AMD vs Intel 2011 and 2012?

[Notorious Honey Badger]

So what's the scoop from the gaming and windows perspective? I'd love to hear what some of the system building guru's have to say about AMD vs Intel. I remember back in the day I built a system with an AMD Barton core when AMD was tops for gaming, seems like eons ago.

Thanks for any input... I'm just looking for opinions on how the current chips stack vs each other. Even general opinions about the new chips are welcome.

[photon]

Intel still leads.

AMD's most recent Bulldozer chip was step forward, but was pretty disappointing I think.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4955/t...-fx8150-tested

The latest stuff can compete with Intel's i5 in heavily multithreaded apps that can take advantage of the greater # of cores, but in single threaded stuff it suffers.

[Hack&Lube]

AMD's latest CPU, Bulldozer was pretty much considered a flop/disappointment by most enthusiasts. Instead of designing them by hand, they allowed automatic algorithms to design them and they came up unoptimized and performed even worse than some of their older CPUs. AMD was battered financially and just eliminated 10% of it's workforce last month.

AMD is doing quite poorly. I don't see AMD being able to compete with Intel, even on the lower priced CPUs for quite a long time. It may not even be possible given the state of the company and how it's fallen.

[Notorious Honey Badger]

that's sad. competition is what really got intel going and gave us the core 2 duo days. i cant think of anything worse for computing than AMD going tits up

[Hemi-Cuda]

i remember when the Athlon64 first came out and absolutely destroyed anything Intel had at the time. sad to see a company who was able to hit Intel that hard devolve into obscurity

[Hanni]

I miss the days of an Athlon 2200+ and an ATI 9600XT, that setup lasted me a good 7 years.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

AMD's latest CPU, Bulldozer was pretty much considered a flop/disappointment by most enthusiasts.

Fortunately, AMD isn't run by enthusiasts Bulldozer is a shift in internal architecture thats quite significant, skewed towards scalability and multithreaded workloads.

Not all of us are interested in one or two cores running really fast and counting FPS in some game. It's a very interesting architecture for big workloads like virtualization, web serving, etc.

[REDVAN]

Originally Posted by Hemi-Cuda

i remember when the Athlon64 first came out and absolutely destroyed anything Intel had at the time. sad to see a company who was able to hit Intel that hard devolve into obscurity

It's not sad... it's reality.

If there is a fast food chain that brings out their new PRODUCT X and it starts to really draw crowds and take sales out of McDonalds, you'd better believe McDs is going to develop something better to gain their old customers back.

That's what intel has done. So until AMD starts producing good chips again, it's their own fault they're dying.

[zamler]

I think there is a pretty good chance AMD will exit the enthusiast CPU space.

[Badgers Nose]

Intel's budget stuff (i5-2600) beats AMD's top stuff right now.

I am really worried about their CPU business. ATI is the only thing keeping them in business IMO.

They are rumoured to be getting into ARM CPUs in a big way too.

[Badgers Nose]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

Fortunately, AMD isn't run by enthusiasts Bulldozer is a shift in internal architecture thats quite significant, skewed towards scalability and multithreaded workloads.

Not all of us are interested in one or two cores running really fast and counting FPS in some game. It's a very interesting architecture for big workloads like virtualization, web serving, etc.

Yeah, there is more profit in that space. But I can see Intel and AMD losing that entire space to ARM in the next 5-10 years.

[photon]

Article on AMD's recent entries for the server market.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5058/a...nterlagos-6200

Not a home run but still keeping up and having specific advantages.

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by Badgers Nose

Intel's budget stuff (i5-2600) beats AMD's top stuff right now.

I am really worried about their CPU business. ATI is the only thing keeping them in business IMO.

They are rumoured to be getting into ARM CPUs in a big way too.

Originally Posted by Badgers Nose

Yeah, there is more profit in that space. But I can see Intel and AMD losing that entire space to ARM in the next 5-10 years.

What do you mean? AMD is doing something with ARM? Or do you mean AMD is going to make RISC based processors?

ARM and RISC are finally succeeding like they should have in the 80s and they have so many applications in the mobile market. You would still use full fledged CISC processors for most fullsize computers though. I don't think how Intel and AMD could lose the budget space to ARM. ARM doesn't mean low-cost, more like low-power consumption because of RISC design.

[Aegypticus]

Don't ask me to source this, but I saw some rumours on various forums awhile back that Intel is actually sitting on some pretty good advances because nobody is putting any pressure on them right now. Intel is still putting out some amazing products, but this situation isn't really helping people looking for the latest and greatest.

[zamler]

What's happened is in the desktop space, 95% of people don't need more CPU power. The hardcore enthusiast will demand and buy the absolute fastest stuff out there (within reason), the rest don't need anything better than a $60 processor and a $100 graphics card, most get buy with much less powerful video hardware. Workstations, servers, specialized hardware applications are where the big metal stuff is going to be relegated to, the rest of the market has reached a "satisfaction point".

So why should AMD sink billions into trying to outdo Intel in processors? They simply can't monetize this going forward, they don't have the marketshare. Which is why I believe AMD is going to try and push Fusion as much as possible, continue with their strengths on the discreet GPU side, and license ARM tech. It makes sense, Intel literally stole billions from AMD in last 10 years, it's no wonder AMD does not have the R&D budget to keep up with Intel, it is remarkable they have done as well as they did.

But it's time for AMD to reinvent themselves, or Intel will continue to bleed them out. BTW, Intel wants NOTHING to do with AMD leaving markets they both compete in, as soon as that happens, Intel goes back under the monopoly microscope.