5 ms·

I could imagine two companies who have a vital anti-trust interest in keeping AMD alive: Intel for its processors, nVidia for the ATI graphics cards.

smegel 14y ago
Intel has ARM, ATI would be spun off if AMD went under.
- revelation 14y ago
  Right now, Intel and ARMs business are very much segregated. Each of the two is making steps into foreign country, but with relatively meager success. To clarify: ARMs business is the embedded and booming smartphone market, Intel has the never-going-to-cease-to-exist high performance server and workstation market. The fate of the thing between, consumer and "office" PCs, is very much unknown.
  - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
    Cloud-based data centers are beginning to adopt ARMs for power consumption reasons. If that trend picks up along with everyone using cloud providers, then I think even the high-end PC server business could start dying. Incidentally, this is a market where NVIDIA could begin to really cream Intel, a lot of scientific computing has already moved over to CUDA/Tesla (granted, there is a huge difference between scientific and enterprise applications). I don't see the same thing happening to workstations, however, difficult to move that work into the cloud.
  - smegel 14y ago
    > Intel has the never-going-to-cease-to-exist high performance server and workstation market. You haven't been an advisor to AMD by any chance?
mtgx 14y ago
Nvidia might find itself in a similar position soon if its Tegra line-up doesn't become significantly more popular and successful. Intel is squeezing them out of the market with its integrated graphics in laptops, and I think that's quite a shame because I don't think Intel played fair there. They tried to force manufacturers to use integrated graphics even if the laptop used discrete graphics. Now that Intel's integrated graphics chips are becoming "good enough" for most people, it's going to be a very smooth transition to take Nvidia out of the laptop market. So Intel is killing both AMD and Nvidia. Hopefully Nvidia has the last say with its ARM-based chips, though. If ARM ends up disrupting Intel in all its markets, and if Nvidia remains one of the best ARM chip makers, then Nvidia will ultimately win. That can't be said about AMD, though. They're stuck in an x86 world where they're falling further and further behind Intel, and they haven't even begun to enter the ARM world, and even if they do, it might be too late now, because they lack the ARM engineering experience of their competitors. Buying the OMAP division from TI might help, but OMAP is not doing that great now either, and they always use overclocked last-gen GPU's to compete with the new mobile GPU's, which I find a bit annoying. Plus, I don't know if AMD can even afford them, or the turn-around that comes with that. Another interesting acquisition target could be MIPS, which is for sale, but AMD would have to also promote the benefits of that architecture on their own, which seems even harder.
- seanmcdirmid 14y ago
  NVIDIA still owns the high-end scientific computing market. This combined with their ARM products could save it in the future. AMD...their only advantage has been X86 and that is just a dying market, kudos to the board at least for dumping the CEO who wanted to focus on the high end PC market. AMD still has really good GPU tech, enough to compete with NVIDIA on the high-end non-GPGPU market, but that is very niche.
  - DeepDuh 14y ago
    Actually, I fear for NVIDIA's HPC market as well. Kepler 2 in my eyes is not well suited for GPGPU, they've rather optimized it for the gaming market in order to go after AMD. I.e. they introduced much more cores, but those cores now have less cache and register resources available to them. Less registers, especially, is deadly - this has already been a limiting factor for many HPC applications. Meanwhile Intel pushes out their Xeon Phi boards with huge memory bandwidth and OpenMP support. If there's not some kind of surprise in terms of performance either on Intel's or NVIDIA's side I see dark clouds coming for them.
CoolGuySteve 14y ago
When 3dfx started flailing, they sued NVidia for IP infringement until NVidia purchased them. I could see the board of AMD doing the same thing, patent trolling everyone in sight until somebody buys them out.

smegel 14y ago

Intel has ARM, ATI would be spun off if AMD went under.

revelation 14y ago
Right now, Intel and ARMs business are very much segregated. Each of the two is making steps into foreign country, but with relatively meager success. To clarify: ARMs business is the embedded and booming smartphone market, Intel has the never-going-to-cease-to-exist high performance server and workstation market. The fate of the thing between, consumer and "office" PCs, is very much unknown.
- seanmcdirmid 14y ago
  Cloud-based data centers are beginning to adopt ARMs for power consumption reasons. If that trend picks up along with everyone using cloud providers, then I think even the high-end PC server business could start dying. Incidentally, this is a market where NVIDIA could begin to really cream Intel, a lot of scientific computing has already moved over to CUDA/Tesla (granted, there is a huge difference between scientific and enterprise applications). I don't see the same thing happening to workstations, however, difficult to move that work into the cloud.
- smegel 14y ago
  > Intel has the never-going-to-cease-to-exist high performance server and workstation market. You haven't been an advisor to AMD by any chance?

mtgx 14y ago

Nvidia might find itself in a similar position soon if its Tegra line-up doesn't become significantly more popular and successful. Intel is squeezing them out of the market with its integrated graphics in laptops, and I think that's quite a shame because I don't think Intel played fair there. They tried to force manufacturers to use integrated graphics even if the laptop used discrete graphics. Now that Intel's integrated graphics chips are becoming "good enough" for most people, it's going to be a very smooth transition to take Nvidia out of the laptop market. So Intel is killing both AMD and Nvidia. Hopefully Nvidia has the last say with its ARM-based chips, though. If ARM ends up disrupting Intel in all its markets, and if Nvidia remains one of the best ARM chip makers, then Nvidia will ultimately win. That can't be said about AMD, though. They're stuck in an x86 world where they're falling further and further behind Intel, and they haven't even begun to enter the ARM world, and even if they do, it might be too late now, because they lack the ARM engineering experience of their competitors. Buying the OMAP division from TI might help, but OMAP is not doing that great now either, and they always use overclocked last-gen GPU's to compete with the new mobile GPU's, which I find a bit annoying. Plus, I don't know if AMD can even afford them, or the turn-around that comes with that. Another interesting acquisition target could be MIPS, which is for sale, but AMD would have to also promote the benefits of that architecture on their own, which seems even harder.

seanmcdirmid 14y ago
NVIDIA still owns the high-end scientific computing market. This combined with their ARM products could save it in the future. AMD...their only advantage has been X86 and that is just a dying market, kudos to the board at least for dumping the CEO who wanted to focus on the high end PC market. AMD still has really good GPU tech, enough to compete with NVIDIA on the high-end non-GPGPU market, but that is very niche.
- DeepDuh 14y ago
  Actually, I fear for NVIDIA's HPC market as well. Kepler 2 in my eyes is not well suited for GPGPU, they've rather optimized it for the gaming market in order to go after AMD. I.e. they introduced much more cores, but those cores now have less cache and register resources available to them. Less registers, especially, is deadly - this has already been a limiting factor for many HPC applications. Meanwhile Intel pushes out their Xeon Phi boards with huge memory bandwidth and OpenMP support. If there's not some kind of surprise in terms of performance either on Intel's or NVIDIA's side I see dark clouds coming for them.

CoolGuySteve 14y ago

When 3dfx started flailing, they sued NVidia for IP infringement until NVidia purchased them. I could see the board of AMD doing the same thing, patent trolling everyone in sight until somebody buys them out.