AMD and Their Struggles - CPUs

AMD’s biggest market by far is CPU sales. AMD had been doing very well until recently. Their X2 dual core processor isn’t a bad processor; it spanked the Intel Pentium D processors. It’s just that Intel came out with a product that is far superior to any that it offered before; in particular, Intel's processor is superior to the AMD X2. As far as Best Buy or Circuit City computer sales go, I would have to say that between Intel and AMD, it’s about 50/50 as to which company's CPU is in the computer. Now move to sales from places like newegg.com or zipzoomfly.com, the numbers begin to skew toward Intel. Grandma and Grandpa couldn’t care less which overclocks better; they are going to just hit the power button and want it to work. Overclockers have a different take. Whichever chip overclocks better and offers the absolute best performance is what flies off the shelves.

Dual core CPU is so last year. These days, it’s all about quad cores. Intel had theirs out in November 2006. AMD didn’t have a quad core on the market until a year later. At the time of this writing, it is still hard to find AMD’s quad core CPU for sale. If finding them weren’t hard enough, there is a major problem with them involving data corruption and system hangs. Sounds really bad, doesn’t it? Well it’s not all that uncommon for CPUs to have this issue, but most of the time the problem can be quickly fixed without a noticeable performance change. However, the patch for this problem does throw a monkey wrench into the performance. Your options are: run the patch and lose performance, or run without the patch and risk data loss. Looks like it’s time to wait and see how this problem is fixed in the next revision of the CPU.

AMD’s CPU market has taken a hit recently and can’t seem to get a great product out the doors. We finally saw AMD’s quad core, but it is flawed and not readily available. Currently, the only speeds available are 2.2 GHz and 2.3 GHz. In contrast, Intel’s bottom of the line quad core runs at 2.4 GHz and tops out at 3.0 GHz. AMD is trying to catch up in performance, trying to get their efficiency up to Intel's level, but these slower speeds are only hurting the performance.

To try and keep sales up, even with a lesser product, AMD dropped prices. If they can’t compete in clock for clock performance, they could drop the price down to where the extra speed for the same price could create a competing market. This increased sales, but drastically decreased revenue.

AMD’s new marketing scheme is green. The CPUs they are making now are more energy efficient. This will save money in the long run from an energy standpoint. Many businesses are starting to try to cut budgets and saving on electricity is a place to start. On the flip side, AMD chips don’t have as much computing power, so you will need more time and CPUs to make up for it.

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