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It's been difficult to take claims of "high performance" from AMD seriously for a while :)

ewzimm 12y ago
They may not manufacture the highest-performing cores, but they have consistently provided the best performance for the price. Who cares who's fastest? The consoles went with them because they were fast enough and better priced.
- api 12y ago
  AMD's problem for a long time has been power consumption. They have had the performance per dollar crown, but their stuff runs hot. Only place I ever see them is gamer market and some servers.
  - engendered 12y ago
    Add that the performance per dollar lead is only if your workload is atypically multi-threaded. Intel has really taken a bite out of AMD's already tenuous market with the "Pentium" variants.
  - userbinator 12y ago
    This somewhat reminds me of the Netburst era, when AMD's Athlons were in the lead while Intel decided to chase after high clock frequencies with much higher power consumption as a result. Then Intel went back to the P6 to produce Core, and rapidly overtook AMD. I still hope AMD will make another sudden leap like that, to keep the x86 market more competitive, but they seem more intent on keeping to the path started by Bulldozer...
    - ewzimm 12y ago
      But you're commenting on a press release about how this architecture's main benefit is gains in performance-per-watt. AMD has a reputation for using more power right now because they slowed down to focus on unifying architectures. I think ARM has proved this strategy works in the long term. Everybody knows power efficiency is king right now.
- williadc 12y ago
  If electricity were free, you'd have a great point. TCO is something that needs to be considered, and Intel's chips are very competitive.
  - ewzimm 12y ago
    Intel makes 160 wH chips too, but you would probably compare something like a 95 wH Core i7 with a 125 wH FX. That's about $42/year in the USA, but that's assuming running at full power 24/7. Real cost would be a lot lower.
- mbell 12y ago
  > they have consistently provided the best performance for the price Need a citation on that. For low thread count or FP heavy applications, i.e. the vast majority of cases, Intel's Pentium G series has been the best bang for the buck for several years now. AMD is only cost effective for applications with lots of threads doing integer work which isn't terribly common.
  - ewzimm 12y ago
    You could look at Passmark: http://m.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_available.html http://m.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_available.html Low-end Xeons are on top, but the first you might want are the FX-6300 and 8320, followed by the Pentium Gs. Since you are not comparing equal cores, the cheaper Pentiums do make sense in a lot of cases, but AMD does often have cheaper motherboards. Actual performance is going to depend on use case. I feel like the console situation speaks for itself. AMD is still putting out some good stuff, especially for an undedog.

They may not manufacture the highest-performing cores, but they have consistently provided the best performance for the price. Who cares who's fastest? The consoles went with them because they were fast enough and better priced.

api 12y ago
AMD's problem for a long time has been power consumption. They have had the performance per dollar crown, but their stuff runs hot. Only place I ever see them is gamer market and some servers.
- engendered 12y ago
  Add that the performance per dollar lead is only if your workload is atypically multi-threaded. Intel has really taken a bite out of AMD's already tenuous market with the "Pentium" variants.
- userbinator 12y ago
  This somewhat reminds me of the Netburst era, when AMD's Athlons were in the lead while Intel decided to chase after high clock frequencies with much higher power consumption as a result. Then Intel went back to the P6 to produce Core, and rapidly overtook AMD. I still hope AMD will make another sudden leap like that, to keep the x86 market more competitive, but they seem more intent on keeping to the path started by Bulldozer...
  - ewzimm 12y ago
    But you're commenting on a press release about how this architecture's main benefit is gains in performance-per-watt. AMD has a reputation for using more power right now because they slowed down to focus on unifying architectures. I think ARM has proved this strategy works in the long term. Everybody knows power efficiency is king right now.
williadc 12y ago
If electricity were free, you'd have a great point. TCO is something that needs to be considered, and Intel's chips are very competitive.
- ewzimm 12y ago
  Intel makes 160 wH chips too, but you would probably compare something like a 95 wH Core i7 with a 125 wH FX. That's about $42/year in the USA, but that's assuming running at full power 24/7. Real cost would be a lot lower.
mbell 12y ago
> they have consistently provided the best performance for the price Need a citation on that. For low thread count or FP heavy applications, i.e. the vast majority of cases, Intel's Pentium G series has been the best bang for the buck for several years now. AMD is only cost effective for applications with lots of threads doing integer work which isn't terribly common.
- ewzimm 12y ago
  You could look at Passmark: http://m.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_available.html http://m.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_available.html Low-end Xeons are on top, but the first you might want are the FX-6300 and 8320, followed by the Pentium Gs. Since you are not comparing equal cores, the cheaper Pentiums do make sense in a lot of cases, but AMD does often have cheaper motherboards. Actual performance is going to depend on use case. I feel like the console situation speaks for itself. AMD is still putting out some good stuff, especially for an undedog.