What Went Wrong for AMD's AM2?

An anonymous reader writes "When AM2 was first announced it seemed like it was going to be a guaranteed hit. After all, this platform would be moving the tremendously successful socket 939 into the future with its use of DDR2 memory, a greatly increased memory bandwidth, hardware virtualization, and a number of exciting new CPUs. Despite everything AM2 had going for it, this includes a dedicated enthusiast base and a tremendous amount of pro-AMD spirit at the time, the new platform has largely been dismissed by consumers. The question now is, what happened? How did AMD go from record growth and being the darling of enthusiasts to having a new platform which failed to impress?"

What went wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

What went wrong with AMD's AM2?

Core 2 Duo?

Nothing went wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should anything be wrong with the AM2 platform?
Nothing.
It is just an evolutionary step for the AMD.

Asked, answered.

[shmlco]

How did AMD go from record growth and being the darling of enthusiasts to having a new platform which failed to impress?"

Question asked, question answered. It failed to impress, and they let Intel jump ahead.

One only has to look at the seesaw video card wars between ATI and NVIDIA to realize the truth. The people who care about such things are a fickle lot. Let one or the other realize a huge gain in performance and odds are that most people--even "loyal" customers--will jump ship in a second.

And if you don't care about such things, then... well, you don't care. So there's no demand, and you might as well have a hamster cage inside the box.

Three words

[oskard]

CORE 2 DUO.

It just did, really, really, unexpectedly well. It is a good processor and has changed a lot of peoples opinions about the processor market and AMD's (and Intel's) competitiveness. I appreciate the fact that Intel, the top dog, is still willing to put up a fight and compete in price, performance, and power in a market that they already dominate.

Oh Woe is AMD!

[segedunum]

I found the article a bit desperate to be honest in trying to portray some sort of honeymoon period being over for AMD. So AMD have released a product that wasn't in itself bad, but just didn't have enough gains about it over what had gone before for people to really go for it. So what? This just means that what went before was pretty damn good, isn't goint to be improved on much and is going to be hard to beat. For Intel, of course, beating what had gone before wasn't hard at all ;-).

The only major gains AMD are going to make is when they shift to a new 65nm process and then kick off a newer architecture from there.

It's because Vista, 2007, and HD video

[A Wise Guy]

Currently, my pc runs fast, i can do everything I want on it and easily. Plus I am running an amd 3200. I have not been willing to update anything because my pc runs just fine. If I upgrade now, vista is around the corner and also unreal 2007. I want to make sure I can run the game when I get it. I also have not forked out for a new video card since I am running AGP. The last card I can use to upgrade my rig to play at least the current flock of games nicely is the 7800gs+ agp. This pc is going to become a Linux box to run unreal 2007 and I have no intention of updating until i see some benchmarks. at the moment, it runs just fine just like every person I know who owns a pc and does not wish to update. There is also HD video playback, HD video editing, currently, people are asking me about this and I keep telling them the technology is coming and there is no reason to update because your pc needs to be hdmi ready which current new brands and video cards are just barely getting into it. Current flock of technology is no reason to upgrade and most people I know are still making rediculous payments for the current pc's to lowsy dell and circuit city.

writeup? wtf?

[macadamia_harold]

Despite everything AM2 had going for it, this includes a dedicated enthusiast base and a tremendous amount of pro-AMD spirit at the time, the new platform has largely been dismissed by consumers. The question now is, what happened? How did AMD go from record growth and being the darling of enthusiasts to having a new platform which failed to impress?

well, the article itself answers this question in the first paragraph:

The disappointment in AM2 is not a result of its failure to perform, but rather the failure to match the performance gains seen in the move to the K8 platform. Our testing has confirmed what the industry at large has found to be true- the move to AM2 should bring performance gains of about 3-10% when compared to socket 939, with an average increase below 5%. This is what we would comfortably call an "incremental" performance boost, but nothing more.

Has it?

[LarsWestergren]

It would have been nice if they could have started by showing some hard sales numbers to back up their statement that it is "being dismissed by consumers". I don't have any special love for either company, next time I'm going to upgrade I'll just pick whatever gives me the biggest bang for the buck, but when you write a whole article about "where did they go wrong", it helps your credibility if you can just quickly show some evidence that they HAVE gone wrong.

Especially since many online hardware sites tend to be pretty low journalistic standards, and pretty high on drooling fanboyism.

AMD is not focussing on the consumer market

[pieterh]

AMD has, pretty much, wrapped up the high-end market with its Opterons. All the noise about Itanium - it's turned into Opteron sales.

So now Intel has made a strong come-back on the desktop... and AMD calculates, do we make slices of silicon that sell for $100, or that sell for $1,000 and the answer is pretty clear. AMD does not have the capacity that Intel has, so it's making the most out its fabs by aiming at the server market.

Re:2 things: price / speed, speed / power consumpt

[ggy]

(their [Intel] naming scheme confuses like hell).

And AMDs doesn't? "AM2", "4x4", "x.xGhz+" ? (Okay, so the last one had a point, but still!)

I think people missed the point a bit.

[pjr.cc]

It wasn't AMD doing anything wrong, it was intel doing something right. AM2 was a natural progression from the 939. But intel came out with conroe, a low-power, low-heat-output and blisteringly fast that made AM2 look lacklaster and even worse comparing the bang per buch factor. 939 was so popular because of things like prescott (a cpu that had such a huge heat output a new case spec was required), add to that power consumption and lackluster performance (while trying to maintain the same price-point) and the 939 was hot (figuratively speaking). So where too from now? AMD have already hinted at multi-core cpu's that "look" like single core cpu's and i suspect that will be a killer feature that will rocket AMD back into the lead again, consider a cpu that has the power of 4 cpu's while allowing a single threaded application to take full advantage of it... that would be dam impressive. On a side note, anyone else find it very amusing the evolution of computing since the PC? We've swung from serial to parallel since the dawn and hopefully we will continue to.

Sick of pointless upgrading.

[Conor Turton]

People are becoming increasingly sick of having to upgrade a large proportion of their hardware for a minimal increase in performance.

I have a AMD X2 4800 Socket 939 with 2GB of RAM. It does what I want. For me to upgrade to the next level, it's not only a new CPU but new motherboard and new RAM too and that DDR2 stuff ain't cheap if you go for the higher speed stuff to try and futureproof.

Many, including myself, are starting to see the introduction of a new CPU socket type as nothing more than a vain attempt to try and keep revenue flowing by trying to persuade us of all the benefits that these new sockets can offer which apparently the old ones can't. Two downsides to this. The first is ASROCK who have proven that the chipsets are more than up to running new sockets with the help of a low cost adapter to allow you to use the different RAM and CPU. The second is Intel who have come along with the undeniably impressive Core 2 processors that not only run on the existing 775 socket but also the i965 chipset with many boards requiring nothing more than a BIOS update to recognise the new range of processors.

So my message to you, AMD, is simple. We're sick of CPU sockets changing every 18 months. For christ sake, Socket 754 had about 6 months before it was superceeded. Slot A, Socket A, Socket 754, Socket 939, AM2 in less than 6 years with the last three having no real benefit over each other..WE'VE HAD ENOUGH.

Quad core processors

[mikaelhg]

I know that my reticience to invest in AM2 equipment has had nothing to do with the current market situation or AMD's competitors, I'm simply waiting for the upcoming quad-core processors before I'm investing anything at all into hardware.

Re:Asked, answered.

[Jekler]

When I was younger, I had (misplaced) loyalties to certain brands. Now that I've matured, I realize that AMD, Intel, ATI, NVIDIA, Microsoft... none of them have actually done me any favors. In the past I was loyal to AMD, ATI, and 3DFX - it was like I had some kind of "underdog" complex. I have come to understand that these companies are the technology equivilant of Nike and Reebok. They want us to be fanatical and pick sides like they're our friends, but they're not friends, they just want cash. With that in mind, I no longer pick my processors or video cards based on brand loyalty. I study some benchmarks, examine some price comparisons, and go with the winner. There are other companies, like many GNU/Linux developers, GNU/Linux distributors, and Google, that HAVE done favors for me and that actually warrants loyalty. But for all those companies I'm paying for a product, they've got me only as long as theirs is the best.

Re:Nothing went wrong.

[Znork]

Indeed. I really dont get the point. AM2 is simply a platform change; basically just a couple of lines drawn differently on the motherboard. And a new memory standard that's just not that big a deal (and, iirc, the reason it was a big deal at the Socket A introduction was that ordinary SDRAM performance really sucked and nobody wanted to touch RDRAM with a ten foot pole even if they could afford it, creating a huge up market demand for that specific change).

The only consumers who have a reason to care at all about AM2 are people who look to standardize on a single platform for multiple upgrades, with the advantages of interchangeable components that brings. Separated platforms like 754/939 stink for that as you cant mix cheap and higher performance components, which makes AM2 a much better choice. But really, it's not that'll amount to that many.

WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people just read advertising, hype and Slashdot, and so maybe they deserve what they buy.

I run my own benchmarks. The AMD Turion 64 X2 runs my stuff more than FOUR times as fast as the current Intel Core Duo 2.16 GHz flagship processor (0.2 seconds rather than over 0.9 seconds, with fast being better; array floating point stuff).

So still, people think something is wrong with AMD? It sure ain't the processor. Something's wrong with their brains, that's what's wrong.

Re:Easy, two things...

[Kjella]

When you look at it that way, other than being more "future-compatible",

Which is majorly overrated. What am I missing in my fairly current machine?

1) No Dual-core. Motherboard just won't support it, no matter if you tweak the BIOS.
2) No PCI Express. Last generation AGP port.
3) No DDR2 support (not important unless I could upgrade my CPU to a memory hungrier CPU)
4) Too few SATA ports
5) Too few SATA power connectors
6) No PCI Express slots for expansion cards
7) No eSATA port
8) No SATA II support
9) No RAID5 support

The best future-proofing you can get is the money to buy a machine in the future. Chances are that by the time you're ready to upgrade, all the standards have changed. Unless there's a *very* compelling game that requires a better GFX card than I got coming out in 2007, I expect I'll get a new one in 2008. By then I expect it will have already skipped one generation and go straight for DDR3, DirectX 10 card etc etc.

Re:Unfortunately, AMD is now hooked up with ATI

[Anonymous Coward]

One can always hope that this will change with AMD's influence.

Intel finally did something....

[TechnoBunny]

The AMD chips that went up against most recent Pentiums won their contests hands down. But now that Intel has finally got its act together with the Core 2 Duos, its obvious that AMD's market share will suffer, for simple reason that it has real competition for the first time in 3 years.....regardless of subtleties in the relative merits of the 2 platforms.

Re:Nothing went wrong.

[Znork]

"This new memory might help also with quad cores and beyond."

True, and if AMD had waited with the platform upgrade until memory starvation did become an issue, the newer motherboards would have had a greater advantage compared to the old ones. So, complaining about the incremental nature of the change and lackluster performance increase means complaining about AMD being proactive and adressing the potential problem before it becomes serious.

I suspect some reviewers are a bit bored and are just fishing for hits, because as far as I can tell, if AM2 isnt living up to expectations in some particular fashion, it's the expectations that are off, not the actual hardware.

Re:2 things: price / speed, speed / power consumpt

[moro_666]

4x4 is a direct loan from car industry. You have a jeep that uses 4 wheels to crawl around, it has 4x4 written on it, do you assume it has 16 pulling wheels ? It doesnt say 4 times 4 cores, it says 4x4, it's an expression, not math, it's time to get over it :)

  Anyway, i'd like to know where this article author lives, he claims that he can get DDR rams cheaper than DDR2, while in most places where i'm checking out, it's pretty much the other way around. Whatever x86 i will acquire as next will have at least DDR2 in it, there is no point to go for DDR & S939 anymore, the memory price just undermines it's cheapness.

  However, what i'd would like to see (and to what amd will say "in your wildest wet dreams") , would be AMD Geode , running on DDR2 memory and consuming 15W power for the cpu and 60W for the whole machine. Fanless ofcourse :)

Re:Asked, answered.

[LordLucless]

It depends on why you have brand loyalty. Personally, I prefer nVidia stuff because all the ATI gear I've bought has had annoying driver/software problems. I have loyalty to nVidia, not because I think they are better in some abstract sense, but because based on past experience, their products have delivered more of what I'm looking for. Same for AMD; I used to buy AMD because, again, based on past experience, I could get a similar performance from a cheap AMD cheap as an Intel. All other things being equal (cost, price, performance, etc), I am more likely to go with a brand to whom I'm loyal - but they've got to have earned that loyalty by having a history of quality products. The important thing is to realize why you have loyalty to a certain brand, and be willing to re-evaluate your position when the quality of the brand you favour starts dropping.

2 years ago the article would have been flamebait

[Browzer]

... but not anymore. That is what is wrong with AMD.

The unanswered question remains, "Is AMD necessary in order to keep Intel honest?"

Re:Asked, answered.

[MrNaz]

I can see one having loyalty to GNU/Linux, after all, being community based, people can take and receive from it directly at a personal level. But Google? They actually did you a favour? As in, they did something that they otherwise would not have done for your personal benefit? Or even the benefit of a group of people that you are a part of? I would sincerely love to know what this is.

Brand loyalty can often be because a customer believes in a philosophy of a company's activities. A prime example would be me buying carpet from Interface. I would buy carpet from them even were it twice the price of the nearest competitor. I would do this because I am loyal to their ideals. I would change brand only if their fundamental philosophy changed. There is a balance, and if their products became absolutely abominable, then I would review this position, but I am making the point that brand loyalty is often not just immature, misplaced "fanboyism", and does factor rationally into a purcahse decision.

Brand loyalty could also be a statement of complaint against a competitor's actions. We're always told that in the free world we can vote with our dollar. Fat lot of worth that has, when bone heads like you can be bought for a 1% price difference. If a company is engaging in pollution, unfair trading, selling substandard or harmful products, the economic theory states that consumers will shun this by avoiding their products, hence, the market will adjust these externalities out. Bollocks I say, and you've just proved me right. Most consumers are too ignorant and apathetic, reduced to simple counters of dollars and cents, with zero insight into the wider ramifications of a particular company's actions. I wrote about this very topic, feel free to read it here [mrnaz.com].

I loved that your rant against brand loyalty was baed on the idea that it was immature, when in the next breath you cite Google as a do-gooder, which is just tomorrow's hegemonic corporation in wait for the current ones to get out of the way. If you're naieve enough to think that by not charging you to use their search engine / webmail / mapping features they are doing you a favour, then you have no business starting rants with "Now that I've matured".

Re:2 things: price / speed, speed / power consumpt

[joshetc]

I think the problem is people building their own computers that don't have enough common sense to buy a motherboard that has the same socket as the processor they want to buy.

1. Socket 775 CPU
2. Socket 939 CPU
3. Socket AM2 CPU

Now match it with a motherboard

a. Socket 939 motherboard
b. Socket 775 motherboard
c. Socket AM2 motherboard

Its common sense.

The CPU *isn't* the performance problem

[Colin Smith]

It hasn't been for ages... Yup, decades I believe.

The performance bottleneck is the disk and it has been forever. You want a really fast system today? This is what you need:

http://www.m-systems.com/site/en-US/Products/IDESC SIFFD/IDESCSIFFD/Products_/SCSI_Products/FFD_Ultra 320_SCSI.htm [m-systems.com]

320Mb/sec burst rate, 40Mb/sec sustained and key... 0.02ms access time. It's the biggest performance upgrade you can make to a computer.

 

Rubbish

[fullofangst]

What a strange and useless thing to say, that AM2 has been 'dismissed'.

Perhaps one could say this if the platform was somewhat more mature?

As it is, this is still a pretty new platform, with a lot of people still on Socket 939. S939 also has a good choice of CPU's available and I personally haven't found any major bottleneck with not having DDR2 memory.

I still have an upgrade path to a Dual Core CPU that runs several hundred megahurtz faster.

Why exactly would I want to buy a new motherboard?

There's nothing wrong with AM2, it's just that people who already have a S939 system don't yet have a good enough reason to upgrade. People buying new would probably consider it, but then Intel Core 2 is here and its fast.

So I stand by my comment that saying "What went wrong for AM2" is a redundant thing to say. The answer is, "nothing".

Re:Enough with the upgrades!

[whoop]

Slot A, Socket A, Socket 754, Socket 939, AM2 in less than 6 years with the last three having no real benefit over each other..I've certainly had enough.

Um .. so don't upgrade with every little swing in technology. Honestly, I bought a Slot-A when the Athlons first came out, like 1998 for my Linux server/desktop. That was performing just fine when I had upgraded other computers and finally put in a Socket-A motherboard in maybe 2004 or so. It still runs quite well, same case, hard drives, etc.

Recently I was putting together a MythTV box, and decided to go with a 939 motherboard as I have plenty of hand-me-down memory I can put in that vs buying new DDR2 sticks. Give it time, AM2 might eventually work out. To me, it's still new and too early to decide if it's a complete failure. But then, I don't completely upgrade every computer in my house every 2 months.

What Have You Done For Me Lately?

[dlapine]

How quickly we forget what terrible choices the Intel fanboys had before Core 2 Duo shipped. CPU's that ran too hot, consumed too much power and had worse, much worse in some cases, performance than its AMD counterparts. AMD clearly had the upper hand for performance for the first time, and took advantage of it to make some much needed cash.

AMD put out 3 different socket sets to maximize their profits- socket 754 for low end, non-64 bit computing, and single channel memory, socket 939 for mainstream users, and socket 940 for server and extreme users. All marchitechture, but all forgiven because the AMD users could buy dual cores that weren't just space heaters. Yeah, the price for the good stuff wasn't any cheaper, but the benefits were so obvious that only the Intel/Dell fanboys "stayed the course" or at least, held off from buying.

Then Intel releases a near perfect CPU, great performance, good heat, medium power, just no upgrade to memory acces. Intel fanboys rejoice and finally upgrade. Middle of the roaders feel like they have a choice. AMD is suddenly left in the position it had occupied for all those years, second place. Yeah, it has a lot of options, and is still competitive for server stuff, but it's no longer a lock for the desktop user.

Amd reverts to what worked for them previously- move all desktops to the same socket and give that socket a lot of upgrade life. Since DDR2 is finally available in quanity, and at speeds that actually don't produce a slower OS than using DDR 400, AMD decides to make the change to DDR2. Save for the recent attempt to make money, AMD users have been able to buy one socket for the majority of AMD cpus available at that time, and that provides them some marginal sales, for those users who want a chance at a later CPU upgrade.

SO, socket AM2 is released at a time where it doesn't make much sense to upgrade for AMD fanboys. Intel fanboys are buying all the core 2 duo's their pocketbooks can handle, and middle-of-the-roaders are picking and choosing, just like always, versus performnce and price. AM2 is not cheaper than Intel solutions; the real deals for AMD are the clearance of older socket 754/939 stuff. Any real wonder that AM2 sales, at the moment, have been lackluster? As I see it, AMD took the long view, and released AM2 for the upcoming K8L and newer stuff. They'll take whatever sales they can get, but they aren't overly worried about sales right now. I mean, Dell is finally selling AMD's and I'd bet that AMD is waiting on that cash cow to come in.

Simple answer

[goldcd]

People don't buy sockets - they don't decide what upgrade to get based on the socket.
They choose the best performing CPU for their budget, then maybe the same for a graphics card. Once these two are selected they just chose the memory and motherboard that allows it all to fit together in a stable fashion (or overclock if that's your thing).
Currently if you're looking to upgrade you'll choose a Core based CPU. Once you've got that CPU, it's not really a huge leap of logic to conclude you won't buy an AM2 based board.

It is all about timing and size.

[sgt scrub]

To begin with, I've been accused of being an AMD fanboy on this site. I thought I was partial to Alpha processors -because absolutely everything sucks in comparison :p cough sorry.

IMHO:
The reason AM2 "is not a big hit" is because Core 2 Duo is a better processor. It is faster, runs cooler, and priced right. The reason it is faster is because AMD made a couple mistakes.

1) They bought ATI instead of re-tooling to .65nm. If the Turion X2 was built on .65nm us "AMD fanboys" would be saying things like "Core doo doo" and "Core 2 so over".

2) AMD couldn't implement AM2 with DDR3 support so they shouldn't have introduced it at all. The switch to AM2 was needed to consolidated their platform but until DDR3 the move is pointless. The memory makers beleived strong DDR2 sales were still possible because AMD hadn't moved to it yet.

AMD might have known they would loose the competitive edge with these descisions. They can't count on the nForce product; so, ATI was a good direction. Well, it is a direction anyway. For all I know the cost of re-tooling might have been much more expensive.

I have to give Intel props for the new dual core processor. The Pentium Pro was the last good processor they made. Until now that is. Pentium Pro was a fantastic processor. The new one looks every bit as good.

FanBoy Alert!!!

Don't get me wrong. I think the single core version "Core homo" is shit. Fortunately, it isn't as bad as the "Celery"