News - Reports that AMD is up for sale are denied

[kingpotnoodle]

Why do people keep suggesting AMD = second rate GPU? As I said earlier in the thread, they're very competitive with Nvidia, the two trade blows over releases, but ATM AMD's (older) cards are beating Nvidia in most games (especially with 12.11 drivers), for less cash. I'm not knocking Nvidia, and don't intend to start any sort of flame war, but why do people see AMD as inferior even when, well, they're not?

AMD have AM3+ and FM2. Intel have 1155 and 2011?

Price performance also still remains strong, especially in heavily threaded apps. E.g. PD for ~£150 beats i7 for ~£250 in stuff like transcoding for instance.

Definitely, AMD GPUs are fine, a little more power draw on the extreme end but otherwise fine.

The CPUs designs are great for heavy desktop users doing certain multi-threaded tasks but IMHO are often 2nd best when it comes to more basic scenarios which is sadly what most users spend time doing. The FX line is becoming a bit niche, which is never a good thing if you want big sales.

The APUs are good for media PC stuff where CPU isn't important and mediocre graphics are the sweet spot.

[watercooled]

Sorry if it seemed like that post was directed at you, it honestly wasn't, but reading it again it does seem that way. You just brought up a topic that is the basis for many flame wars and a general problem with rumours/etc, my argument was towards that, not your post.

In terms of reliability, again in my experience, there hasn't been enough to categorically call it one way or the other. But you make a valid point about there being a ton of poor AMD compatible motherboards around, and I admit I've had my share of problem with them. This obviously isn't a problem with AMD's products, but I agree they could do more to certify boards or something, to better guarantee quality.

Edit: This post was in reply to post #32, didn't notice #33 until now.

[pp05]

This idea that is always peddled that AMD is not competitive /or put out 2nd rate products is misleading. Intel blackmailed OEM's to only use Intel. Intel were practically funding Dell's marketing budget. Look at their results after it got found out?

[scaryjim]

tbh, I don't think you can call AMDs current CPUs second-class at all. The dual core APUs will satisfy 90% of the PC market comfortably (the same people who are happy with a mobile Pentium in their laptop), and the A10s would satisfy 99% of the market. Hard to see how that can be called 2nd class Same applies to the FX range: the 4300 and 6300 are more than enough for the vast majority of users. It's only enthusiast fanboys who really think they're 2nd class, and they're basing that off quantitative benchmarks rather than qualitative assessment. You don't get a qualitatively worse experience from an AMD machine. They're class 1b at very worst

[AGTDenton]

Could we see the ultimate green team that nearly was 8 or so years ago with AMD and nVidia
In reality I suspect this would be too tricky with ATi tech in the way but it feels good remembering those moments years ago.

It will probably end up being Cisco or someone we dont necessarily expect.
I can't see IBM going for AMD. Today desktop chips are so 1980's to them. They moved on to bigger and better projects this would slow them down, not to mention their own processors. They recently sold their POS business to Toshiba so as far as I can tell they have now exited the x86 market completely so would be mad to go back.

[kingpotnoodle]

tbh, I don't think you can call AMDs current CPUs second-class at all. The dual core APUs will satisfy 90% of the PC market comfortably (the same people who are happy with a mobile Pentium in their laptop), and the A10s would satisfy 99% of the market. Hard to see how that can be called 2nd class Same applies to the FX range: the 4300 and 6300 are more than enough for the vast majority of users. It's only enthusiast fanboys who really think they're 2nd class, and they're basing that off quantitative benchmarks rather than qualitative assessment. You don't get a qualitatively worse experience from an AMD machine. They're class 1b at very worst

You're probably right most users wouldn't notice, and class 1b is a good way of putting it.

In equal price comparisons AMD generally offer better integrated graphics performance and more but weaker cores, and often using a bit more power under load. In my opinion that makes them unsuitable for basic users where low power draw and single thread performance probably more important and many people don't even stretch the Intel graphics never mind anything more, for example office PCs for email, Word/Excel. Whilst I agree that most of those users wouldn't appreciate the difference it doesn't mean there is no difference and the people who do the actual buying generally do know the difference.

For example A10 5800K currently retails at same price as Core i3 3220.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/676?vs=677

http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph6347/50411.png

The Intel chip has crushing single thread superiority and wins the office type scenarios, gaming with a dedicated GPU etc, whilst the AMD chip wins back with multi-threaded things like 7Zip and some video encoding. The worst part for me is the potential power draw, it's not good for small/quiet form factors.

I know which I'd put in a PC for my Dad or secretary... for my own machine I would probably also select the Intel and use discrete graphics, a media centre would be a toss-up and I might well go for the lower max power draw, really the only place I'd use AMD would be a power user on a tight budget who can't afford discrete graphics - and therein lies AMD's problem, they are either a niche or the budget option and getting stuffed in with other budget components can make them look bad.

Some certification, a bit of marketing with emphasis on their strengths and trying to improve single thread performance in the long run is what they need IMHO, it's not hard to go from 1b to joint 1.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

In my opinion that makes them unsuitable for basic users

Trying so hard but still failing miserably!!

[watercooled]

I have to agree that doesn't make much sense; CPU's have been 'good enough' for everyday tasks for a good while now, and a decent video engine makes high-res video playback (which is fairly intensive in software) easily achievable. Actually, have Intel finally fixed the 24p sync problem yet? As has been mentioned elsewhere many times, an SSD would make much more of a difference than the only-distinguishable-in-benchmarks difference you get between CPUs in general tasks.

Also edited my post further up to avoid confusion, missed a post when I posted mine.

[peterb]

Most users couldn't give a flying... (moose?) which processor they have so long as theior applications run..Put two identically cased PCs side by side (one with an AMD chipset and one with Intel ) and for 'basic' users (whatever that is - not many people use BASIC now ) they couldn't tell which is which.

Where there 'might' be a difference is where an application is coded to favour the idiosyncrasies of a particular chip's instruction set, and that largely comes down to compiler optimization.

[scaryjim]

The Intel chip has crushing single thread superiority and wins the office type scenarios

I'd take issue with that. It wins in synthetic office-related benchmarks, but for a standard office grunt the bottleneck is how quickly they can type and read, not how quickly their processor can handle that input. I've recently supported an office full of admin staff all using socket 478 P4 machines, and with enough memory and a clean Windows install it's hard to tell the difference, in real world office use, between those and the Core i5 machines the analysts were using for their complex data crunching.

So unless you're trying to tell me that AMDs latest CPUs are slower than old Northwood P4s, I'd argue that Intel's measurable advantage is single-threaded performance is in fact utterly irrelevant in real world use.

And as to power draw, I note you've picked the A10-5800k as your comparison chip, rather than the rather more likely office-machine option of the A4-5300, which has only a 65W TDP and in office usage will spend 90% of its time at idle, sipping power just as happily as any Intel alternative. In fact, at idle Trinity generally draws less power than i3 thanks to very good aggressive power management. And believe me, for general office use a PC will spend the vast majority of its time in idle states, not running at full pelt*.

So for office use, Intel's measurable heavy load power draw advantage is, again, utterly irrelevant.

Unfortunately, they make nice evidential bullet-points for persuading people to buy processors for benefits they will never actually use, but that's marketing for you...


*EDIT: to test this I actually ran resource monitor whilst I was typing the above comment. The CPU didn't boost up to more than 40% of it's peak clock rate, and remained below 20% of actual usage. i.e. for most office tasks the CPU will at most make 20% utilisation of 40% of its peak performance - in other words 16% of its full potential. Makes all those 100% load power draw tests seem a bit pointless, no?

[watercooled]

If you're using an intensive single-threaded app, look to see if there are any multi-threaded alternatives, and if so, complain to the developer. Sure, not all applications are well suited to SMT, but a great deal of commercial apps which still use one thread (including games, although it's slowly improving) would greatly benefit from it. Same goes for a lot of the benchmarks used; people pay too much attention to single-threaded runs of apps which are highly-threaded??

Edit: Missed post above mine AGAIN!

In response to above, a good reformat and sensible choice of applications upon reinstall is all a lot of systems need to perform well again, but a lot of people insist the CPU is just too slow and spend hundreds upgrading it. Again, this is another scenario in which an SSD would probably help massively.

[Terbinator]

In my opinion that makes them unsuitable for basic users where low power draw and single thread performance probably more important and many people don't even stretch the Intel graphics never mind anything more, for example office PCs for email, Word/Excel...

...video playback and light gaming - where the Trinity trumps it big time.

You could always get this if TDP was of any real consequence to you: http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/cpu/47...0-5700/?page=8 2D load is higher, but it would also be faster so probably equal out. Same for gaming, it uses more power but is immensely faster.

Better boards tend to be cheaper on AMD than their Intel equivalents too.

[kingpotnoodle]

Trying so hard but still failing miserably!!

Cherry picking silly out of context elements rather than the whole. Good job...

I'm not "trying hard" with anything, just trying to have a reasonable discussion about where AMD are faltering despite reasonable products.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Cherry picking silly out of context elements rather than the whole. Good job...

Cherry picking silly out of context elements rather than the whole. Good job...

[scaryjim]

Cherry picking silly out of context elements rather than the whole. ...

Like cherry-picking full-load benchmarks when discussing basic office use?

When background OS processes and antimalware software were both resource hogs, we had relatively slow single core processors, and memory was horrifically expensive to ensure you had enough, it was possible to run into bottlenecks performing some fairly simple tasks. But those days are pretty much behind us now (even with Atoms and Brazos). Any modern processor will give you a good experience in general office tasks. Benchmarks are almost completely irrelevant to real-world user scenarios because, for the vast majority of tasks you do, the processor will essentially remain idle.

Cherry picking silly out of context elements rather than the whole. Good job...

CAT, that's descending into childishly pointless, and isn't really contributing to the discussion. If you've had enough of banging your head against a brick wall you'd be better off gracefully backing out of the thread

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

CAT, that's descending into childishly pointless, and isn't really contributing to the discussion. If you've had enough of banging your head against a brick wall you'd be better off gracefully backing out of the thread

Its called sarcasm! He cherry picks worse case scenarios(not the first time even),and then passes it off as the absolute truth. He then accuses others of doing the same!? Hence my response is adequate,and he should take his own medicine.

Even with the last quote,he ninja edited after my reply too.

Edit!!

Yeah,this is not adding to the thread,so I will trundle off somewhere else.

PS:Moose are the antithesis to gracefulness!!



http://www.totalcarcrashes.com/wp-co...tr-533x400.jpg