[ausjke]

These days when I read news like this, my first response is that, does AMD have any chance to survive at all? The technical details for any new chip is secondary.

Dr.Su did not have a good tracking record and I never got it why she was picked as the CEO, but it's not all her fault though, AMD has been in decline for years, I just hope someone will buy it before it totally collapses.

Additionally, Intel is battling with ARM/Samsung etc and the need for AMD as a competitor(i.e. to avoid monopoly litigation) is gone too.

Sigh.

[BinaryIdiot]

> These days when I read news like this, my first response is that, does AMD have any chance to survive at all? The technical details for any new chip is secondary.

I know what you mean. When I started reading my first thought was "ugh, why don't you guys just give up" which is a terrible sentiment for me to have. Carrizo looks promising but I just can't see them gaining a whole lot of market share back from Intel.

When I used to build my own computers I always picked the best processor and graphics card at the time, no brand loyalty at all. It was about the time AMD was kicking Intel's butt and it made me so happy to use the "underdog's" products. Now it's probably been a decade since I've used a single AMD processor. It makes me sad.

[fnordsensei]

I understand completely what you mean. CPUs and graphics cards are hard problems to solve. For a long time, I was very happy to use AMD, because I felt that I was helping to keep the desktop market at least at two players (which is also crazy close to a monopoly). I still use AMD graphics cards for this reason.

[Qantourisc]

If I was a judge the ARM thing would not excuse them from a monopoly. For me it's a bit like saying you have competition because Intel has GPU's too. You can do general computing on a GPU too, but it's a different playing field.

[higherpurpose]

To see just how little Intel cares that AMD exists in the PC chip market these days, just look at how they price their Atom-based chips. Some of them go up to $160 [1] - for what is effectively only a $30 ARM chip competitor.

Intel can afford to do this because as far as it knows the "AMD competition" doesn't exist at that level. If it did, Intel wouldn't dare to price a $30 chip five times higher or replace "Core"-based Celerons and Pentiums with Atom-based ones to trick 99% of its customers into thinking it's actually an upgrade.

[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/9125/intel-braswell-details-qu...

[lewisl9029]

I'd have thought that the XBox One and PS4 GPU deals would have given them quite a boost, but it seems like they're still struggling these days.

Can anyone enlighten me on why those deals might not be helping as much as I thought they would?

[SXX]

> Can anyone enlighten me on why those deals might not be helping as much as I thought they would?

Good explanation may be found there: http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/150892-nvidia-gave-amd-ps4... "Two years ago, in January 2011, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang told reporters that the Sony-Nvidia deal had earned Nvidia $500M in royalties since 2004. The total number of shipped PS3 consoles by March, 2011 stood at 50 million according to data from the NPD group."

[lewisl9029]

Thanks for the link.

I did think margins on any console GPU deal would probably be slim, but I didn't know it could be that slim. Seeing some hard numbers really helped.

[neilmovva]

Console hardware is always high volume and low margin; MS and Sony usually breakeven on costs or even eat losses at the start of a new console generation. For AMD, it was the volume they needed just to keep orders going to the fab and a cash stream of some sort, but actual profit is slim by nature of that market.

[kayoone]

My guess is that AMD probably wanted those deals so bad that their margin is not very healthy.

[NicoJuicy]

I thought AMD's revenue went up by not investing to much in "being the first with 5 % performance improvement " research... ( more revenue in the server market, ... )