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It is quite surprising that AMD has been undervalued for so long. Would't be surprised by more radical upwards corrections.

arca_vorago 11y ago
I have a slightly different take on AMD these days, in that I don't think they were undervalued, at least not too much, but rather I think they saw the direction the future held and jumped at it, thinking they would be ahead of intel, mostly in their understanding of the merging of cpu and gpu. I simply think they did it a bit too fast and left their other offerings with too little resources, but now that they are using the 14nm and 16nm manufacturing process, Zen is poised to be a much heavier hitter than I think most people understand yet. So they werent undervalued too much, but they are now, and so I think you are probably correct about more radical upwards corrections. I am especially excited to see their server cpus with zen. My favorite machine I have ever built is actually an AMD machine, and I built it fairly recently because there are some models in which they excel. (Its a quad opteron 6380 system for a total of 64 cores at 2.5ghz, and I did it for less than 5k$ Something I theorycrafted while in bioinformatics, though I didnt get to buld it until I was no longer in that industry.) Also, I'll say that I have been looking at building a new system for my gamedev purposes, and I have concluded that I am going to wait for Zen. If they miss the q4 2016 release though they may lose the mindshare momentum they are bulding up.
- tcoppi 11y ago
  The ATI acquisition was very forward looking, the problem is the hardware and software stack required to make APUs successful was nowhere close to ready at the time. We are just now seeing small enough process nodes that can support real GPU performance on the same die as a decent CPU, though the software isn't there yet still it is much closer. If Zen can match/beat Intel and it scales well enough down to APUs I think they might finally find their market, and Zen on the server should be a killer as well if that is the case, as AMD has always done really well at shoving lots of cores in small packages.
- scholia 11y ago
  > Its a quad opteron 6380 system for a total of 64 cores at 2.5ghz That sounds good. Unfortunately, in my experience, the real-world performance of the low-end chips in cheap laptops has been absolutely dire for about a decade. And those low-end chips are the ones most of us experience....

arca_vorago 11y ago

I have a slightly different take on AMD these days, in that I don't think they were undervalued, at least not too much, but rather I think they saw the direction the future held and jumped at it, thinking they would be ahead of intel, mostly in their understanding of the merging of cpu and gpu. I simply think they did it a bit too fast and left their other offerings with too little resources, but now that they are using the 14nm and 16nm manufacturing process, Zen is poised to be a much heavier hitter than I think most people understand yet. So they werent undervalued too much, but they are now, and so I think you are probably correct about more radical upwards corrections. I am especially excited to see their server cpus with zen. My favorite machine I have ever built is actually an AMD machine, and I built it fairly recently because there are some models in which they excel. (Its a quad opteron 6380 system for a total of 64 cores at 2.5ghz, and I did it for less than 5k$ Something I theorycrafted while in bioinformatics, though I didnt get to buld it until I was no longer in that industry.) Also, I'll say that I have been looking at building a new system for my gamedev purposes, and I have concluded that I am going to wait for Zen. If they miss the q4 2016 release though they may lose the mindshare momentum they are bulding up.

tcoppi 11y ago
The ATI acquisition was very forward looking, the problem is the hardware and software stack required to make APUs successful was nowhere close to ready at the time. We are just now seeing small enough process nodes that can support real GPU performance on the same die as a decent CPU, though the software isn't there yet still it is much closer. If Zen can match/beat Intel and it scales well enough down to APUs I think they might finally find their market, and Zen on the server should be a killer as well if that is the case, as AMD has always done really well at shoving lots of cores in small packages.
scholia 11y ago
> Its a quad opteron 6380 system for a total of 64 cores at 2.5ghz That sounds good. Unfortunately, in my experience, the real-world performance of the low-end chips in cheap laptops has been absolutely dire for about a decade. And those low-end chips are the ones most of us experience....