AMD Layoffs

[tiberiandusk]

http://allthingsd.com/20121012/exclusive-amd-to-cut-up-to-30-percent-of-workforce/

[herzmeister]

damn ASICs 

[meebs]

damn ASICs 

i'd say it has more to do with them being absolutely ABYSMAL in the desktop CPU market the past few years....

their highest end chips are barely competing with friggin core i3's that use like 1/3rd the power (i have a i3 3225 that barely uses 25 watts at full load...)

[crazyates]

damn ASICs 

i'd say it has more to do with them being absolutely ABYSMAL in the desktop CPU market the past few years....

their highest end chips are barely competing with friggin core i3's that use like 1/3rd the power (i have a i3 3225 that barely uses 25 watts at full load...)

Their APU products are quite the product, tho. Cheap, good battery life, and very good reviews. Buying ATI was actually one of the smartest things they could have done.

[GernMiester]

AMD CPU's suck so no surprises there.

[legolouman]

Sure, they lost the high end CPU war, but APU's are the best thing ever. I love them.

[crazyates]

AMD CPU's suck so no surprises there.

I'm still waiting for Piledriver to hit.  

[legolouman]

AMD CPU's suck so no surprises there.

I'm still waiting for Piledriver to hit.  

http://www.cpu-world.com/news_2012/2012092001_Pre-order_prices_of_AMD_FX_Piledriver_CPUs.html

Relevant, as am I.

An 8 core processor running 4.0 Ghz is crazy.

[Desolator]

their highest end chips are barely competing with friggin core i3's that use like 1/3rd the power (i have a i3 3225 that barely uses 25 watts at full load...)

That's not possible.  They use 55W.

[crazyates]

their highest end chips are barely competing with friggin core i3's that use like 1/3rd the power (i have a i3 3225 that barely uses 25 watts at full load...)

Link? Most of the stuff I've seen puts them competing with an i5. Sometimes they lose to the i5, sometime they beat even the i7s.

[kokojie]

AMD simply don't have the cash to compete with Intel in the long run. Intel's capex per year is far larger than AMD's entire company value.

[Desolator]

Someone's getting the future Steamroller chips and the current Trinity (aka Piledriver, yeah, it's out already) chips mixed up.  Steamroller is very lacking in details but everyone's hoping it comes in and destroys everything Intel has in performance numbers.
The the Trinity series is out now though and AMD's own release notes for it say it will outperform an i3 but they're slower than an i5 but at an i3 type of price.

i3's are around $115 still with the Ivy ones a lot more and the new i5's are around $185 so here it is (the Trinity A10) for $129:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113280

but it uses 100 watts :-P If I'm not mistaken, that onboard GPU absolutely demolishes the latest intel graphics capabilities.  I still wouldn't game on it though, so it's kinda pointless  Both can run a full HD netflix stream and play facebook games and if you hop from that to Skyrim, you're probably not going with an onboard GPU, lol.

They also make an A8, A6, A4 for a lot cheaper but still in the trinity series but I'm not sure how those stack up against comparable Intel products.

[crazyates]

Piledriver is just the next improvement of Bulldozer. The new Trinity APUs (the A10s) actually do have Piledriver modules in them. And sure enough, it shows about a 10-15% improvement over Bulldozer modules, which is what they were expecting. Piledriver has not made it into a Desktop CPU yet, but it hopefully will soon.

[Desolator]

Okay first, I just corrected the naming in my post I meant Streamroller.  And secondly, whaaat?  I thought Piledriver was in the new desktop CPUs?  According to wikipedia, The A10-5800K, A10-5700, A8-5600K, A8-5500, A6-5400K and A4-5300 APU models were released on 2 October 2012 and are all classified as 2nd gen Piledriver chips.

[SgtSpike]

I've kind of been out of the loop on mobile chips lately, but have been looking at buying a new laptop... are the "APU's" the chips that contain both a process and a GPU?  And they are good?  I'm looking in the $600 or less range, but can only find integrated graphics on the Intel side with those, and decent dedicated GPUs on the AMD side.  So I like the looks of the AMD offerings on paper, but I am just concerned about the CPUs themselves - power usage, actual processing power compared to the i3/i5's, etc.  And what's the difference between A6/A8/A10?

[crazyates]

Okay first, I just corrected the naming in my post I meant Streamroller.  And secondly, whaaat?  I thought Piledriver was in the new desktop CPUs?  According to wikipedia, The A10-5800K, A10-5700, A8-5600K, A8-5500, A6-5400K and A4-5300 APU models were released on 2 October 2012 and are all classified as 2nd gen Piledriver chips.

Those are all APUs. By Desktop chips, I mean a higher performance chip without a GPU. The FX series is about to release new models with Piledriver modules, With the FX-8350 being the top end, 4GHz octo-core. That's the one I want, cuz Steamroller won't be out for quite a while.

[Desolator]

for any laptop, I tell people that AMD's fusion APUs are quite fast and decent but they get a lot hotter and worse battery life.  They're similar in performance but if anything, slightly slower than most intel products.  Either one will get you to a high def netflix or youtube stream and not much farther so if graphics are a concern, you'll probably just have to step up to something with an Nvidia 540m inside or even faster.

That said, we use an older A6 APU quad (it's only like 1.4GHz!) for a 3D software demo to customers machine and it's alright.  It's about 95% fast enough for that at a large res and since it's a 17" it doesn't get too hot.  I have a feeling a modern i3 would outperform it.  The current mother of all perfect laptops is the Toshiba Satellite C855-S5206, which I have sold 3 of so far at my shop.  It's insanely good for $400 and has every feature imaginable for a reasonably priced laptop.

[legolouman]

for any laptop, I tell people that AMD's fusion APUs are quite fast and decent but they get a lot hotter and worse battery life.  They're similar in performance but if anything, slightly slower than most intel products.  Either one will get you to a high def netflix or youtube stream and not much farther so if graphics are a concern, you'll probably just have to step up to something with an Nvidia 540m inside or even faster.

That said, we use an older A6 APU quad (it's only like 1.4GHz!) for a 3D software demo to customers machine and it's alright.  It's about 95% fast enough for that at a large res and since it's a 17" it doesn't get too hot.  I have a feeling a modern i3 would outperform it.  The current mother of all perfect laptops is the Toshiba Satellite C855-S5206, which I have sold 3 of so far at my shop.  It's insanely good for $400 and has every feature imaginable for a reasonably priced laptop.

APU's are a bit better at multitasking and rendering than anything Intel has to offer. I use an APU based laptop for programming in LabVIEW, and I personally feel that it is a step above any other laptops that I have worked on. It loads faster, it compiles faster, etc.

[underminer]

I have a desktop with a 2.9ghz llano fm1.  The apu mines at 68mhs by itself and the motherboard has 2 pci express card slots and one x1 slot.  So theoretically I could be mining with 3 cards and one "crappy" one (the apu) for a pretty cheap price.  I bought the socket because it looked like it was going to be expandable but what did they do?  They make fm2.  Fuckers.  Alienating the people that invest in their experimental products is part of their problem.  I also have the 8120 8 core "bulldozer" chip, (which I bought because the name is AWESOME) its far from abysmal but doesn't stack up to an i5 from what I understand.

[SaintDevil]

I've kind of been out of the loop on mobile chips lately, but have been looking at buying a new laptop... are the "APU's" the chips that contain both a process and a GPU?  And they are good?  I'm looking in the $600 or less range, but can only find integrated graphics on the Intel side with those, and decent dedicated GPUs on the AMD side.  So I like the looks of the AMD offerings on paper, but I am just concerned about the CPUs themselves - power usage, actual processing power compared to the i3/i5's, etc.  And what's the difference between A6/A8/A10?

I have a laptop with AMD A10 processor and it has an integrated graphics 6620G. A6/A8 and A10 I believe differ in what graphics card integrated into them.
My laptop also has a dedicated 6650 and what I love about amd apus is that you can crossfire them.