This year is especially difficult for Intel, and this is not so much the company's internal problems as the explosive growth of its direct competitor – AMD. Where else will explode anytime soon?
History
Over the past 10 years, supporters of the AMD camp have been disappointed several times to see the company trample in one place. With the release of new generations of processors, the lag behind Intel was felt more and more, and the benchmark results looked more and more like posthumous epitaphs. The monstrous monster of the 2013 Vishera generation AMD FX-9590, which siphons off the power supply under (rumored) 400W load, is the brightest member of the entire 'pre-Ryzen' family. The brutal power of eight x86 boilers, automatically overclocking to 5 GHz, seemed to be enough for leadership among desktop productivity solutions, but life has shown the opposite.
Now the FX-9590 can be bought on Avito for a measly 5,000 rubles (in my city), exactly the same as the price for the junior representative of modern reality AMD Ryzen 3 1200. And to which it is inferior at least 10-20% in tests and real applications.
A bright future for AMD began in 2014, with the appointment of a new CEO Lisa Su and the return to the company of Jim Keller (the developer of the legendary Athlon 64). Our direction, the direction of mobile electronics, is interested in processors with integrated graphics (APU), and here the company is doing well. In the release before last about modern netbooks, the junior AMD Ryzen 3 2200U solution showed itself not only as a vigorous typewriter, but also as a kind of almost gaming solution that allows you to play last year's games at the minimum graphics settings. In the cheapest segment, where Pentium and Celeron reign Intel, AMD can only offer low-frequency APUs based on Athlon cores. The point is not even that they are not cheap enough, but that their performance is not enough even to unleash the full potential of integrated graphics cards-companions of the Vega generation. Does AMD really have no modern products for the lowest price segment?
Modernity
In a recent issue, we recalled that the popular Nvidia ION platform in the past was originally created as an embedded solution for displaying images on public terminals, gaming machines and advertising stands. Surprisingly, when we talk about energy efficiency, embedded processors and platforms will give a hundred points a head start to any consumer product, even with the prefix 'U' and 'T' in the name, or without them. And all such solutions have one thing in common – they are equipped with good video chips, the performance of which, if they hit the consumer market, would be enough for everything except heavy games. Our today's topic, which, in fact, could sound like “how will AMD kick out Celeron and Pentium”, implies a slide show, which I propose to do. Charger, charge the first slide!
In February last year, AMD introduced the world to four new processors that were planned to be used for industrial and medical equipment, and also mentioned the possibility of building gaming devices based on them.
Quite simply, it was the first attempt at bringing high-performance Ryzen outside the consumer market. The entire AMD V1000 series is a symbiosis of powerful Ryzen cores and Vega graphics. But miracles do not happen, and the senior processor V1807B (CPU performance of the i7-4700MQ level, graphics twice as productive Intel UHD620) cannot cost as much as the older Pentium, which means that for the position of bouncer in the dwarf club series The V1000 doesn't fit. Younger processors of the line smash laptop Intel Core i5s and are also not suitable for this role.
AMD Ryzen's first start in the industrial market was too strong for the new processors to be used in budget netbooks, nettops and other consoles. Just like their siblings, AMD Ryzen 3 and 5 with 'U' boxes. And at the same time, it's a shame that the V1000 series did not hit the consumer segment, because it completely solved the issue of a 'small but powerful computer'.
The elegant (15×14 cm) SAPPHIRE FS-FP5V mainboard for AMD V1000 has remained a 'not for everyone' product. However, enthusiasm for the V1000 among developers has not subsided until now, and some have gone even further and are showing their development at the 'Alpha' stage. And among these, the most striking is the startup Smach Z, a PSP-like set-top box on top-end mobile hardware:
And this is perhaps the only way to evaluate the performance of the AMD V1000 under real load – in games:
Say what you like, but analogs on Android and iOS are very far from this level of performance.
Source Buzzap.jp
From a recent leak on the Japanese portal Buzzap.jp it became known that the upcoming GPD Win MAX micro-notebook is also based on AMD V1000. All of the above devices are pretty niche, but they show AMD's progress very well.
Near future
And just a week ago, news flashed about the presentation of the 'weakened' Ryzen – the R1000 series with integrated Vega graphics. The appearance of this series is likely to put an end to the production of AMD 'A' series processors and, possibly, drive the company Intel into even higher costs. The processors are so new that the cat cried out about them:
The manufacturer does not give specific information on performance, but if you make a couple of assumptions, you can get an idea of the state of affairs. The Geekbench database contains the results of engineering samples of new processors, and about the graphics part, we will make the assumption that it is not inferior to that in the younger V1202B (and Athlon 200GE) of the V1000 series. It remains only to compile all the data into a table and compare it with the current Celeron / Pentium offerings from Intel. The most massive modern processors Intel 'between Atom and i3' at the moment are Pentium N5000 Silver and Celeron N4000, to be sure of this, it is enough to look through the range of online stores, which means that you need to compare with them . And this is what happened:
Double the advantage in all respects. And, perhaps, it will play a cruel joke with AMD. All our (and not ours) stores are jam-packed with devices with weak Intel of different generations on board, and if a device is launched on the AMD R1000 platform right now, not only Intel, but also themselves will suffer losses the shops.
I see here a direct connection with the fact that Asrock has released a nice IBOX-R1000 nettop, but does not indicate where exactly it can be bought, or at least the price, inviting all buyers to contact them individually.
The long-suffering startup Atari VCS also announced its desire to switch to the new AMD R1000 platform.
Conclusion
No matter how events develop in the lower price segment of mobile devices, a new wind is already being felt, AMD has ready-made solutions to fill all niches, and Intel has taken the position of standing catching up.
Friends, is it time to start opening the AMD tab first when choosing a new netbook or nettop in the online store? What do you think?