AMD expects Q2 2015 revenue to be lower than previously guided

[DanceswithUnix]

Whatever rule you apply to Intel also applies to AMD & Nvidia though, if Intel had to let a whole load of employees go to keep revenues flat then why didn't AMD do the same, did Nvidia have to do the same to keep their revenues flat.

Intel do some interesting stuff with their revenues. The Atom contra-revenue system seemed to involve selling chips at full price and then helping out with development costs or whatever up to the price of the chips bought. So revenue stays high because they are taking with one hand, but then they are giving the money back with the other hand so it is all fake.

Luckily for Intel, people seem to be willing to pay stupid money for their high end chips so they are still able to turn a profit.

Mind you, Intel seem to do redundancies on a regular basis, yet somehow it never seems newsworthy. I notice this morning that Fudzilla have picked up on a possible rumour of AMD maybe letting some people go, apparently that is big news and their top item right now despite the current lack of evidence.

[shaithis]

What about Nvidia purposely hobbling 4GB of VRAM? Pretty sure that would have been one of the most silly things you've heard as well.

The 970 VRAM issue was an oddball that annoyed a number of people. The problem with your "purposely hobbling" is that if you understood the issue you would see it was nothing more than a bad design decision. Funnily enough the vast majority of people who purchased them are extremely happy with them and people are still buying them. Guess those people must be silly buying such a trash card......

Garbage. Most of those who bought 970's and were displeased with not getting 4GB "punished" Nvidia by...buying 980's!

Want to link me to the numbers to back that up? Or have you just seen a handful of people on forums like Oc*UK doing it and then extrapolating that to "most people"?

Gameworks works on NOTHING. What you mean is "over tessellation" that gimps their own cards just as much as they do AMD's. Just like they've been doing for years, and getting away with it because of the tame press that is too dependent on their advertising funds to give independent and unbiased coverage.

Gameswork works on nothing? Maybe you want to tell all those developers who are using it to make their lives easier........

As for tessellation, it's like EVERY other feature. One architecture is more efficient than another at it. The funny thing is, there have been times when AMD have had the best tessellation hardware......were you complaining then? And lets not forget it is DEVELOPERS who use tessellation. It is THEIR choice....and most games let you turn tessellation down/off if you don't want it or it performs badly on your hardware.

[DanceswithUnix]

Want to link me to the numbers to back that up? Or have you just seen a handful of people on forums like Oc*UK doing it and then extrapolating that to "most people"?

Well supposedly 5% of 970 owners returned their cards in disgust. http://www.kitguru.net/components/gr...al-is-below-5/

That isn't a lot of people, so what they buy isn't really going to punish or reward anyone. In a year, it will be as relevant to the market as the FDIV bug to the CPU market (I was informed by some bloke down the pub when that happened that FDIV would be the end if Intel )

[GrimMachine]

Gotta love the AMD fanboys coming on here saying it's the Nvidia Fanboys fault that AMD are falling behind in Market share....as usual fanboys will be fanboys!

Think about it a little, it maybe, just maybe be the fact most prudent buyers compare the market and purchase the best performing parts for the money?? Surely not, I mean how could people be so clever, surprising really...

[DanceswithUnix]

Think about it a little, it maybe, just maybe be the fact most prudent buyers compare the market and purchase the best performing parts for the money?? Surely not, I mean how could people be so clever, surprising really...

That sounds far too sensible. Partly, because this is a hobby so "what you like" is more important than "what is most sensible", and also because people really don't work like that

How about this: You get a warm fuzzy feeling that you really want a gtx980, then you go find whatever nebulous reasons you can to justify the expense.

The sensible thing to do? Keep your existing card, spend the money on gym membership and eating well. Yeah, like that is going to happen.

[Jimbo75]

Gameswork works on nothing? Maybe you want to tell all those developers who are using it to make their lives easier........

Lol you're seriously trying to tell us that GameWorks makes their lives easier? Yes by making them more money easier due to Nvidia's money-cannon perhaps, however it certainly doesn't make their lives any easier when they have to deal with the fallout of using Nvidia's broken piece of crap software. Has there been a single GameWorks-afflicted game that performed reasonably out of the box?

As for tessellation, it's like EVERY other feature. One architecture is more efficient than another at it. The funny thing is, there have been times when AMD have had the best tessellation hardware......were you complaining then? And lets not forget it is DEVELOPERS who use tessellation. It is THEIR choice....and most games let you turn tessellation down/off if you don't want it or it performs badly on your hardware.

The DEVELOPERS get paid millions for it. The same extra millions that Nvidia has because people overspend on Nvidia hardware due to being slaves to marketing.

Gotta love the AMD fanboys coming on here saying it's the Nvidia Fanboys fault that AMD are falling behind in Market share....as usual fanboys will be fanboys!

Think about it a little, it maybe, just maybe be the fact most prudent buyers compare the market and purchase the best performing parts for the money?? Surely not, I mean how could people be so clever, surprising really...

Go through any publication that does "best graphics cards of the month" awards and tell me which company wins the majority of them.

You can start here - http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/gaming...iew-32899.html

As soon as you can logically reconcile those results (6-2 Win for the AMD cards should actually be 7-1 because Toms are giving a free win to Nvidia with the GT 730 even though it loses to the R7 250 at the same price) with the current market share of each company, you can come back and BS about "prudent, clever buyers". The vast majority of the buying public are clueless sheep and chances are you too are somebody who thinks he knows but actually doesn't. I find this to be the case with Nvidia buyers a lot tbh.

[Corky34]

Lol you're seriously trying to tell us that GameWorks makes their lives easier?

Isn't that part of what a good API is meant to do? A good API makes it easier to develop a program by providing all the building blocks.

The DEVELOPERS get paid millions for it. The same extra millions that Nvidia has because people overspend on Nvidia hardware due to being slaves to marketing.

Citation needed please. AFAIK Nvidia sends engineers to work with developers, just like AMD did/does/could, I've yet to see any proof that money changes hands when it comes to developers using GameWorks.

[PuremasterZ]

This is really looking bad for AMD and us. If AMD ends up destroyed then we won't even be able to get the GTX cards

[GuidoLS]

Lol you're seriously trying to tell us that GameWorks makes their lives easier? Yes by making them more money easier due to Nvidia's money-cannon perhaps, however it certainly doesn't make their lives any easier when they have to deal with the fallout of using Nvidia's broken piece of crap software. Has there been a single GameWorks-afflicted game that performed reasonably out of the box?



The DEVELOPERS get paid millions for it. The same extra millions that Nvidia has because people overspend on Nvidia hardware due to being slaves to marketing.



Go through any publication that does "best graphics cards of the month" awards and tell me which company wins the majority of them.

You can start here - http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/gaming...iew-32899.html

As soon as you can logically reconcile those results (6-2 Win for the AMD cards should actually be 7-1 because Toms are giving a free win to Nvidia with the GT 730 even though it loses to the R7 250 at the same price) with the current market share of each company, you can come back and BS about "prudent, clever buyers". The vast majority of the buying public are clueless sheep and chances are you too are somebody who thinks he knows but actually doesn't. I find this to be the case with Nvidia buyers a lot tbh.

Dude... you might want to wipe the froth from the corner of your mouth. It may frighten passers-bye. Zombie apocalypse and all that...

[Jimbo75]

Dude... you might want to wipe the froth from the corner of your mouth. It may frighten passers-bye. Zombie apocalypse and all that...

Here, take a look at this Hexus review and tell me if you can find the problem - http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/graphi...e-performance/

Figuring it out might help wake some of you up from whatever naive dreamland you're living in.

[Jimbo75]

This is really looking bad for AMD and us. If AMD ends up destroyed then we won't even be able to get the GTX cards

Yes AMD only exists so you can get cheaper Nvidia cards lol.

[watercooled]

Isn't that part of what a good API is meant to do?

It is. Just based on currently released games though I'm not sure 'good' is a word I'd use to describe it.

Yeah I know, correlation and causation and all that, but so far as Jimbo75 said GW doesn't exactly seem to be making developers' lives easier to the extent of having their product function well on release. And it's not just a problem for AMD, GW titles so far seem to run pretty badly on any hardware on PC. In fact rather ironically, many run better on GCN than on Kepler.

I don't claim to fully understand how Gameworks affects the workflow of game production but assuming it reduces time by using drop-in blobs rather than having the devs work with the source code, I'm not sure it's really a worthwhile trade-off for anyone involved if it negatively impacts customers and sours the reputation of the studios involved. I don't think it's doing Nvidia any favours either as they're taking the blame (whether justified or not) for the poor performance of GW titles.

Maybe there is in fact room for optimisation but the GW blobs allow a barely-functioning game to be forced out more quickly? That would be somewhat comparable to the issue of poor console ports - some games seem to be in a state of 'release it as soon as it works' rather than having any thought put into PC-oriented features. In that case it's still up to the developer/publisher to ensure they're releasing a quality product but the presence of the console version means they can get away with releasing a 'working' version more quickly without having to change the weird 30fps vsync with simulation speed tied to fps. In other words, saves time but introduces issues which wouldn't have occurred otherwise. I'm just speculating of course.

On the subject of tessellation, it's been covered exhaustively but isn't that the games in question were using excessive levels in order to improve the experience but in doing so it performed worse on certain hardware - it's that those games used simply stupid levels of tessellation which didn't improve image quality and wasted computing resources on all hardware therefore negatively impacting user experience unnecessarily, but because of specifics of each architecture if harmed one far more than another. You could use idiosyncrasies of any architecture to achieve a similar result i.e. a greater performance deficit of another architecture for no good reason.

Potential motives/reason behind the issues are another story, but they're clearly present.

It's the same sort of reason people, myself included, get annoyed with things like platform-specific content in games - users of other platforms end up with a worse experience for no good reason besides business motives. And as I've discussed elsewhere, why it's annoying that Youtube forcing VP9 on to all users despite it causing major playback issues for many people, even some x86 Chromebook users believe it or not.

[GuidoLS]

Here, take a look at this Hexus review and tell me if you can find the problem - http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/graphi...e-performance/

Figuring it out might help wake some of you up from whatever naive dreamland you're living in.

Let's play a game. One based on a question you asked in this very thread - how is AMD's current problems AMD's fault.

Let's say my name is Michael Dell (it isn't, but let's pretend). Let's further pretend that the company I lead has 13% consumer market share worldwide, and my company is the world wide leader in thin clients. As a company, I was (and still am) a supporter of AMD products. Now, let's say that, due to some down sales in the market, I see that AMD has changed its corporate office. Hey, good idea - maybe it will come up with some new, better ideas. Now, let's say that I noticed that sales are still down, and the response is to once again change the corporate office. Hmmm.... ok, there is something of a sales slump, and most companies are just riding this out, but maybe they think they still have a better idea. Now sales stay flat, and again, AMD changes the corporate office AND stars shedding various parts of their company that they spent a small fortune, IN CASH, for. My thought, as CEO of my company is that I may still do some business with AMD to keep my low end going, but I have no faith in their corporation having a good business model, so that's as far as I'm going to go.

Sound far fetched? That's how big business is done. And if you don't like the name Dell, just cycle in the CEO's of HP. Or Lenovo. Or Asus. Or any other high profile, high volume company.

The problem is, the enthusiast crowd (read: those of use here that look at ourselves in the mirror daily) thinks that they are more important, in the big picture, than they really are. We don't make enough of a difference to save or drown a company like AMD. If anything, the only reason they're still treading water IS the enthusiast crowd. But until they get their house, their books and their management in order, the Michael Dell's of the world aren't going to pay for their survival.

And I think that the biggest mistake AMD ever made was the purchase of ATI. I personally feel it put their CPU development behind by at least 7 years, and maybe more. It was a bad investment then, and it's a bad investment now. I don't care one way or the other about who makes the faster card this week - I might buy that model a couple of years down the road. Most people will never buy it, much like they won't ever buy a top end Porsche or Land Rover.

Plain and simple - AMD's problem is what happens in AMD's boardroom. And that's reflected in how much market share they're losing from the OEM's. You'd have thought they would be flush with cash considering the exclusives they got with Sony and MS. That's obviously not the case. So, in continuation of the game, riddle me this - what happened to the cash? Because if I'm Michael Dell, I want to know why a business partner that I rely on for product is on the fast lane to broke. And no, blaming a magazine, fan site or review site isn't a good, or even poor answer.

[Jimbo75]

The problem is, the enthusiast crowd (read: those of use here that look at ourselves in the mirror daily) thinks that they are more important, in the big picture, than they really are. We don't make enough of a difference to save or drown a company like AMD. If anything, the only reason they're still treading water IS the enthusiast crowd. But until they get their house, their books and their management in order, the Michael Dell's of the world aren't going to pay for their survival.

I'm not sure what business you are personally in but this concept you've come up with has absolutely zero bearing on the reality of the IT world.

Plain and simple - AMD's problem is what happens in AMD's boardroom. And that's reflected in how much market share they're losing from the OEM's. You'd have thought they would be flush with cash considering the exclusives they got with Sony and MS. That's obviously not the case. So, in continuation of the game, riddle me this - what happened to the cash? Because if I'm Michael Dell, I want to know why a business partner that I rely on for product is on the fast lane to broke. And no, blaming a magazine, fan site or review site isn't a good, or even poor answer.

There is no "riddle" and there never was.

The problem here is that you and many others in this thread are simply *guessing* at how this all works based on your own flawed reasoning.

AMD's "cash" from the console wins is keeping them alive at the same time their CPU business is dying a slow death. Do you think that Bulldozer and it's derivants are making AMD money or losing them money? Do you think that Dell, Lenovo etc didn't understand exactly what was happening? Do you actually believe that AMD themselves didn't know what was going to happen with Bulldozer? Do you think that maybe - just maybe - there was a good reason why BD's followups were mostly cancelled? Ever heard of the saying "don't throw good money after bad"?

That said - it's really amusing regardless because Dell just recently started using AMD CPUs again! - http://www.cnet.com/news/dell-inspirion-amd-carrizo/

And I think that the biggest mistake AMD ever made was the purchase of ATI. I personally feel it put their CPU development behind by at least 7 years, and maybe more. It was a bad investment then, and it's a bad investment now. I don't care one way or the other about who makes the faster card this week - I might buy that model a couple of years down the road. Most people will never buy it, much like they won't ever buy a top end Porsche or Land Rover.

This is so far from reality I don't even know where to begin. AMD buying ATI had zero bearing on their current CPU architecture. Not one bit. If it had, they wouldn't have built Bulldozer the way they did. CPU development is a minimum 5-year process and BD was the result of AMD's dream of server domination.

When AMD delivered BD they were stuck with a crappy CPU arch for 5 years minimum. That's how it goes. There is no way to speed it up, the entire thing needed thrown out and starting from scratch. That's what AMD did. They cancelled projects and made do with what they could - they informed OEM's that their CPU business would be drastically reduced over the coming years, well in advance. Do you really believe that AMD thought that their ****ty Bulldozer chips would last for 4 or 5 years bringing in the same quarterly ~$1billion revenue?

They ramped consoles instead of graphics at TSMC. Any idea just how much AMD sacrificed elsewhere in order to meet console chip demand? Hint: Both console chips are just a little smaller than the GTX 980 and have sold over 10x more. Then again, the consoles were *guaranteed* money at a time when nothing else would do. This has all been about riding it out until 2016 with new architectures on new 14nm nodes.

AMD is a true tech company producing miracles to stay alive while you all guzzle down the marketing koolaid of their competitors.

[GuidoLS]

Lots of stuff, including AMD is a true tech company producing miracles to stay alive while you all guzzle down the marketing koolaid of their competitors.

I have a far greater knowledge of business than you have any way of knowing. And this isn't an IT issue. That's yet another myth people are trying to perpetuate - if it isn't IT, it doesn't matter, or if it isn't IT it isn't tech. Which is bullocks - oh, you don't know IT, so your opinion on a tech company doesn't apply nor matter... wrong answer. This is a general population consumer issue. At least that's what AMD is specifically blaming this particular down turn on. You did read the article, right?

And I never said Dell wasn't using AMD chips - I said they were no longer using them on the high end - unless you somehow want to pretend that a $249 laptop is anywhere close to high end. And don't fixate on Dell. I used them as more of an example because more people know the CEO's name than they do for HP or any of the others. ANd nobody is using AMD for their flagship products currently. Sure, their GPU's end up, deservedly, in some of the high end boutique rigs being sold. But mainstream?

AMD is a true tech company? Your own reaming of their BD architecture gives lie to that. There's no doubt that they have some very good, and by that I mean far better than anyone I may know, technical people there. But the corporate culture is anything but 'true tech'. Again, you seem to be ignoring that particular forest for the trees - when they make a good product, they make a good product. When their management doesn't get in the way.

And if you don't think that blowing billions of dollars on a GPU company at the expense of either building your own brand new, shiny fab center, or updating, at minimum, 2 already existing fab centers, is a waste of money, then I don't know what ledger books you think you're looking at, because all any of us are seeing, and all sites like Hexus are reporting is, their ledgers bleed red. Not occasionally show red. BLEED red. They aren't spending it on PR. I can honestly say I've never seen an AMD TV commercial for any product they've made. I see an Intel Inside commercial multiple times weekly. Usually being hosted by Jim Parsons (currently the biggest fake geek on TV - at least here in the states). Don't think I've ever seen an Nvidia commercial either, but I don't have cable, so maybe they do something on SpikeTV or G4TV or something.

Like I said before, wipe the froth from the corner of your lip. You're taking this as personally as if someone had spit in your grannie's shoes or something as personally insulting. As far as Kool Aid goes, *I* use the best tech I can afford at that moment. I don't care about color. I care about longevity. I care about performance. Not performance per dollar, but actual performance. That's why I can run most modern software (read: non DX11) on a machine that has parts averaging 7 years old. At 1080p resolution. Which is fine for me. And yes, my CPU is Intel. And yes, my GPU is Nvidia. And it has nothing to do with fanboy - at the time AMD had NOTHING that compared to the C2Q processors, and they still don't make a decent Linux driver.

You, sir, otoh, seem to be drowning in the red bug juice, and blaming everyone else for the fact that the flavor isn't as sweet as it was back in the T-Bird days. And despite protestations to the contrary, the fault for that lies squarely with AMD. By your own admission, it's been their own poor business decisions.

[DanceswithUnix]

And if you don't think that blowing billions of dollars on a GPU company at the expense of ...

I think they had problems before then. Part of that was an identity problem, people saw them as as "Not Intel" rather than a company in their own right. Getting good at graphics gave them a chance to find a unique selling point, something that Intel would have (and still are having) lots of trouble catching up with. So now they are "the ones with good integrated graphics", something which personally I couldn't care less about, but it gives them more of an identity and I wonder if they would still be going without that because it doesn't matter how good a CPU is, most people buy Intel because it feels like the safe choice.