Now that the Piledriver benchmarks are in I think it's becoming very obvious that AMD isn't going to be able to compete with Intel on the current platform.

It seems general consensus that AMDs Piledriver improved on Bulldozer by 15-20% in terms of performance and cooling. However since Bulldozer was such a dog, the improvements don't even bring AMD up to Sandy Bridge, let alone Intel’s latest Ivy Bridge CPUs. Performance per core is still about 50% worse at same clock speed and the only way for AMD to compete is in heavily threaded applications where the faux 8 cores it has on the Piledriver, combined can beat Intel's 4 cores on Ivy Bridge CPUs.

Even more concerning is the efficiency of AMD cpus which alone at stock speed (~300W)consume more power than an overclocked intel GPU + any video card combined (idle or light use).

At this point I don't see AMD being able to compete with Intel in the near future without a complete overhaul of the platform. And since they don't have cash to do any heavy R&D...the conclusion seems inevitable.

I see one of two things happening in the next 12 months.

1. AMD announcing that they will focus on APU's and graphics by this time next year and will completely leave the enthusiast market to Intel (scary thought).

2. AMD getting bought out by a larger company and getting infused with cash in order to revamp their products, including the enthusiast high end CPUs.

Thoughts? Opinions?

Why shouldn't AMD bow out from a space temporary or otherwise when they are not being competitive in that space?

They have been successful at providing graphic cards to game consoles. They have been unsuccessful in the PC CPU space.

Whats wrong with Intel? They became stagnant and complacent started facing competition from AMD. Then they stepped it up and more recently have done nothing but truely stellar hardware and great prices. Their on-board graphics chips have also been getting better and they have also innovated important consumer focused features. All the MacBooks and iMacs are now running on Intel chips.

Is the concern that Intel has no competition? Well just look at what the iOS devices are running on... not Intel but rather ARM.

AMD is getting squeezed out by both Intel and ARM. ARM is the bigger competitor to Intel. Companies compete, innovation takes place and consumers benefit.

Please forget about product/brand loyalty. May the best product for the right price always win.

AMD is already dead. It has been from the Bulldozer launch; they do not and will not ever have the R&D cash to catch up, and management have made redundant most of the engineering staff. On top of that Intel's process lead is insurmountable, TSMC and GF and Samsung have no interest catching up. I was an AMD fan for a long time (though I always made rational purchasing decisions) and it's sad to see them go. In particular this new ARM strategy of theirs is ridiculous.

I agree that the competition is now ARM-based, but I actually think it is Samsung or Apple or Qualcomm, because they have alone have the R&D cash and will to design custom CPU cores with performance in mind. ARM is a small company with even less revenue than AMD.

I hope ATI are spunoff before all the talent leaves, I don't want to see Nvidia the sole graphics maker.

I agree with you here for the most part and there is definitely no brand loyalty on my end.

The concern comes from the aspect of R&D and pricing. Enthusiasts like myself want companies like Intel to dump money in to R&D and find ways of making CPUs more powerful. With AMD out of the high end consumer market, they will simply coast in the high end market segment and release 5-10% incremental upgrades. Also if the next gen of Intel CPU's is unchallenged the sheer demand for their products will drive the price up. 300-400 dollars per unlocked CPU instead of 200-300 will be the norm.

In terms of AMD, they are doing some excellent work on the APU side. Intel really doesn't have an answer there yet. They are also on the cusp of announcing production of ARM server and presumably consumer chips which should be very interesting for the mobile market. I don't see them going away...just stepping back from the high end consumer enthusiast market.

Like I said above, I don't think AMD is dead. They are just dead from the enthusiast segment. GPU division and APU's are still quite excellent value and performance propositions.

They need capital to revamp the high end CPU line and start with a new platform, which like you said they don't have. Hence why I predict a buyout or bust. There may be some stuff behind the scenes we are not seeing which can bring them back from the dead for the high end, but I'd say the odds of that happening are 15% maybe.

Cool post, I really enjoyed reading it. I was never really an AMD fan, I just want them to stay competitive and keep intel on their toes.

What did happen to AMD? They used to be the master of performance per clock. Now they're the masters of nothing!

AMD will be bankrupt or bought out within the next two years. Theyare no where in mobile, their legacy pc business is dying with the rest of the x86 industry (see dell, hp Intel itself), they are laying off 15% of the company, the console chip business is not helping. The stock is currently at 2 dollars and is only worth 1.5 billion. Sad times ahead

Here is an interesting slide from AMDs product roadmap. They were expecting performance increase of 10-15% with Piledriver. And that is what they got... but thanks to the fact their manufacturing process is more efficient they managed to push 10% extra clock speed for about 20% better performance.

Unfortunately intel also jumped around 10% with ivy bridge, without changing the clock speed at all. They can not catch up in core for core, clock for clock performance at all.

Looking at this graph and current trending performance increases, the only way AMD can catch in overall performance is if multithreaded performance becomes the norm for majority of programs, including games.

To present this mathematically, in terms of gaming performance best AMD can hope for is full 8 core support and scaling.

Intel - 1.5 + 1.5 + 1.5 + 1.5 = 6

AMD - 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 8

Wouldnt say a disaster but stagnation. Prices will stay high and performance will stay the same. Why would intel pour money in to R&D for these high end chips when no one is challenging them? Instead they will spent their resources making x86 as efficient as possible to deal with ARM.

Who knows maybe in 5 years we will have a 5 inch x86 quadcore i7 smartphone...running full windows 9