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srg86 wrote:

True, it was a nice Abit board as well, It was a shame to have to throw that board away.

KG7-RAID? I had one of those too. Don't remember what happened to it. I either sold/gifted it at one of the TRBBQs, or it is still in the crawlspace somewhere; not sure which.

Captain Ned wrote:

NoOne ButMe wrote:

I don't think that would matter. I think they would need to exceed Intel's bribing budget.

Ah, young padawan gerbil, there is but a small step between marketing and bribing. I was simply being polite.

Honestly, Intel is a girl scout compared to what heavyweights like Samsung and Oracle regularly do. It's how the game is played, gotta be a shark or otherwise be eaten by them.

maxxcool wrote:

Not looking to debate it, but I would personally NEVER devote large amounts of my company's product lines or quality bin parts to a company who has been gushing blood for the better part of a DECADE. If the intel counterparts are slightly more expensive, I'd go with them EVERY time because I know::

Except normally a large amount meant "A model"
No one is here saying Dell or any other OEM should go all AMD. Merely that finding more than 1-hidden model has often been very hard.

They can keep up with manufacturing demands

This has been AMD's biggest issue when competitive. If they can supply one OEM 100%, than it would have killed Intel's MOAP.

Wont possibly disappear overnight in a company sale, or hostile take over and upset my product'
Have better relationships and support with other vendors
Has multiple magnitudes better brand recognition.

Because you want to sell your own brand. Get the customer to want a Dell computer the next purchase instead of any Intel purchase.
This has always been the biggest issue between Intel and OEMs I think. Intel always focusing on it being an Intel product. AMD of course wants this association, but doesn't push it as hard. Mostly because they cannot afford to imho.

Regarding disappearing overnight, contracts.

Sure there are predatory incentives.. But golly gee welcome to capitalism. No way is anyone dedicating more than trivial test level product lines at this very moment. AMD has to prove it will survive and thrive before AMD might be in a Dell AlienWare box. And that's just that.. in a year or so we may see top trier desktops with the option for a AMD cpu.

AW will probably have one before that.

And AMD would have already fallen in true capitalism. Because even when it had a better product Intel bullied everyone to keep AMD down. Although AMD's insane purchase price for ATI was just as bad.

OEMs should have a nice 2018. Intel's OEM pricing will have to fall back to previous levels.

NovusBogus wrote:

Captain Ned wrote:

NoOne ButMe wrote:

I don't think that would matter. I think they would need to exceed Intel's bribing budget.

Ah, young padawan gerbil, there is but a small step between marketing and bribing. I was simply being polite.

Honestly, Intel is a girl scout compared to what heavyweights like Samsung and Oracle regularly do. It's how the game is played, gotta be a shark or otherwise be eaten by them.

Perhaps now they are. We may see them jump back into the ring...

Aranarth wrote:

Captain Ned wrote:

NoOne ButMe wrote:

I don't think that would matter. I think they would need to exceed Intel's bribing budget.

Ah, young padawan gerbil, there is but a small step between marketing and bribing. I was simply being polite.

Wait a minute! Marketing and Bribing are not the same thing?!

Kind of like how lobbying and bribing are not the same thing?!

Damn straight.


I wasn't so much concerned with Dell not having more AMD options, albeit that would be nice. My concern with that image was that if you go with Dells lineup in order it is always a sort of "Entry level, good, better, best" type of scenario. If the AMD system is "Better" on that lineup, why the hell does it has a 5400 RPM drive? The cost from going from a 5400 to a 7200 is next to nothing, especially for an OEM. It's as though they went out of their way to purposefully put a crappier drive in the system, and then priced it higher. I wonder if they are just keeping to their margins and Intel is still giving them units under fair market value. I mean there are laws that restrict manufacturers selling units for below a certain point below the cost of manufacturing. It's also possible that they are doing it fully legally and just selling units to Dell barely above their own cost in order to keep Dell happy. I mean Dell is pretty much the number 1 OEM in the USA. I have to think Intel's costs involved in R&D, manufacturing and so on has to be less of a % of their profit when compared to what AMD has to spend to make.

I'd be content just to see the OEMs not purposefully gimp systems for no apparent reason. Unless they really just don't expect to sell those units because they are AMD rigs and carry less recognition. If I were AMD I'd be all over some deep talks with OEMs about pairing proper hardware with their chips. They really need to work on their OEM relations.

Yeah, Carrizo fell off of my radar as soon as all of the Ryzen info started coming out. My wife is in a wait pattern for a new laptop based on an Ryzen APU, will finally retire her Asus N61J which has been downright buggy at times. Was thinking at one point Carrizo was going to be the answer for her next laptop. Too bad because this next semester is her last for college, so she will be getting a laptop not for school but for her accounting business. All the same in the end .

just brew it! wrote:

GloFo is big enough now (they've become the Borg of fabs lately) that production capacity should not be an issue any longer;

I'm just not confident in that viewpoint.

Intel shipped more than 100 million microprocessors during Q3 of 2014

The article detailed that 100m was a new quarterly high for Intel. So let's say Intel only ships 300m processors in a given year.

Intel has nearly 90% of the x86 market in 2016.

So GloFlo was already having to produce 36m (12.1% share) CPUs for the x86 market. That doesn't include all the work done producing RADEON products or custom chips for consoles.

AMD to recapture their heyday of 20% of the market would have GloFlo producing 60m CPUs a year, plus RADEON and custom chips for consoles. Presumably other companies turn to GloFlo for capacity as well, not just AMD.

Just not sure AMD can make the promises they need to the Lenovo, HPs, and Dells of the world about capacity.

It's also questionable whether an OEM should care about Ryzen. No integrated video is already a huge issue. Also the average consumer or business machine doesn't need MOAR CORES. Hell the average enthusiast doesn't need MOAR CORES, but that's not going to stop them from buying it.

MOAR CORES has just becomes the next GHz race. Everything old is new again.

Ryu Connor wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

GloFo is big enough now (they've become the Borg of fabs lately) that production capacity should not be an issue any longer;

I'm just not confident in that viewpoint.

Intel shipped more than 100 million microprocessors during Q3 of 2014

The article detailed that 100m was a new quarterly high for Intel. So let's say Intel only ships 300m processors in a given year.

Intel has nearly 90% of the x86 market in 2016.

So GloFlo was already having to produce 36m (12.1% share) CPUs for the x86 market. That doesn't include all the work done producing RADEON products or custom chips for consoles.

AMD to recapture their heyday of 20% of the market would have GloFlo producing 60m CPUs a year, plus RADEON and custom chips for consoles. Presumably other companies turn to GloFlo for capacity as well, not just AMD.

Just not sure AMD can make the promises they need to the Lenovo, HPs, and Dells of the world about capacity.

It's also questionable whether an OEM should care about Ryzen. No integrated video is already a huge issue. Also the average consumer or business machine doesn't need MOAR CORES. Hell the average enthusiast doesn't need MOAR CORES, but that's not going to stop them from buying it.

MOAR CORES has just becomes the next GHz race. Everything old is new again.

So AMD should have never sold GloFlo, damn! Seriously though, they had to and we all know that was a good move or they may have been bankrupt already. About your point of GloFlo having to produce for other clients, I'm curious what % of their production goes to AMD vs others. It sounds like even if AMD had 100% it wouldn't meet the number that Intel is pumping out, not even close. So that would be an argument to be made for OEMs not getting involved in the AMD game. I still can see them picking up Ryzen products for more budget gaming systems with for instance a 4c/8t R5 for those not wanting to pay i5/i7 prices with less threads compared to the i5.

Yeah, the more and more I've looked at Ryzen I've learned how spoiled we have become by having Intel's IGP that is more than enough to run even 2 monitors at 1920x1080 for office environments. I'd like to see AMD with Ryzen+ release a seriously cut down perhaps Polaris chip as their IGP. It doesn't even need to be any better than Intel's current IGP, just capable of pushing pixels for 2-3 monitors. A R7 1700 with IGP would seriously make that one fun home server chip, even without ECC on the boards. But IGP would have raised the chip size, cost and power/heat.

just brew it! wrote:

product life cycles for CPUs are short enough that whether the company is still around 2 years down the road is not super-critical

I disagree with this. I think it makes it more critical when you're a company the size of Dell/HPE/Lenovo/etc. They are looking that far ahead at their own product life cycles and their own internal engineering efforts, especially for the enterprise products side of the house. I would wager that the big three have engineering samples for Intel's CPU's and chipsets far in advance. There's also the fact that systems these days will easily last 3-5 years. If the company supplying my CPU's is out of business two years into a product life-cycle then how do I support that if there's a hardware issue requiring a motherboard or CPU replacement? The only way to do that is to keep enough stock on hand, but then you get into supply issue concerns. And let's face it, two years ago I think almost everyone thought AMD was going under.


AMD's problem for more than the last few years has been they've had a lot of misses on the CPU design side of the house. Has Intel had huge performance gains over their own products? No, but compared to AMD until Ryzen...no question. So put yourself in the OEM's shoes. Is Ryzen a fluke or is AMD going to continue having more hits than misses? Only time will tell and I'm not sure I would want to bet my own company on the first, albeit great, hit after years of misses. It's also been mentioned in the thread about past products not having native support for modern technologies. While AMD's direct 1st party offerings may be cheaper than Intel's, once you start adding in a 3rd party SATA controller, 3rd party USB 3.0 controller, 3rd party Ethernet, etc., engineering to integrate those into the solution, source stable drivers for the entire platform, and test it all, those costs add up and can make the final product more expensive than a full Intel-based package.

NoOne ButMe wrote:

Perhaps now they are. We may see them jump back into the ring...

...and do what, another round of vendor exclusivity contract clauses? Ermagerd, those big blue meanies might follow in the footsteps of most major B2B-focused corporations past present and future. Heck, telcos and associated hardware vendors do it to consumers all the time with nary a peep from any but the most diehard Naderesque consumer-rights advocate. You just don't hear about it most of the time because the B2B world is highly insulated from consumers and associated drama.

curtisb wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

product life cycles for CPUs are short enough that whether the company is still around 2 years down the road is not super-critical

I disagree with this. I think it makes it more critical when you're a company the size of Dell/HPE/Lenovo/etc. They are looking that far ahead at their own product life cycles and their own internal engineering efforts, especially for the enterprise products side of the house. I would wager that the big three have engineering samples for Intel's CPU's and chipsets far in advance. There's also the fact that systems these days will easily last 3-5 years. If the company supplying my CPU's is out of business two years into a product life-cycle then how do I support that if there's a hardware issue requiring a motherboard or CPU replacement? The only way to do that is to keep enough stock on hand, but then you get into supply issue concerns. And let's face it, two years ago I think almost everyone thought AMD was going under.

Yeah, I agree it's an issue on the enterprise side of the house. AMD is probably gonna have a tough time clawing back market share in the server space; it's almost as if they are starting over again from where they were 15 years ago.

Consumer side, I still suspect the OEMs aren't going to be as picky, as long as they can get a decently performing product at an attractive price. In a commodity market, they're going to use whatever helps them maximize their margins. As has already been mentioned, the lack of iGPU Ryzen parts is gonna hurt them here; it seems AMD's strategy is to go after the PC gamer and performance desktop market first, on the assumption that these people will want a dGPU anyway. But iGPU parts are a big chunk of the commodity desktop market.

I'm a firm believer in the simplest answer being the best answer; while I don't doubt that Intel, MS and Dell (and some other OEMs) have colluded in some form at some point in time, I think that it may have sprung up organically rather than a concerted effort to screw would be competitors.

I think because of Intel's size they can afford to give processors to Dell at prices that AMD just can't compete with, in turn the buying public comes to associate cpu's with Intel, which leads to more sales for Intel, higher revenue, which in turn allows then to give better discounts to OEMs like Dell.

Couple that with the fact that Intel has had the performance crown since Core2Duos first came unto the scene and why would any OEM offer AMD powered systems.

Let's not forget that once the above arrangements had been made, there is no reason to change unless AMD offers something significantly faster than Intel and Ryzen just doesn't do that, they match Intel's offerings but they don't beat them.

just brew it! wrote:

Yeah, I agree it's an issue on the enterprise side of the house. AMD is probably gonna have a tough time clawing back market share in the server space; it's almost as if they are starting over again from where they were 15 years ago.

I asked my Dell reps and they said as soon as they (AMD) have a product, they'll have a handful of machines to sell. Poweredge 2U boxes, most likely.

Waco wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

Yeah, I agree it's an issue on the enterprise side of the house. AMD is probably gonna have a tough time clawing back market share in the server space; it's almost as if they are starting over again from where they were 15 years ago.

I asked my Dell reps and they said as soon as they (AMD) have a product, they'll have a handful of machines to sell. Poweredge 2U boxes, most likely.

Cool. If they can get some design wins like that it'll certainly help their long-term viability.

Getting some buy-ins from big cloud providers (Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft...) would also be huge. There may actually be less resistance there, since they're very much about what's gonna get them computing cycles the cheapest, and aren't averse to rolling their own enclosures and infrastructure (so they're less dependent on the big OEMs).

I can easily see OEMs push these for content creation, where a dGPU is a given and more cores can contribute to the bottom line (Lord knows I'd already be packing Ryzen if I were into videography), but that's still a very thin market overall.

sophisticles wrote:

I'm a firm believer in the simplest answer being the best answer; while I don't doubt that Intel, MS and Dell (and some other OEMs) have colluded in some form at some point in time, I think that it may have sprung up organically rather than a concerted effort to screw would be competitors.

This stuff is all available in public documents. There were multiple settlements related to this, Dell settled with the SEC for hiding it, Intel settled with AMD for doing it, Intel settled with the FTC for doing it, etc...

"Belief" "Simplest" and "doubt" don't play into it, this isn't a matter of reputable dispute: Intel and Dell did this.

sophisticles wrote:

I think because of Intel's size they can afford to give processors to Dell at prices that AMD just can't compete with, in turn the buying public comes to associate cpu's with Intel, which leads to more sales for Intel, higher revenue, which in turn allows then to give better discounts to OEMs like Dell.

It doesn't matter what you think, they ended up paying billions because there was a document trail a mile long in which Dell was begging for the payments to avoid bad quarters and Intel making gigantic arbitrary reductions in the payments once Dell introduced AMD.

What was going on wasn't remotely unclear: It was robber baron levels of misconduct.

sophisticles wrote:

Couple that with the fact that Intel has had the performance crown since Core2Duos first came unto the scene and why would any OEM offer AMD powered systems.

The Core 2 Duo was introduced the same year as when Dell made AMD a supplier, practically the same quarter even.

curtisb wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

product life cycles for CPUs are short enough that whether the company is still around 2 years down the road is not super-critical

I disagree with this. I think it makes it more critical when you're a company the size of Dell/HPE/Lenovo/etc. They are looking that far ahead at their own product life cycles and their own internal engineering efforts, especially for the enterprise products side of the house. I would wager that the big three have engineering samples for Intel's CPU's and chipsets far in advance. There's also the fact that systems these days will easily last 3-5 years. If the company supplying my CPU's is out of business two years into a product life-cycle then how do I support that if there's a hardware issue requiring a motherboard or CPU replacement? The only way to do that is to keep enough stock on hand, but then you get into supply issue concerns. And let's face it, two years ago I think almost everyone thought AMD was going under.


AMD's problem for more than the last few years has been they've had a lot of misses on the CPU design side of the house. Has Intel had huge performance gains over their own products? No, but compared to AMD until Ryzen...no question. So put yourself in the OEM's shoes. Is Ryzen a fluke or is AMD going to continue having more hits than misses? Only time will tell and I'm not sure I would want to bet my own company on the first, albeit great, hit after years of misses. It's also been mentioned in the thread about past products not having native support for modern technologies. While AMD's direct 1st party offerings may be cheaper than Intel's, once you start adding in a 3rd party SATA controller, 3rd party USB 3.0 controller, 3rd party Ethernet, etc., engineering to integrate those into the solution, source stable drivers for the entire platform, and test it all, those costs add up and can make the final product more expensive than a full Intel-based package.

/applaud/ you said it better than me /bow/

just brew it! wrote:

Cool. If they can get some design wins like that it'll certainly help their long-term viability.

Getting some buy-ins from big cloud providers (Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft...) would also be huge. There may actually be less resistance there, since they're very much about what's gonna get them computing cycles the cheapest, and aren't averse to rolling their own enclosures and infrastructure (so they're less dependent on the big OEMs).

I certainly hope they go all-out. Naples is going to be an IO monster compared to current Intel 1P/2P systems. For building fat IO nodes, it's going to be king...assuming major OEMs pick them up.

Waco wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

Cool. If they can get some design wins like that it'll certainly help their long-term viability.

Getting some buy-ins from big cloud providers (Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft...) would also be huge. There may actually be less resistance there, since they're very much about what's gonna get them computing cycles the cheapest, and aren't averse to rolling their own enclosures and infrastructure (so they're less dependent on the big OEMs).

I certainly hope they go all-out. Naples is going to be an IO monster compared to current Intel 1P/2P systems. For building fat IO nodes, it's going to be king...assuming major OEMs pick them up.

It also makes me sad that I couldn't begin to use that much processing power! Short of running that many more VMs.

Welch wrote:

It also makes me sad that I couldn't begin to use that much processing power! Short of running that many more VMs.

Pushing many tens of GB/s of bandwidth through a box is hard (well, expensive) with Intel. AMD is poised to flip that on it's head thanks to the ludicrous in comparison number of memory channels and PCIe lanes.

As to the OP's point to throw some arguments on the other side: Being a megacorp that has to support its own products Dell is going to want to wait until drivers and especially board BIOSs and memory issues get ironed out before it sells Ryzen products.

Also Dell is probably the MOST interested in Ryzen 3 products, and that hasn't even launched yet. Give it six months for them to put systems together and test them and I'd be surprised if Dell didn't start capitalizing on Ryzen 3's value. Dell used to sell AMD chips in <$200 desktops for a few years, but those died off a long time ago. Bad sellers or high returns I'm guessing..

Kougar wrote:

As to the OP's point to throw some arguments on the other side: Being a megacorp that has to support its own products Dell is going to want to wait until drivers and especially board BIOSs and memory issues get ironed out before it sells Ryzen products.

Also Dell is probably the MOST interested in Ryzen 3 products, and that hasn't even launched yet. Give it six months for them to put systems together and test them and I'd be surprised if Dell didn't start capitalizing on Ryzen 3's value. Dell used to sell AMD chips in <$200 desktops for a few years, but those died off a long time ago. Bad sellers or high returns I'm guessing..

You are correct, Dell will want to see stable units and Ryzen isn't really there. I was just more surprised by their AMD APU systems which were priced higher than their Intel "equivalents" and matched with a 5400 RPM drive. I'd be OK if the performance of those AMD systems were lower and they targeted a lower price point and slapped a 5400 RPM drive into it to meet a price point.

Pre-built RyZen PCs are on the shelf at your local Best Buy, courtesy of their distribution agreement with CyberPowerPC.

JustAnEngineer wrote:

Pre-built RyZen PCs are on the shelf at your local Best Buy, courtesy of their distribution agreement with CyberPowerPC.

Nice, what does the pricing and specs look like? CyberPowerPC is one of those "small local computer shop" type vendors online that are big. So they can typically build whatever a user wants which is nice. It is still unfortunately not the type of "OEM" I am hoping to see have Ryzen systems available for the sake of it gaining market share.

JustAnEngineer wrote:

Pre-built RyZen PCs are on the shelf at your local Best Buy, courtesy of their distribution agreement with CyberPowerPC.

I didn't realize CyberPowerPC was that large a business. Great way for them to avoid Fedex/UPS wrecking half their shipped systems

...and they are apparently not affiliated with CyberPower Systems, the vendor of UPSes. No, that's not confusing at all...

Kind of reminds me of this bit of silliness:
http://www.gentex.com/
http://www.gentexcorp.com/

Two separate (and completely unaffiliated) businesses, exact same name, even similar corporate logos (one has a more squared-off font, but they're both just the company name in blocky all-caps). I used to work for one of them, and yes it caused a lot of confusion; we routinely got phone calls and mail for the other one from people who just Googled us and pulled the contact info off the web (I'm sure the reverse was happening to the other one). Vendors often got our accounts mixed up too (yes, unfortunately we had several vendors in common); fun times.

Sounds like one of the Gentex needs to acquire the other to really through people for a loop and simplify the confusion for everyone else.

Looks like Dell has seen the light and have made some Ryzen machines,

namely an 8-core 27-inch AIO:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/11455/del ... n-7-rx-580

and an "inspiron" desktop:
https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing ... amd-ryzen/

Having multiple models seems to indicate that it isn't a token effort.

raddude9 wrote:

Looks like Dell has seen the light and have made some Ryzen machines,

namely an 8-core 27-inch AIO:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/11455/del ... n-7-rx-580

and an "inspiron" desktop:
https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing ... amd-ryzen/

Having multiple models seems to indicate that it isn't a token effort.

Okay, I bit. I went and looked on dell.com at the consumer models, and it's really not a token effort.

For consumer desktops, from the top model # down:

7000 series
Inspiron 7775 27" AIO AMD
Inspiron 7459 24" AIO Intel

5000 series
Inspiron 5675 Gaming Desktop AMD
Inspiron 5488 24" AIO Intel
Inspiron 5475 24" AIO AMD

3000 series
Inspiron 3668 Desktop Intel
Inspiron 3656 Desktop AMD
Inspiron 3455 24" AIO AMD
Inspiron 3452 24" AIO Intel
Inspiron 3265 22" AIO AMD
Inspiron 3263 22" AIO Intel
Inspiron 3252 Small Desktop Intel
Inspiron 3052 20" AIO Intel

Wow. This is what competition looks like

It's too bad they didn't follow the Poweredge naming scheme - you could know at a glance if it was AMD or Intel just by looking at the last digit (5 for AMD, 0 for Intel).

Waco wrote:

It's too bad they didn't follow the Poweredge naming scheme - you could know at a glance if it was AMD or Intel just by looking at the last digit (5 for AMD, 0 for Intel).

Or the OptiPlex 740 and 745. Which were the other way round.

But maybe they did? All those current Inspiron AMD models end in 5 or 6, all the Intel ones end in 2, 3, 8, 9 ...

Topinio wrote:

But maybe they did? All those current Inspiron AMD models end in 5 or 6, all the Intel ones end in 2, 3, 8, 9 ...

Good point - hopefully that trend continues, even if it's a bit more convoluted.