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Loading ...Episode 8 discussion: ways to save AMD?
Alex Watson
In the most recent episode of our podcast, we ended by discussing AMD’s recent troubles - Intel is piling on the pressure with its cheap and fast Core 2s, while on the graphics front, Nvidia’s 8-series have the upper hand against the Radeon HD 2000 series. As fans of the red guys, we racked our brains to think of a cunning plan: CPC editor Gareth maintained they simply need some time to get their quad core chips out and to tune the HD 2000 architecture, while Clive thinks its time for some radical thinking and AMD should make its own games console. During the discussion we asked for your suggestions and we’ve had quite a few interesting emails…
The first was from the splendidly named “Courntey Ponce”, but that turned out to be a spam, which was a shame. Tom Harling suggested that AMD should hook up with CPC cooling favourites Arctic Cooling:
“They should just stick Arctic Cooling HSFs on their CPUs and OC them by about 30%, but still sell the CPUs at the same price. I’m sure that that would narrow the gap between them and Intel. Also, the fans would be very quiet.”
Simple, and effective - at 3GHz and £150, the Athlon 64 X2 6000+ is actually competetive with a similarly priced Intel chip. Overclocking was also suggested by Andrew Levick as a methofd for making the Radeon HD 2900XT more competetive: “Just out of curiosity, how hard would it be to ramp up the shader speed on the 2900XT to the same speeds as an 8800ultra? If they did it (and took the RAM up to 1GB) it should become a really good top end card with little effort on their part. They could have it out of the door in no time at all.”
As for CPUs, he echoes a point Clive made on the podcast: AMD’s chopping and changing sockets has hurt them:
“In terms of CPU’s they have kind of shot themselves in the foot by changing the socket every year (usually when they change RAM type). What they need to do is release one socket and say “well use thing for the next five years”. They could easily add extra pins they don’t need for early CPU’s and then use them at a later date. Providing motherboard manufacturers put future memoery slots (eg DDR3) on the board even before the RAM is available, this means people could just up grade their AMD CPU without changing their entire system. Future boards should be able to use DDR3 and/or DDR2 for AMD CPU’s, something that I think might happen for Intel CPU’s with the P35 chipset controlling the RAM.”
It seems a bit harsh to crticise AMD on this point to me - Intel is after all, notorious for releasing new chipsets with each generation of CPUs, although it’s changed its tune somewhat with the P35.
hi i listened to the podcast and it got me thinking. You guys said if we had any ideas about amd/ati we sould email you so here goes nothing, any way i my self wasnt to sure about this whole native quad core thing it would be expensive and would it really give better power consumption and performance?
Jan Urbanski thought we’d missed something really obvious: “I can’t believe you guys couldn’t figure it out! One word will save amd and that word is ’staple.’ If AMD can reduce manufacturing size to 45nm they could potentially just staple 2 quad core chips to one die and have an octo core cpu…”
He’s an optimist for AMD’s chances, too: “AMD will be back on top by next year IF they have a succesful launch of the Phenoms this year. I think the idea about a console is pretty good but like you said Microsoft has enough money to just buy you out if it doesnt want you in its area. A better idea would be to side with Microsoft and help them design the cpu/gpu/chipsets for the next Xbox console. They could make 3-4 times as much as they did on just making the gpu for the 360.”
If you’ve got any suggestions of your own for getting AMD back on top, let us know - add a comment to this blog post, or drop an e-mail to podcast AT custompc DOT co DOT uk.
I don’t suppose CustomPC could e-mail these comments to AMD - I’m sure they need all of the help that they can get.
I hope AMD learned its lesson about this whole native core design philosophy… I think for future designs, they need to take advantage of what they have… So if they gotta sandwish 2 quads into its nect Octo Core then do it if it means trying to get a performance edge over intel… Than when they have a native octo core they can bring that into the market… At the end of the day, people are looking for the best performance they can, not if its a native design or none of that crap… Intel is $$$ by using that strategy!!!
i couldnt give a sh;t about AMD
it cost u tons of £ $ before iNTEL
gave u core 2 duO for 1 of AMDs
cpu s so sod em