After seeing what Papermaster's doing recently, I'm actually getting enthusiastic on where AMD is going. Call me crazy, but given their CPU & GPU experience I think they just might be able to turn this thing around -- and maybe move faster than Intel:<p><a href="http://www.amd.com/us/aboutamd/corporate-information/executives/Pages/mark-papermaster.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.amd.com/us/aboutamd/corporate-information/executi...</a>
As someone who doesn't follow CPU manufacturers closely, it is still surprising to me AMD is in a tough spot - don't their CPUs power a huge portion of commodity hardware based cloud servers like AWS and Rackspace cloud? It seems like demand for that space is huge and only going to grow.
The math somehow does not add up.<p>The order was reduced from $500m to $115m + a penalty of $320m (i.e. $435m in total). So the savings are only $65m for 75% or $385m less product.<p>Is this a cash infusion for GlobalFoundries?
Here's where AMD went wrong:<p>- Treated Linux as a second class citizen (see if AMD-ATI chipset support is anywhere near the level of Intel support)<p>- Went soft after settling with Intel (or maybe even before, they couldn't innovate once Intel abandoned the idiotic 'netburst' path)<p>- Missed the commoditization of the PC market. Should focus on OEM/Corporate sales and price<p>- Missed marketing. I wouldn't doubt if all the myths about AMD processors are still in people's heads.
I really hope that if AMD dies the HSA Foundation for heterogeneous computing won't go with it. Hopefully ARM can take the leadership for it and continue their work.<p><a href="http://hsafoundation.com" rel="nofollow">http://hsafoundation.com</a>
The real problem for AMD and Intel is that ARM chips are too cheap and have better power profiles. As ARM chips hit that sweet spot of say 2 GHz and say 3-4 cores, they'll hit laptops and it will be game over. Why would a company pay $100 for an AMD chip that is a 50 watt or 100 watt chip when an ARM chip might be 5 watt and $10?<p>Once chips hit the "good enough" threshold where they perform well enough that the average user doesn't notice the increased performance, it becomes more of an issue of economics and $10-15 ARM chips are at a huge advantage over $100+ chips from AMD and Intel.<p>Also, Apple is certainly working on an ARM version of full OSX (as iOS is already basically OSX on ARM), Android obviously runs on ARM, Linux runs on ARM, and WinRT runs on ARM, so all of the major OS's can/do support ARM. Thus, there's not a major barrier software wise for ARM, it's more of a performance barrier, which won't likely last more than 3 years.<p>To AMD's credit, they're working on ARM for servers, but ARM is going to eat their whole business, so they need to move as fast in that direction as they can afford to. x86 is going to die a lot faster than anyone could imagine.