back to article AMD gets in Intel's grille with desktop Fusion rollout

AMD's first desktop Fusion processors were detailed on Thursday, and the company marked their debut with a confident blast at its megacompetitor, Intel. "We win – that's our competitive positioning," Sasa Marinkovic, AMD's head of desktops and software product marketing told a press gathering when the A-Series APUs ( …

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  1. Bill Gould
    Trollface

    Just one question

    Have they been working with the major studios for compatibility? I still play one large MMO that only recently got a bit of ATI support.

    "We win! ... Please support us... we have cookies..."

  2. Homer 1
    Linux

    Yes, but does it run Linux?

    Type your comment here — plain text only, no HTML

    1. Bill Neal
      Linux

      too easy

      doesn't every processor architecture run some form of linux?

      show me directx 11 on linux. that will impress me.

      1. E 2

        One word: drivers

        The question is whether the drivers for Linux are ready and work properly. It took AMD about 6 week after E350 & C50 were on the shelves to make fully functional drivers for Linux available for those chips.

        1. toughluck

          @E 2 : Ummm, no

          The beta drivers were there earlier. Plus, the older drivers worked (sort of). And let's not forget that it was 6 weeks after the *announcement* was made. General availability wasn't until a few weeks after the release.

  3. James Turner

    Sandy Bridge gaming

    The problem for AMD, is the pricing of the new kit appears to be higher than for a basic Core i3. With the difference, you can buy yourself a nice discrete card as good as the integrated unit in AMD's APU.

    So, a faster processor and similar graphics for the same money. Only if you absolutely have to have it integrated does AMD look a winner.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Facepalm

      Perhaps when comparing chips try counting cores.

      i3 only has 2, all these new AMD chips have 4 cores.

      The i3 does have hyper-threading but 95% of the time that equates to about 2.2 cores and sometimes 1.9 (ie: its slower).

      So according to your example you could get a SLOWER machine for the same money!

      But you left out the part about Intel motherboards costing more, and generally having lower specs with inferior chipsets (even when the bugs are removed).

      Plus the RRP of these new chips as stated in the article is $115-135 that makes them about the SAME price as the i3.

      Today: SB i3 prices at www.scan.co.uk range from £90-107, and the cheapest SB i5 is £138.

      The current Phenom 955 (quad core @ 3.2GHz) is £88.56, and there are cheaper versions.

    2. Ammaross Danan
      Go

      A few corrections

      As stated in an earlier reply by some else, but with a lot more bias, you're wrong.

      The new AMD kit is a mere $5-10 premium over the "on sale" i3-2100. If you compare vs the i3-2105 (with the HD 3000 gfx, rather than the very worse HD 2000 of the original i3-2100), the price matches exactly.

      Platform is also a consideration, since the A75 boards, when features are compared, are generally cheaper than their 1155 counterparts. Not by much mind you.

      Also, as a correction to the biased reply, it is true the i3 is a dual core, with hyperthreading, however, hyperthreading gains a lot more than a mere 10% (the OP stated "2.2" factoring in the dual cores) performance increase. There's upwards to a 40-60% increase in threaded situations over running with hyperthreading disabled. What was never touched was that the i3 cores, MHz-for-MHz perform better than the AMD cores.

      In the end, the i3-2105 (yes, better GPU than the 2100) has better performance in single-threaded or general light loads. The AMD A8 chip does better when you're taxing the system with heavily-threaded loads (does better by far btw). However, you're not likely to do that unless your encoding video or doing many things at once, at which point, you bought the wrong CPU either way. The GPU core in Sandy Bridge doesn't even hold water against the A8 GPU core. The A8 has 2x the performance of the HD 3000, hands down. There's just no comparison. The only advantage the HD 3000 has is QuickSync. But then again, the A8 has DX11.

      Who's the victor? Anyone who buys the $500 Walmart machines. Why? Because they'll have an AMD CPU.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Mushroom

    Crysis 2

    I was just about to say Crysis 2 was DX9 only but it turns out the DX11 patch was released yesterday.

    Nice to see AMD pulling back against Intel though

    Crysis was stressing my GPU much more than Crysis 2.

    Mushroom cloud because I'm now off to patch my Crysis 2 I was leaving until DX11

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Trollface

    This is not a title.

    Cookies, pfft, you can't give them away these days...

  6. Flybert

    quotes

    "Marinkovic's "We win" effusion may be a bit brash." ... AMD

    "WINNER" .. Charlie Sheen

    AMD brashc ? .. not quite

  7. John Savard

    Competing

    I think that Intel is making a big mistake in viewing Nvidia as a hostile competitor. Instead, since antitrust considerations prevent it from buying Nvidia the way AMD bought ATI, it should be cooperating closely with Nvidia to bring out products similar to this as a joint effort.

    That's not to say that its massively-multicore x86 chips won't also be useful, but not necessarily as much so for graphics.

    1. Bill Neal
      Meh

      hmm, good point, except...

      currently Nvidia is worth more than AMD, and the only reason AMD is still alive is because of Intel. of course, in my dream world AMD would have paired up with Nvidia instead of ATI (whose crap I could never get to work properly).

    2. Flybert

      @John Savard

      what has you thinking Intel sees nVidia as a hostile competitor ?

      they have settled differences, are particularly not stepping on each others toes at minimum ...

      Intel not interested in ARM or discete cards .. nVidia not interested in mobo chipsets

      wouldn,t surprise me a bit nVidia is sharing GPU tech with Intel or that Intel is sharing it's fab and circuit expertise with nVidia ... and I think Intel paid nVidia $1.3 billion or so for cooperation and IP sharing

      They both see AMD as competition though .. and likely have other common enemies

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Go

    VMware ESX support for VDI?

    These advances are cool, but we need them for Virtual Desktops in corporate america...

  9. Bo Pedersen

    @Bill Heal, it surprised me too

    AMD were well in bed with Nvidia prior to the ATI deal

    the nForce chipsets were pretty cool, I built many awesome rigs based on those chipsets

    so I have been an AMD/Nvidia setup man for years, slightly messed up by a lot of Crossfire only amd boards.

    Fusion is great for slimline low-power machines, I have used the MSI X370 laptop and it performs well. The graphics are nothing to write home about though, definitely not a massive advantage over Intel's option.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      But the MSI X370 is for e350 and C50 chips not these chips.

      The e350 completely trashes the Intel opposition in its class, which is Atom.

      The e350 and the single core c50, use less power, and are faster and more capable than any Atom setup.

      I noticed that Toshiba have build a full size laptop with e350's which large keyboard, 15" screen and still give excellent battery life.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Facepalm

    "We win"

    Err, what?

    Besides, I'll decide on that when I can read your end of year report side by side with Intel's.

  11. David Austin
    Thumb Up

    title

    Intel are at their most productive when AMD Are snapping at their heels, meaning both sides get some aweome products.

    When AMD came up with the Athlon XP and Athlon64, Intel quickly dumped NetBurst, went down the Core path, and didn't look back. Would be great to see both sides raise their game again.

    Can't wait to see some real world benchmarks.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Intel vs AMD graphics

    It's pretty disingenuous to say the new AMD cores have marginally more graphics power than than the latest Intel chips. From what I've seen of the AMD A8-3850 vs Intel i3-2100 (which is about £15 cheaper) the AMD hammers it for basic gaming. For example minimum 54 FPS on Left 4 Dead at 1280x720 on High settings vs 13 from the Intel.

    For pure grunt go Intel, for a HTPC get one of these new AMD cores as it also saves you buying a graphics card.

    Looking forward to what AMD can do with the Bulldozers though.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    AMD have one advantge...

    ..Intel have always been utter shit at producing graphics chipsets. It would be a miricle to get them to beat them.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    AMD still rules

    Hi, considering AMD is more innovative than Intel for many years, they are not going anywhere. Intel for years used blunt force old processors while AMD developed more modern cpus, which Intel finally came out with them and x64 bit. Without AMD, Intel would not be where it is today.

    They both have cross licensing agreements.

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