Brand perceptions can definitely change but the reality right now is that for the past 5 years AMD has been shipping non-competitive parts and has had zero premium design wins and very little money spent on advertising.
For the average consumer, every high end system they have seen in recent memory is Intel, and every ad they have seen is Intel, and if they have seen AMD at all it has always been positioned as a budget product.
That is going to take a long time for AMD to turn around assuming they can sustain performance parity with Intel.
That is also why AMD is focused on servers and semi-custom where they are selling to technical people who are evaluating based on price/performance and not based on brand perception.
There's nothing "premium" about those gaming consoles, maybe the PS4Pro/XboneX could be considered "premium" for the console sector.
Imho parent was talking about the PC sector and in that regard, AMD has been sadly trailing way behind Intel/Nvidia for quite a while now. AMD has struggled to oppose Intel's i5/i7 dominance.
Similarly, they still have no real competition for the high-end NVidia GPU's, like the 1080's.
If money is not a limiting factor, then you will be hard-pressed to come up with a build that does not include an Intel CPU and at least one Nvidia GPU.
Yeah, I know...it's just in light of this argument the timing seems strange.
AMD are on the brink of offering products that for the first time since forever at least has potential to build up their brand vs Intel, to actually have a significant differentiator that they can market. It seems really harsh to kill that before it even begins. But yeah, it could actually be a sign that AMD knows it couldn't go the whole nine yards in this game anyway.
I don't think OC is a fair baseline to qualitatively distinguish between CPU classes (at least low/mid vs high-end). OC is surely a large factor in purchasing decisions for a subset of high-end users, but not all.
Are people actually looking to buy a computer for an Intel CPU? I have honestly never met anyone that said "I need my computer to be Intel Inside™ ". They just say they want fast / modern / able to do X task and 99% of people have no idea what a CPU even is.
> Are people actually looking to buy a computer for an Intel CPU? I have honestly never met anyone that said "I need my computer to be Intel Inside™ ".
I've had friends go out to buy a computer and insist on an i7 because "it is the best."
Same people who buy the newest Samsung Galaxy every year.
My dad went to Best Buy to replace his 10+ year old laptop last year. He actually said he wanted Intel instead of AMD because he heard AMD processors were very slow. I had to tell him the Intel N-whatever and Celerons were also very slow so that he'd stick with one of the i-whatevers.
Basically anything they sell him will be faster than his current laptop. Many of the low power i series aren't actually much better than a celeron, but they're very common in new laptops.
CPUs aren't the bottleneck though, disk I/O and I/O in general are where most "slowness" issues are promulgated from.
You might have a good point for the home market - I couldn't say either way. I do know for the corporate market, businesses want as low a number of SKUs to support as possible, and so they will often only buy Intel (and only specific CPU models at that). This is particularly true in the datacenter / cloud world.
I work in heavily optimized compute, and it does matter there. We write assembly that is supported by one architecture only (for now), and frontier Intel chips are easier to come by. So our code runs on Intel’s processor extensions a generation or two before AMD, and that represents a high switching cost.
But this is server compute stuff which this news doesn’t seem to be about.