08-31-2017, 08:58 PM
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/25...litigation
Quote:Did AMD defraud investors? That’s a lot harder to prove. The PC market began to decline in 2012 and the decline became precipitous in 2013:
Granted, AMD was seeing the impact of this strategic misalignment on its own sales before CY 2013 had begun, but manufacturers tend to place orders for new hardware based on how the old equipment is selling. Regardless of whether AMD’s public statements rose to the level of being legally actionable, the company was clearly tired of the case following it around. And it’s definitely true that Llano’s introduction was delayed by poor yields. The problem was almost certainly on the GPU side of the equation — GlobalFoundries had plenty of experience building CPUs, but AMD had never before attempted to put a GPU and CPU on the same piece of silicon. When Intel rolled out its first CPUs with GPUs on-package, it kept the chips separate for a generation before integrating them into the same die with Sandy Bridge. AMD skipped this step, hoping to save time, but it cost them in the long run.
Llano ultimately faded out of the market, replaced by other APUs, and the entire ‘Fusion’ concept and the HSA capabilities AMD once trumpeted have largely vanished as well. It’s not clear how tightly AMD will tie Zen to this previous exercise. One of the paradoxes of the HSA/Fusion situation was that accelerating workloads by using the onboard GPU was critical to improving the performance of AMD’s older hardware — but now that Zen finally offers a solid CPU core to match with AMD’s on-board GPU, the need for that acceleration is significantly reduced.