AMD Line up thoughts...

[MontyBonjangles]

Although AMD have hit a massive low recently, let's take a look upon what processors they have churned out. I am referring from the Semprom line all the way up to the Piledriver series that have been released.

The Semprom and Athlon series were rolled out as main weapons by several oems as a cheap but sufficient processors meaning a huge influx of budget systems flooded the pre built market. They were effective for what they were capable of, but for not much else really. I think that the Athlon II x4 640 was a little gem of a chip at that point.

The Phenom series was the staple market for AMD for a long time, and the huge range of it reflected that. It seriously lacked behind Intel's boom in computing power, but still provided a massive market for the price per core. I believe this is what kept the Phenom alive for that much longer.

Then Bulldozer-FX came along. Despite a hyped release it was dubbed a 'faildozer' by critics for it's instability and finickiness with RAM. I feel that this is not so, in fact I find it still at an aggressive price point for the user with a lower budget. We saw the introduction of an eight core processor, which in my opinion compensated for falling behind Intel's Core I series by providing those cores. Albeit, it still was flawed.

Piledriver-FX quickly jettisoned onto the scene, following the apparent failure of the bulldozer. I think these did improve vastly on Bulldozer's failures, and were much more stable at higher clocks. In my opinion, the Piledriver is up there with the Core-i5.

The FM2 platform seems to be the saving grace for AMD, It seems to have caught on as a good niche for low-mid end gaming and HTPC uses, It is entirely possible that AMD could be going down the APU line much more in depth.

The question is, what will the future hold for AMD?

What are your observations guys?

~Monty

[RailfanS]

I personally think that AMD destroyed the reputation of the Bulldozer line before it was even released. They set everyone's expectations so high will all the hype that there was no way the CPU's could live up to it. If they would have just released the chips and simply stated that they were comparable to a traditional quad core with hyper threading they would have been fine. But they didn't, they decided to push the whole "8 full cores, twice the performance of a traditional quad core" line and the result was unrealistic expectations. I mean, can you honestly expect a product to provide twice the performance of a similarly priced product from a competitor. When it didn't live up to the massive expectations reviewers put it down, and Intel fanboys loved that. The result it the "faildozer" reputation the bulldozer line has today. These CPU's are still more that adequate for most users, and they're definitely competitive price wise. I think the bulldozer "failure" was more of a marketing one than an engineering one.

Unfortunately, the future for AMD is a bit uncertain right now. On one hand, as programs start to use more threads AMD's modular architecture might become more useful than it is now. If that happens AMD will be ready, and Intel will have some catching up to do. However Intel has a much larger market share, so programmers might be inclined to keep the number of threads their programs us down, for compatibility reasons.

I would actually like to see AMD make a more traditional line of processors to compete with Intel in the present gaming market. Imagine a 32nm (or 22nm) Phenom quad core clocked at 5+ GHz. That would probably be one of the only things that could save AMD's reputation with the enthusiast crowd. Once again, how it's marketed matters. It wouldn't have to be hyped as an "Haswell killer" it would just have to be competitive with Intel's top end again.

Just my 2 cents

[SubTract]

AMD are in an interesting position, their shares are on a slow but steady incline from November. They now have a strong Competitive CPU and people are starting to recognize this. They have alot of fixed hardware deals that aren't taken into consideration. WiiU and Xbox 360 More on the GPU side but these will keep this company alive.

I think they're better off sticking with an architecture that they believe in and that they think can be improved further than their competition. They've done it before after all. We just have to wait for them to come back into their own. The Marketing they're using might be "Optimistic" to say the least but it shows that they believe that it can perform better. It all just needs more work. I would like to see a new extreme chip from AMD just for enthusiasts where price isn't an issue, just to show what they can do. It might place some faith back in them.

People will ditch their sockets to upgrade so if the socket is holding them back get rid of it.

Right now I probably would build on an Intel platform, but if AMD keep pushing I think they can come back and be extremely competitive. Competition is always a good thing, It keeps things moving forward.