TVS AMD based NAS and thoughts?

[sfx2000]

I like to support the underdog like AMD if their stuff is good, which it is - so we can avoid this:
Without competition there is no excellence (nor low prices).

AMD is the only credible vendor outside of Intel that can build and qualify X86 chipsets - and leveraging into a huge amound of SW built on the x86 architecture...

We can thank AMD for X86_64 - and pushing Intel forward with SSE, AVX, etc... heck, Intel's GPU's are largely in response to AMD's path down Fusion/HSA on their Fusion line...

Been a lot of rumours lately about AMD getting bought and broken up, which, I think would be bad for the industry...

Microsoft is the anti-example in the tech sector. If they'd cut the employee head count to 200, they products would improve.

Also, perhaps some props to MSFT for their $100M investment in Apple in their darkest days just after the Next buyout...

 

[stevech]

Well, another speculation: Had AMD gone kaput, Intel's monopoly may have pushed PC prices so high that _____ fill in the blank. ARM comes to mind.

 

[kamina]

Been a lot of rumours lately about AMD getting bought and broken up, which, I think would be bad for the industry...

Not necessarily if AMD runs out of funding.

 

[stevech]

With the broad trend to portables (ARM based), Intel's x86 CPU revenue must be down sharply.
But, perhaps Intel's revenue is not dominated by x86 sales.

I sold my Intel stock about a year ago.

 

[sfx2000]

It's an interesting time in the business...

Both Intel and Microsoft are having to pivot and they are...

AMD, for better or worse, is in a bit of a financial pickle... stop and consider, not only are they the only credible x86 vendor outside of Intel, but they are also the only credible big GPU vendor outside of nVidia...

CPU's - Both Sony and Microsoft have serious skin here with the Console APU's
GPU's - Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Apple - serious stakes there as well, either for discretes, IP blocks, or again, APU's..

My thoughts on AMD - they're underwater as a business, and well below what their true value is - consider nVidia, which does have ARM's (the Tegra line), but their real business is discrete GPU's, and that is a $7B business...

AMD's market cap, $1.6B..

Spin out the old ATI business to shareholders, maintaining an equity stake, and then take the AMD CPU business private - The GPU business, it can take care of itself, and by having a separate bottom line and book of business (ATI pays AMD for the CPU IP blocks in the Sony/MSFT APU's for example), this business could be turned around perhaps..

It would be a bad thing for AMD to go out of business - Both Intel and nVidia would have less reasons to innovate...

 

[kamina]

One problem for AMD is that even though Intel has been slow in their releases lately, they are still releasing pretty good products. Back in the day P4's left quite an opening in the market for AMD to gain market share, unfortunately (whatever the reason) they could not get enough to level the field and where still left as an underdog. Achieving the same thing now would require more then a new instruction set or power efficient cpu's...

 

[sfx2000]

AMD had a couple of big missteps - the K10 with the TLB issue which impacted performance in the first two steppings, but they recovered from that, and then Intel had a huge step in peformance with the Core2 lineup after Prescott melted (quite literally sometimes).

After that, AMD was always perhaps a half-step behind thru Barcelona/Istanbul - and Intel was doing their whole revised Tick-Tock development schedule - and then there was Nehalem, which in many ways took the design concepts of K8/K10 by moving the Northbridge into the CPU with onboard mem controller...

But, like x86_64, AMD did it first...

AMD also was the one that did a major architecture change with Bulldozer - cpu modules (two CPU's, shared cache with a share FPU) - unfortunately, Windows scheduler with Threads/Processes didn't handle that very well at first (MSFT did release a fix), which hurts reviews and public perception - but they were very much ahead of the game, because it's the same game that Intel is playing now with their low power cores (Silvermont).

And Intel was going thru Westmere, and then with the Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Haswell cadence, going from 45 to 32 to 22 nm nodes - their process team kicked pretty hard... only recently on the 14nm node they've struggled a little bit with Broadwell, but seems like they're getting that one sorted...

AMD followed up with Trinity, the first credible APU (CPU/GPU with tight integration) and Brazos/Zacate...

It's been fun to watch - AMD has some great ideas, but Intel is so tightly integrated between the core architecture teams and their process/fab teams - Intel hands down has one of the best fab/process teams in the world...

AMD has to do outside to GloFo, TSMC, or others, so again, they're a half step behind...

With the PS4/XBone, AMD was at the right place, at the right time... Jaguar was a very good improvement on Bobcat, and GCN was the right evolution of GPU scalability and both were at the sweet spot of 28nm (and TSMC was sorted at the Fab level). These are great APU's, and it's helped out AMD by being a relative commercial success...

I guess what I'm getting at it that AMD leads on ideas, but Intel leads on Execution...

AMD is fighting a battle on two fronts - Intel on the CPU side, and nVidia on the GPU side, and they're doing a credible job at it.

Intel is having to worry about ARM, but with Silvermont, and now Airmont on the LPIA side, they're getting close.. but if they didn't have AMD pushing them on the x86 front, we wouldn't see the big improvements that we saw with Ivy Bridge and Haswell...

Having AMD around, very important for the industry...

 

[stevech]

Let's not forgive Intel for their way-back x86 silicon that screwed up floating point answers for certain operands!

What would Intel's chip price be without AMD's competition.
And, famously, "without competition there is no excellence". Microsoft is just beginning to grasp that.

 

[sfx2000]

Let's not forgive Intel for their way-back x86 silicon that screwed up floating point answers for certain operands!

What would Intel's chip price be without AMD's competition.
And, famously, "without competition there is no excellence". Microsoft is just beginning to grasp that.

Ah, the Pentium FDIV bug... there's a more recent example, on Intel's Haswell cores - TSX-NI - which can be a big deal for some applications - and for certain applications (think HPC on big clusters), folks investing millions of dollars on Haswell based XEON's (which ain't cheap) only to find that TSX was bugged...

These things do happen...

Microsoft, to their credit, is pivoting hard - they had it pretty easy for a long time, but as the market moved to mobile, and away from their Wintel desktop/laptop paradigm, they found themselves behind the game - enough so that they tried to buy in via Nokia's handset division, only to be the minor player in the Android/IOS dominated space... it was bad enough that even Ballmer's most staunch supporter, Bill G, voted him off the island...

And for that, they're getting better - I've tinked about with Office on my iPad, and it's not bad - it's like MSFT getting back to basics, and when they focus, they do a good job...

Surface devices aren't so bad, and the XBone is pretty good actually... They still bone it once in a while, e.g Windows RT for ARM on the Surface RT, but they recovered well from it - Surface 3 is cheap, usable, not quite an iPad experience, but it's not that bad...

 

[htismaqe]

Surface 3 is cheap

It is? They're like $900 and don't include the keyboard, you have to buy it separately.

 

[htismaqe]

And while the Xbox One is good hardware, Microsoft's ecosystem is not at all user-friendly. In fact, it's pretty much structured so that they can leech money off of you little by little and you can't leave without losing a limb...

 

[stevech]

I can't forgive Microsoft for quietly taking all these computers into .Net with a byte-code interpreter for C#. Why? To use unskilled "coders" at low pay, rather than software engineers.

No wonder Windows eats CPUs faster than they can be invented.
You are reminded of the blinding speed of today's CPUs sans abstraction layers, when you run a native C, non-GUI program and think about how fast that ran.

 

[sfx2000]

It is? They're like $900 and don't include the keyboard, you have to buy it separately.

You're thinking Surface 3 Pro - they're around 900... the little one is 499..

 

[sfx2000]

And while the Xbox One is good hardware, Microsoft's ecosystem is not at all user-friendly. In fact, it's pretty much structured so that they can leech money off of you little by little and you can't leave without losing a limb...

That's pretty much the same for any ecosystem - it's about providing services that users want, and monetizing what they can...

The XBone is an interesting play - while mainly sold as a game console, it's also a digital media hub, and a conduit for MSFT to monetize that screen for them and third parties... I always that it showed some foresight on the HDMI passthru, as that is a way to capture and overlay other content on the HDMI links from Cable box to other HDMI boxes...

 

[sfx2000]

I can't forgive Microsoft for quietly taking all these computers into .Net with a byte-code interpreter for C#. Why? To use unskilled "coders" at low pay, rather than software engineers.

No wonder Windows eats CPUs faster than they can be invented.
You are reminded of the blinding speed of today's CPUs sans abstraction layers, when you run a native C, non-GUI program and think about how fast that ran.

I'm with you on on the whole DotNET thing... and just updating the frameworks is a major pain (they're huge and seems like thousands of little files). But like any language, you're going to see the same issue - design and engineering still matter... and being ByteCode, how is this any different than Java or Android's Dalvik?

Not saying that Microsoft is perfect, not by a long shot - witness some of the bone-headed UI's they have tossed at us - Office's Ribbon (which frustrates me to no end, even years later, that's why I run Mac Office, as the ribbon is there, but so are all the menus), or Win8's Metro/Modern UI, e.g. Buttonworld...

I like their new direction - Windows is still a key component, but it's now a means, not the end - Look at Azure - nothing to stop one from running Linux or BSD in that cloud, and the iOS versions of Office Apps are world class - and free... after a long time, they're starting to focus on what they kind of lost sight on - writing good software.

 

[htismaqe]

Sony's Playstation ecosystem is COMPLETELY different. Yes, they monetize things when they have the opportunity. However, they don't force the customer into their online ecosystem (e.g. requiring both players in a LOCAL couch coop game to have Xbox Live Gold accounts, which cost money) nor do they make the customer pay for something that has already been purchased (e.g. Xbox Live Gold being required to use Netflix or Hulu). In addition, trying to leave the ecosystem is next to impossible. It took me over 2 years to finally be sure my Windows Live ID was gone whereas removing a user on PSN is as simple as clicking a button and it's gone.

As for the One, the idea was interesting. They actually intended it to be a media hub FIRST and it showed early. That's why the gaming platform is already so far behind the PS4, not only in sales but also in overall performance. When you add in the fact that the media hub feature has never fully materialized and the Kinect has been all but a complete failure, I think the luster is completely off the Xbox One. That's why they're shuffling execs in and out faster than McDonald's.

 

[htismaqe]

You're thinking Surface 3 Pro - they're around 900... the little one is 499..

I can get an Asus T200 12" that runs full-blown Windows and includes the detachable keyboard for $349 at Staples right now I believe.

 

[sfx2000]

I can get an Asus T200 12" that runs full-blown Windows and includes the detachable keyboard for $349 at Staples right now I believe.

Surface 3 is x86 with full blown windows 8.1 - not WinRT...

Agree though - Surface's come with a premium price, and I've always though they should include the keyboard cover...remains to be seen if this things are a success or not - last flight I was on, walking forward from the back of the plane to my seat mid-flight, there's a lot of iPads out there

 

[sfx2000]

I watch the XBone mostly from a perspective of what is MSFT going to do with it - I don't own one...

I think where it could get interesting with the XBone is Win10 - and how they integrate it into their "One Windows" strategy - if they do it right, it could be a big plus...

Sony's PS4 - this is what I have, and it's a great console.. but PSN is a value add, and again, costs money after the fact. PSN is not absolutely required, if I recall, but without it, options are pretty limited as we all have discovered when PSN goes down from time to time..

The other bone I have to pick with Sony is that PS4 basically runs on BSD, with a lot of middle/upper layer special sauce by Sony - and they haven't contributed much back to the FOSS community - which is really hurting for a truly high performance graphics sub-system... they use Clang/LLVM, but again, don't contribute anything back to the project other than providing a CPU definition for LLVM (and only just recently).

 

[htismaqe]

Having to buy the keyboard separately just really burns me.

I've never dealt with another company that nickles and dimes you as much as Microsoft. I'm surprised they're not whole hog on developing games for iOS/Android. They'd fit right in with all the "pay to play" crap out there.

And yes I'm biased. There are few companies in this industry that I truly despise outside of Cisco and Microsoft is one of them.