
The Loyalty to AMD’s GPU Product Among AMD CPU Buyers Is Decreasing - boxerbk
https://blog.parsec.tv/the-loyalty-to-amds-gpu-product-among-amd-cpu-buyers-is-decreasing-9647c70a6da4#.1te2mdi4i
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digikata
That's funny, I just built my first new home Linux desktop in maybe 7-8 years,
and installed an AMD RX 480 GPU into it, because the increased openness in
their devices is finally really allowing for a first class open source driver
for Linux to be written for this generation of GPU. At this point it really
seems to be just starting to pay off in the performance & stability
departments. If they keep it up, there will be good reason (at least on Linux)
to favor AMD video cards.

Here's to hoping the new AMD CPU does well too, it's good for the market that
Intel has competition.

~~~
ensignavenger
I'm getting ready to build a new Linux Desktop- and I am thinking about an AMD
CPU, but a Nvidia GPU- from everything I have read, Nvidia's performance on
Linux is far better than AMDs? Is that information out of date, or are you
just forecasting future improvements by AMD? I do really appreciate the open
source driver efforts by Nvidia, but I'm not sure I am willing to sacrifice
that much performance at this point.

~~~
lettergram
AMD was trying to push code into the linux kernel to speed up performance.
However, it was recently rejected, publicly, and rather harshly.

With the push to the linux kernel AMD GPU's would be better than Nvidia...
that being said, I wouldn't hold my breath.

~~~
snuxoll
AMD wasn't pushing code for better performance, they were pushing a janky
abstraction layer for their devices to make porting their Windows driver
easier, that basically did what NVidia does and skipped a lot of the existing
DRM infrastructure in the kernel.

If you want to write a kernel driver that's effectively a Russian train toilet
nobody will stop you, and you can feel free to maintain the engineering effort
on it - but it's not going to be accepted into the mainline Kernel and you'll
have to maintain it out of tree.

If AMD wants a shim to make it easier to port their Windows drivers over
that's perfectly acceptable, but they need to work with the existing DRM
infrastructure and the people that maintain it to get a kosher driver that
everyone can be happy with.

------
zelon88
I am still loyal to AMD CPU's, but I haven't been loyal to AMD GPU's since
they were ATI. I always found their driver stack to be more cumbersome in the
past, and I had a rash of bad cards that left a bad taste in my mouth. Not
sure if it's changed since, but I still have faith in their CPU's. The way I
see it, the benefit of supporting innovation that drives Intel to improve
outweighs the benefit of having an arguably faster computer for arguably the
same amount of money.

Without Chevrolet we'd be driving Model-T's. Without AMD we'd by running
8080's. Support the little guy, even though they've historically not always
made the right choices.

------
chrisp_dc
I was loyal to AMD's CPU from 1999 - 2013. Price and not nerfing advanced
features (overclocking, VM extentions) kept me coming back. However, there
aren't many recent server/workstation options. So I begrudgingly switched over
to Intel Xeon chips.

I bought an AMD RX 480 this year. I hadn't bought a discrete GPU in decade. I
looked at Nvidia, but saw you needed Quadro/Grid to use with VT-d. AMD's GPU
work with VT-d out of the box.

It'd be a damn shame to lose a company like AMD that doesn't disable features
for marketing reasons. I'll happily buy another AMD CPU if the zen line comes
close to the hype.

------
distantsounds
AMD's CPU offerings have been lackluster in recent years, Intel has taken the
cake in that department. I'm not surprised people are building Intel more and
more. Ryzen is going to change all that, though. AMD is squaring that up to be
the next big competitor. On the GPU front, the 8GB RX480 is making quite a
dent in the market. It's beating out NVidia's 6GB GTX1060 in DX12 games,
creeping towards the 1070's benchmarks, while costing less than $250. They
aren't catering to the high-end market that the GTX1080 latches onto, but the
price for performance is hard to beat. I surmise Ryzen to play out the same
way.

~~~
speeder
I recently bought a new 380X...

Being honest, AMD disappointed me, it was my first AMD GPU, that I purchased
after all the pain of nVidia Optimus, and... AMD managed to outdo nVidia in
how shitty they are.

* All cards and models have terrible power usage and heat.

* Drivers, both on Windows and Linux still aren't decently stable, on my Windows I had to switch drivers SEVERAL times depending on what game I wanted to play, because with each game it had a different serious bug.

* AMD software (not just drivers) crash a lot on my machine. No other software behave like that.

* AMD tried to "pretend" they don't have too much power usage, on the 380X case they just put a tiny TDP limit for a beastly GPU, so it all the time keeps throttling due to power limits (even when increasing them... I am looking now for information on how to edit the TDP beyond the card defaults), the 380X TDP is the same as the 380, despite it having double the RAM and having more transistors to power.

* AMD RX480 "tdp cheat" instead was to add only a single cable, pretend the card didn't had too much power usage, and let it melt people's PCI-e slots by pulling 7.7A from slots rated to 5.5A

* AMD distribution network is terrible, they make zero effort to sell around the world, meanwhile nVidia and Intel trounces them, not only in marketing, but by reaching local companies to do distribution deals, for example I paid for my 380X the same price as a GeForce 970... (this was one month before RX480 launch). When nVidia launched the 1080 they called the local media, and told them what price the retailers were supposed to sell the 1080 (even if they ran out of stock), a price that was slightly cheaper than AMD Fury cards...

* AMD and partners support just suck, I asked the SIZE of my card, and their support instead told me to "RMA" it, I tried to explain I wanted information, not an RMA, and they refused to help... when I asked about the TDP, then thigns got worse, they got even more staunch that I should just return the card (and eat the shipping costs to US myself!)

* AMD official forums has employees spouting bullshit (like claiming in a huge thread of people complainign about the 380X, that it was the hardware on the complainers machines that was defective, withotu realizing that he just accidentally painted the whole 380X product line as shitty, since there is lots of people complaining of common issues, and if lots of people have the same issues, and is a hardware issue, then the hardware that is crap... also, on the forums making ANY negative comment about AMD, get you attacked, people claim you are nVidia shill or worse, I even got banned from AMD chat after I asked how to circunvent a driver bug that was preventing me from setting my CRT resolution correctly, because they didn't wanted me talking in public about negative things).

~~~
mustacheemperor
Interesting, I am an nvidia owner but have read many times that AMD's software
and drivers are much better now than they used to be. If that bit about the
480 is true that's appalling. It doesn't really surprise me the brand's
product forums are defensive about the brand, I'd wager the Nvidia forums
users respond to negativity about nvidia the same way.

~~~
speeder
It is true and AMD "fixed" it with a driver hack.

[https://www.custompcreview.com/news/amd-aims-reduce-
rx480-po...](https://www.custompcreview.com/news/amd-aims-reduce-rx480-power-
consumption-upcoming-graphics-driver/30719/)

The driver do two things to "fix" the problem:

1\. Draw more power from the cable (it is what the card should have done in
first place).

2\. They put back on the card the behaviour the 380X have, that I am trying to
get rid of, of clamping down hard on the TDP and throttling heavily.

And yes, the claims of this making the card faster ARE true, and also applies
to older cards, AMD cards draw so much power and make so much heat, that if
you UNDERCLOCK them, they can get faster, because sometimes the stable speeds
with less throttling is a bigger benefit than the amount that you underclocked
the card.

That said, last I checked (this was 2 months ago), the driver changes were
Windows only, some guys mining bitcoin on Linux didn't noticed and happily
melted their riser cables.

I really don't like nVidia behaviour as company, pulling shady tactics left
and right, but AMD frankly shocked me with their shoddy engineering. (also
see: recently Linux kernel devs REFUSED AMDGPU driver patch... AMD was warning
in February that the patch they were attempting to do was crap, and they still
went ahead with it, there was even some passive-agressive personal insults
exchanged on official Linux kernel mailing list).

------
paulmd
The really interesting "loyalty" aspect I've seen recently is AMD users
(/r/amd, etc) buying into AMD stock, big time. It's not just loyalty on
hardware purchases anymore, it's literally propping up their stock price.

Of course they seem to have been correct that AMD was way underpriced where it
was before - but at some point it'll come back down too.

------
hayitsbacon
The lack of a competitive consumer CPUs from AMD gave the year to Intel when
it came to new gaming systems. With RYZEN and Vega GPUs coming Q1 2017, AMD’s
80%+ rally in the market, and Intel’s lack of innovation, I expect a comeback
for AMD in the gaming PC market. Their move back into the Professional and HPC
GPU market will also be a huge financial push for AMD to get back where they
want to be.

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boxerbk
We all know AMD is losing market share to Intel and Nvidia, but it's
interesting to see that there was so much loyalty to AMD GPUs among people who
bought AMD CPUs. This is starting to decrease as Nvidia wins more of the GPU
market. AMD CPUs were only included in 11% of PC builds in the last six months
on PCPartPicker.

~~~
toss1941
I believe AMD's market share in consumer PC's is about to double or more with
Zen, if their demo is to be believed. Their supposed < $500 CPU is on par in
performance with Intel's $1100 CPU with a TDP of 95W instead of Intel's 140W.

~~~
phren0logy
Agreed. And with both lower power usage and ubiquitous support for ECC memory,
I think we will be seeing a lot of them in server rooms.

~~~
snuxoll
If Zen ends up mopping the floor with the E3 and E5 Xeons I will be one of the
first to replace gear in my homelab. The amount of money Intel wants for a
second E5-2403v2 (a really weak cheap in comparison to my similarly priced
i5-4570 in my desktop) to go in my ThinkServer TD430 is insane. Not to mention
they're still gimping the memory capacity and PCI-E support of the low-end E3
chips, even though they can cost almost as much as a low-end E5/E7 with
similar clock speeds (this part is extremely annoying for my FreeNAS box which
is an HP ML10, I could really use support for more than 32GB of RAM).

------
user5994461
Never had any loyalty to any manufacturer.

When I need a new CPU or a new GPU, I just open the latest benchmark and go
for the best price/performance ratio for gaming.

~~~
chc
In AMD's case, I think at least some of the loyalty to them is more than
fanboyism. They're the only competitor to Intel in the desktop CPU space and
Nvidia in the GPU space, and they're in a much more precarious financial
position than either competitor. If AMD go away, both of those markets become
completely monopolized. So in a way, it is to everyone's benefit to
disproportionately support AMD.

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zarraya
I don't know how many of you here keep up with AMD but their drivers have
lately been great, on par with Nvidia at least. The Crimson edition showed a
change toward quality. I still think that for the price AMD cards are
competitive.

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ihsw
The data sample is for the past six months -- from my limited understanding,
most big-ticket items have their prices raised prior to the Christmas holiday
shopping frenzy so that grandiose claims of price cuts can be met with a
straight face.

Perhaps most AMD GPU products have seen a higher price raise in the past six
months in preparation for this shopping frenzy?

~~~
boxerbk
The data is for Intel, Nvidia, and AMD, so you would expect the same from all,
no? It's more about relative market share amongst the three.

------
Sephr
It's pretty obvious why: Nvidia's top 5 GPUs wipe the floor with every current
AMD offering.

The GTX 1070, GTX 1080, Titan XP, Quadro P6000, and Tesla P100 are all faster
than every AMD GPU in similar price brackets.

Additionally, GloFo 14nm (used by AMD Polaris) is generally thought to be less
efficient than TSMC 16nm FF+ (used by Nvidia Pascal).

------
brilliantcode
I've always supported AMD because they were the underdogs. However, overtime
the cost advantage disappeared for it's GPU.

I will continue to buying AMD CPU but I've already switched to Nvidia for GPU.
I will switch back if the next offering is something like Maxwell cards,
silent, low power consumping GPUs.

------
LandoCalrissian
I still purchase AMD CPUs since the price difference between Intel is so huge.
I have however given up on AMD GPUs, the price and performance are usually
around Nvidia, but it's just always a little crappier or buggy.

I always want them to do well, since I don't want just on company running the
x86 market.

------
paulmd
That's no surprise. AMD's CPUs are now objectively inferior except for a few
narrow use-cases: highly threaded workloads, VM hosts that need lots of
physical cores to pin to machines, maximum iGPU performance, ECC RAM support
on a budget (note that i3 also supports this), or very cheap fileservers/media
PCs (especially AM1). A high-end FX-8350 is going to significantly
underperform an i3-6300 while gaming - especially in minimum frametimes. The
single-threaded performance of AMD's construction cores
(Bulldozer/Piledriver/Steamroller/Excavator) has always been abysmal.

The FM2-based products are alright, but they are glorified laptop processors
and they do not really compete well in the desktop market overall. Nice if you
want a decent iGPU but most people use discrete GPUs for any serious gaming,
and without the iGPU all you have is a mediocre CPU.

AMD's future in the CPU market rests heavily with Zen. Right now they
essentially do not compete for the vast majority of users (power-sensitive
mobile/server market, productivity users, or gaming). They run the games, the
averages are sometimes decent, but the minimum frametimes suffer pretty badly
and they use a lot of power. Compare the 99th-percentile frametimes and the
cumulative frametime charts here (both are "badness" metric for measuring
stutter) and you can see that AMD's single-threaded performance really
torpedoes some games far beyond expectations. The FX-8350's 99th-percentile
frametimes are significantly worse than a Pentium G2130 and it even falls
behind a dual-core Clarkdale (first-gen Core i5).

[http://techreport.com/review/23750/amd-fx-8350-processor-
rev...](http://techreport.com/review/23750/amd-fx-8350-processor-reviewed/5)

AMD's GPU products, on the other hand, are still reasonably competitive -
although their top product only competes with a GTX 1070 and is very low on
VRAM capacity during a time when VRAM consumption is increasing rapidly and
will continue to do so (particularly DX12 and Vulkan games). The RX 480 is a
solid card though, especially for the price, and the Fury is due for a refresh
soon with the new Vega series, which will undoubtedly have more VRAM.

In particular, there's a problem with combining AMD GPUs and AMD CPUs. AMD's
GPU driver stack has a reputation for being single-threaded and somewhat
inefficient - so you really need good single-threaded performance with AMD
GPUs more than ever before, and Intel processors are very much the preferred
pairing. Again, this difference is particularly pronounced when comparing
_minimum_ frametimes rather than averages.

They have been working hard on cleaning this up with Crimson and they made
another big driver refresh recently too - but AFAIK there's still a pretty
significant quality-of-life improvement from using Intel processors with your
AMD GPU due to minimum frametime improvements.

Conversely NVIDIA's driver stack has a reputation for being less dependent on
good single-threaded CPU performance. So perversely, if you are running on an
AMD CPU then you are best off getting an NVIDIA GPU.

Also, side note: AM1 is my favorite AMD CPU platform right now _by far_. The
CPU supports ECC, most motherboards don't but the Asus AM1M-A does. It makes a
nice little NAS box if you can forgive its paltry 2 onboard SATA channels and
mATX footprint, and you can pick up a CPU+mobo for $45 from MicroCenter.

~~~
usrusr
The surprise is that it is supposed to happening now, shrinking relative to
2015 when AMD CPUs where already just as far behind.

Maybe there was a pattern of brand-loyal, sufficiently rich gamers who made a
hobby out of building a new system at the very top end of AMDs offerings
whenever a new generation Radeons came out. Those would not find an excuse for
an upgrade this year because the latest generation of Radeons tops out lower
than previous generations.

But this explanation attempt breaks down completely when I try to back it up
with the numbers from the article. The way I understand them, the average
AMD/AMD system has actually become more expensive, suggesting that AMD lost
more at the low end. But I have similar problems with the main conclusion of
the article: what I see in those tables is that the Radeon fraction has
dropped faster on Intel machines than on AMD CPUs. With this in mind I would
rather conclude that brand loyalty is even more important for AMD than it used
to be, it's just that with shrinking general popularity of Radeons, the CPUs
get less of a helping hand.

~~~
niftich
The analysis in the article (and the PCPartPicker spreadsheet from which they
source their data) excludes integrated GPUs.

This is a _significant_ difference, because Intel has a 17.48% marketshare on
graphics per the Steam Hardware Survey [1] (the original source for the
spreadsheet data), while AMD has a 23.46% share -- which includes both their
integrated and discrete graphics.

The average price of AMD builds has risen because the lowest-end builds on the
Intel side can rely on Intel's integrated graphics. Intel integrated GPUs
attain one or two percent share of all GPUs for each generation, while AMD
APUs are far behind.

[1]
[http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/](http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/)

------
larrik
I used to be quite loyal to AMD (and I'm typically not loyal to any
companies), but their latest chips are meh. Their GPUs perform very good in
benchmarks, but are buggy and poorly supported otherwise.

~~~
louhike
I often had a lot problems with the drivers on AMD GPUs. Sometimes it took 2
months to be fixed. Two months during which my laptop heated too much and I
was unable to play games and had problems on Youtube.

------
faragon
My last 3 discrete GPUs for PC were AMD, and while AMD keep reasonable prices,
Linux Kernel support, and supporting standards on Linux (OpenGL, OpenCL), I'll
continue buying from them.

------
dogma1138
Not counting Zen there are considerably more reasons to buy an AMD GPU than a
CPU.

Everyone I know with an AMD GPU has an Intel CPU (Core i5/7) since buying AMD
GPU's for gaming is an utter waste of money.

The CPU's are slower, and the platform is old and buggy, not modern PCIE,
storage performance is garbage, and USB 3/3.1 support is laughable.

------
jobu
My kids and I game on the family computer some, but nothing that requires
bleeding edge technology. To me the performance of AMD GPUs is good enough,
but they produce a ton more heat and require more active cooling than a
comparable NVidia GPU. Even with very good fans there is no way to get a quiet
PC that performs well using AMD GPUs.

------
vectorEQ
its funny its decreasing now... because now Vulkan is released which put amd
back in the market tbh with power consumption and performance. the cpu's i've
ditched after i couldn't get the octa core properly stable. but i'm learning
towards their gpu's now as it's less than half price for same performance...

~~~
pjmlp
Vulkan is yet to be widely deployed.

------
urlwolf
Are there any deep learning libs that work ok AMD cards? Looks like CUDA
totally owns that market.

------
amiga-workbench
After a AMD driver update removed audio pass through over HDMI on my HTPC
build I'm not going back for more, Nvidia seem to support their gear for
longer too.

