Understanding AMD's Semi-Custom Strategy

by Anand Lal Shimpi on 9/5/2013 5:51 PM EST
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  • davidcTecher - Thursday, September 5, 2013 - link

    I don't quite understand how silicon features will help these 2nd tier companies sell more hardware devices. They would have to find a really compelling feature and be able to market this advantage vs the AAPL/GOOG/MSFT trio. Just a faster CPU or better battery life is not going to get enough people to defect from their current platforms. I also think Samsung is in a tough position in the long run since GOOG has an incentive to sell its hardware.
  • Guspaz - Friday, September 6, 2013 - link

    Samsung has a large marketshare, though. Massively larger than Google's device marketshare (via Motorola), or any other Android vendor, for that matter. I think that it's Google that should be worried, because if Samsung decided to fork Android, the more their marketshare grows, the more clout they have to get the rest of the Android market to follow them. They could effectively usurp Google as the primary driver behind Android.
  • whorush - Monday, September 9, 2013 - link

    firefox OS might be really cool. samsung might try and make something out of it and break all the vertical integration.
  • malmental - Thursday, September 5, 2013 - link

    Not impressed with any of it to be honest.
    Also can't help but thinking how much I distrust AMD Marketing in the first place.
    Proof is in the pudding AMD, I'll take my chances with Intel.
  • HisDivineOrder - Friday, September 6, 2013 - link

    AMD has a habit of saying things that don't bear out. Usually, Intel and nVidia don't outright lie as much, but all three like to exaggerate to varying degrees.
  • axien86 - Friday, September 6, 2013 - link

    By contrast, Intel has been civilly prosecuted and convicted of offenses in countries all over the world.

    Their multi-billions dollar settlements with AMD and government agencies are just a small part of their extensive history of illegal market manipulation. Without competitors like AMD and now ARM, you would still be paying hundreds of dollars more for an overheating overhyped CPU.
  • Black Obsidian - Friday, September 6, 2013 - link

    At some point--as with the Microsoft anti-trust conviction--people are just going to have to let that go. Yes, Intel as a company did some bad things a number of years ago. Yes, it got caught, and yes it was punished. But unless you have evidence that Intel is still engaging in such behavior, there's really no point in bringing it up, especially when Intel seems to have been going out of its way the last five years or so to *avoid* crushing lame-duck AMD.

    Also, AMD and ARM are both irrelevant to consumers not having to "pay[ing] hundreds of dollars more for an overheating overhyped CPU." AMD hasn't been a meaningful performance competitor with Intel for several years, and ARM has never been. Intel's biggest competitor is--and has long been--the massive install base of its older products. If you want people to spend the money to upgrade, you've got to give them a good value proposition, and that, far more than AMD or ARM, is what ensures progress in the CPU space.
  • anubis44 - Friday, September 6, 2013 - link

    So, Intel tried to screw it's customers, but that was a little while ago, so we should all just forget about it? Not a chance. I will not buy Intel-powered products so long as I can possibly avoid it. I will not bow down to corruption, and I will not countenance cheating and just pretend it never happened.

    I will go out of my way to buy AMD-powered devices (CPU and GPU) unless and until AMD disappears. End of story.
  • Sabresiberian - Saturday, September 7, 2013 - link

    I think your characterization of AMD as some kind of star of honesty compared to Intel's crookedness is willful blindness on your part. They are still actively trying to snow us about their performance/dollar and performance/watt compared to Intel PC products. They introduced a mixed-GPU system ("Dual Graphics") and proudly pointed out that it gives better frame rates, but analysis has shown the frame rate number might be true, the effect on the visual quality is that it is useless at best.

    http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/dual-graphics-...

    Unfortunately, there isn't a large company anywhere that has always been perfectly honest in its business. AMD might not have been slapped down in the legal system, but it seems to me they have often been no more honest than those carnival-barker TV advertisement guys.
  • SAimNE - Saturday, September 7, 2013 - link

    tomshardware is pretty much well known to have a bias against AMD.... anyone who actually uses dual graphics can tell you that the amount of times you run into negative side effects is rather rare, and nothing in comparison to the amount of content it unlocks at a price that would normally have nothing but intel HD to rely on.

    I'm still using the original llano processors and i dont run into gliches very often at all.... screen tearing is all but non-existent even on the first generation, and my frame rates have usually risen from 5-15 in comparison to when it is off. I've had 2 occasions out of like 50 games that it actually did nothing(one of which it caused negative 2 fps). anyway point is the benefits largely outweigh the negatives, and if you find that it isnt working you can just lower the games quality and shut it off relying on either the gpu or your igpu(which unlike intels isnt a total joke)

    dual graphics, despite what tom will tell you, is a surprisingly stable and useful work, and is likely to be improved in leaps and bounds thanks to the HSA kaveri apus that will be arriving in 2014, and the introduction of ddr4 ram that is likely to happen within a year(apus increase performance dramatically with faster ram)
  • novastar78 - Friday, April 4, 2014 - link

    I can assure you this was no marketing ploy or trickery. They honestly didn't know the situation was that bad. They are so spread thin with so many products and trying to make them all work together and they don't have the resources to polish everything like the bigger players.

    What they really need to do is improve there finish and efficiency. They need more polish and learn to finish projects completely.
  • jjj - Thursday, September 5, 2013 - link

    Remains to be seen how bad it gets if they are dumping many cores and go just APUs and don't try harder to transition fast to the newest process.
    They could argue that 300$ CPUs are a smaller market but it's very important for marketing and even discrete GPU sales. Plus it's pretty much the only PC segment that can still be exciting (it's not because Intel sells 250mm2 dies at 550-1000$ and AMD is not competitive).
    As for the process we'll see what they do further down the road since short term it seems they are in no rush. Would be nice to have a PS4 like APU on 20nm early next year instead of a 28nm part with 512 GPU "cores".
    Short term the consoles seem very low margins so won't help much and if they get things wrong in a shrinking PC market it won't be much fun for them.
  • Homeles - Thursday, September 5, 2013 - link

    "Plus it's pretty much the only PC segment that can still be exciting."

    Mobile Haswell and Bay Trail don't excite you?
  • HisDivineOrder - Friday, September 6, 2013 - link

    A $100 Bay Trail NUC-like device would be exciting.
  • jabber - Friday, September 6, 2013 - link

    Exciting to whom exactly?

    A few thousand enthusiasts or the other 7.3 Billion who really don't care and just want to pay $300 for a PC to do Ebay on?

    The world has moved on. PC tech is dull now. It's a commodity household item like a microwave. For most it just has to do a simple job with the last hassle and cost.

    AMD knows this.
  • Mondozai - Friday, September 6, 2013 - link

    "PC tech is dull now. It's a commodity household item like a microwave."

    This is a genuinely hilarious statement, and so stupid on so many levels I can't even begin :D
  • Black Obsidian - Friday, September 6, 2013 - link

    And yet, for the majority of consumers, it's true. Gamers and power users of all stripes are a tiny, *tiny* percentage of the overall market. Most everybody else just wants something that works well enough to not cause them any grief when they need to use it for their mundane daily tasks.

    The automotive industry is exactly the same in this regard.
  • jabber - Friday, September 6, 2013 - link

    You perfectly illustrate my point further on.

    You and a few others might get a hard on waiting for the latest generation Intel i7 benchmark results but the rest of the world really doesn't give a damn. They want cheap simple tech that 'just works'. After all this time it should do.

    Do you really think the world waits with anticipation for the latest top end $1000 Intel i7 chip? Hmmm have to say never seen a PC CPU being a news article in any newspaper since...erm the Intel Pentium bug back in 1994 whenever.

    Niche.

    You are part of a very small group that probably is getting smaller and smaller every year.
  • jabber - Friday, September 6, 2013 - link

    That was to Mondozai by the way.

    Maybe one day Anandtech will update to a 21st Century comments system.
  • SAimNE - Saturday, September 7, 2013 - link

    the kaveri apus are supposed to be coming in early 2014 last time i check, and based on estimated specs they are going to completely blow the apus in the ps4 out of the water.

    especially once ddr4 memory is released.
  • Flunk - Thursday, September 5, 2013 - link

    Short term selling something simlar to the PS4 and Xbox One's APUs for notebooks would really go over well. Small CPU big GPU? That's exactly what people want to play games on their notebooks. Get something that fits into a 45watt TDP all together and can manager half-decent GPU performance and they might have a break-away hit.
  • piroroadkill - Friday, September 6, 2013 - link

    Thing is, they already make them. But you can only find things like that stuffed in godawful 15.6" 1366x768 plastic piles of rubbish.

    No manufacturer seems to be making a classy AMD notebook.
  • phoenix_rizzen - Friday, September 6, 2013 - link

    Funny you should mention that:

    http://anandtech.com/show/7270/asus-announces-x102...

    And there's several listed here:

    http://anandtech.com/show/7242/choosing-a-gaming-l...
  • Westfields - Thursday, September 5, 2013 - link

    Listening to the people and to customers on their needs and wants is a proven successful market model. I have definitely seen a difference as it builds relationships with the community. I I have had many friends ask about what is going on at AMD...the RED Team...the AMDTESTDrive program are some that come to mind. When I reviewed that A10 6k processor with the Fractal case and Fractal PSU I had many come and see what was up and then go to AMD's website and signup for programs and notifications. It is all about market saturation with feedback from the end-users (because of social media) becoming of primary importance in the growth and success at AMD. As we consumers become more computer savvy we will cling to those companies that will offer us our niche products that we require. Yes there will be those that will just go and buy a computer off-hand but NOW they are more likely to call ME first and have me order them one. Of course then I will be looking for those companies that are offering computer components that I would like to have a say so in the process of buying a computer that fits the needs of the person I am ordering for. I give AMD an A+ and it's partners an A+ for thinking ahead of the curve and adjusting to the new market structures that are being heaved upon us daily. AMD=WIN!
  • Homeles - Thursday, September 5, 2013 - link

    Most people live in a post-desktop world. Their desktop innovations aren't awfully relevant today.
  • HisDivineOrder - Friday, September 6, 2013 - link

    Actually, most people live in a computer world. PC's, tablets, smartphones, smartwatches, Google Glass, consoles, HDTV's with playback, smartcars, etc.

    They're all computers.

    They're all PC's.

    We've lived in a "post-desktop" world for about ten years now. Since the rise of the laptop that exceeded desktop shipments a long, long time ago. With that said, the conventional computer remains the thing people would take with them if they could only choose one in surveys. The reason you don't see computers selling as well does not imply people have less computers than they did. It implies they're not purchasing new computers as much as they did.

    Why?

    Because Intel is not innovating. They're chasing low power, high performance targets, trying to smoke out ARM by out-ARM'ing ARM. That's a huge gamble for Intel in the long term because you rarely win when you let the opponent choose the battlefield, the rules by which you fight, the time of day, every facet of the conflict, and then show up when they're good and ready for you. Intel is so used to just showing up and destroying anyone that dares challenge it, it hasn't had a real conflict in so long it doesn't know how to strategize properly.

    That's why they're likely going to lose. Their overconfidence betrays them. Like MS, they thought, "If you build it, they will come." Except no, they won't because they can still spend less and get "good enough" over with ARM. That'll be true for as long as Intel wants huge profit margins on their chips and as long as MS does the same. Even if Intel were to give away their chips, they'd still have to get MS to ALSO kill their licensing fees. Android on x86 is a dead end.

    But back to computers. Intel is actually killing themselves. They aren't making new chips that offer performance advantages because they think they have to chase tablets and smartphones, which is leading to unconvincing CPU's for desktops and by extension laptops. Unconvincing CPU upgrades first to regular consumers and if you look at Haswell's reception, that now extends to enthusiasts who are the ones who usually go forth and proselytize for them. Now you have the very hardest of the hardcore going, "Yeah, SB to IVB was pathetic, but IVB to Haswell is often a downgrade since the chips are petering out after moderate overclocking rather quickly" and "Who would go IVB-E after waiting so long through SB-E? Who would buy IVB-E to upgrade an almost identically performing SB-E system?" Intel has managed to lose the interest of the enthusiasts completely while having already lost the regular consumers by not focusing on performance, focusing on not moving the metric up enough to warrant a purchase.

    So if the enthusiasts aren't seeing anything worthwhile, then why would the casual consumers do so? Instead, they're now seeing so few gains from generation to generation that most of them view their computer like an appliance. Your TV at best, your fridge or washer/dryer at worst. How often do you buy a new fridge and/or washer/dryer? Do you spend a lot on it or is good enough just good enough? Are you content to sit on old ones for what? 5, 10, 15 years?

    If Intel were truly pushing the performance levels, people might see a real difference between a laptop versus a tablet, see a reason to want a computer that's new rather than one they've had for 5 years. Right now, Intel isn't doing anything even remotely in that direction. They keep screaming, "It runs longer on battery! It's cooler!" and people shrug. "My tablet lasts still longer and it's way cooler and it browses the web fine enough."

    Since "good enough" is what Android and iOS pursue as their ultimate strategy of "make low end hardware seem smooth," then suddenly Intel's advantage in performance is meaningless. So really Intel has two options.

    1) Copy ARM wholesale by giving up performance entirely, forget high profit margins, pump out tons of product cheaply and sell it cheaply, keep it low power and good enough

    2) Go high performance, ignore ARM because they're a different product class, and convince people to see the "good enough performance" as frankly not good enough by giving them new performance highs the likes of which no tablet could ever approach while fostering software that wouldn't have been nearly as convenient without it.

    They're both gambles, but what I can tell you with certainty is their current strategy of straddling the divide and doing both isn't going to work. They're going to have to choose and I suspect they'll wind up going with the first option, PC market be damned.

    The irony is that while it might seem like the less risky of the two options, MS seems to be choosing that course and it doesn't look like it's ending well for them, either. I think it's probably the riskier path since it accepts their competition's narrative for the way things will play out.
  • p1esk - Friday, September 6, 2013 - link

    Or it could be that Intel does not push performance levels because the vast majority of their customers don't care?

    PC usage didn't change that much in the last decade. People still check their emails, browse the web, listen to music, watch videos, play games. Only the last two require somewhat decent CPU performance, which existing chips (SB, IVB, Haswell) already provide. Haswell is good enough to play 4k video, and to play games you are mostly limited by a videocard, so why do we need more CPU power?

    In the scenarios where you really do need as much power as possible (scientific computing), GPU clusters is the way to go. Intel tried to get into that market with Larrabee, and failed miserably. That is one area in which I wish they would try again, and try harder.

    Back to PC market. Most of Intel's customers want to have cool-looking, light and thin, highly portable laptops and tablets which last all day on a single charge.
    That's why Haswell is not faster than Ivy Bridge, and that's why it is a successful chip that everyone wants in their next laptop/tablet. I'm ready to drop $1,500 for a new laptop.
    There are 4 requirements I have:

    1. light and thin (<3lbs, <15mm)
    2. high res screen (>1080p)
    3. solid build quality (Apple quality)
    4. all day battery life

    Notice there's no mention of performance, because pretty much any Haswell chip is good enough for me (and 90% of other people).

    Intel does not gamble. It continues to give people what they want.
  • gobaers - Friday, September 6, 2013 - link

    Haswell has a 15% IPC bump over Ivy Bridge, and can do so with greater power efficiency. What are we complaining about, again?
  • silverblue - Friday, September 6, 2013 - link

    15%? In what usage scenario?
  • jabber - Friday, September 6, 2013 - link

    Ahhh good at last some others are waking up to the fact that -

    PCs/Laptops are boring and everday items like refrigerators to 99.999999% of the worlds population.

    That 99.999999% don't really care what's inside their box or laptop as long as it does Ebay and Facebook. Oh and it's cheap.

    That Intel and AMD have realised that balls to the wall mega horsepower isn't the best selling point for CPUs anymore.

    That it's not 1997 anymore.

    So many on enthusiast websites fail to remember that they are a tiny tiny minority and hardly register on the most big tech companies ledgers. The world does not revolve around them.

    As for the corporate end a mate of mine is selling PCs left right and centre. He can't sell enough, doing crazy business. Thousands of PCs a month.

    Whats he selling? It's not i3/i5 or i7 based systems. No one wants them. AMD? Nope, who cares?

    No he's selling refurbished 2008 spec Dell Dimension C2D boxes with 80GB HDDs and 2GB of ram with Windows 7 Pro or Vista Pro on them.

    Hottest item in business tech right now. He gets a couple of thousand in for peanuts and sells them on in a week or two for a small fortune.
  • haukionkannel - Friday, September 6, 2013 - link

    Exacly!
    99.999% of the customers can not be wrong. Emailing, and facebook is everuthing you need to do with PC... And companies manufacture devises that most people want.
  • hobagman - Friday, September 6, 2013 - link

    only an ignoramus would compare a cpu to a refrigerator. sure, a stupid consumer might think they are the same.

    anybody with half a brain would realize how much more complicated the cpu is.
  • jabber - Friday, September 6, 2013 - link

    The irony is strong with this one!

    I love people that help make my point. I don't even have to pay them.
  • mrdude - Thursday, September 5, 2013 - link

    Intel has to funnel billions into R&D and fabs just to maintain it's process lead, but they have to throw an obscene amount of money if they want to extend that lead. With respect to margins, AMD has the flexibility to operate at far lower margins than Intel does just in order to tread water. That's a huge benefit for them, but this notion that AMD can operate as a fabless semico isn't necessarily true given the nature of their agreement (marriage) with GloFo. AMD doesn't have anywhere near the flexibility of a Qualcomm, nVidia, or other fabless semico's in this respect. Frankly, those two (GloFo+AMD) are joined at the hip and that union hasn't been going well recently. When AMD had a great product in Llano, they were delayed by 6+ months and were supply constrained for 3/4 of the year. Shortly after, AMD had to cancel and their 28nm GloFo Bobcat followups, resulting in a year-long delay in order to make the transition to TSMC's process and also had to pay to get out of their GloFo contract - excess capacity that would have otherwise been filled. Fabless semico really isn't an apt description here.

    I think Rory&crew have maneuvered a difficult market incredibly well given what they've been tasked with thus far. The bigger questions are regarding AMD's future. Frankly, the short term looks much better than the long term does. Going forward, what can AMD offer that the other guys can't? What's the niche that AMD will fill? Qualcomm was able to take and hold (and will hold for the foreseeable future) the all-important modem corner, but what's AMD gonna' do? At this moment all I see is x86, and that really isn't selling all that well on either front given the lackluster PC sales and the epic failure of MS on the mobile side.

    I believe AMD wants to focus on and leverage the graphical power of their APUs, but that's a case of chewing your own foot in order to stave off hunger; and chips like the Richland APU certainly aren't gonna do it. So...

    Where's Kaveri? Where's the GDDR5 on an APU? What's the news from AMD that will make me say, "Whoa, I didn't see that one coming"?
  • Homeles - Thursday, September 5, 2013 - link

    "Qualcomm was able to take and hold (and will hold for the foreseeable future) the all-important modem corner."

    I'm not so sure I agree. While it's certainly not a good idea to count chickens before they hatch, Intel *does* seem to be a big threat when it comes to the modem space. While it will take quite some time for them to port their modem IP to their own process, their upcoming LTE modems are no slouch, despite their disadvantage of being a separate package.

    As for AMD, right now, Kabini is in a pretty good position. We're already seeing this with the XBO and PS4. As far as the PC space goes, there is a fun little gap between the upcoming Bay Trail and Intel's Haswell that has the potential to allow AMD to steal a bit of market share.

    Kaveri is obviously late, but it should improve AMD's position relative to where they were with Trinity vs. Ivy Bridge. Well, possibly. Haswell is a really big deal in the mobile space, and I find it highly unlikely that Kaveri will be able to provide anywhere near power draw advantage that Haswell offers. Still, the product isn't out yet, and it's hard to evaluate its impact on the market without knowing many details about what it has to offer.

    Their FX line is still an unknown, and it is rather frustrating for people that follow the tech industry, like myself, to not have any idea of whether or not we will see a successor to Vishera.

    I am quite doubtful that we will see anything unpredictable out of AMD, however. I would expect their big news to be that they start becoming a profitable company sometime in the near future, for better, or for worse.
  • name99 - Friday, September 6, 2013 - link

    It's not clear to me the extent to which Qualcomm are willing to be flexible re modems. They've built their company around a certain model of a modem, with specific functions split between analog and digital blocks. Many companies in a similar situation would rather define themselves as "we're a company that makes analog RF front ends attached to digital base bands" rather than "we're a company that makes the best damn digital modems in the world", even if that means the slide from irrelevance to bankruptcy.

    Intel, as incumbent, has the advantage of being much more flexible in how they do things. Today their offerings suck, but I could see them being the FIRST to offer a generic "digital communications engine", kinda like a GPU but specialized for signal processing, which would be a single chip capable of running WiFi, telco, and BT all at the same time, and doing most of the RF filtering. I could also see them as far more willing than Qualcomm (and Broadcom) to investigate and experiment with alternative ways to balance power/performance (eg in how adaptive modulation is chosen, how MIMO parameters are chosen, in how to aggregate, in when to use RTS/CTS, etc); I'd also see them as far more willing to push cognitive radio, even if that starts off just with very simple things like much aggressive detection of which 2.4 and 5GHz bands are most crowded, and rapid renegotiation to move to less crowded bands.
  • savagemike - Friday, September 6, 2013 - link

    This may be overly simplistic but as the consumer computer world heads toward mobile Microsoft's hardware endeavors take on a whole new light. They are going to be competing with their hardware partners on what is going to be increasingly the lion share of that hardware market.
    Nobody like Windows 8. That's just pretty much the fact.
    Linux has come a long way in recent years. What it lacks against Microsoft Windows is simply intimacy with the hardware. The capability to really produce drivers which pull the best from the hardware in both graphics and power management.
    AMD should pick one primary company (Ubuntu would be the most logical) to really work hand-in-hand with to bring the same kind of fundamental base level driver support of this type of hardware using Linux which Microsoft has traditionally enjoyed. It should then present this partnership as an opportunity for the traditional hardware builders to have a play competing with Microsoft. Build desktops and laptops using AMD hardware married to Linux operating systems.
    This will complement their work with enterprise too, where Linux has a strong position already. Better power management capability will become increasingly relevant there too.
    Using this combination also differentiates from what Microsoft is doing and makes direct chip comparisons to Intel less interesting.
    If I can buy a computer and use it day to day and get great battery life and experience smooth OS usage then I don't care so much what the chips inside do in head-to-head benchmark comparisons against Intel.
    All the pieces are there I think if they want to pick them up and work together.
  • jabber - Friday, September 6, 2013 - link

    "Nobody like Windows 8. That's just pretty much the fact."

    Really? I think the term is a few IT Hacks brewed up a BS storm and a lot of sheep went along with them.

    I found it really embarrassing to see so-called respected IT journalists writing "It took me two weeks to work out how to shut it down!"

    Sure 8 isn't perfect but then 7/Vista/XP/2000/NT4 etc. were not either.

    As for Linux......"It's been a long road..getting from there to here...." Dream on.
  • name99 - Friday, September 6, 2013 - link

    If you are right, then why are the sales figures for Win8 so lousy compared to Win7?
  • jabber - Friday, September 6, 2013 - link

    Hmm because if my experience is anything to go by a lot of people finally stumped up and bought a PC around 2010 when 7 had been out a year to replace a lot of their old XP machines. I was selling PCs a lot back in 2010. Now my customers have largely got all the laptops and PCs they need. I'm doing a lot of upgrades and servicing instead.

    Windows 7 was timed just right for a big PC sales boost and it did. Those folks with a Windows 7 PC are not in the market to buy another PC for at least another 3+ years.

    Plus a lot of ordinary folks have realised they dont need a PC and a tablet does all the Ebay/Amazon they need.

    The market has changed a lot since 2009. PC kit doesnt need upgrading quite so often as it did and a lot of people bought Windows 7 or tablets. It's not down to Windows 8, not at a ordinary consumer level.

    But one can arguie blue in the face either way.
  • Nagorak - Friday, September 6, 2013 - link

    Windows 8 just sucks. You can find supporters that love it, but the fact is it has not gone over well with the public as a whole. It's no mystery why that is the case either. The entire strategy behind Windows 8 was all wrong. There was no need to force a mobile OS onto a desktop machine. There's a reason Apple maintains OSX and doesn't force iOS onto the Mac.

    What MS should have done is make their system configurable so that it could be tailored for desktop use (Start Menu, mouse-centric interface, limited or no touch screen use), and for tablet/phone (Metro, touch screen-centric interface). Trying to force the wrong OS elements onto the desktop is what has thrown a monkey wrench into Win8 adoption.

    At this point anyone who refuses to admit that Win8 hasn't gone over well is just in complete denial.
  • gobaers - Friday, September 6, 2013 - link

    I don't think people are understanding the strategy Anand is describing above. Forget about desktop and laptop processors, forget about GPUs. What AMD is trying to deliver is custom silicon to non-vertically integrated OEMs; much in the same way Qualcomm provided the SoC for the Moto X.
  • duploxxx - Friday, September 6, 2013 - link

    I understand the situation from AMD today and there turn around, not sure they will make it...

    In the past old fassion IT people and market driven consumers along with intel unfair business killed AMD to become bigger, today still old fashion IT people kill AMD.

    current and future: even more dominant Intel forcing anybody to follow there rules. examples: netbook and ultrabook pathetic design rules, server portfolio, ...

    to final result: consumer will suffer from it in price, choice and technology slowdown.
  • Impulses - Friday, September 6, 2013 - link

    I'm not sure three Nexus devices a year really make Google a vertically integrated company... And Surface wasn't exactly a home run. I think Google and MS have proven it's pretty hard to go whole hog with that approach a-la-Apple... Not that I think they should, just saying, the Nokia deal doesn't change much in the short term... It's not like Nokia's been building tablets and laptops in a basement somewhere.
  • Dribble - Friday, September 6, 2013 - link

    Where is this high margin PC market they are supposed to be milking?

    They have success with budget cpu's, and consumer graphics. The margins are tight in those markets. For big margins they need to be in the business world selling cpu's for data centres, and gpu's for professional workstations which they are failing to do.

    Then you look at the debt they have to pay back, rising costs from selling all their buildings (so now have to pay rent), and the fact that global foundries still has them by the family jewels (so they are a fabless company that still has to use one fab or pay huge fines even if that fab is a bit rubbish).

    How is that going to give them money and flexibility to invest in new projects?
  • jabber - Friday, September 6, 2013 - link

    Debt is not always a bad thing. Especially big debt. It can mean the banks and investors are up to their necks in it with you. It means they want to get something back and will wait or even give you more money to turn you around. You are a partner, not a customer that can be cut off from funds and shut down.

    People were asking why AMD went to the consoles if they were not getting anything from it. Well they were, not necessarily major profit but having both Sony and Microsoft as major partners certainly frees up the extra credit.
  • Nagorak - Friday, September 6, 2013 - link

    That's true that debt is not always a bad thing-- when it allows you to expand your business and make more money. Being saddled with debt while being in an economically vulnerable position is never a good thing. A company in AMD's situation would be much better off having no debt than having debt.

    No one wants to throw good money after bad. Lenders may be willing to work with AMD, but if their situation starts to look hopeless they will not hesitate to pull the plug and try to recover whatever they can from selling off AMD's assets. I really don't think your view of the debt situation could be any more incorrect.
  • jabber - Saturday, September 7, 2013 - link

    I wasn't actually referring to AMD directly when it comes to massive debt. I was just stating that having massive debt for a company is not always as terrible situation as it seems. Depends from situation to situation.
  • Little Leo - Friday, September 6, 2013 - link

    So what I get from this is AMD is looking to get into more partners in the Tablet and smartphone market by making more custom CPUs, APUs... to match their partner's needs. Time will tell who will succeed and who will wither and die.
  • Dwood - Saturday, September 7, 2013 - link

    I've read this article, and I have to agree, that there are some exciting things with the AMD CPU's. I know that Intel has a much, much larger userbase than AMD, however they do have a fantastic business model thus far, as well as prior line-up of products.

    One minor example that only enthusiasts would be able to understand, is that AMD has had significantly fewer socket-type iterations than Intel. I'm still rocking my AMD Athlon x2 3800, which had an AM2 socket, which was compatible with the AM2+ as well for upgrading. The AM3+ socket is out as well.

    tl, dr: AMD beats Intel at naming their CPU sockets.

    Another digression, however, is that I believe that getting the highest-end gaming system possible is going to return once more (with a vengeance) with the advent of the Oculus Rift as well as other input devices that require exceptional demand from your graphics card. AMD/ATI could, I believe, swing onto the tide of the rising tech, and make quite the comeback. IMHO.
  • Hrel - Tuesday, September 10, 2013 - link

    I think this is the right approach for AMD. Good to see them finally diversifying. Still, I'd love to see them reach per core parity with Intel, on a performance/watt basis. Or at least within 10%, given their manufacturing disadvantage.

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