AMD's David Bennett On Gaming, APU's, And The Competition

[Opcode]

Source

 

AMD has been particularly active over the last year or so. With AMD APUs powering both the Xbox One and the Playstation 4, it’s a good time to hear from the company about where it thinks it’s headed, the state of gaming in India and a number of other topics. We got the chance to chat with David Bennett, who oversees the Asia-Pacific-Japan region for AMD as its Corporate VP in Delhi recently.

 

A decent read.

[Humbug]

Well the below is quite an arrogant claim.

David Bennet; Let me put it this way, when I started out 2 years ago, two companies would keep me awake at night- Intel and Nvidia. Today, only one company does that- Intel.

 

Is he just blowing steam or is he that confident about Pirate Islands (or whatever it's called) beating Maxwell?

 

I don't expect AMD to have any issues going to head to head or maybe even beating Maxwell in terms of performance. But power consumption is a different story.

[Samfisher]

Intel keeps him awake?  AMD is so far behind it's not even worth staying up for.  Nvidia on the other hand, AMD has been much closer in the GPU race.  If anything, Nvidia should be the one giving him sleepless nights.

[Humbug]

Intel keeps him awake?  AMD is so far behind it's not even worth staying up for.  Nvidia on the other hand, AMD has been much closer in the GPU race.  If anything, Nvidia should be the one giving him sleepless nights.

He prob meant AMD is always competing with Nvidia head on and AMD is selling GPUs quite well all the way up to the $1000 market. They make money from GPUs.

 

Intel is killing AMD's CPU market on PCs. Intel's x86 CPUs are so much faster that AMD has no choice but to sell their CPUs dirt cheap- each time Intel launches something they have to make price cuts and further damage profitability of a company which is already making losses- enough to keep any executive awake.

[nokturrduk84]

He prob meant AMD is always competing with Nvidia head on and AMD is selling GPUs quite well all the way up to the $1000 market. They make money from GPUs.

 

Intel is killing AMD's CPU market on PCs. Intel's x86 CPUs are so much faster that AMD has no choice but to sell their CPUs dirt cheap- each time Intel launches something they have to make price cuts and further damage profitability of a company which is already making losses- enough to keep any executive awake.

It's AMD's fault. If they could work harder or hire new people which could compete with Intel CPUs we would have different picture today. But it seems people working in AMD are lazy asses or they don't even care about competition with Intel. In both options they are in a pretty bad shape & we can't blame anyone, but AMD. If they didn't have GPU side, I think they would go bankrupt.

[worldwin]

It's AMD's fault. If they could work harder or hire new people which could compete with Intel CPUs we would have different picture today. But it seems people working in AMD are lazy asses or they don't even care about competition with Intel. In both options they are in a pretty bad shape & we can't blame anyone, but AMD. If they didn't have GPU side, I think they would go bankrupt.

There is a reason they hired Keller.

[Humbug]

There is a reason they hired Keller.

Ya Rory Read recently pretty much admitted that the bulldozer architecture did not work out and they are just living with it until 2016 when Jim Keller's new Zen architecture will be ready.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2014/09/11/amd-zen/1

 

[SpaghettiCarbonara]

It's AMD's fault. If they could work harder or hire new people which could compete with Intel CPUs we would have different picture today. But it seems people working in AMD are lazy asses or they don't even care about competition with Intel. In both options they are in a pretty bad shape & we can't blame anyone, but AMD. If they didn't have GPU side, I think they would go bankrupt.

 

So what you're saying is... A company that is currently in the red isn't trying it's best to get profitable again?

 

K den

[brownninja97]

It just comes down to everyone knowing the inte branding while the amd branding confuses people so they dont know if they are buying a good apu

[spartaman64]

amd is a much smaller company than intel and nvidia so they cant hire thousands of engineers like intel and nvidia does

[BallGum]

It just comes down to everyone knowing the inte branding while the amd branding confuses people so they dont know if they are buying a good apu

That's definitely a factor when people buy things like laptops and desktops.

[deviant88]

So what you're saying is... A company that is currently in the red isn't trying it's best to get profitable again?

 

K den

You guys should know AMD is failing on CPU side for 2 reason, they didnt put enough R&D in there in time, bulldozer was almost good,if they had 2nd gen bulldozer(piledriver) as the first release it would have been killer cpu and good profits.But then they would be out of luck with 32nm for any follow up cpu, and here comes the 2nd reason and most important they dont have fabs,they kept relying on GF and TSMC which are lagging really bad, moore's law end could kill so many businesses in the near future.GPU wise they can survive only because nvidia doesnt have its own fab's if they would they would probably be ahead of AMD just like Intel on the cpu side,imagine maxwell on 16-22nm right now, K/O AMD.Im still curious how amd can produce a gpu that can equal 980 or beat it and use under 200Watts on 28nm,not gonna happen amd always sucks on power efficiency,doesnt really matter on desktop but if you wanted a gaming laptop your #1 choice is intel cpu and nvidia mobile gpu,cause thats whats most efficient.

[SpaghettiCarbonara]

You guys should know AMD is failing on CPU side for 2 reason, they didnt put enough R&D in there in time, bulldozer was almost good,if they had 2nd gen bulldozer(piledriver) as the first release it would have been killer cpu and good profits.But then they would be out of luck with 32nm for any follow up cpu, and here comes the 2nd reason and most important they dont have fabs,they kept relying on GF and TSMC which are lagging really bad, moore's law end could kill so many businesses in the near future.GPU wise they can survive only because nvidia doesnt have its own fab's if they would they would probably be ahead of AMD just like Intel on the cpu side,imagine maxwell on 16-22nm right now, K/O AMD.Im still curious how amd can produce a gpu that can equal 980 or beat it and use under 200Watts on 28nm,not gonna happen amd always sucks on power efficiency,doesnt really matter on desktop but if you wanted a gaming laptop your #1 choice is intel cpu and nvidia mobile gpu,cause thats whats most efficient.

 

My point is that currently, for AMD to get out of the red, they need to spend money for extra R&D to make some ground-breaking products that will get them some profits, but that will cost a lot of money and they probably don't have a lot of money.

 

I will admit that a lot of their spending doesn't really make sense though. Why hold a big conference thing and give away a fuckton of high-end GPUs all for the launch of a mid to high-end GPU that only exists to expand the feature set in it's price bracket? If they spent all that money on R&D and just did a post on their website or something instead, that would be really beneficial for the next product they start development on.

[pixeldensity]

That's definitely a factor when people buy things like laptops and desktops.

yep, my parent didn't even know AMD existed until I told them. All they knew was Intel Intel Intel. Heck at a young age before I got into computers I didn't know amd existed. 

[pbenologa]

It's AMD's fault. If they could work harder or hire new people which could compete with Intel CPUs we would have different picture today. But it seems people working in AMD are lazy asses or they don't even care about competition with Intel. In both options they are in a pretty bad shape & we can't blame anyone, but AMD. If they didn't have GPU side, I think they would go bankrupt.

Just because they can't give you what you want doesn't mean they are lazy and does not care about competition. They can't magically create something that can overpower intel. After all, it's a business. And everything has process. You can't just create shit just because people want you to do it.

[nokturrduk84]

Just because they can't give you what you want doesn't mean they are lazy and does not care about competition. They can't magically create something that can overpower intel. After all, it's a business. And everything has process. You can't just create shit just because people want you to do it.

Then how Intel managed it? How Intel made it? So they have some super genius engineers?

[harrynowl]

So what you're saying is... A company that is currently in the red isn't trying it's best to get profitable again?

 

K den

The interview explains the main reason for no new bulldozer based cpus well enough despite him being on about ARM mobile chips:

David Bennett: That’s fair and it’s mainly because of the proliferation of ARM and the number of choices that have opened up. But if we have a limited amount of resources to spend, we want to continue doubling down on where we’re strong- graphics, gaming and compute. I think if we start looking at a business that’s really commoditized, low margin, really dirty, that’s this segment. Even our biggest competitor is having trouble in this market and we don’t want to jump in.

 

[pbenologa]

Then how Intel managed it? How Intel made it? So they have some super genius engineers?

They have different architecture. AMD was never on the same road with intel. 

[Psykomantis00]

 So they have some super genius engineers?

Yes. With more money you can pay for more R&D.

[nokturrduk84]

They have different architecture. AMD was never on the same road with intel. 

I know & that's why they are behind Intel.