AMD being squeezed out of the computer business

Couperin47

Member
SoSH Member
Pretty much all the news in their latest financials are bad or worse:
 
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/21/amd_q4_2014_earnings/
 
the only glimmer of hope is in embedded and systems chips, but when it comes to cpus for computers and gpus for video, AMD is falling further and further behind. There has also been what amounts to a mass exodus of all their top officers in the last 6 months.
 

nvalvo

Member
SoSH Member
Jul 16, 2005
21,755
Rogers Park
I was sort of wondering how much they made from Apple, whose custom chips for phones and tablets are based on and license some AMD tech. That has to be a pretty lucrative racket.
 
Clicking the link, that might be enumerated under the "semi-custom" business which they say is way up. So maybe there's some hope? 
 

AlNipper49

Huge Member
Dope
SoSH Member
Apr 3, 2001
44,967
Mtigawi
Not good news for Intel, They've basically let AMD to live in certain niches (IMHO) in order to give the guise of them having some competition out there.
 

Couperin47

Member
SoSH Member
AlNipper49 said:
Not good news for Intel, They've basically let AMD to live in certain niches (IMHO) in order to give the guise of them having some competition out there.
 
exactly, AMD tried to focus on low power cpus with better integrated graphics, mostly for use in laptops and other compact formfactors.  Intel's new cpus also focus on much lower power envelopes and, apparently, blow away AMD offerings for low power envelopes. The Intel graphics are still not as good, but that doesn't seem to much matter and 4600 and better seem to be 'good enough'.  Hard to see how AMD generates the resources to ever produce a truly new and competitive architecture.
 

wade boggs chicken dinner

Member
SoSH Member
Mar 26, 2005
30,959
nvalvo said:
I was sort of wondering how much they made from Apple, whose custom chips for phones and tablets are based on and license some AMD tech. That has to be a pretty lucrative racket.
 
Clicking the link, that might be enumerated under the "semi-custom" business which they say is way up. So maybe there's some hope? 
Are you sure about this?  I knew that AMD chips were powering high-end versions of the MacBook Pro and IMac but I thought Apple's current phone and tablet chips are designed in-house and made by Samsung.
 
As for the semi-custom business, I believe that is primarily due to the fact that AMD chips are inside the XBONE and PS4.  It was up 51% YoY but down 11% sequentially.  AMD also announced a couple of quarters ago a couple of new semi-custom wins (estimated at $500M apiece) but I don't think they've given details yet.
 

wade boggs chicken dinner

Member
SoSH Member
Mar 26, 2005
30,959
Couperin47 said:
 
exactly, AMD tried to focus on low power cpus with better integrated graphics, mostly for use in laptops and other compact formfactors.  Intel's new cpus also focus on much lower power envelopes and, apparently, blow away AMD offerings for low power envelopes. The Intel graphics are still not as good, but that doesn't seem to much matter and 4600 and better seem to be 'good enough'.  Hard to see how AMD generates the resources to ever produce a truly new and competitive architecture.
From what I understand, AMD is resting a lot of its hope on Carrizo - (for example) http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2015/01/19/can-amds-upcoming-carrizo-apu-rival-playstation-4-graphics/ - and maybe they can create a market for better graphics inside machines.  However, Carrizo isn't due out until 2016 at the earliest and its hard to see where they can sell their chips in 2015.
 

Blacken

Robespierre in a Cape
SoSH Member
Jul 24, 2007
12,152
AMD has never had CPUs in the MBP or iMac. They're strictly using the mobile Core i series. At times they've had mobile Radeon GPUs in the high-end machines, but that's not high-margin, especially when dealing with Apple. I can't imagine the custom Jaguars that they're supplying to Sony or Microsoft have huge margins, either.
 

Couperin47

Member
SoSH Member
and all of this ignores AMD's other insoluble issue: Their destiny is entirely out of their control since they are totally dependent on how and when the fabs they use can move to new processes and get decent yields. It can be argued that AMD was screwed no matter what they did: They sold their fab because they needed the capital to survive, and even if they had kept them, there was no way they could ever generate the resources required to evolve those plants competitively. Selling bought them some time and Arab investment bought them some more, but time is running out.  The video (what was ATI) and specialized portions probably will survive somehow as a competitor to Nvidia...but there's only so long that you can keep selling cpu designs that basically are just minor refinements of 2012 technology.
 

jimv

Member
SoSH Member
Feb 5, 2011
1,118
wade boggs chicken dinner said:
Are you sure about this?  I knew that AMD chips were powering high-end versions of the MacBook Pro and IMac but I thought Apple's current phone and tablet chips are designed in-house and made by Samsung.
 
As for the semi-custom business, I believe that is primarily due to the fact that AMD chips are inside the XBONE and PS4.  It was up 51% YoY but down 11% sequentially.  AMD also announced a couple of quarters ago a couple of new semi-custom wins (estimated at $500M apiece) but I don't think they've given details yet.
Apple's phone/tablet chips are ARM-based processors customized by Apple. And, iirc, they've moved to TSMC fabs for manufacturing
 

wade boggs chicken dinner

Member
SoSH Member
Mar 26, 2005
30,959
jimv said:
Apple's phone/tablet chips are ARM-based processors customized by Apple. And, iirc, they've moved to TSMC fabs for manufacturing
 
Sorry, I should have looked it up before I posted.  Apple has moved part of its A8 production to TSMC but Samsung is still supplying a good amount.  http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/12/30/conflicting-reports-claim-tsmc-samsung-each-have-upper-hand-for-building-apples-a9-chip
 
And yes, Apple only uses AMD graphics processors.  But my question was really about Apple, AMD, and phones and tablets but i think the person who posted that statement may have been confusing ARM and AMD.
 

jimv

Member
SoSH Member
Feb 5, 2011
1,118
wade boggs chicken dinner said:
 
Sorry, I should have looked it up before I posted.  Apple has moved part of its A8 production to TSMC but Samsung is still supplying a good amount.  http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/12/30/conflicting-reports-claim-tsmc-samsung-each-have-upper-hand-for-building-apples-a9-chip
 
And yes, Apple only uses AMD graphics processors.  But my question was really about Apple, AMD, and phones and tablets but i think the person who posted that statement may have been confusing ARM and AMD.
I didn't realize that. I guess Apple is trying to avoid using a single supplier, or avoid using a single supplier that doubles as one of their competitors. The semiconductor space can be odd
 

santadevil

wears depends
Silver Supporter
SoSH Member
Aug 1, 2006
6,523
Saskatchestan
AlNipper49 said:
Not good news for Intel, They've basically let AMD to live in certain niches (IMHO) in order to give the guise of them having some competition out there.
 
Isn't this just not good news for us, the consumers?
No viable competition isn't good for anyone.
 

Couperin47

Member
SoSH Member
santadevil said:
 
Isn't this just not good news for us, the consumers?
No viable competition isn't good for anyone.
 
The assertion will be that ARM is their new 'real competition" and while this is undoubtedly true in tablets & phones etc., it's laughable in anything from Chromebooks on up where the performance they can currently provide is anemic, even by AMD standards.  Otoh, they at least may have the growth and resources to aspire to the deeper end of the pool... just equally unlikely that they want to try or that the mainstream of PC computing is migrating to ARM archtecture.
 

AlNipper49

Huge Member
Dope
SoSH Member
Apr 3, 2001
44,967
Mtigawi
Couperin47 said:
 
The assertion will be that ARM is their new 'real competition" and while this is undoubtedly true in tablets & phones etc., it's laughable in anything from Chromebooks on up where the performance they can currently provide is anemic, even by AMD standards.  Otoh, they at least may have the growth and resources to aspire to the deeper end of the pool... just equally unlikely that they want to try or that the mainstream of PC computing is migrating to AR archtecture.
Intel's greatest enemy at this point is that almost nothing the average end user does these days is bottlenecks by CPU. I'm still throwing i3s ss shit branch office servers, because it's hard to project them needing more.

CPU density (cloud services, whatever) and massive over subscription (virtualization) is also reducing the need for tons of need for CPU power at the consumer end of things.
 

zenter

indian sweet
SoSH Member
Oct 11, 2005
5,641
Astoria, NY
Blacken said:
AMD has never had CPUs in the MBP or iMac. They're strictly using the mobile Core i series. At times they've had mobile Radeon GPUs in the high-end machines, but that's not high-margin, especially when dealing with Apple. I can't imagine the custom Jaguars that they're supplying to Sony or Microsoft have huge margins, either.
 
One of the things killing AMD is helping keep them afloat - Microsoft and Sony. There's at least 5 years left in the current generation of consoles. So... There's that.
 

Couperin47

Member
SoSH Member
AlNipper49 said:
Intel's greatest enemy at this point is that almost nothing the average end user does these days is bottlenecks by CPU. I'm still throwing i3s ss shit branch office servers, because it's hard to project them needing more.

CPU density (cloud services, whatever) and massive over subscription (virtualization) is also reducing the need for tons of need for CPU power at the consumer end of things.
 
All true, we've really had no new breakthrough in applications since god-knows-when. I always thought that really usable voice recognition would be that application, (all I'd need is a decent proximity mic and then play around with formatting in Word) and would require a serious leap in local processing power etc. It's looking like, if/when that arrives it will be via the cloud which for an attorney who's dictating seriously confidential work product is going to be rather more problematical. I don't think I want the NSA having real time transcriptions of everything I do.
 

Blacken

Robespierre in a Cape
SoSH Member
Jul 24, 2007
12,152
AlNipper49 said:
Yes I'd say it is very bad for us.
Intel has competition. It's called "Intel." The advances from Sandy Bridge to Haswell and the upcoming Haswell->Skylake were and are not spurred by AMD. They need to move product that was sufficiently better than what they already were pushing, so people actually buy it. ARM is sufficiently threatening in the normal case that Intel can't sit back (and that's why Bay Trail and friends are so aggressively advancing).

I wouldn't be particularly worried; Intel is no more than ten years from being out of headroom anyway with current approaches, at which point this becomes almost academic. We're seeing the end of this branch of computing technology. Something will have to change, but what that is is hard to say.
 

derekson

Member
SoSH Member
Jun 26, 2010
6,265
Blacken said:
Intel has competition. It's called "Intel." The advances from Sandy Bridge to Haswell and the upcoming Haswell->Skylake were and are not spurred by AMD. They need to move product that was sufficiently better than what they already were pushing, so people actually buy it. ARM is sufficiently threatening in the normal case that Intel can't sit back (and that's why Bay Trail and friends are so aggressively advancing).

I wouldn't be particularly worried; Intel is no more than ten years from being out of headroom anyway with current approaches, at which point this becomes almost academic. We're seeing the end of this branch of computing technology. Something will have to change, but what that is is hard to say.
2014 looked like a year where progress in desktop and high end laptop CPUs was basically completely stalled because Intel was focusing almost entirely on advancing their mobile offerings as Broadwell came out first as the ULV parts designed for tablets and convertibles. If Intel had any kind of competition in the space where i5 abd i7 chips sell then they probably would've dedicated more development money and hours to getting the desktop and laptop Broadwells out as an actual upgrade in mid 2014 rather than boosting Haswell SKUs by 100 MHz and calling it a day.
 

Couperin47

Member
SoSH Member
I'm putting this here because it's probably not worth a separate thread... I'm building a new box for a member here and just got some of the parts. Last night I got the Intel i5 cpu (4 core) and the motherboard...an ASRock. ASrock started out as a subsidiary of ASUS, but has been independent for years. Both are Taiwanese companies, these days making everything on the mainland...or so I thought... the mb I just received was made in ...Vietnam. Manufacturing is now seriously migrating out of China to even cheaper labor. As someone who saw friends drafted off to Nam this is a bit stunning. Then I looked at the Intel cpu, most of their lower end stuff I've been seeing out of their fab in Costa Rica...not this one....it was made in....Vietnam.  The heart of the box I'm building, both mb and cpu will have been sourced from Vietnam...unreal.
 
Edit: Just to clarify, all Intel fabs are in US plus one each in Ireland, Israel & China. The country of origin is where final assembly/testing takes place....which is far more labor intensive:
 
Currently: Arizona, 2 in Malyasia, Costa Rica, China, Israel and...now Ho Chi Min City, Vietnam...yeah Saigon...
 

Couperin47

Member
SoSH Member
LoweTek said:
AMD stock is popping today on takeover speculation.
 
Unless whoever (in this case assumed to be a Chinese company) is mostly interested in the video end (the former ATI) it's unlikely because after previous negotiations it's pretty clear that the very complicated and mostly secret details of AMD's cross-licensing agreement with Intel is not transferable without Intel approval, and without that, somewhere between 20 up to near 50% of their current products can't be made or sold.
 

charlieoscar

Member
Sep 28, 2014
1,339
I just tried to download the most current driver for my video card (an AMD Radeon) and you can't believe the amount of junk they included, even after I did the custom install, which they specifically said would bypass some of it. For example, I ended up with one of their folders containing 1161 files and taking up 179 MB of disk space. And now I have a plug-in for Photoshop that won't work properly,
 

Blacken

Robespierre in a Cape
SoSH Member
Jul 24, 2007
12,152
derekson said:
2014 looked like a year where progress in desktop and high end laptop CPUs was basically completely stalled because Intel was focusing almost entirely on advancing their mobile offerings as Broadwell came out first as the ULV parts designed for tablets and convertibles. If Intel had any kind of competition in the space where i5 abd i7 chips sell then they probably would've dedicated more development money and hours to getting the desktop and laptop Broadwells out as an actual upgrade in mid 2014 rather than boosting Haswell SKUs by 100 MHz and calling it a day.
You know where the money actually is in this market, right? Halo chips don't sell squat compared to the massive numbers of chips in every $200 shitbook ever. If AMD was competent and competitive, they'd be doing literally the exact same thing as Intel did.

And the high-end really is not good enough, as-is, for maybe literally one in a hundred thousand people.
 

derekson

Member
SoSH Member
Jun 26, 2010
6,265
Blacken said:
You know where the money actually is in this market, right? Halo chips don't sell squat compared to the massive numbers of chips in every $200 shitbook ever. If AMD was competent and competitive, they'd be doing literally the exact same thing as Intel did.

And the high-end really is not good enough, as-is, for maybe literally one in a hundred thousand people.
 
I never claimed that Intel wasn't being smart in allocating resources away from high end chip development, I was simply saying that we're already seeing the lack of competition in desktop/laptop chips affecting Intel's product development roadmap. Development is relatively stagnant compared to development in mobile chips where they're competing with ARM-based alternatives.
 
It wouldn't surprise me if Intel has looked at the numbers and found that even people who upgrade their desktop/laptop frequently are most likely only upgrading every 2 years or so, and rather than the previous ~12 month cycle for significant new lines of i5/i7 chip releases we'll probably see them settle into something closer to a 24 month cycle. It sucks for OEMs that want to have new model releases every year but with no competition to drive development Intel really has no reason to release annual upgrades of any significance.
 

Blacken

Robespierre in a Cape
SoSH Member
Jul 24, 2007
12,152
Why would any competition be trying to "win" in the least rewarding market segments anyway, instead of also aiming for the actually-makes-money mobile market?
 

Couperin47

Member
SoSH Member
The latest CEO of AMD. Lisa Su, led todays big announcement. Basically they are admitting they can't survive turning out bargain basement chips. The new strategy is also an admission that the entire "Bulldozer" architecture is uncompetitive and a technological dead end. They announce that they will move to a new architecture which, not coincidentally is exactly what Intel has been doing for a decade and want to be able to charge the sort of money Intel does for high end chips. A few problems here: their top designers and engineers have left, their remaining technical staff is a fraction of what Intel employs, they have no recent experience in these designs, whatever they develop has to conform to the limitations of the Fabs that will make these chips (Global or Samsung), and AMD has only been trying to produce chips they can sell at Intel prices for 25 years now... with zero success. Their future is "Zen" which is probably appropriate because there is scant evidence they have any of the required resources to actually deliver on any portion of this strategy.
 
http://www.techspot.com/news/60626-tech-reading-amd-zen-comeback.html
 
Oh and after these announcements, I'd expect current sales of AMD cpus and motherboards may decline precipitously, the Zen stuff isn't promised til 2016 (and if they are on time it will be the first time they ever have been on time). I wonder if Lisa has ever heard of Osborne Computer ?
 

jimv

Member
SoSH Member
Feb 5, 2011
1,118
Couperin47 said:
The latest CEO of AMD. Lisa Su, led todays big announcement. Basically they are admitting they can't survive turning out bargain basement chips. The new strategy is also an admission that the entire "Bulldozer" architecture is uncompetitive and a technological dead end. They announce that they will move to a new architecture which, not coincidentally is exactly what Intel has been doing for a decade and want to be able to charge the sort of money Intel does for high end chips. A few problems here: their top designers and engineers have left, their remaining technical staff is a fraction of what Intel employs, they have no recent experience in these designs, whatever they develop has to conform to the limitations of the Fabs that will make these chips (Global or Samsung), and AMD has only been trying to produce chips they can sell at Intel prices for 25 years now... with zero success. Their future is "Zen" which is probably appropriate because there is scant evidence they have any of the required resources to actually deliver on any portion of this strategy.
 
http://www.techspot.com/news/60626-tech-reading-amd-zen-comeback.html
 
Oh and after these announcements, I'd expect current sales of AMD cpus and motherboards may decline precipitously, the Zen stuff isn't promised til 2016 (and if they are on time it will be the first time they ever have been on time). I wonder if Lisa has ever heard of Osborne Computer ?
What alternatives do they have? They've been circling the drain for several years and without radical changes they'll go down soon enough.
 
Intel needs AMD to avoid monopoly scrutiny. Which brings up an interesting possibility - would Intel fab the new AMD designs? From Intel's perspective they could keep AMD afloat and earn a little $$ on AMD's sales. From AMD's perspective they get access to best in class mfg tech and perhaps enough market share to survive.
 

NortheasternPJ

Member
SoSH Member
Nov 16, 2004
19,468
Does Intel need AMD to really exist? The future of much of the market is in mobile / portable devices, which Intel can attest they are way behind in. Intel's competition is Samsung manufacturing etc. not AMD. There's always the server architectures, but would anyone go after them for being the main player in that space? 
 

Couperin47

Member
SoSH Member
AMD has tried the mobile market. There have been several generations of silicon with built-in graphics and, supposedly, low power. If you haven't noticed it's because the tablet makers, and generally everyone else, completely ignored the AMD parts. AMD Bulldozer architecture and most everything else they make has sucked when it comes to competing as low power options which is why they have failed in the mobile markets. Intel used to suck too here, but they are now serious about that and everyone knows they have the resources to compete in any market they get serious about. While it was once the case that Intel needed AMD to ward off anti-trust issues, they are fast becoming so irrelevant that I now doubt that's much of an issue...keeping in mind that these days the issue is probably more about the EU than the US.
 
Intel fabing for AMD is a fantasy, older processes Intel would probably not even be competitive on price and the current and future process technology is ridiculously proprietary where design and fabrication are so intimately entwined it's quite impossible. This is another reason why AMD crippled themselves permanently when they sold their Fabs and ceased cooperation with their one partner who had the tech and resources to help them: IBM. Back when, there were endless rumors/speculation that eventually Big Blue would buy AMD. Sadly, IBM moved away from hardware too, a decision I personally suspect they will, in the end, regret.
 

luqin

Member
SoSH Member
Jul 15, 2005
1,972
Kind of sad.  AMD (quietly) revolutionized the datacenter by moving x86 to a NUMA architecture (eliminating the centralized memory controller bottleneck) and creating 64-bit extensions for x86 while Intel was busy building the Itanium (now more commonly known as the Itanic).  Their design was so impactful that at one point they were selling > 50% of the 4-socket datacenter virtualization servers circa 2005-ish, and eventually Intel ended up licensing the tech for their own x86 line in order to compete.  AMD also delivered hardware-assisted virtualization capabilities in their chips first.  Had AMD not been crazy innovative during this time period, you could argue that cheap ubiquitous virtualization would have never happened, and the entire cloud-enabled universe would be hamstrung by the old legacy x86 architecture and burdened by shitty performance and scalability.    
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opteron
 

HriniakPosterChild

Member
SoSH Member
Jul 6, 2006
14,841
500 feet above Lake Sammammish
jimv said:
Intel needs AMD to avoid monopoly scrutiny. 
 
There's nothing illegal about having a monopoly; you just can't buy or bully your way into getting there.
 
In the 1990's when Microsoft executives were on the hot seat for cutting of Netscape's air supply, Intel was always very good about not leaving antitrust regulators any rope lying around to hang them with. I'd expect that to be the same today.
 

AlNipper49

Huge Member
Dope
SoSH Member
Apr 3, 2001
44,967
Mtigawi
At this point it's pretty much Intel keeping them alive to avoid billions in antitrust legislation and lobbying.
 

derekson

Member
SoSH Member
Jun 26, 2010
6,265
I had an interesting thought the other day when I was looking at benchmarks of the iPhone 6S. It seems like in ARM processors, Apple is to Qualcomm/Samsung as Intel was to AMD in x86-64 chips. Basically, Intel (and now Apple) have such better individual cores that to match the overall performance in a processor, AMD had to keep throwing additional cores in their processors (just like Qualcomm and Samsung are doing now to keep up with Apples Ax chips). The newest Snapdragon and Exynos chips are using 8 cores to keep up with Apple's dual core chips, just like AMD was doing 4 and 6 core chips to keep up with Intel's dual and quad core chips.
 
NVIDIA seems like the only company capable of making dual core ARM designs that are in the ballpark of APple's chips, and as far as i know those are only for tablets.