Intel Strategy Shuts Out PC Enthusiasts

BeerTent

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May 8, 2011
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Evil Smurf said:
BeerTent said:
Evil Smurf said:
I will be buying a Mac, but I can see AMD sales improving.
The irony in the first bit of this statement is too good to not point out, assuming your getting a mac to avoid Intel.

If this is all true, and a lot of people are saying the source is shit, then this could very well be our future. AMD is inevitably going under. They're processors were just plain awesome while it lasted, but I feel the acquisition of ATi brought both sets of hardware down a few pegs. (Ask me about my last Radeon... We're talkin' a lot of pegs here.) The average user just won't know better, and there will be little demand for the units you have to insert yourself.

We need more information. Reliable information. Why do this? What benefit does it have to the customer? The last thing I want to see is a motherboard that is it's own unit, only sporting SATA on the board itself. I can understand placing low end sound and graphics cards on the Mainboard, but a Proc, and inevitably RAM in the future? No. Even for laptops, this still feels like a disaster. There's a reason why you can swap components out of a car, just like there's a reason why you can swap components out of a PC.
No, I just like the GUI and UNIX based security of OSX too much not to get a Mac Wow, that's a lot of acronyms. Although I am a little annoyed at the fact that technology is super focused on getting slimmer. This means less expandability due to the soldering of parts to the case/motherboard and the lack of disk drives in some modern computers.
Aah, this, I understand. I thought you were aiming at avoiding Intel, which is what Macs are primary built from. If you prefer the GUI, then go for it. (Personally, I cannot stand the lack of control OSX forces on the user. No devmgr? MMC snap-ins gone? No GP? No way to edit Plist/Registry out of the box? Just give me a cardboard box instead.) Though, on the security topic, might as well be a moot point if your a home user with nothing to hide. I'v been without an AV/Using Router as FW for years, and my PC's always been on top. I actually do have something to hide.

While I like how thin things have become, (Gotta admit, some of those macs are pretty Sleek) The inability, again, to swap out hardware is what kills any and all appeal for me. Everything has to be built a certain way. No wiggle room. Can't stand it. I don't even like my laptop because of this.
 

QUINTIX

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May 16, 2008
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Somewhat off topic: the first game with the audience reach AND production/marketing budget of a summer blockbuster will be for sub 20 watt SOC powered general-purpose computers, be they tablets or laptops or what have you. No other category of device (except maybe midrange laptops) have the kind of install base low power laptops/tablets have.
 

gyroscopeboy

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Nov 27, 2010
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gunny1993 said:
Roelof Wesselius said:
Hey AMD This is your chance and you had better fucking take it.

EDIT: Wait isn't amd in financial troubles?
Their stocks were recently at the lowest they've been for almost 2 decades, they have a tiny portion of the CPU market. Although intel haven't been doing too well (current climate and all that shit) AMD are still doing worse. Whether they are on the precipice of disaster though, remains to be seen.
Sounds like a great time to scope out buying some AMD stock :D
 

Strazdas

Robots will replace your job
May 28, 2011
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Roelof Wesselius said:
Hey AMD This is your chance and you had better fucking take it.

EDIT: Wait isn't amd in financial troubles?
is AMD ever not in financial troubles? its like status quo for them.

OT: that sucks, but then, i really never changed the CPU without motherboard anyway. mostly because by the time i get new CPU, the old motherboard is too weak to handle it anyway so i got to buy both. This will jut unite them. Now say if they were to melt GPUs into motherboards, that would be a problem.

Well I've never really had the money for Intel CPUs and thus have went with AMD. Looks like this won't be changing. Also what is it with all the companies locking down their products lately?
control. in age when internet allows users to create better content than actual professionals, they dont want to loose thier jobs over to some "internet kids". You know, there are internet tutorials how to construct your PC, and that doesnt involve buying CPU.

Well, another reason to keep using AMD I suppose.
there were reasons before? you like graphic bugs? or are you that cheap?
 

AlwaysPractical

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I never thought that the future of PCs and PC gaming may actually be with AMD and Ubuntu. Intel, Windows... what happened? Why go console and tablet?
 

ratix2

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Its unlikely to happen for a number of reasons. First of all is that Broadwell, Haswell and many of Intels other architectures show a reaction to the changing market, i.e. a massive spike in the demand for low power, ultra mobile chipsets for mobile devices such as phones, tablets and even household appliances such as all-in-one control centers. This field is dominated by ARM holdings at the moment but Intel is and has been trying to get an upper hand in this market. What they are attempting to do is create a single processor that works across all fields, mobile (laptop}, ultra mobile, desktop and server. However since each market has different requirements and picks processors for a variety of reasons its more likely that in the future Intel will move to not only having different processing "family's" (for lack of a better word) but even different iterations of its x86 instruction set for different areas. Admittedly though they wouldnt want this, but its inevitable since a single all encompassing processor for each market makes no sense and would lose Intel a lot of market share to a variety of competitors.

The biggest thing keeping me from thinking that this will be the case is the server space. Server customers of course take power and cooling into consideration when making a decision, but by far the biggest requirements are processing capabilities and expansion, neither of which would be handled well by an integrated solution. If their customers arent able to buy new motherboards and drop in more RAM and processors as needed then Intel would likely lose major business to competitors that would be more than happy to take their server and super computer customers away, competitors like IBM, Nvidia and AMD just to name a few. And seeing as the market for servers is going to grow exponentially withing the next few years (thanks in part by the push to cloud computing) Intel would lose a lot of money by ignoring this space.

I mention the server space for this reason, modern desktop processors are essentially re-binned server processors, case in point Sandy Bridge-E. It would be easy for Intel to charge a premium for a re-binned server cpu and sell them as desktop processors.

Of course the desktop market is shrinking, but its not going to go away for a long time, and this brings me to a point of another major part of their revenue, OEMs like dell, HP, lenovo, sony, etc. who make computers and sell them to the public. As this article points out AMDs market share is only about 20%, but if intel were to go to an integrated solution many of these companies would likely jump ship not only to AMD but likely Nvidia as well. Nvidia has long been trying to replace traditional processors with its GPU parts and something like this would allow them to begin making GPUs that can be dropped into a motherboard like processors.

Of course what makes this all possible is Microsoft finally moving away from supporting x86 exclusively and and supporting other instruction sets with Windows 8 and this is likely to continue. Nvidia has enough money and influence they could likely get Microsoft to consider adding CUDA support to Windows, and even if not Nvidia does have a license to use ARMs instruction set (or if they dont unlike x86 ARM does license it out to other companies). They could easily create one that runs on ARM.

What we have here, in my opinion, is intel trying to serve many markets with one chip, bit its just not going to work in the end. Intel finally has a lot of competition on the horizon (not just AMD anymore) and a move like this would hurt them in more places then it would help them.
 

Adam Jensen_v1legacy

I never asked for this
Sep 8, 2011
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I seriously doubt that Intel would shoot themselves in the foot with a .50cal hollow point exploding round filled with acid like that.
 

Twilight_guy

Sight, Sound, and Mind
Nov 24, 2008
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Huh, that sure would help AMD out. Course, it'd only effect people who actually are going to change there CPU, which I assume is not the majority of all PC owners and thus it's hard to say what's gonna happen.
 

Kinitawowi

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Nov 21, 2012
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Dexter111 said:
Kinitawowi said:
Boris Goodenough said:
-- This is because Intel needs to be more competitive in the tablet market
This is it, people. As much as I hate the things, tablets (and by extension smartphones) are where the next few years are heading, and if you're not in that market then you're not in the market. Microsoft figured that out (hence Windows 8) and Intel are catching on - show me a Samsung tablet where you can swap out the processor. No, on-board is the norm now, to be closely followed by off-chip - the raw clock speed of the die will stop being the thing when they realise that they can lower the heat overhead and thus raise the power output by pulling the GPU out.

Tower machines? Enthusiasts still swear by them, but you can't run a company aiming only for the enthusiasts. Sad but true. And towers are done, as far as the mainstream is concerned.
What people like you don't understand
Whoa, dude. As a person like me, I understand it fine. No need to be so condescending.
is that you can't do any sort of programming/work/typing/designing/encoding/rendering CG/any sort of research/scientific work and basically everything that big companies require on a "tablet", the entirety of other markets like PC Gaming, CAD, SAP, CGI etc. are also based on the PC architecture and it will not go away as much as some people and companies seem to desire it.

Tablets and similar devices are fine for reading something, browsing the web a bit and maybe reading E-Mails... I've got like 2-3 of them around the house in their various forms (most of them because I didn't have to pay), but anything that gets more serious than that requires and will continue to require a PC till there is something equivalent or better.

Just like "smart phones" you can keep in your pocket that do a lot of things tablet devices do didn't "kill the tablet market" or the other way around because they are a different form factor and do different things, they won't be going anywhere.
I work in PC retail and I call it as I see it. Any of the significant rendering, scientific work and a couple of other applications you mentioned are done on an entirely different server-based architecture rather than an old-school tower PC. The vast majority of what we sell is laptops - where CPUs are soldered in as a matter of course - followed by all-in-ones (which are frequently based on laptop architectures), then iPads and Nexus 7s and such. Tower desktops are low, low, low on the list. We get far more people coming and asking about the Nexus 10 than we do about the i7-3770K and liquid cooling setups.

I'm very aware of the limitations of tablets - like I said, I personally hate the things and they're designed to fill a hole between the smartphone and the laptop that simply isn't there in my life. (Partly because there's no space for the laptop either, unless I finally manage to pin down a cheap second hand top end Vaio P.) But you can't target a niche market. Most companies make their money by aiming for the mainstream (or the lowest common denominator, call it what you will), and until it shakes down, right now that means laptops and tablets. Reading something, browsing the web a bit and maybe reading e-mails is all that a hell of a lot of people ever do with their computers.

Even Nintendo realised a while back that their competition in the handheld market wasn't coming from the PSP and the Vita. It's coming from the iPhone. Tablets and smartphones are all that matters right now. I hate them, they're limited, they're completely wrong for a lot of specialist applications (and some not-very-specialist - the reason laptops still thrive is mainly the fact that they've got a proper keyboard and access to a familiar version of Microsoft Office). But they're selling by the millions. Our store manager recently struck a business deal to supply 8,000 tablets to one company. That's not even lightweight personal stuff, that's an actual business that's aiming that way now. Manufacturers simply cannot afford to ignore that market.
And this article is sensationalist hogwash.

Oh and regarding Microsoft:
http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-mojo-steve-ballmer
http://semiaccurate.com/2012/11/14/microsoft-has-failed/

They do the same shit they've often done before from a "marketing" standpoint and some planned "market strategies" by their higher ups instead of what makes sense. Without really understanding the market, while throwing lots of money at it and hope that it sticks.
Nobody ever said Windows 8 was a good idea. But there was a point a couple of years ago when some variant of Windows was installed on some 85% of the computer systems on the planet. That number is falling fast, and it's not OSX that's eating it, it's Android - for much the same reason that ARM dominates the global processor market right now, not Intel. Windows 8 is a blatant marketing grab, a reactionary play to get into a market where they have practically zero presence. It's all wrong for anything other than a tablet or an all-in-one touchscreen. But those are where the wind is blowing right now. As Jarvis Cocker once sang, "It stinks, it sucks, it's anthropologically unjust. But the takings are up by a third; c***s are still running the world."
 

madster11

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Aug 17, 2010
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Chances of intel doing this: <10%.

They already have a non-socket solution, so changing the main line of CPUs to this makes very little sense.
Not that it'll matter if they do - people will just stick with the old generation of CPUs until Intel quickly reverse their position, much like MS will do with Win8 once they realize 90% of people call bullshit on it.
 

N3squ1ck

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Mar 7, 2012
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The Sandy Bridge stuff made me switch from AMD to Intel and that will make me switch back again, meh. Nothing of value is lost if they die (apart from their excellent driver support for Linux / the reason I went with Intel for my laptop)
 

Aaron Sylvester

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Jul 1, 2012
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...architecture present in Intel's Core series of CPUs, none of which is particularly relevant to anyone but the most die-hard PC nerds.
Am I the only one who thought "...the fuck?" when I read this?
Pretty much every kid and their mother is running an Intel Core chip or has used one at some point. The Core2Duo, Core2Quad, Core i5, Core i7 (both in SB and IB flavors), etc etc...all those series fall under that naming scheme.
 

Andrew_C

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Mar 1, 2011
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Aaron Sylvester said:
...architecture present in Intel's Core series of CPUs, none of which is particularly relevant to anyone but the most die-hard PC nerds.
Am I the only one who thought "...the fuck?" when I read this?
Pretty much every kid and their mother is running an Intel Core chip or has used one at some point. The Core2Duo, Core2Quad, Core i5, Core i7 (both in SB and IB flavors), etc etc...all those series fall under that naming scheme.
That's true, but your average Joe doesn't know or care about the differences between a Core 2 Duo and all 3 flavours of a Core i7. Haven't you ever tried to explain something about computers to a non-technical person and watched their eyes glaze over? If your are lucky they will know what version of Windows their computer runs. If you are really lucky they will know if it has an Intel or AMD CPU and NVidia or AMD graphics.
 

kburns10

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Sep 10, 2012
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I'll be sure once I make the jump to PC gaming I support AMD. I don't understand why Intel feels the need to do this.
 

TheEndlessGrey

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Sep 28, 2009
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AMD's 20% will grow among those who care about controlling every part of their system, if Intel puts the squeeze on as described above. What percentage of the total market those people comprise is another question. I have to suspect it's small enough that Intel is willing to let them go in order to get a larger return on the business and casual consumer markets. If the tablet invasion has shown us anything, it's that people will buy whatever hardware happens to be inside a device, as long as it has a slick feature list and good marketing.
 

zumbledum

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Eri said:
I'm confused. Why does this end custom built PC's? Sure, you might not be able to upgrade the cpu, but beside that, there is effectively no difference? Or am I missing something?
People are assuming either that Intel will leverage their market share to partake of either serious wallet rape or to limit the choices we have now by supplying fewer versions hence saving itself a ton on development/manufacture.

Personally i think it will probably pan out a bit different. its a bit too early for the MS move i suspect this first round of integrated core bundles ie the welded chip to mobo + integrated stuff will actually be extremely good and not to highly priced. getting both the high and mid ends to flock adoringly to them. this will kill the ailing AMD off and do about the same to the motherboard makers. and it will be the generation after that actually drops the belt buckle.


But im also not overly worried, i do not see this happening outside of the states for legal reasons. i just dont see the EU allowing it on legal terms or Intel will at least be forced to still supply its chips to other parties as it does now as well as running thier own "intergrated bundles"