AMD's price/performance conundrum: Can it keep its high-end customers?
Its highest-end CPUs will be stuck behind two big barricades -- a 2.6 GHz speed cap and a 65 nm barricade -- until at least the latter half of the year. So AMD now looks to ATI to help make up the difference, with an argument that just might work.
AMD's value proposition for its updated desktop processors is based on a return to the company's remaining strengths, and a hope that it can triangulate its positions in three corners of the PC component market -- CPUs, GPUs, and chipsets -- to eke out a price/performance claim that's stronger than any of its components viewed separately.
But traditional AMD buyers won't translate the way their view its products quite so readily. They will continue to evaluate the characteristics of Intel's Core 2 Quads and quad-core Core 2 Extremes against AMD's Phenom X4s, and they'll take note of the fact that AMD's clock frequency stops at 2.5 GHz while Intel stretches well into the 3.0 GHz stratosphere. And they'll wonder whether they'd be trading off too much.
It's worth noting that newer ATI Radeon graphics cards making special use of features in AMD 7-series chipsets. For instance, the new, low-price "Hybrid Radeons" will leverage features of existing graphics hardware installed on integrated motherboards, supplementing their capacity instead of substituting for it. AMD is relying on this and other means of leverage to sustain its new, platform-centric strategy -- a transition away from its historic emphasis on variety and choice.
But is it AMD's new contention, now that these channels of leverage are available and new quanta of performance can be realized through them, that AMD no longer needs a 3.0 GHz processor?
"For a gamer, we think that the easy way to get performance that matters...is to scale GPUs," Simon Solotko, AMD's desktop brand manager, told BetaNews in a conference with reporters earlier this week. "That way is through the 790FX [Spider] platform, which features up to four GPU slots. Now, if you were to buy that baseline Spider platform for about $1,200, or a little less, then you could very easily add another ATI Radeon HD 3850 GPU for about $150, and get really tremendous performance on state-of-the-art games, and then you're able to run at true HD resolutions, high settings. That kind of benefit is very accessible...it's very easy to expand the performance for gaming by adding additional GPUs."
To help make his case, Solotko demonstrated an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600-based system running on a motherboard with an Intel X38 chipset, supporting an ATI Radeon 3450 GPU. He stated this system would be about $30 more expensive than the Phenom 9850-based system running on an AMD 790FX motherboard with a 780G chipset and the Radeon HD 3850 GPU, running beside it. So price was the equalizing factor here (which explains the difference between the 3450 and the HD 3850).
In a FRAPS rendering test of Half-Life II Episode 2 for both systems, frame rates for the Spider platform clearly registered as much as 70 fps, while the Intel-based system failed to break 17 during the time the camera was on it.
So AMD is finally making use of ATI, and it's doing so in a big way: For the performance its enthusiast-level CPUs may appear to lack, it's looking to ATI to make up the gap, with the notion that only gamers would be interested in that level of performance anyway, and if that performance comes from a lower-price GPU rather than a premium CPU, why should that be a problem?
Next: Charting the Intel/AMD battlefield