AMD leaving behind PC market to focus on mobile now? O_O

[DeltrusDisc]

http://news.softpedia.com/news/AMD-N...e-237103.shtml

AMD is going to leave the PC CPU market by the sounds of it.... wow.

[Meleti]

It's probably going to stop competing with Intel in the performance segment and keep producing cheap CPUs, but all of this is really speculation. AMD's people didn't actually commit to doing anything specific.

[hammock]

Huh.
(10 chars)

* User was infracted for spam.

[Auralian]

I would have guessed a priority switch to Servers then Mobile and Low cost PC's being last. Mobile is where the big explosion is at the moment and they would be stupid to leave it behind.

[vesseblah]

AMD is already doing well in low power processors and multiple cores, so it's smart move from them to focus on their strengths instead of trying to fail less in the enthusiast gamer segment.

[Sephiracle]

Makes me wonder how many phones will explode due to too much power consumption.

[BicycleMafioso]

OEM is where the money is at, anyway. Their Fusion-series with Llano in the lead is slowly eating up the marketshares from beneath even in desktops.

[Deleted]

It could mean multiple thing, ranging from "nothing will change" to "we'll turn out backs on x86 chips".

1. They might simply give up trying to compete with Intel for the "Enthusiast/Gamer" market. CPUs like the Bulldozer eat up a lot of development resources and only cater to a relatively small market. Performance PCs really aren't in high demand at the moment and I don't see that changing. On the other hand, these "performance" chips often serve as a basis for the lower budget chips designs.

2. They might give up on normal "CPUs" and focus on APUs after the Bulldozer design has run it's course. That would mean they'd probably only compete in the sub 100$ CPU range.

3. Rather than basing their designs on the dated x86 architecture, they might decide to license ARM CPUs which are known to be very efficient. This would mean abandoning the x86 chip design and refocusing on ARM chips. It would really mean quite a big change but not entirely unthinkable since Window 8 will support ARM chips. In any case, we probably wouldn't see fruits of these labors until 2-3 years from now.

[glo]

There's absolutely no reason for them to back out of the OEM market. Especially on notebooks, they devour Intel in terms of CPU/integrated GPU combos. They're also still widely used in desktop OEMs.

The only thing they -might- drop is enthusiast chip development.

[detectivekr]

This is pretty awful news, to be honest. I have an even mixture of intel and AMD chips in my house, and I liked that the two companies were in competition with each other. Without competition, the drive for innovation is going to be a lot less. People have speculated that intel has the power to make CPUs faster than they do now, but don't because of the lack of competition making it financially unreasonable. With AMD out of the picture, I'm worried Intel will grow lax and decline in quality.

[glo]

UPDATE November 30, 2011: AMD said it remained committed to x86

Hooray for false rumors!

[hayharut]

then who is going to keep Intel in line with their pricing?!

[Mif]

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/1...mitment-to-x86

When we contacted Silverman, he confirmed that the original statement has been taken somewhat out of context and provided additional clarification. 'AMD is a leader in x86 microprocessor design, and we remain committed to the x86 market. Our strategy is to accelerate our growth by taking advantage of our design capabilities to deliver a breadth of products that best align with broader industry shifts toward low power, emerging markets and the cloud.' The larger truth behind Silverman's statement is that no matter what AMD does, it's not going to be 'AMD versus Intel' anymore — it's going to be AMD vs. Qualcomm, TI, Nvidia, and Intel."

[glo]

This is a good thing, really. AMD does mobile implementations VERY well. This shift in resources could very well put them in place to dominate the notebook/tablet/netbook/phone market the same way Intel dominates the desktop world.

You can see it now, actually. Take a look at anything Intel is offering in terms of mobile (HD 2000/3000) chips, and they're absolute trash. AMD however hands Intel their own asses and then some when you compare their equivalent (Fusion APUs).

Who knows, maybe they're realizing their niche.

[Majik8ball]

Not surprising; Intel is more popular, and intel's ivy bridge looks to further the gap. AMD was really only good for budget building. I do enjoy my AMD Radeon gpu. I have never tried NVIDIA, but I do hope they continue making new ones because I don't really want to try a new company for fear of buying something of a lower quality.

[vesseblah]

Hooray for false rumors!

Nitpick mode:

x86 is the 32-bit design which is currently used in netbooks and other low power applications, x64 would be the desktop 64-bit design.

Anyway, my bet is that they will continue making mobile processors and 10+ core CPUs for servers, but will drop the competition on enthusiast gamer market only having a token processor or two there without full lineup.

[Dch48]

When they said x86, I'm pretty sure they meant the PC cpu's, all of which are now 64 bit. I can't see them pulling out of the PC business since they are in the process of gaining dominance in the laptop field with as has been said, the fusion APU's. It's fairly well known as well that the so far disappointing performance of the Bulldozer line is more of a Windows problem than anything else. The chips are not recognized correctly by Windows 7 so the enhancements they have are not functioning right. Win7 is treating the chips as true 8 core units when in fact they only have 4 discrete cores with an additional integer processor in each one. This is confusing Windows at the current time. It's been shown that they do perform substantially better in Windows 8 and the last I heard was that AMD and Microsoft were working on a patch for Win 7 that could increase Bulldozer performance by 40%.

[glo]

Nitpick mode:

x86 is the 32-bit design which is currently used in netbooks and other low power applications, x64 would be the desktop 64-bit design.

Anyway, my bet is that they will continue making mobile processors and 10+ core CPUs for servers, but will drop the competition on enthusiast gamer market only having a token processor or two there without full lineup.

No, x86 refers to 64bit as well.

x86 = 16bit / 32bit / 64bit. It's the name of the instruction set, not the architecture.

[vesseblah]

Bah... Sometimes it's just easier to quote myself and highlight bits that people are skimming over...

Anyway, my bet is that they will continue making mobile processors and 10+ core CPUs for servers, but will drop the competition on enthusiast gamer market only having a token processor or two there without full lineup.

performance of the Bulldozer line is more of a Windows problem than anything else. The chips are not recognized correctly by Windows 7

increase Bulldozer performance by 40%.

Try half of that, closer to 20%.

And it's amateur mistake by braindead morons to release the processor when there's no software support for it causing million bad reviews, mass layoffs and losses of few billion dollars.

[Herecius]

I don't like the idea of giving Intel what amounts to dominant control over the CPU market. Monopolies are bad already, as competition is very important for development, but a monopoly on a product that, by its very nature, must continue to get more powerful as time goes on, worries me.