Next PC's- revamp to save the industry?

[Pemalite]

Scisca said:

Pemalite said:

nVidia won't go anywhere, having an AMD monopoly is a bad thing.
nVidia also has some pretty hardcore fans who will not even contemplate using anything else, nVidia also has more money than AMD in their war chest with more profit.

Zen won't dethrone Intel, it's meant to catch up not surpass, even when the Athlon was pounding Intel in almost every aspect, performance, power and price... Intel still outsold AMD, why? Because Intel actually can advertise, it also has tons of deals with OEM's. It has consumer sentiment.

But that is fine if Zen doesn't take the performance lead, AMD doesn't need it. But they do need "Good enough" performance at the right price.
Today... In 2016 if anyone buys an FX CPU... They are insane in my opinion, they are woefully inadequate, if AMD can offer 90% of the performance, heck even 80% and at the right price, then they are on a winner, right now though their fastest can't even beat Intels mid-range.
That should also entice some OEM's, which leads to more AMD design wins.

Polaris is a mainstream product, not Fury's successor, it is not a high-end or enthusiast graphics card. - That won't happen until Vega drops.

I won't be buying Polaris. I'll be buying Vega. Four of them, Polaris isn't going to be fast enough.
I'll likely stick with intel for the CPU as Zen is just a catchup and I tend to go for high-end gear.

Now where things *do* get interesting is AMD's plan to drop a 200-300w APU, an APU that is going to be faster than the consoles, with HBM memory, this will be great for a Mini-ITX gaming build or HPC.

Don't get me wrong, I want AMD to succeed, but I also don't want them to win and take majority share, Monopolies are bad in the tech space, stuff stagnates, Intel is a prime example of that fact.

I know Zen will be weaker than Skylake, let alone Kaby Lake, let alone the next Lake And AMD won't overtake Intel in sales, but as you said, AMD is going to change the game somewhat with Zen based APUs, which can be a very interesting option for people not building a top-of-the-line PC. Current APUs are almost there in my opinion, but with Zen they will finally make the jump to being power efficient (not overheating!) and powerful enough, to be able to take a $50 MoBo, $150 APU, 8 GB of RAM and have a great PC for office stuff/web browsing and even some light gaming. I can see every budget PC being built aroung AMD CPU/APU, especially if Intel keeps an i3 with merely 2 cores as competition. High end is still going to belong to Intel and that's where the money's at.

An APU competing with consoles could also be a great solution for gamers. Sky is the limit and in this field they have no competition.

I know nVidia isn't going anywhere, just as Intel they have far superior image and brand power, but they will have to work hard to keep it and it will be harder for Greens than Intel. After all, AMD is currently on par with nVidia when it comes to performance, unlike with Intel. I think that once Polaris hits the market, GPU marketshares of 80-20 won't be and option anymore AMD is better with VR, multiscreens, has free Freesync and thus cheaper monitors. This snowball is starting to grow, but let's face it, 50% marketshare in GPUs will be a huge success for AMD and will take time to achieve.

I think I'm going to go with a 480 or 480X and be perfectly happy. All I want is 75 fps in 2560x1080p @ultra. I'm going to have to see the benchmarks and see which card gives that level of performance and buy it. Don't need to spend more on a PC, there's so many other things to do with money

A high end 300w APU isn't isn't going to be cheap, it's going to be targeting high-end gaming PC's, not budget machines which have Core i3 processors, AMD will charge a premium for it, because they can.
And Current APU's are horrible, anyone who buys one in 2016 is insane.

As for Multi-screens, AMD had the edge since the Radeon 5870 Eyefinity edition, it's why I chose AMD over nVidia that round, that got improved over the other generations... With that said, nVidia's surround vision isn't entirely lacking and is more than sufficient. - VR is yet to be determined, yet to see how AMD is going to have the edge, Freesync is only important to those who own/will own a Freesync monitor, right now it's in a minority of sales and will continue to be as most panels typically are cheap low-end ones where Freesync (And G-sync) are non-existent.

Also. "APU" is an AMD marketing term, it consists of a CPU and GPU being on the same die, thus Intel has had "APU's" for years, they just don't use the term, probably because it's an AMD one, Intel has also been investing heavily in it's IGP's, even throwing L4/eDRAM at the problem.

Also. AMD CPU's cannot overheat anymore, that hasn't been an issue since AMD's Palomino back in 2000, once it reaches a thermal threashold, the CPU scales back.

And remember that AMD will have competition from nVidia when it launches Polaris, nVidia has something equally as impressive known as Pascal which gets followed up with Volta, if you think AMD is going to be walking in and taking 80% marketshare when it has competition, no brand presence and a loyal following that numbers less than nVidia... You haven't paid much attention to AMD and thus ATI over the last few decades.

I hope AMD can do well, but you do need to set some realistic expectations, even when they have had superior performance, energy efficiency and price... They still have never had managed to gain majority marketshare.