition for Nvidia, especially for the money and especially in crossfire.
Rumors of AMD's demise may be greatly exaggerated.
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Damn. Soon its going to be just.. Intel and Intel. who as we all know have at least 30 years worth of tech boxed up and ready to be put into mass production, over the past few years AMD have forced them to occasionally skip one or two cycles of 'filler' technology which is basically a crippled version of something they invented in the early 90's.
Most of intel's R&D spending probably goes to finding ways of crippling more advanced technology and presenting it in such a way so that it doesn't appear crippled. yea Intel probably has a few quantum processors lined up but first they are going to bore us with the Core 3 Duo and Core 2 Trio and the likes so they can spread it out over as much time as possible
Yeah, I am actually afraid that if AMD were to go under that intel would have no reason to up the ante anymore, and would basically just do what they were doing pre-amd64 days- putting out the same chips with tiny incremental clock speed changes and making us all pay for it and limit other technologies to their will.
I think it would just be best if AMD were to all of the sudden start doing really well. It's not like it would do very much financial damage to intel because of how deep their pockets are and how widespread their chips are in the electronics industry. WE THE CONSUMER need AMD to do well so that prices come down, and new technologies and efficiencies are introduced in the heat of competition.
I agrees with Organic_Shadow, we (the customers) need AMD to do well in order to counter-balance Intel's monopoly in computer chip market.
@cellular. Then a lot of people need to ante up and buy AMD machines... I just bought an AMD based laptop. Any other takers?
Unfortunately a quick search of Dell seems to indicate that you can't get an AMD powered Dell any more, not that I would ever recommend anyone buy a Dell, but for a company their size to stop offering AMD processors is gonna hurt AMD
No kidding. Intel was just putt-putting along until the Athlon 64 came around and demolished P4. And boy, did they. That was brutal. These things happen in cycles- Intel is ahead for this cycle.
The difference, of course, is that Intel had been around for long enough that they had the piles of cash to weather the beating they were taking. AMD, on the other hand, does not, as far as I know. I think that the Phenom is getting an amount of bad press that is not exactly fair- in order to really school the Phenom, you're looking at a MUCH pricier Intel chip.
I do think that AMD still has the technology advantage- HT 3.0 is a screamer, and although the intel's use less power and run cooler, it's because intel has the money on hand to suddenly switch out to a 45nm process. I hope AMD can handle this, but I think I will build my next system on and AMD (again) since they do keep prices down for all of us, and they keep technology driving forward, which a company, left to itself, has no reason to do.
@JD: you don't need to go too far up the Intel range to start handing out beatings...
'The Core 2 Quad Q6600 is around 6% faster than the Phenom 9900, 10% faster than the Phenom 9700, and almost 16% faster than the Phenom 9600 which is its closest price competitor throughout the rest of 2007.' - http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=3153&p=6
Ok, it's a little old now but highlights AMD's woes in great detail.
@CraigJ: I just bought an all AMD/ATI lappy as well,(Gateway T-1625) it's kind of nice to have 0 Intel content in this new machine... but I'm not giving up my Q6600 desktop any time soon.
It's not looking good for AMD. Remember the Cyrix 686? When they first came out, their chips were faster and cheaper than Intel chips. Very quickly, they became nothing more than inferior products.
Then AMD came out. Same thing but they lasted much longer. For many years they've always had superior chips when compared to similarly priced Intel chips. The smart money was always to go with AMD (as long as you weren't stuck with some crappy mobo chipset like the early ones from VIA).
All that changed when the Intel Core 2 came out. Intel released a superior product that AMD cannot match. Being "almost as fast" isn't going to cut it unfortunately. The underdog competitor has to have a superior product. Not something people settle for in order to save a few bucks. I'm a bit worried this may be the beginning of the end for AMD. Combining this problem with the terrible ATI deal (ATI also now suffering inferiority issues to Nvidia). Maybe IBM will get back in the game.
@Spyvie. I don't have any problems with intel, just in that particular case AMD made more sense because of the price and use of the machine.
@Sean. Almost as fast is fine if it's half the price...
2G of Ram, a 250G HDD, ATI X1270 graphics, a 14” screen and a DVD burner for $650... I've owned my AMD lappy for about 3 weeks now and I couldn't be happier with it.
The newest ATI cards are more than adequate competition for Nvidia, especially for the money and especially in crossfire.
Rumors of AMD's demise may be greatly exaggerated.