So I'm sitting here with my 5870 churning away, I've gotten rid of the Catalyst Control Panel entirely, updated the drivers, noticed some bugs getting fixed, and I'm just thinking, "you know, this card is pretty damn nice." It may not have had much wow-factor for me, and it may lack some features, but the performance is damn good, the quality is damn good, and as I start to adjust to the new equipment, I'm starting to realize how happy it's making me. AMD's got a good thing going here.
The GPU market shouldn't surprise many people, it's a one-horse race for the most part, with NVIDIA limping along on three legs. The CPU results are the first good news AMD's had in a long time, with Intel dominating in sales and market share and dominating in performance while AMD has bled money. The rich get richer while the poor get poorer, they say. Looking strictly at the <$300 segment, AMD's margins aren't as good as Intel's, compensating with a large die and more cores where their architecture falls behind. As The Tech Report said, they can afford to do this now that they don't have to dump so much into manufacturing. Intel simply has better engineering on their side, and more of it, so they can work on not just awesome desktop processors, but lots of side projects, even able to waste a few billion on failed ones. That's AMD's biggest disadvantage, and while AMD's manufacturing is just about caught up to the best contract fabricators in the industry, they now have the disposable revenue to start addressing that problem.
But until that's totally resolved they will continue to throw more cores at the problem, and worry about the financial ramifications from behind the scenes, while pretending they don't have a power consumption disadvantage. One thing they're really good about is making their new CPUs back-compatible, so while Intel might have multiple sockets for a single generation of CPUs, some of which only work with their own tailor-made chipset, AMD still has one socket that will fit 1 to 6 core CPUs across multiple generations, and all of their chipsets will follow along. Sure there's AM3, but that's an optional socket. Intel got close to that with LGA775, but screwed it up with their chipset iteration.
Then there's Bulldozer, a chip that's supposedly on schedule for availability next year. What we know of the architecture looks promising, working more towards good multi-threaded integer performance and leaving floating-point performance open for expansion with the integration of their GPU architectures in the future. Lucky for AMD, Intel's next-gen Sandy Bridge has hit a snag and won't be out till next year also, pitting the two against each other more directly rather than taking turns trading blows with one of them inevitably lagging behind. I don't expect Bulldozer to make the multi-generational leap necessary to reach parity with Intel, but I do think it's a step in the right direction, setting a course that will lead to a stronger overall strategy than Intel has going for them. Intel has their GMA graphics and their Larrabee-derived higher-level performance, but the two don't meet in the middle, where they would need to if Intel was to have a versatile processor that could ride the GPU-computing wave when it took off.
AMD's going to start building its capital and paying off its debts, gradually putting more into R&D as they desperately need, and introducing more dramatic changes to their designs than they're known for to eventually start catching up to Intel, who is eventually going to run out of the sort of performance jumps they've been having the last few years, while probably being even worse prepared for the coming heterogeneous computing environments than even NVIDIA. I see it as the start of the beginning for AMD.
