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by StillBored
1495 days ago
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But as a consumer, all I really care about is price/perf (and maybe power and a few other variables). Far to much of the tech industry runs around talking about how great the top dog (this week) is because they bin, push the engineering margins and sell some golden chip that ends up being .0000001% of their product line for some crazy $$$$$. During the early part of the bulldozer timeframe AMD could provide a competitive part of much of intel's lineup at a lesser cost. It was only at the end were they kept falling farther and farther behind that it was a problem. For a few years there, you could actually _SEE_ in intels pricing where AMD's top part was because there would be a bunch of parts all clustered below some number (say $200) and then there would be a big price jump between every part above that line. And so AMD had a real problem when you went into the $RETAILER looking at a $600 laptop because while their laptop might have been better than the similarly priced intel, what you would hear is "amd sucks" and so people would actually pick the inferior product. |
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But making a low-cost product was not what AMD set out to do at the outset, so that's not really a defense of the technical flaws in Bulldozer's design. Sure, when they realized it was a trainwreck, they cut prices. Everyone does that, though, and that wasn't plan A.
Nobody is going to go through the expense of R&D and design and tapeout and then just not sell the product because it sucks/"missed expectations". You adjust the price to wherever it needs to be to sell the product.
Even in laptop the bulldozer chips were way power-hungry (actually this matters a lot more than in desktop) and just not that good a performer.
It was Intel's CEO's job to smile and sell hyper-clocked 14nm chips going against TSMC 7nm and it was AMD's CEO's job to smile and sell bulldozers going up against sandy bridge. That's what officers of the company do, even when they know it's shit. You go to war with the army you have, not the one you want, and you go to market with the product you have, not the one you want.