Graphics The Polaris core could be AMD's last competitive GPU

Golden samples are bread and butter of the industry, journo's always get a working board, the best silicon etc. You can't stop that, because no one is going to buy everything. The good thing about OC % is that it's catalogued by the community en-mass anyway, rather than by any the small number of tech sites saying 'we achieved %' on our sample.

But it's not just about GS products - a majority of the manual work on positioning the product, providing materials that conveys the story well, getting product to reviewers in good time with software that works: being well prepared and having solid business PR process. If it makes your life easier, it affects the sentiment. That's only amplified in user reviews on Amazon etc, which is were ~80% of buying opinions are created. And at the end of the day you never want to read 100% sanitized benchmarks, because reviews are still a form of entertainment, so you go to read opinion derived from a feeling just as much. I'll admit Nvidia constantly does well in PR and branding machine, while AMD have historically had piss poor PR and not a strong or cohesive corporate marketing team. Again, in a sanitized world of technical achievement divorced of product names and such, it shouldn't matter, but it really does.

 

Everything you're experiencing is the power of branding and brand conditioning. These people identify wholly with Nvidia - who control the experience and have a VERY strong, long-term brand identity in their products and software, just like Apple, and not AMD. What you see is people want to be directed. They don't value a company that's not positive - they want to get behind the 'winner' and they will continue to buy into security of knowing their product line-up, without examining other choices. Nvidia are a master-class at this - better than Intel, even. They've made obscure automotive tech a mainstream tech-site interest with gif-able demo's and pre-seeded quotes like: "Nvidia Driver as powerful as 150 Macbook Pros". Macbook Pro is the anchor to the 'real-world' that your average person can read and relate to instantly. It's the "Olympic swimming pool" volume of the tech world. Technically speaking it's a ****ing stupid comparison but it was still parroted in headlines by tier-1 tech sites!

On the other hand AMD go 'here's our chip make what you like' and people go "uhh what do I do with this information? Is it good?" AMD seek open source alternatives, but they aren't brand-driven, so they are inconsistently or badly conveyed by media and understood by the public.

Take HDMI vs DisplayPort - you'd think because it's zero-cost, 'open source' DP would kill off HDMI, but the people behind HDMI puts so much money into business relationships and marketing that people understand what it is even though it's a cost-driven version of the exact same thing!

This is the world we live in.

The tech industry by and large is gearing strongly towards direct social- and interest-driven relationships with gamers and gaming - away from media interaction, because spending money brand conditioning 'uncritical' gamers to want your product yields better, long-term results than 'fussy' media. PC market is being strongly categorized into business, professional needs and gaming. General use is too commodity to care, and being targeted by notebooks or phones. This is dangerous because it fuels uncompetitive markets and the incumbent.

 

Getting AMD Prebuilt beyond E1200 processors in laptops is impossible. I've seen a couple of A8 and A10 desktops but if that's the biggest decline in sales, who's going to buy them.
The only place I've seen AMD take off is HP desktops for collage and in my last job in the civil service. Again, both HP based.
At this point it is only the enthusiasts that can save AMD but it would take something special. I'm still waiting

I think the biggest issue is day one reviews. A lot of comments about price, performance and overclocking are made regarding launch prices. A few weeks after launch however and as you pointed out, AMD are sitting quite well in terms of price/performance.

 

Intel's advantage is 3-fold: it's about 20 year business relationships and their overwhelming - but not monopolistic - market share, it's about contra-flow advertising$ and chip discounts based on sales (not illegal), and rarely stated; it's about the OEM support on technical, validation assistance, free sampling and documentation quality. Intel's engineering support is simply brilliant (on PC side from what I saw). AMD, on the other hand (CPU, not GPU), is awful, due to their financial and resource situation. You couldn't even start do a start-up to tap that AMD niche because the end product would be a) far, far too expensive because of low volumes and b) if you actually found engineers you'd put in too many work hours to make it worthwhile. AMD should have made their own devices but like I said they're more of a "here's the chip sort yourselves out".
Nvidia are now doing the same thing for their 80%, but, are even more ruthless than Intel (in legal ways) as Nvidia aren't as financially strong. Nice people, but ****ing hell I'd never want to be an Nvidia partner (apart from EVGA that gets the serious loves in North America)
Let's keep going: want to make a Nexus product? Prepare your anus for Google's fist. It's a nightmare of lawyers (collective term). Microsoft also protects their domain against Android/Chromebooks in other ways, as you'd expect.

Agree, but, welcome to the internet. If it's not outright wrong, it's on shoddy drivers, last-minute to hit deadlines and poorly tested. Got a testing problem that the company needs to look into? Well you're not hitting day 1 review and your traffic suffers. Or, it's a leak 6 months ahead of launch that everyone makes judgement on, or, retail product isn't available for 3 months after NDA anyway so the review is as good as useless. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯


Something like 80% of buying decisions are made in the store front on consumer reviews anyway. Some companies do put in efforts to 'manage' those on Amazon and from what I have seen (admittedly not much) Amazon is too big to really control it. Newegg, (rightly!) gets very shitty about it, but people still try. No idea if the same is true for UK places, I guess so, it's too valuable not to.

 

Intel will have to drag them out of the grave, like last time. They can't have a monopoly (Unless there is a 3rd CPU manufacturer that I'm not aware?)

 

They no longer have a monopoly due to ARM Holdings. Thats the reason Intel has pushed into AMDs lower priced areas in recent years.

They can state that ARM has 1billion + devices running its cpu so how can we have a monopoly and that will hold up in court.

Was Mensioned on before by people with far more knowledge on the subject than I have. But they stated for 100% that Intel does not have a monopoly on CPUs anymore.

They hold near enough 100% of the X86 server market. But its not a monopoly as IBM and ARM are other players in the market.

Intel will not rescue AMD this time, Totally different set of circumstances. The Smartphone craze sorted out alot of Intels Monopoly problems.

One of the main rumours in tech at the moment is that Intel Could buy out AMD. Apples latest A9x chipset is already faster than some of Intels stuff.

 

As further to that, Its not agaist the law to have a monopoly. Its agaist the law to abuse it.

 

Yea and IBM's new open policy on its POWER cores only adds to this.

Also if AMD goes out of business from 'its own accord' (arguable in court), then it likely wouldn't count against Intel.