It's not an either/or proposition. I agree that power-sipping portables with integrated Radeon cores is the way to go for the tablet/thin & light laptop/htpc segments, but for desktop CPUs and server CPUs in more demanding processor roles, AMD does need to put out competitive x86 CPUs or become irrelevant. It's up to them.

If they really believe fusion is the way forward, then they need to dedicate the money they're not spending on R&D for top-tier x86 performance on actually writing the OpenCL code needed by software developers to easily integrate that functionality for AMD CPUs/APUs. They can't just say it's possible, and leave it to the software developers to figure out how to do it, or they won't bother. AMD needs to be MUCH more aggressive about ensuring that a game or application program detects an AMD CPU/APU/AMD graphics card and installs the optimized code to accelerate that program for that hardware.

because computers today have so much wasted power in the GPU if you don't use it for gaming or other GPU related tasks.

I could love to have my laptop to use every available horsepower it got, no matter the maker of cpu/gpu combo.

Actually this is one of the reasons I bought a Brazos based EEE and frankly I love it. the non GPU heavy tasks I have don't need a lot of power, web browsing, editing multitracks (not adding effects of course, simply checking levels and making sure they came out alright) and working on word docs. But the nice thing about the brazos chips is when i want to watch movies or Internet TV that GPU takes most of the load and the smaller CPU gives me great battery life. i went from less than 4 hours on my big 17 incher to over 6 watching video and over 7 doing basic web tasks, and the 12 inch weighs half as much and is easy to carry.

All in all I can see what they are going for and for many people like me it works whereas the Atom units simply were too slow graphics wise.

GPU lag is much more frequently experienced and noticeable than CPU lag. The average load on all notebooks running at this moment is close to zero.

OpenCL uses the hundreds/thousands of ALU processing units to simultaneously process large amounts of parallelizable data. i.e. music, image, computations, etc. CPU's are not designed for massive threading, and they will choke the system right away.

OpenCL is designed for heterogenous computing and the next generation of APU's will be a new form of processors that can handle large amounts of serial, parallel vector/scalar data. There will not be a CPU or GPU anymore. It will be the ultimate processor that will handle vector/scalar data.

The latter does not mean discrete GPUs are history, since they will be needed. Though, the new generation of processors can handle any kind of data by itself without having to send/receive data through the bus.

Whoever designs a native CPU/GPU hybrid processor will have the best competing technology, and AMD has an advantage with the APU's. Intel does not have high performance GPU's, but it is caching up. Some with misleading advertisings, for the naive buyers, and some with actual technology like Ivy Bridge gpu's.

This guy is the worst CEO AMD has ever had. He is turning AMD into a 2nd tier budget brand. The only bright star remaining is their HD7800/7900 series. Bulldozer is a completely fail and Trinity's GPU didn't live up to expectations. Battery life still trails Intel and GPU performance loses to budget Kepler GT630M.

Once Read took the CEO post, he stated on many occasions that he wants to target emerging and low-cost market segments, not enthusiasts. Since that point in time, I lost all hope that AMD's CPU division will be competitive in the next 10 years.

Worse than Ruiz? The current situation AMD is in, is because of Ruiz. Sanders gave them the edge in processor performance (there's always quite a lag), Ruiz did very little to advance that, and now they're screwed with obsolete designs, and no fabs to build them in, so they lose any synergy of building to their own fab process. Ruiz seriously damaged the company, and this new clown has to work with what he has, and he has very little in the way of CPU technology. What can he say? CPU power is very important. Oh by the way, we don't have much of that. He has inferior CPUs to work with, so naturally he downplays the importance of them.

Ya, I agree with you. I may have been harsh. I am just frustrated after owning Athlon XP and X2 that I no longer have a choice for performance based AMD CPU on the desktop. You are right that he came in when AMD was already in trouble. At the same time what he is doing now is repositioning AMD into low-end segments and I am not a fan of that either. Also, he is the one who oversaw the pricing on Bulldozer and huge price increases with HD7000 series. The launch pricing for FX8120 and esp. FX8150 was outrageous!

What makes you think that 90% of mainstream consumers wouldn't be willing to pay a $200-400 price premium for a laptop that fits their criteria of good battery life, thin form factor, high quality materials, nice screen?

Their best shot with this strategy is to target countries with lower income levels and emerging markets. It will be very hard to gain traction in US/Canada where most consumers in the Ultrabook segment would rather pay more $ for a nicer laptop that they'll use for 3-4 years than cheap out and get a crappy $400-500 laptop that's "good enough." The whole point of Ultrabooks is to deliver a more premium laptop experience, not a budget laptop experience. Perhaps in 4-5 years most Ultrabooks will cost just $400-500 and has magnesium/carbon fibre bodies, but not today.

As it stands, Trinity's CPU performance is still slow and battery life is behind:
http://www.anandtech.com/...ew-a10-4600m-a-new-hope/8

Furthermore, budget laptops don't have SSDs that Ultrabooks have. This will hurt the overall user experience.

More and more people who go to college realize their computer will serve them for 4 years. Professionals wouldn't be caught dead with a cheap looking laptop with a crappy screen. Most of these customers would rather get a decent laptop for $700-1,500 than a cheap crappy laptop for $400-500. The $700 Intel laptop will also entitle them to a FREE Xbox 360 that they can sell, making the Intel laptop just as cheap, despite offering superior CPU performance and battery life.

Free Xbox with a $600 laptop in Canada and $700 laptop in US:
http://techreport.com/discussions.x/22957

The Trinity A10-4600M GPU is laughable for games as it can't even play Diablo 3 smoothly at 1080P (sure it's better than HD4000 but that doesn't say much). http://www.notebookcheck....-Benchmarked.74918.0.html

The fact of the matter Trinity APU still falls way short of the performance compared to even GT630M:
http://www.anandtech.com/...ew-a10-4600m-a-new-hope/6

Soon there will be plenty of Intel laptops for $700-800 with fast i5 CPUs, superior battery life and GT630M/640M Kepler GPUs. Most consumers will go that route, except for countries where income is low and in cases where such laptops are unaffordable.

Also, Ultrabooks currently represent an upper mid-range to high-end segment of the market, where the target consumers are paying for thin form factor, battery life and high quality materials. AMD currently doesn't have a single win in this area from any major manufacturer.

Instead this is the type of laptops they are putting their APUs in - $400-500 level:
http://www.newegg.com/Pro...Weekend_Sale-_-34-215-257

I think you are confused about what the Ultrabook segment is and what consumers it's meant to target. At this time Ultrabooks are not $400-600 budget laptops with plastic casing. Therefore, Trinity does not directly compete with them. If AMD gets some design wins, and introduces more quality laptops, then they might start competing.

The reason Trinity will succeed is because it will target the budget $400-600 market segment. In terms of performance and battery life the Intel + Kepler combination is far superior in every way imaginable for most consumers, but of course it will cost more $. AMD has found a market segment that Intel doesn't care to occupy since the margins are too low in this space. Basically AMD has chosen to go after a niche segment - budget laptops. It is a smart strategy since Intel is more focused on the mid-range and high-end markets.

To state that Trinity will steal "Intel's Ultrabook" lunch is like stating that Honda Civic will steal BMW M3's lunch. They are competing in entirely different price segments targeting entirely different consumer income levels. When AMD has Ultrathin laptops for $800-1,300 that can compare to Asus X32UVD, HP Spectre, MacBook Air, Samsung Series 9, Lenovo U300, Lenovo X1 Carbon, then you can start making that statement. Until then Trinity is for budget laptop segment.

AMD will go the way of the Dodo when Intel adds ECC to its consumer-level processors :D

Of course, that's just my point of view - I have recently decided that my data is very important to me and my next system will be with ECC memory which excludes Intel since I cannot pay for server-grade gear. ECC may not be the majority's concern (but it should be!) but it comes to illustrate a point about Intel's marketing policy. Whereas AMD's CPU within the same generation differ only in speed Intel will cut various features. A typical example is virtualization where for some time it was almost impossible to know in advance whether a particular Intel chip supports it or not. Now it's the AVX where some SB chips support it and others don't which delays the adoption of said feature by software developers. Wherever Intel has had significant market dominance the rate of CPU innovation had slowed down because Intel segregates the market so it can milk the most out of it. Want virtualization? - "Well," says Intel, "all our processors have it. But it's only activated in the more expensive ones." Fuck that!

I'm not saying that AMD will be any different should they ever come to dominate the CPU market. But for the time being they are the good guys, the underdogs, the David fighting the Goliath. And my next CPU will be AMD because it's the only one that offers the features that I need. Plus I'll feel good about my purchase. If I buy Intel, I'll feel like a whore.

Price is the achilles heel of the intelligent dinosaur. Smaller/cheaper is the way out. The sky is not falling, my friend. By the way, what is your CPU right now?

"Things are getting worse because voters have been fooled into thinking all regulation is bad"
Ironically we only have this issue BECAUSE of regulation. Specifically government mandated monopolies granted via patents.

Remember transmeta?
And nVidia said they wanted to build an x86 CPU and could do a good job of it (so they say) but are not legally allowed to.

Rather then breaking those companies up, revoke their patents. (and while you are at it, revoke 99%+ of patents)

And Trinity/Llano meets all of mainstream consumers needs for hundreds of dollars less than Intel so AMD's Ultrathins will definitely steal Ultrabooks lunch.

I am not convinced either way, but it seems odd to me that AMD now believes that the market wants or is fine with stagnated performance on the CPU front. There is only a small class of appications in the consumer space that can benefit from GPGPU, the CPU is still the central component for most serial tasks.

He is basically saying they are not going to fight for mainstream or high-end CPU markets anymore. This is why many people have left AMD because they don't agree with Read's strategy to dumb down AMD's CPU division.

The only way this strategy will work is if they have substantially better battery life or significantly underprice Intel. Right now more people are willing to buy nicer quality laptops now, not plastic / cheap looking laptops. And battery wise, Trinity still loses.

http://www.anandtech.com/...ew-a10-4600m-a-new-hope/8

You don't hear consumers complaining about Llano or Trinity performance but you do about Sandy Bride laptop chips which can't run video. Ivy Bridge HD 4000 laptop chippies are almost able to catch up to Llano in graphics - when Intel's drivers actually work.

Just as most consumers do not need the fastest desktop or server CPU, laptop consumers don't need the fast CPU performance because any on the current laptop APUs will do anything mainstream consumers desire without issues. In fact some reviewers of Trinity laptops admitted that they could not really tell the diff in performance between a 45w Ivy Bridge and a 35w Trinity laptop - in actual use.

Harping on CPU beformance is a waste of time when consumers get a better user experience and value with Llano or Trinity over Intel powered laptops. For those few people who run benches all day for amusement (sic), or those with some specific application that requires the maximum CPU performance possible in an APU but little to no GPU performance, there is the over-priced Intel SB or IB. For the rest of the world there is Llano and Trinity and that's a good thing.

There is no financial exploitation of consumers on Llano or Trinity powered laptops, just good performance and value.

You can hate the message and the messenger but it don't change reality.