[saas_co_de]

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.

[myrandomcomment]

I am pretty sure the current PS4 and Xbox count as premium design wins for AMD.

[freeflight]

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.

[wolfgke]

> 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

If money is not a limiting factor, you probably look at AMD EPYC now.

[StudentStuff]

Yeah, the PCIe lanes alone are killing it, never mind the increase in CPU performance. Intel doesn't have much to offer to oppose this dominance, and their at a wall with process technology (can't go much smaller than 7nm without massive power leakage) with a 3 to 4 year pipeline just to get a new chip out. Making one chip takes 9 months end to end, assuming the design is ready now, hence the long pipeline.

[freeflight]

That looks promising but is aimed at the server market. I haven't been keeping up that well since Ryzen but imho AMD has been really struggling with the premium desktop market, especially CPU wise.

Ryzen helped some with that but afaik Intel's chips are still way ahead in terms of single-thread performance, which is something many desktop users (like gamers) are looking for.

On one hand, it's cool to have i5's/i7's last so long, on the other hand, it's never a good situation when there's no real competition. Too bad Intel didn't pull through with Larrabee, a third player in the dedicated GPU market would have made this whole situation way more interesting/dynamic.

Tho could just as well have resulted in AMD going belly up, trying to compete against Intel and Nvidia vs the current situation sounds like it would been a worse deal for AMD.

[nerpderp83]

And consumers don't say, I want the same processor as the Xbox.

[wolfgke]

> And consumers don't say, I want the same processor as the Xbox.

XBox One's processor is from a pre-Ryzen generation, so this should not be a concern. :-)

[StudentStuff]

APUs pre-Ryzen weren't too bad, used to have a VM box running an A10 before I put a 1500X in it. Price wise they're very competitive, and AMD is happy to fab semi-custom silicon for anyone, hence how they were the primary vendor for all consoles for years.

[dahauns]

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.