The announcements made at the recent "worldcast" held by AMD's new CEO Rory Read have been kept a good secret with very little information trickling out to the public.
What we did hear is that the changes that were announced by Read would be explained to analysts and the press at the 2011 analyst day, which will be held in February of 2012. The only reliable information we received was that Read is cracking down on AMD's ability to execute much more efficiently and cure its manufacturing pains that put a lid on its recent growth opportunities.
A new report published by ExtremeTech could fit this scenario as the company claims that AMD has scrapped its 28 nm manufacturing plans at GlobalFoundries and is now intending to start with TSMC "from scratch". It has been no secret that AMD is slowly separating its ties from GlobalFoundries and that it has been extremely unhappy about the capabilities of its former manufacturing unit to reliably and effectively ramp the production of semiconductors.
There is no definite information in the ExtremeTech article and we could not receive any confirmation from AMD on this topic. If it is true, then AMD is making a major bet here. If TSMC has to integrate the 28 nm process and scale it to volume, AMD may be at least one year away from introducing such processors, while Intel will be ramping its 22 nm parts into volume in Q1 2012.
The good news may be that Rory Read's efforts to travel around the world and calm customers could be showing some results. According to Fudzilla, Read is leaving a good impression and is injecting confidence that he can bring AMD's CPU business back on track.
AMD is in some strife, I really REALLY hope they make a comeback. There needs to be competition in the market in the high-end segment.
I'm planning on getting a FX8120/FX8150 for a small home VM server and just to generally play around with to find it's strong and weak spots. Oh and to help out team Green.
AMD may be stuck playing catch-up as far as CPU performance is concerned, but Intel will likely be stuck playing catch-up to AMD's APUs. I'd still take a Llano laptop/ultrabook over any Intel solution any day. People don't seem to get that CPU performance is at a "good enough" level nowadays and most consumers won't notice much, if any, difference between going with an expensive Intel Core-whatever or a cheaper AMD solution unless they are gamers that must play on the highest quality settings or actually use their computers for computationally intensive tasks fairly often. The vast majority of the market does not fit into those categories.
Just like I enjoy Android but don't want to see Apple fail, I don't want to see AMD fail. I want them to succeed and force innovation. AMD brings something different and that's what we need in today's world.
Just like I enjoy Android but don't want to see Apple fail, I don't want to see AMD fail. I want them to succeed and force innovation. AMD brings something different and that's what we need in today's world.
AMD may be stuck playing catch-up as far as CPU performance is concerned, but Intel will likely be stuck playing catch-up to AMD's APUs. I'd still take a Llano laptop/ultrabook over any Intel solution any day. People don't seem to get that CPU performance is at a "good enough" level nowadays and most consumers won't notice much, if any, difference between going with an expensive Intel Core-whatever or a cheaper AMD solution unless they are gamers that must play on the highest quality settings or actually use their computers for computationally intensive tasks fairly often. The vast majority of the market does not fit into those categories.
AMD is in some strife, I really REALLY hope they make a comeback. There needs to be competition in the market in the high-end segment.
I'm planning on getting a FX8120/FX8150 for a small home VM server and just to generally play around with to find it's strong and weak spots. Oh and to help out team Green.