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Rumour: AMD cancels Steamroller/Excavator

Posted: Mon Nov 19, 2012 7:40 pm
by Game_boy
http://semiaccurate.com/2012/11/19/amd- ... excavator/

"It looks like the big AMD core line that went Bulldozer, Piledriver, Steamroller, Excavator, has been revised to Bulldozer, Piledriver, the end. Pretty much the entirety of the AMD big core line was a casualty of the last round of layoffs. It looks like it is game over in that whole segment for the green team."

Cancellation of these amounts to withdrawal from the desktop and server markets, at least until ARM can compete there. There is an official AMD denial, but Charlie doesn't make up stuff on this scale.

Re: Rumour: AMD cancels Steamroller/Excavator

Posted: Mon Nov 19, 2012 7:49 pm
by sschaem
did you look at the update ? AMD denied it officially.

I actually wonder if this was "AMD bait" ... AMD is very secretive, and I guess this is the only way to get them to talk.

Re: Rumour: AMD cancels Steamroller/Excavator

Posted: Mon Nov 19, 2012 7:51 pm
by Game_boy
sschaem wrote:
did you look at the update ? AMD denied it officially.

I actually wonder if this was "AMD bait" ... AMD is very secretive, and I guess this is the only way to get them to talk.


I already put that in my post. Denials don't mean much from a company whose stock is down 75% since March and has had three rounds of layoffs. They also shed no light on its veracity because AMD would not allow a rumour site to break that news, they will wait until the next earnings call or Analyst Day.

Given the layoffs, do you think AMD is capable of carrying on developing Bulldozer, Bobcat AND ARM products? That's three full CPU cores.

Re: Rumour: AMD cancels Steamroller/Excavator

Posted: Mon Nov 19, 2012 8:04 pm
by chuckula
Game_boy wrote:
sschaem wrote:
I already put that in my post. Denials don't mean much from a company whose stock is down 75% since March and has had three rounds of layoffs. They also shed no light on its veracity because AMD would not allow a rumour site to break that news, they will wait until the next earnings call or Analyst Day.


The official denial actually added to the weight of Charlie's story in my mind. He regularly posts similar hyperbolistic crap about other companies who completely ignore him while what little is left of AMD's PR department bends over backwards to deny this one particular story....

I actually only semi-believe semi-accurate on this one (and that's more than I believe a lot of their stories). When it comes to pure-CPU systems that you as a consumer want to buy, then AMD is rapidly leaving that business. Don't expect anything post-Vishera for the AM3+ platform and don't expect there to be a successor to the AM3+ platform.

While Kaveri is definitely not a 2013 product, I think Charlie is jumping the gun when he claims that it has been cancelled and that there is no future for AMD in APUs above where the low-end Jaguar systems are aimed. AMD recently released statistics showing that 75% of its sales are from APUs and the majority of those are Trinity... you don't kill the product that is doing the best.

Re: Rumour: AMD cancels Steamroller/Excavator

Posted: Mon Nov 19, 2012 8:17 pm
by I.S.T.
Game_boy wrote:
There is an official AMD denial, but Charlie doesn't make up stuff on this scale.


I'm pretty sure there are at least ten examples someone could find...

Funniest one to me, and one first coming to mind is Fermi runs tessellation in software...

Re: Rumour: AMD cancels Steamroller/Excavator

Posted: Mon Nov 19, 2012 9:01 pm
by Game_boy
I.S.T. wrote:
Game_boy wrote:
There is an official AMD denial, but Charlie doesn't make up stuff on this scale.


I'm pretty sure there are at least ten examples someone could find...

Funniest one to me, and one first coming to mind is Fermi runs tessellation in software...


http://semiaccurate.com/2010/02/20/semi ... 80-scores/

"There is one bright spot, and it is a very bright spot indeed. The tessellation performance in Heaven. On that synthetic benchmark, the numbers were more than twice as fast as the Cypress HD5870, and will likely beat a dual chip Hemlock HD5970."

He wasn't claiming it was slow, he was claiming Fermi didn't have a dedicated unit for it. And he was partly right: it scaled with shader count, AMD's was fixed. I think that's more him not understanding the tech.

I don't care to defend his record, undoubtedly he has been wrong, but I see no case that he's deliberately lied or made stuff up. His greatest weakness is the trashy style he writes the articles in which is basically trolling for hits.

Re: Rumour: AMD cancels Steamroller/Excavator

Posted: Mon Nov 19, 2012 9:06 pm
by Captain Ned
Charlie don't surf.

Re: Rumour: AMD cancels Steamroller/Excavator

Posted: Tue Nov 20, 2012 9:41 am
by just brew it!
The whole site is very tongue-in-cheek, starting with the name; and if you still have any doubt about the intended double meaning of the name, look at the logo. I don't know why people get so bent out of shape that a site named SemiAccurate isn't always... erm... accurate.

He does get things right (or at least close to right) from time to time though. I hope this is one of the times he's wrong!

Re: Rumour: AMD cancels Steamroller/Excavator

Posted: Sun Nov 25, 2012 11:51 pm
by ronch
SemiAccurate is worse than Fudzilla.

However, I do acknowledge that AMD is spreading themselves too thin these days, with SR/EX, APU, Jaguar, GPU and ARM projects going on and with just peanuts in the bank. I won't be surprised if one or more of their projects get canned.

Re: Rumour: AMD cancels Steamroller/Excavator

Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2012 12:35 am
by MadManOriginal
I'd bet that it got pushed back because GloFo wouldn't have had their hybrid 14nm/20nm process ready in time. If I'm remembering correctly, they are going straight from 32nm to that process and it is due out in 2014. Ouila, no Steamroller in 2013.

Re: Rumour: AMD cancels Steamroller/Excavator

Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2012 2:22 am
by Meadows
MadManOriginal wrote:
Ouila, no Steamroller in 2013.

Perhaps you mean "voila".

Like I said on TR's FX-8350 review, it's the first AMD product I've considered buying in a long time, and at this rate, I might do it. (Originally I held a tentative "wait and see" approach for Steamroller. I might still wait for the new Piledriver stepping in 2013. Partly depends on how soon it comes.)
And if the rumour turns out true, it may become my last AMD processor.

Re: Rumour: AMD cancels Steamroller/Excavator

Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2012 2:50 am
by clone
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Re: Rumour: AMD cancels Steamroller/Excavator

Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2012 7:17 am
by RobotHamster
Personally I doubt that they are leaving, besides all the stuff about trading standards and all probably won't let them leave the laptop/desktop sector as then Intel would have a monopoly.
The fact that they nearly have that already is beside the point but they will probably kick up a fuss about them dropping their CPU lines.

Take Seagate for example (at least I think it was seagate) who bought HP's drive business was forced to sell all the manufacturing capabilities to and share all HP design Patents with Toshiba so that there wouldn't be a Duopoly of WD and Seagate.

Since there is already a Duopoly in the CPU space they would be hard pressed to allow AMD to leave the desktop sector.

Maybe they should try releasing a processor with 2 FP units and 1 int unit instead of 2 int and 1 FP unit, perhaps it will perform much better in games that way.

Re: Rumour: AMD cancels Steamroller/Excavator

Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2012 8:58 am
by just brew it!
RobotHamster wrote:
Maybe they should try releasing a processor with 2 FP units and 1 int unit instead of 2 int and 1 FP unit, perhaps it will perform much better in games that way.

That would probably be wasteful, I'm guessing most instruction mixes would not be able to keep both FP units fed. Keep in mind that while the FP units do the "heavy lifting" computationally, the integer units perform all of the logic. If they aren't kept balanced, one or the other is going to be waiting much of the time; all you're doing is wasting die space and power.

Re: Rumour: AMD cancels Steamroller/Excavator

Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2012 9:45 am
by Game_boy
MadManOriginal wrote:
I'd bet that it got pushed back because GloFo wouldn't have had their hybrid 14nm/20nm process ready in time. If I'm remembering correctly, they are going straight from 32nm to that process and it is due out in 2014. Ouila, no Steamroller in 2013.


Steamroller products were meant to be GF 28nm, not 20nm or 14nm.

Re: Rumour: AMD cancels Steamroller/Excavator

Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2012 11:43 am
by clone
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Re: Rumour: AMD cancels Steamroller/Excavator

Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2012 12:13 pm
by MadManOriginal
Game_boy wrote:
MadManOriginal wrote:
I'd bet that it got pushed back because GloFo wouldn't have had their hybrid 14nm/20nm process ready in time. If I'm remembering correctly, they are going straight from 32nm to that process and it is due out in 2014. Ouila, no Steamroller in 2013.


Steamroller products were meant to be GF 28nm, not 20nm or 14nm.


Well, same reason then - GloFo is skipping 28nm. (Part of the same story - skipping 28nm for 14nm/20nm process which won't be ready in 2013 so even if AMD reworked Steamroller for that 14nm/20nm process it wouldn't be out in 2013.)

Re: Rumour: AMD cancels Steamroller/Excavator

Posted: Tue Nov 27, 2012 3:49 pm
by RobotHamster
clone wrote:
Personally I doubt that they are leaving, besides all the stuff about trading standards and all probably won't let them leave the laptop/desktop sector as then Intel would have a monopoly.
while a valid moral position I'm not sure a business case is available for AMD to make given what they've got to offer.


Well what I was refering to was more of the agencies involved in trading standards won't let AMD quit the desktop CPU game as there is already an effective monopoly run by Intel but there is some competition from AMD so it can still be classed as a duopoly and for the past 8-10 years this has been the case, in the past year WD was in a situation to buy the Storage division of Hitachi (yes I got the companies totally wrong originally) and for the deal to be approved by the regulating agencies they had to give an asset package to Toshiba, read the rest here http://techreport.com/news/22553/toshib ... hi-storage

Since these agencies don't like to allow a duopoly in the hard drive business I think they would have a fit if AMD dropped the higher end desktop CPUs from their lineup leaving a monopoly of Intel at every performance point above AMD's A10 trinity APU's so they might either make intel allow more license of its products or provide financial aid to AMD

Re: Rumour: AMD cancels Steamroller/Excavator

Posted: Wed Nov 28, 2012 12:31 pm
by clone
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