Geonerd wrote:Why are you baffled and irritated? AMD obviously has no near-term prospects to compete in the high-end sector, so they are doing the responsible thing and declining to compete this go-around. The high-end is such a niche market that it's probably best for the company to abandon it.
What part of this don't you understand?
"High End" IS Intel. (Granted for the sake of this discussion.)
AMD's 'Grand Vision' that you keep parroting is to Boldly Size the "Low End" in a full-court APU press.
That still leaves the mid-range market up for grabs.
Anyone who buys an APU and then goes on to add a discrete GPU falls into this class. This is the market that they are walking away from, and it is HUGE.
I'm not "parroting" anything. I completely understand what they are doing, and why they are doing it. The market for a discrete CPU/GPU desktop combo is shrinking.
AMD's vision is of a further conjoining of what we consider to be "CPU" and "GPU". Why would they do anything to act contrary to their vision?
In your context, 'Vision' is just Buzzword Bingo for 'Yea, we know our strategy makes no sense. We don't have a clue what we're doing.'
I have no objection to the APU Forever! Kool-Aid party now under way, I just wish I didn't have to DOWNGRADE my CPU to joint the fun.
What don't you understand about AMD's "vision"? I'm not asking this in a jackass sort of way. AMD does not have the resources to compete with Intel in the high-end CPU sector at this time, so it's best that they don't squander their R&D trying to compete this way. If you can't be better, be different. I hope there comes a time in the not-too-distant future that this changes.
Consider this: a few years ago, AMD had heavy influence in x64, to the extent that Intel
had to adopt AMD's x86-64 architecture. It would be huge for AMD if lightning could strike twice.
Show me a single processor using Steamroller technology today.
Show me a single mainstream application running today that benefits from this 'APU Vision' malarkey. Sure, in time it may become a real killer. But not today. Not next year. Not for a LONG time. Until then, there is very much a market and demand for 'biggish cores.'
That market is far smaller than the mobile sector. AMD simply isn't large enough. AMD doesn't have much today, and new architectures take years to develop.
I understand you're upset about this, but even in AMD's heyday, they were not able to make deep inroads in the high-performance CPU market, even when they had the superior product.