RSSAMD and ATI head for uncharted territory with 'Spider'
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published November 19, 2007, 12:15 PM
In an effort to make its investment in ATI pay off, AMD is rolling out its first comprehensive PC platform today, aimed carefully at the lower half of the high-dollar enthusiast market.
The Spider platform aims to accomplish for the enthusiast market what Intel's Centrino accomplished for the mobile connectivity market: to specify components that are certain to work together without fuss. In this case, it's a three-way combo consisting of its long-awaited RV670 chipset family, now called its "7-series;" its ATI Radeon 3800 series graphics cards, unveiled just last Friday; and its Phenom series quad-core (not tri-core) processors, announced last May.
But for whom is this platform being marketed? It's midsized OEMs such as Falcon Northwest that are looking for platforms to serve as buildout guarantees, not just for the sake of reliability, but also in hopes that buying platform components in quantity can help reduce their cost. Without an official logo for Spider - indeed, as late as this morning, the company was using a poorly cut-and-pasted photograph of a spider as illustrations for its own literature - only enthusiast system builders may even be made aware of the trademark.
The initial verdicts for the trio of parts is somewhat less than stellar. As Tom's Hardware's Bert Kopelt discovered, a quad-core Phenom 9600 clocked at 2.3 GHz performs on average 4.3% slower, in a battery of 20 tests, than last year's dual-core AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+ at 3.2 GHz. While the quad-core Phenom did indeed outperform the dual-core in rendering applications, sometimes by slightly higher than 40%, gaming performance actually suffered.
With the 2.2 GHz Phenom 9500 performing over 8% slower, you might expect the top-of-the-line Phenom 9700, expected to be clocked at 2.4 GHz, to match last year's AMD performance. But that processor won't be available until December at the earliest.
Even worse news, though, is Kopelt's results against Intel: The 9600 performed 13.5% slower on average than Intel's Core 2 Quad Q6600, which presently sells for about $300 on the street. AMD's initial price for the 9600 in 1,000-unit quantities is $283, which means its street price will be right in line. That fact might give Intel the early lead in price/performance for desktop platform quad-core.
AMD may very well be aware of this little problem, which could be why its rollout literature this morning is playing up the angle of HD video performance - about the only category where Phenom holds a candle to Intel Core 2 Quad right now. Spotlighting something AMD calls "The Enthusiast Dilemma," it tells a story of enthusiast customers who are looking for some longevity in their product purchases, and who need an alternative to nVidia's "one-dimensional" approach, which merely touts gaming performance while ignoring HD video performance.
PC World's testers this morning complained about their lack of access to the platform parts, and theorized that it had something to do with their general lack of availability to the rest of the market. It then cited benchmark results AMD had published claiming 32% faster performance than an Athlon 64 X2 processor at the same clock speed. That would be the model 4400+, which dates back to 2005.
Today's rollout, while perhaps not as historically significant as its marketing hype would lead you to believe, is still important for AMD's future plans. For it to make the ATI investment work, it needs to find ways for one division's products to give leverage to another's. Up to now, AMD's concept of a platform has been flexible, if not altogether fuzzy: It pre-tests equipment from other manufacturers - which to this day include competitor nVidia - and makes recommendations. That looks nice on paper, but doesn't translate into revenue.
But AMD may have a big problem ahead: Its sole target market for the Spider platform appears to be the very system builders who will have already absorbed those early under-performance figures, and may have already made their decisions based on those findings.
in high-tech nothing lasts more than 6 months. amd's latest release reveals that they have quite a bit of homework to do.
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|AMD touts energy saving. Gamers and Animators don't care about that.
Then they start claiming "true quad core." That's just a word manipulation for marketing purposes. They like playing the mind game of "who came first? the chicken or the egg?"
As a fact both AMD and Intel have quad core chips.
Now, since I no longer care about ATI, the Spider platform is irrelevant. However, what AMD is trying to do with Spider is a fusion of CPU with video card which is very interesting. That should make Intel and Nvidia very nervous for a short while.
Also, if you can afford $20 extra for performance you can get something better than Phenom.
From what I read so far, my preliminary impression of Phenom is below my expectation. And since lab benchmarks are irrelevant in the real world, marketing venting is just BS.
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|i so hope amd can still compete. i dont want intel to be left without check. same for nvidia.
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|I really feel bad for AMD. They never get a break. Now, since Q6600's are selling "retail" for about the same price as the 9700, AMD will now have to drop the prices of the 9700 so the price/performance ratio is in-line.
Will this mean more money lost per processor like the raping they got handed to them with the latter months of the X2 series?
Will they also drop the price of their 3800 series cards, since they too get their asses handed to them by Nvidia's offering?
What the hell is going on at AMD?
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|proof is in the framerates
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|In my experience Tom's Hardware has had a bias towards Intel products. When AMD was leading Intel in processor performance they were the standard bearers for Intel. So I would take any review of AMD hardware by them with a grain of salt and await a broader base of technical reviews before drawing conclusions regarding actual performance.
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|http://www.tomshardware....ves_its_web/page22.html
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|I know your views are shared by others, Dan, but in the interest of full disclosure, I'll share with you this: I worked with Tom's for over two years, and I still have friends who work with the successor organizations (BestOfMedia, Tigervision). And during my time there, there was absolutely no Intel bias - zero. I've read a truckload of complaints about how Darren or Patrick didn't take into account the entire performance gap when saying some AMD processor outperformed some Intel processor...and if you see these guys at work and if you know what they have to work with, you realize that their data is not skewed in the least by opinions one way or the other.
Say what you will about what's happened to the publication over the years, but at least during 2004 - 2006, I can absolutely assure you there was zero Intel bias throughout both the staff and the freelancers there.
-SF3
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|LOL.
That pretty much puts paid to the "there's no bias here - move along" rubbish.
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|Forget toms ... read the conclusions anyway, despite the fact that Q6600 was superior in every category (except maybe Mainconcept), they bolded 4 or 5 times reasons to buy AMD, almost beggin' you to buy AMD...
Instead, go to www.hexus.net... same results.
Anandtech.com... same results. AMD friendly HardOCP .. same results, pick one, any one... all come back with the same data...
http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=10427
"We can debate all day whether the majority of consumer software is threaded enough to take advantage of four execution cores, but the immutable fact remains that AMD's fastest quad-core offering is slower than Intel's slowest." ... Ouch!
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|There's two groups of "enthusiasts": the money-is-no-object type and the price-to-performance worshippers. As long as AMD and ATI are producing inferior hardware they lose the former, and as long as Nvidia has the developers in its pocket they'll never get the latter, either.
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|The ATI buyout was one of the biggest mistakes in the industry in the last 10 years. It made no sense what-so-ever.
AMD needs to get bought by a private equity company so they can bring in a team that really knows their s*** and put the company back on track.
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|Equity companies are pimps. They buy companies, wh*** out the technology for what they can get and then leave them on the scrap heap.
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|Because that's obviously what the private equity company that bought Seagate did, right? They were going down the tubes, got bought and now they're the biggest hard drive supplier in the world... if a company is beyond saving then it makes sense to break it up and sell it's pieces to companies that can make good with those pieces, but AMD is still a very strong company that just lacks good leadership and expertise and could use a break from the relentless goal of trying to satisfy investors at the end of each quarter that can ruin a company's ability to properly execute strategies.
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|UNLESS if the forthcoming cpu & gpu on same dye turns out to be a winning innovation....
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|You are right Roj.
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|ATI is dead.
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