5 ms·

Purchasing ATI didn't seem to help them much, either. Perhaps it was to offset the losses that they saw coming, but it also seemed to distract them a bit.

agumonkey 10y ago
I never understood what were the failure and what could AMD have done better. When intel started to be ahead in single threaded IPC, AMD tried to innovate by bringing low consumption, multi threaded, with embedded GPUs cheap SoC. It seemed quite in touch with the early netbooks where people would need a blend of capabilities (hardware video accel, compositing / CSS3 able GPU) instead of a compilation workhorse. I don't know if the designs were really absurd, or if the market couldn't understand AMD's value prop. Or if the programmers couldn't (or wouldn't) tap into their APU idea. Multiple papercuts made them fall I guess.
- EpicBlackCrayon 10y ago
  The funny thing is that that's where the market is sort of heading now.
- dom0 10y ago
  APUs didn't take off except in low-end-ish notebooks and low-end desktop computers not because the idea is bad, or the graphics performance was poor (it wasn't), but because the CPU part was subpar. The gaming consoles show how well the concept works, although, sadly for AMD, these deals may be high volume but don't have high margins. AMD dedicated graphics have only minor issues imho, they're very competitive with nVidias offerings. But in the professional and compute segments they fail to take off, because nVidia established the popular, proprietary CUDA standard there. I don't think there's a (major) technical reason why AMD has much less market share there.
  - gsnedders 10y ago
    > The gaming consoles show how well the concept works, although, sadly for AMD, these deals may be high volume but don't have high margins. They're likely fairly consistent income, however, even if the margins are relatively slim. For a company in AMD's state, constant income no matter how small is likely a good thing.
    - agumonkey 10y ago
      Always good to have economic mass, market presence. I have no data, but I could see a guy owning an AMD based game console thinking about other AMD products for its PC.
      - theandrewbailey 10y ago
        The problem with that is unless that guy figures out what's inside his console, he would never realize that an established PC vendor was providing key parts inside. I've never had a game console, but I don't remember seeing AMD stickers on consoles or their packaging.
    - hvidgaard 10y ago
      In large, it pays for fabrication facilities and some R&D. While it may not be ideal, it's not bad either.
  - usrusr 10y ago
    One problem with APUs is that they make it so difficult to rank offerings by performance. A convenient benchmark blend is a reasonably useful approximation of actual utility for conventional general purpose CPUs. But when GPU becomes part of the mix, you get a lot more uncertainty if you do not investigate the details. For an entry level system, where APUs are at home, few people are willing to invest that much effort into their buying decision. AMD marketing tried to put GPU performance in the spotlight. The unfortunate effect was that a moderately informed consumer then had the choice between a somewhat predictable level of graphics performance paired with whatever CPU that came with it if buying AMD, versus a somewhat predictable level of CPU performance paired with whatever GPU that came with it if buying Intel. In most market segments, uncertainty about graphics performance has much less impact on buying decisions than uncertainty about general purpose compute. The (involuntarily, given their portfolio) focus of AMD's marketing on the graphics part of their APUs made it close to impossible to successfully communicate value-for-money advantages in their price range (assuming they had it).
- DiabloD3 10y ago
  No, it was early designs (intentionally?) fucked up that deviated strongly from AMD's reference design. Rumors went around that Intel paid manufacturers to do it intentionally, but nothing was ever proven. However, given how Intel has had similar behavior in the past, it isn't an unreasonable rumor either...

agumonkey 10y ago

I never understood what were the failure and what could AMD have done better. When intel started to be ahead in single threaded IPC, AMD tried to innovate by bringing low consumption, multi threaded, with embedded GPUs cheap SoC. It seemed quite in touch with the early netbooks where people would need a blend of capabilities (hardware video accel, compositing / CSS3 able GPU) instead of a compilation workhorse. I don't know if the designs were really absurd, or if the market couldn't understand AMD's value prop. Or if the programmers couldn't (or wouldn't) tap into their APU idea. Multiple papercuts made them fall I guess.

EpicBlackCrayon 10y ago
The funny thing is that that's where the market is sort of heading now.
dom0 10y ago
APUs didn't take off except in low-end-ish notebooks and low-end desktop computers not because the idea is bad, or the graphics performance was poor (it wasn't), but because the CPU part was subpar. The gaming consoles show how well the concept works, although, sadly for AMD, these deals may be high volume but don't have high margins. AMD dedicated graphics have only minor issues imho, they're very competitive with nVidias offerings. But in the professional and compute segments they fail to take off, because nVidia established the popular, proprietary CUDA standard there. I don't think there's a (major) technical reason why AMD has much less market share there.
- gsnedders 10y ago
  > The gaming consoles show how well the concept works, although, sadly for AMD, these deals may be high volume but don't have high margins. They're likely fairly consistent income, however, even if the margins are relatively slim. For a company in AMD's state, constant income no matter how small is likely a good thing.
  - agumonkey 10y ago
    Always good to have economic mass, market presence. I have no data, but I could see a guy owning an AMD based game console thinking about other AMD products for its PC.
    - theandrewbailey 10y ago
      The problem with that is unless that guy figures out what's inside his console, he would never realize that an established PC vendor was providing key parts inside. I've never had a game console, but I don't remember seeing AMD stickers on consoles or their packaging.
  - hvidgaard 10y ago
    In large, it pays for fabrication facilities and some R&D. While it may not be ideal, it's not bad either.
- usrusr 10y ago
  One problem with APUs is that they make it so difficult to rank offerings by performance. A convenient benchmark blend is a reasonably useful approximation of actual utility for conventional general purpose CPUs. But when GPU becomes part of the mix, you get a lot more uncertainty if you do not investigate the details. For an entry level system, where APUs are at home, few people are willing to invest that much effort into their buying decision. AMD marketing tried to put GPU performance in the spotlight. The unfortunate effect was that a moderately informed consumer then had the choice between a somewhat predictable level of graphics performance paired with whatever CPU that came with it if buying AMD, versus a somewhat predictable level of CPU performance paired with whatever GPU that came with it if buying Intel. In most market segments, uncertainty about graphics performance has much less impact on buying decisions than uncertainty about general purpose compute. The (involuntarily, given their portfolio) focus of AMD's marketing on the graphics part of their APUs made it close to impossible to successfully communicate value-for-money advantages in their price range (assuming they had it).
DiabloD3 10y ago
No, it was early designs (intentionally?) fucked up that deviated strongly from AMD's reference design. Rumors went around that Intel paid manufacturers to do it intentionally, but nothing was ever proven. However, given how Intel has had similar behavior in the past, it isn't an unreasonable rumor either...