Why AMD Could Win The Coming Visual Computing Battle

Vigile writes "The past week has been rampant with discussion on the new war that is brewing between NVIDIA and Intel, but there was one big player left out of the story: AMD. It would seem that both sides have written this competitor off, but PC Perspective thinks quite the opposite. The company is having financial difficulties, but AMD already has the technologies that both NVIDIA and Intel are striving to build or acquire: mainstream CPU, competitive GPU, high quality IGP solutions and technology for hybrid processing. This article postulates that both Intel and NVIDIA are overlooking a still-competitive opponent, which could turn out to be a drastic mistake."

Sorry, you overlooked the obvious

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Year over year annual growth has ceased and this past quarter shows a 0.2% decline in revenues.

Re:Sorry, you overlooked the obvious

[moderatorrater]

Apparently you didn't RTFA, because they describe the problems that AMD is having and then go on to say why the problems may be surmounted. In other words, you're overlooking the obvious position that AMD's in. nVidia doesn't have a CPU line that's one of the top CPUs in the market and in performance. Intel doesn't have a GPU that's competitive in performance. With the market moving towards greater integration and interaction between the CPU and the GPU, there's only one company that can deliver both.

So it's going to come down to whether or not AMD has the ability right now to keep pushing their product lines and innovating fast enough to beat Intel and nVidia to the punch. Their financial situation hurts their chances, but it doesn't negate them completely.

Re:... vested interest.

[Vigile]

This was written by an AMD shareholder, of course.

Guilty as charged as well, here.

I am absolutely not an AMD shareholder. Nor do I own anything in Intel or NVIDIA.

Re:Monkey See, Monkey Do

[MOBE2001]

Parallel processing is a new paradigm? Since when? The 1960s called, they want you to stop stealing their ideas.

What's being passed as parallel processing is not really parallel processing. In fact this is the reason that parallel programming is so hard: it's not what it's claimed to be. Switch to a true parallel programming model and the problem will disappear. Read Why Parallel Programming Is So Hard [blogspot.com] to find out why multithreading is really a fake parallelism.

Re:Apple's role in AMD-Intel war

[dreamchaser]

OS X runs just fine on SSE3 equipped AMD CPU's as it stands. It's not supported of course but it runs just fine. They (Apple) could easily support AMD even if they didn't optimize for them quite as much as they do for the Core 2 architecture. Frankly, I'm not sure the difference would be all that noticeable compared to the already noticeable delta in performance between the two main x86 architectures.

Re:AMD bought out ATI?

[What Would NPH Do]

And to add to my previous comment for 50 dollars I can buy a DVD burner and a 100 pack of DVD-Rs and I can have enough storage for almost 500 gigs of data. You on the other hand would have to buy almost 59 of those USB drives to match that at a cost of almost 1800 dollars. Have fun with that.

Re:Sorry, you overlooked the obvious

[BobPaul]

Intel has CPU but their graphics are severly lacking. nVidia has GPU, but no CPU at all (unless they pair with VIA or someone else). AMD is the only one of the 3 that has both. How is that statement self contradicting?

Re:AMD bought out ATI?

[Anpheus]

I just bought a portable hard drive, it's got better read-write speed, portability and it's easier to back up data too.

AMD is out of money...

[dtjohnson]

AMD processors are great. I've used them exclusively for the last 9 years. But AMD has a fundamental business problem that will prevent them from competing as the article says. They are out of money. It takes a lot of money to build the state-of-the-art fabrication facilities that are needed to be in the business that AMD and Intel are in. AMD builds a new fab and then they sell the products so cheap that they never come close to recovering the money they spent to build the product. Then they go out to investors for more money and the cycle starts again. After doing this a few times, their debt piles up, their stock tanks, and their ability to borrow money slips away. The bottom line is that whatever new cool product AMD is going to build will have to made in their current fabs and in the fast-moving semiconductor business, if you're not updating your fabs, you're dying. AMD slashed prices over and over to get market share from Intel and max out their production but their sales prices were way below their fab replacement costs. Intel said fine...have some more rope. Now...no more new fabs. AMD just never learned how to sell their products and their technology any way other than with a low price. Yes, Intel didn't play fair and pressured computer companies to buy Intel but AMD's problems were far deeper than that. AMD needed an accountant to tell them 'wait a minute...your fab will only last for 5 years so you've got to sell that product for 50 percent more than you are or you won't stay in business.' Yes, it's a competitive market and Intel sets the price for their competing products and AMD can't control that...now. But I've also watched AMD sell their products for dirt cheap prices even when they had Intel in a hammerlock...and I'd scratch my head at how little money AMD would make even in those good times when AMD was setting the price points.