PHENOMenal scores! Not.

[fstroupe]

Guys, AMD is desperate. They knew Phenom wasn't ready for release, but they are watching their fan base slip away, and they had no choice.

They slowly built that base by quietly making better processors than Intel for well over a decade. They made their processors overclock friendly, and their big partners supported that with overclockable motherboards and BIOS. Then they make the jump to the big time with the A64, and was able to soon follow that up with the X2, which blew the fairly unknown (at that time) Pentium D out of the water.

I don't think that they were ready for the success of the Core 2 Duo, and I know that they weren't ready for the Core 2 Quad. I would imagine that the biggest surprise for AMD is how enthusiast-oriented that the new Intel stuff is.

Hell...most people I know that were diehard AMD fans...myself included...have gone Intel. But you can't go two years without releasing anything new, especially while your only competitor is really kicking ass with new products that appeal directly to your biggest fans.

I hope that AMD survives this.

[XoRn]

Originally Posted by fstroupe

I hope that AMD survives this.

We all should. The CPU competitive market is one of the best things PC enthusiast have relied since... forever.

Now that I think about it though, isn't it competitive marketing that put AMD in this situation? Hasn't their inability to challenge Intel's Core 2 Duo really brought down the company? Maybe its time for third company to step in, or AMD to sell out to stay alive. What if, say, Google acquired AMD/ATI? Hmmmm... *ponders*

[One4yu2c]

And the leaky ships sports yet another hole:

Erratum degrades Phenom 9500, 9600 performance

[XoRn]

Is their a point where enthusiast just have to buy from AMD just to try to help keep them in the market? If not, then I think a 21 gun salute and a round of Taps is in order.

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by One4yu2c

And the leaky ships sports yet another hole:

Erratum degrades Phenom 9500, 9600 performance

Right in the process of posting that on the News. The kicker is that in order to fix it and get any kind of decent clock speeds, it's going to kill 10-20% of K10's already lagging performance. That, and the erratum has caused them to stop shipping Barcelonas to one of their last strong points, the server market.

AMD won't go completely down, I believe. But just imagine a future around 2010 where the newest AMD chipset supports Nehalem and it's refresh for Crossfire. Thats scary, and not too implausible. Hopefully they can keep on track with the HD 3000 series and beyond so we don't lose both the processor and video card duopoly.

[Athildja-x64]

I doubt they will go under also,
the one place they might (might) make a good comback is in the mobile market.
ATi has traditioanlly stomped on both Intel and nVidia there.
AMD has the new Puma platform coming out next year and that should hold a few nice features for the mobile market, especially with the growing trend to have only laptop and no desktop.
This (if it is not like Phenom and Barcelona) will give AMD a good finger hold in a seriously growing market.


now for the bad news,
Intel has repeatedly stated that they will have quad core mobile procs by 08...

[Quakindude]

A huge part of me keeps hoping AMD has a magic processor held under their skirts, the way Intel kept C2D's secret, and that AMD is about to come roaring back into the mainstream desktop market with a nice upper cut.

Then there's that other part of me that is more pessimistic about these things. And sees AMD back to where they were in 1996. If those stupid assholes wouldn't have bought ATI, they would be much more formidable than they can muster now.

[Athildja-x64]

The funny part about that is that C2D was not a secret,
Intel leaked it all over the net.
People had samples that were not even in the tech press.
just about all of the overclockers (even the so-so ones) had it many months before the reviews came out.
AMD just ignored it or was simply unable to do anything about it.

[One4yu2c]

Not only that, but Intel's Dothan (mobile proc) showed that they were fully capable of going the efficiency route, despite the fascination with 900 thousand stage pipelines.

By contrast, we're not seeing any hints or potential silver linings from AMD.

[Athildja-x64]

the new Penryn also has the Deep Power down technology that allows for nice power savings.
Of course most enthusiasts will turn this off right away to make sure they get the most power all the time.