The first major fruits of Advanced Micro Devices' acquisition of ATI Technologies are ready for the public just as the market for those products is going through some profound changes.
Spider will be AMD's first "platform" product when it makes its expected debut Monday. It is designed for desktop PCs, and the entire Spider package comes with a new processor, AMD's quad-core Phenom chip, the new 7-series chipsets, and new graphics chips.
AMD's Spider platform is designed for gaming and multimedia desktops.
(Credit: AMD)The two Phenom processors launching Monday are essentially desktop versions of AMD's Barcelona quad-core processors. They're designed for the upper half of the desktop market: gamers who don't have thousands of dollars to spend on the ultra high-end equipment and families who want a powerful home PC without breaking the bank. When combined with the Radeon HD 3850 and 3870 unveiled last Wednesday, you get a pretty decent system for around $900 to $1,200, said Leslie Sobon, director of desktop product marketing for AMD.
For years, AMD disdained a so-called platform approach for its products, preferring to say that unlike Intel's Centrino and Viiv programs, it gave its PC customers a choice of the components they could use to build a system. But PC companies like platforms because they make their lives easier, knowing they can slap components together that have already been tested and validated to work with each other.
In order to get that kind of technology in-house, AMD bought ATI Technologies last year for $5.4 billion. But Spider, which comes out of that mega-acquisition, hits the market at a tough time for desktop PCs and AMD.
The desktop market has been slowly declining in mature economies such as the U.S. and Western Europe for some time. People with that midrange PC budget--$900 to $1,200--have been spending their cash on notebooks over the last couple of years. That's not expected to change anytime soon, and most PC vendors don't terribly mind, since notebooks are more profitable.
But, there's still a lot of investment in equipment used to build desktop PCs, and there's always going to be a class of people who want something fixed and permanent in their homes. The PC industry's response to that trend was to try to find new ways to sell desktops as either gaming machines or multimedia hubs, rather than the general-purpose PC for the home.
For the most part, the multimedia hub strategy has been a spectacular failure: plenty of people have bought Windows Media Center PCs, but few are actually using those PCs in lieu of a cable or satellite receiver and DVR with their living room televisions.
And PC gaming, while still a significant market, is barely holding its own against console gaming. According to NPD, $1.5 billion worth of PC games were sold at U.S. retail stores in 2001. Last year, only $970 million worth of PC games were sold through the same channels--and there are a lot more PCs out in the wild today compared with 2001. Meanwhile, console sales have skyrocketed.
Unfortunately, AMD's greatest strength as a company has historically been PC gamers and enthusiasts. The company arrived as a corporation with the launch of the Opteron server processor, but it has long enjoyed the attention of PC fanboys who crave every last inch of performance they can get.
The hope behind that strategy has always been that PC gamers and enthusiasts are influencers, in that they are the ones whom family members call and ask what they should buy when shopping for a new PC. But I'm not convinced that's as true anymore, simply because PCs are less of a novelty these days than they were in the past.
People are more confident about buying a PC these days, and they have a wealth of options for advice. That means marketing your wares to a general audience is extremely important, and that's an area where AMD simply does not play.
Intel dominates the marketing of the PC industry. The Intel Inside program was a masterstroke, and years ahead of its time. AMD has no suitable equivalent, mainly because marketing to the general public is expensive. "We're not sitting here with billions of dollars of marketing to push one chip or another, we rely on our customers (the PC companies) to do the end user marketing," Sobon said.
AMD still does pretty well at retail without that kind of marketing effort. In October, AMD had about 45 percent of the U.S. retail market, according to CurrentAnalysisWest. That number also doesn't include Dell, which has made AMD a significant part of its product lineup. Most of that share, however, is made up of desktops, which are a shrinking market and less profitable to boot.
The initial plan for Spider is to launch it through channel partners, rather than top-tier PC companies like Hewlett-Packard and Dell. Falcon Northwest and Velocity Micro are well-known names among the PC gaming community, but they are boutique players in the market at large. And the other vendors in AMD's launch plans? iBuypower and Cyberpower, two companies that aren't exactly on the lips of most PC buyers.
This is the perennial problem for AMD. It can't reach a wider group of buyers in the more profitable segments of the market without the combination of great products and a steady marketing campaign. After Intel's product teams pulled their collective head out of the sand in 2006, the competitive comparisons were much less in AMD's favor.
This is a really tough period for AMD. It's having trouble getting faster versions of Barcelona, the chip it desperately needs to fund the rest of its operation, out the door. The Spider platform is launching into a segment that is changing rapidly, and through partners that won't produce volume. Puma, a revamped notebook processor, is still months away.
And perhaps most troubling, AMD recently canceled a meeting of industry analysts to talk about its future roadmap. CEO Hector Ruiz has done a lot of good for AMD, validating the company as a true industry player with the success of Opteron, but he'll ultimately be judged on whether the $5.4 billion gamble on ATI will pay off in the form of the Fusion products expected in 2009. Right now, that's far from certain.
Correction: This post initially misstated the brand of the two processors that launched Monday. They are Phenom processors.
AMD's upcoming FireStream processor might be a way for scientists to tap into a lot of performance without breaking the bank.
The company will be demonstrating its FireStream 9170 processor next week at the
The big trend in chip design over the past few years has been parallelism. Instead of trying to crunch all the data through a single path moving as fast as possible, the cool kids are now adding paths so data can flow down multiple outlets. This allows the chip to run at slower speeds, and therefore
Graphics processing units (GPUs) have been doing this for years. The high-performance discrete graphics chips from companies like Nvidia and AMD's ATI division have been designed with parallel performance in mind for a very long time. Certain types of customers in labs and research facilities would love to be able to tap into that kind of processing power, but GPUs require special programming techniques.
AMD is trying to bridge the gap between PC processors that are easy to program and graphics chips that offer great performance with the FireStream 9170. Think of it as a high-end graphics chip with a lot more memory than usually ships with those products, said Robert Feldstein, vice president of engineering for AMD.
The performance will be there. The 9170 is essentially one of ATI's high-end discrete graphics chips that has been tricked out with more memory and double-precision floating point units, which apparently is better than single precision. It comes with 2GBs of memory, compared with 512MBs of memory on the most powerful ATI graphics chip.
But the programming is still a little tricky. You'll need a software developer's kit, and you'll probably only want to port limited amounts of your code to run on the 9170.
"You don't have a researcher that's trying to port over thousands of lines of legacy code. They have a particular algorithm that (the researcher) knows will run well on a GPU," said Patricia Harrell, director of stream computing for AMD. "You're not worried about changing code for something that gives you an order of magnitude increase (in performance)," she said.
The 9170 isn't going to be out until the first quarter of next year, as AMD's graphics priorities for the holiday season are discrete graphics chips for PCs that all of us can use. It will cost $1,999, which might seem like a lot, but this is something you should be able to add into an existing workstation or server for a performance boost when you need it, rather than buying a fancy server for just a few lines of code.
Eventually, AMD wants to integrate this type of technology directly onto a PC or server processor. It has already announced plans to integrate graphics chips onto PC chips as part of its Fusion project, but it hasn't identified a timeframe for putting its powerful stream computing technology on a PC chip.
As rival AMD was preparing to snap up graphics chipmaker ATI Technologies, Intel was considering topping AMD's offer or going after Nvidia, according to one of the company's top executives.
In an interview with The Inquirer, Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's digital enterprise group, said Intel looked "pretty closely" at making a play for Nvidia or ATI, the two largest graphics chip companies in the world. Obviously, that never happened, as AMD closed its acquisition of ATI last year and Nvidia continues on as a standalone company.
Intel's Pat Gelsinger addresses attendees of the company's Fall 2007 Intel Developer Forum.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)Intel had some unique concerns that checked its ambitions, according to Gelsinger. "One issue was that we didn't know if we could because, if number one buys number two or three, what happens regulatory-wise?" Intel is the leading supplier of graphics technology for PCs because of its integrated graphics chipsets, and if it were to acquire a dominant share of the graphics market to augment its dominant share of the PC processor market, the U.S. government (well, perhaps the next administration) might have sat up and taken notice. And European regulators, currently hounding Intel on that continent, would almost assuredly have objected to the deal.
But graphics processors aren't just about rendering pretty pictures anymore. One of the real reasons graphics technology is attractive to both Intel and AMD is because graphics chips are very good at processing a stream of instructions at high speeds. That's why AMD bought ATI, and it has plans to integrate graphics chips directly onto a PC processor in 2009, a project known as Fusion.
Right now, those chips are designed to handle graphics data, but there's no reason why they couldn't be used for other applications that require high-performance computing, as long as the industry can figure out a way to program for those chips.
"The key transition (we're going through now) is in the graphics programming model," Gelsinger told The Inq. "The issue (GPU makers) have is making the pipelines more programmable, and we have the most programmable model on the planet--IA." IA (Intel Architecture) is Intel's term for the x86 instruction set; the company likes to remind everyone whenever possible that it came up with that idea.
Instead of teaching programmers how to exploit graphics chips, Intel's plan is to develop a project called "Larrabee" that will build a x86-compatible chip with the performance of a graphics chip. "Larrabee ends the debate on GPGPUs (general purpose graphics processing units)," Gelsinger said at the Beijing Intel Developer Forum in April. "This is what developers want." Both Fusion and Larrabee won't turn into products for a long time, so developers will have plenty of time to decide which model will prevail.
Check out the rest of The Inq's entertaining interview with Gelsinger, as well as the first two parts posted earlier in the week and the final part scheduled for tomorrow.
Nvidia painted a pretty picture in the graphics market during the second quarter.
The company's market share soared by 81 percent compared with a year ago, as it overtook AMD's ATI division and erased some of Intel's lead in the market for PC graphics, according to new data from Jon Peddie Research. Intel held 37.6 percent of the market in the second quarter, while Nvidia garnered 32.6 percent and AMD had 19.5 percent.
Intel holds the lead in graphics by virtue of its integrated graphics chipsets, which ship with low-end desktops and lots of notebooks. Nvidia and AMD also make integrated graphics chipsets, but are better known for the high-powered graphics processors that come in more expensive PCs. Nvidia ruled the roost in the desktop market, but Intel has a sizable advantage in notebooks, thanks to its Centrino marketing program, which encourages PC makers to use Intel's mobile chipsets.
AMD's market share fell 19 percent as it integrates the former ATI into its operations. AMD launched a new series of ATI graphics hardware later than some had anticipated, which may have contributed to its market share woes.
Overall, the graphics market was up 3 percent compared with the first quarter, a reflection of strong demand for PCs that also helped PC processor shipments increase in the second quarter. Graphics shipments were up 8.2 percent compared with last year.
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