News AMD share price hit by revenue warning

I feel bad for AMD there APU's are perfect for almost all office work and even light gaming but it seems people would rather pay more for a crap Pentium or i3 over an AM1. The other problem is that Dell, HP and the other big pc makers don't want to piss off Intel so they wont even offer competitive AMD products.

 

Not a lack of sales it's more to do with a change of manufacturing from 28 to 16/14 that's the cost change. AMDs sales to business at this point are so small they are not worth listing.

Zen looks good AMD just have to keep themselves afloat till that point. The rumours are that they are been looked at to be brought out again by another company was on the financial news this morning again.

 

Agreed, but, the enthusiasts don't help either. Simply because AMD doesn't have a product that competes with i7, enthusiasts don't consider (or recommend) them for anything below high performance.

I'd say HP has generally been pretty AMD-friendly, but HP is a lot more laptop and tablet centric than Dell, and Intel is usually the better choice for mobile platforms.

 

I think Intel put AMD in this state 10years ago by giving huge discounts to big manufacturers and squeezing AMD out of the biggest market's at the time. This left Intel with a big income and manufactures scared to buy from the competition and loose Intel's benefits and AMD just haven't ever had the money to put into R&D since. Leaving them playing catch up with a shoe string budget.

 

2 Problems, the APU is a "jack of all trades, master of none" they are great chips, but the CPU isn't as good as Intel's offering and the GPU isn't as good as a discrete card. Couple with the fact Intel's HD4000+ is perfectly good enough for most people (I've been playing Team fortress 2 on it whilst I wait for my new Fury X to arrive). Second, they obviously put a lot of time and research into HBM on GPUs and the new Zen designs which has meant they have been out of the game for 2 years now.

Having said that, Looking forward to my Fury X arriving. Damn waiting lists.

 

That's rubbish, the reality is they just aren't competitive in most PC markets. What you are actually saying is the people, and big pc makers aren't willing to buy slightly inferior AMD solutions to keep AMD afloat - they would still be good enough, so why won't people buy AMD! You know the answer to that already, big pc companies and the people aren't charities, and they have no particular love of AMD, or any other chip maker, they just want to get the best returns to their investors, and the best value for their money.

 

Not necessarily. The average office PC doesn't need an intel CPU. They don't need AMD's graphics capabilities either, but the difference is for office PCs, AMD is still a cheaper option for roughly equal performance. Obviously, that depends on the task at hand, but in most cases AMD is good enough.

 

Is it really the cheaper option? AMD cpu's are a bit more power hungry so require better cooling, bigger psu, etc. AMD motherboards are different. To use AMD you have to go through the effort of picking, testing, debugging, getting bugs fixed, getting supply chains organised, etc. That all takes time and costs more money - money they didn't need to spend as they already have had to do that to provide Intel solutions. Then you are selling a product with inferior performance and branding (to Intel) so you can't sell it for as much.

Like I said none of these companies particularly love Intel or AMD, they will cost everything out, look at the advantages and disadvantages and make cold business choices. It's simply not cost effective to provide AMD solutions for most of the PC market to the companies doing that work. Where it is the best solution (e.g. consoles) big companies quite happily use AMD, but if it's not that's that really - none of them are going to go out of their way and take a hit to their bottom line just to give AMD some business.

The scary thing is those numbers are being propped up by the console sales - in that I suspect they will be pretty flat year on year. Hence remove the console revenue and the % drop to cpu's and gpu's is larger then the numbers suggest.

 

When not under full load, AMD systems don't use that much more power. For the average home user, it's negligible. For the average corporation, it might not really matter that much depending how often they do upgrades. In other words, the extra money they spend in power might not make up for the money they save in the hardware, if it's replaced soon enough.

...what? That's utterly ridiculous. Since when are AMD systems so glitchy that companies actually have to go out of their way to perform tests on the systems? There were 2 products made by AMD within the past 10 years that had faults. One of them was quickly recalled (the original Phenom x4) and the other only occurred using very obscure instructions (from Bulldozer). I don't know the exact amount, but Intel has actually had more problems with CPU compatibility on motherboards, which says a lot considering how often they change sockets. A good example of this is the i7 5775C.

AMD is a FAR more economical choice for OEMs, because they never change anything. There are motherboards that support CPUs made in 2006 all the way to 2014. With that much backward compatibility, companies don't need to invest in almost any research or development. How is Intel supposed to be a more economic and proven choice when they change sockets every other year?


I'm not trying to be a biased fanboy here, but what you're saying just doesn't make sense. I don't dislike intel products - I'm using one right now.

 

That. 100% that.

It's like in boxing when your opponent hits you in the knackers: The ref pauses the fight, docks a point from your opponent and gives you a minute to 'recover'. Well, your opponent has been docked a point, all well and good, but you've still been whacked in the nuts and are expected to carry on as if nothing has happened.

That's basically what happened to AMD, (except there was no minute's pause). They had a superior product to Intel at the time and were prevented from capitalising on it. Yes Intel had to throw some money at them, (years down the line) but the damage had already been done. AMD were forced onto the back foot and have been trying to play catch up ever since.

That fine (or 'mutual agreement') for illegal, anticompetitive activity by Intel was probably the best money they've ever spent in their history.

 

You still have to buy a more expensive psu, a bigger cpu heatsink, put more effort into cooling, etc. The cost is higher.

They are not more glitchy, they have to do all the same certification for anything made by Intel too.

But the PC maker has to support Intel anyway, so AMD is always in addition. Using ancient motherboards isn't really an option to a PC maker - they have to buy them new for every pc they sell anyway, it's not a home builder who wants to replace the cpu and keep the motherboard. They will want the latest features, the cheapest parts, the lowest power and the best security that the parts will stay in stock - that will be provided by current models.

Really we could keep arguing all day the bottom line is the cold hard completely profit driven market has spoken.

 

+1

and not just Intel's dirty tricks with the box shifters but there advertising campaign as well trying to get the general public to believe that more GHZ = faster

AMD's chips on the other hand were the same speed or faster but with less GHZ. The aftershocks are still felt now, i saw an advert ages ago ( the age of Ivy Bridge ) of a guy selling his Pentium 4 clocked at 3.8 GHZ, advertising it as 'faster than Core I7' and when i enquired he honestly said that 'core I7 only clocks in at 3.7 and his Pentium clocks 3.8, i just facepalmed and moved on

AMD has been on a downward spiral ever since Intel pulled their shenanigans as they had less money for R&D and made less powerful products = less sales = even less money for R&D and the cycle has continued to this day, the money Intel were forced to pay was likely pocket change in comparison to the Damage they did to AMD... Unfortunately i dont see a way out for them, unless they are picked up by a HUGE corporation like Samsung, i just dont see them getting out of the hole they are in, and the chronic lack of funding is also starting to show on the Graphics card front as well... its a real shame and a shame for us ( the consumer ) as competition breeds innovation and cheaper products for us overall

 

AMDs biggest issue over the years has been shocking PR staff who have failed on so many grounds. Any other company the entire department would be fired. Look at the pr leaks in the past the amount of fake benchmarks and miss information they have presented has turned away a lot of people from them.

Even Fury X is guilty of this in the pre launch benchmarks leaked showed it ahead of the 980ti and ahead of the Titan once it launched and reviewers had it people realised once again that was not the case.

That and getting rid of there own fabrication plant and to some extent buying ATI. The debt they got in to finance the deal is still been felt to this day.

 

In the coming year I hope AMD starts being smart and sell off whats not needed and release better competitive CPUs. Their GPU game is frankly not their best suite. They should sell off the discrete GPU lines to another company Samsung or let ATI be ATI again. Keep their APU line as their offering for integrated hardware. Refocus on making outstanding standalone CPUs like the old K8 line.

 

They cant just sell off ATI and still be in existance. Too many cross patents that they use for APUs ( Which is there main income at this point) to do this. Even if they brought a outstanding cpu to the market there Marketing Team would screw it up.

Ended up 15% down after reopen its below $2 at this point. Price was near $5 just last year and people said they were ripe for buyout then at $2 they are surely a free ticket.

 

It is a shame, I used to love AMD in fact up until last week I was rocking a phenom II x6 but had to upgrade as it didn't cut it for me any more. I ended up going to an i7 because there was nothing that was in the AMD arsenal that I felt could compete. I struggle to recommend AMD laptops as they used to run really hot in my experience.

We used to suggest a4 or a6 machines for business use, but the recent price drops to i3 ranges make that less easy too. It's a shame.

 

I don't recommend AMD to anyone either. A cheap Pentium G3258 and a suitable motherboard beat AMD into the ground.

Use an AMD and Intel system side by side, from a similar budget and with the same hardware bar the motherboard and CPU, and you'll easily see that the Intel system feels a lot faster than the AMD one. Why? Simple. Higher performance in every aspect. Oh, and then there's half the power draw too.