Steam survey: Intel and Nvidia most popular – Ouch AMD!

That data suggests AMD and FireFox are far more popular among Steam users than elsewhere.

But AMD has to admit it has lost everything, almost. AMD's minor business was NAND and NAND alone was profitable enough. Its 2012 Q2 revenue is just slightly over 1 billion USDs. Profits, almost zero. The only major reason it wasn't acquired by China or India was there have been national security concerns, whether real or not. Compare that with how much Honhai that owns Apple's Foxconn factories in Shenzhen, Guangdong earns: nearly 30 billion. Achieving so much requires a lot of patience while AMD has been thousands of times more popular among these web communities than Honhai. So what did AMD do during the last ten years other than whining to the European Commissioners and the FTC forever that Intel sells better products at lower prices so they can't continue doing business?

Intel was playing dirty and AMD just wanted to level the playing field a bit. The only thing keeping AMD afloat is their kick-ass GPUs and that they have good value CPUs. They don't even try to compete with Intel in the high-end CPU market anymore because they just don't have the cash for R&D (which is a shame for AMD and consumers). The smartest thing they ever did was purchase ATI.

AMD was playing dirty because there were support from the millions of fanatics. Thomas Papst warned about it once, but you never changed. Intel had none and so they had to work much harder. The same thing is happening to Samsung, too. Samsung has had to invest 30 billion dollars in a year on R&D and fabrication plant construction, setting a world record every year. That kind of drive for extreme growth is martyrdom. ARM didn't get that amount of popular support, but still has been able to sell licenses to more processors than Intel sells.

The only reason Intel allowed AMD to survive by not marketing very powerful processors at $20 was to avoid that US government antitrust persecution. AMD didn't need to compete as it was well protected both by the governments worldwide - including South Korean government - and the public. Intel was attacked by all major governments and everywhere on the web. It was usually the few saying positive things about Intel that had to shut up, or leave forums, or got kicked out for not blindly supporting AMD.

And the problem is, they just left it at that... while Intel was looking to get it's greedy little hands on the next tech business that would make them what they are today.. a worldwide company worth more than 5 times the value of AMD! That's plenty of cash, r&d capital and breathing room for 10+ years of nothing but failure, while AMD could run the company into the ground 2-3x over and out of business in the meantime. AMD does not have a micro mobile (tablet) platform partner, and the this train has all but left the station! AMD needs a tech business that will GROW, and fast..

It's difficult to follow exactly what you are suggesting, but was AMD a competitor for Intel at all?

Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, Digital Equipment Corporations, International Business Machines, they all were, and there were many more, but AMD?

Intel had 10 times bigger revenues than AMD even before AMD started bringing in the engineers from DEC's Alpha team. Some of the others went to Samsung Electronics and Mitsubishi of Japan. It was difficult for AMD even to manage a single fab plant, so what was so great about AMD at any one moment other than the fact it was not Intel?

Intel had to make better CPU's because for once AMD had a much better one. If it wasn't for that short period where AMD had a faster and chaeper chip Intel would not be where they are now beating the crap outa AMD again.
I still use a AMD 6 core and will continue to support them because it's fast enough and way cheaper, at least mine was.
My buddy builds systems and he builds em all and still plays with whatever is new. I think he now builds more top end Intel units because of the speed but builds AMD for customers who don't have a unlimited budget and what good bang for buck.
I think we both hope AMD stays in the game and steps up again but maybe with all the buyouts and changes they are going to have issues till they decide where their money is best used. I have used Intel CPU's before and they always were stable and fast enough for what I spent but I always like the underdog, plus the cost savings for what I get is nice.

I'm familiar with that attitude. But many of the people who prefer AMD to Intel did not like ECS, Biostar, VIA, SiS... or Samsung.

I doubt AMD ever had a CPU that could beat Intel's. AMD did have some success into supercomputers and high-end computing, but it was usually Intel that have kept rising, growing, and getting better and better.

Several years ago, or 12 years ago when SiS was still making popular chipsets for DDR memory chips and AMD Hammer processors, the same AMD fans - which I preferred calling fanatics though I too had more than ten motherboards compatible with AMD only - kept on insisting AMD could somehow beat Intel. Check out the facts... the balance sheets of both AMD and Intel have been available on their websites. AMD simply didn't have the money, or the resources to develop, produce, and distribute as well as Intel.

'More bang for buck' theories usually only work for the ones that chose them. I've seen people saying "I will never buy any HP product again" or "I will never buy anything Samsung sells again", but... what do those public announcements change? People always try to argue and influence they know in person or just about all unknown visitors or searchers so that they would also hate the same brands. That's one aspect of the social networks I never liked, but somehow Chinese created and made their own networks... larger and far more powerful than the Western versions. How that will turn out will surprise everyone - including every Chinese.

I spent my own money and time to make more people use and own AMD systems. One of the better advantages then was DDR support. AMD systems also offered much lower initial cost of ownership for dual CPU motherboards. That was some years before Intel switched to multicore strategies seeing Sun Microsystems advertising 32-core and some others talking about many more cores. But that's another story. AMD probably once or twice had chances, but so did SiS and Via. Sun and DEC, too. It's Larry Ellison, by the way, that now owns Sun. It must have been a coincidence one of his yachts was named Rising Sun. I was just reading about the book The Rising Sun.

My point is AMD or Intel, Samsung or Apple, they are all just businesses. Some donate, and even donations are usually business acts. They are not meant to help all the world's 'underdogs' to make better lives or get more for less. Things might have seemed different, but from here it was always Intel that looked clean and AMD was always the one arrogant and dirty. Same about Samsung and Apple. Samsung's criticized for being massive, industrial, polluting, powerful, evil, centralized, authoritarian, even making arms and tanks and fighters and warships and much more, but it's Samsung that takes the most care of customers.

Whether Intel's abusing monopoly power is for others to judge. There are the European Commissioners and FTC, but there are also South Korean government and PRC government... that are much more harsh than the Western regularatory bodies, and much more biased against Intel as well. Intel and Microsoft will never get fair treatments in South Korea, but all those people bitter about Intel in California don't really understand why it's hated in some other countries. One reason's it's more profitable for governments to hate Intel, than AMD, because AMD can pay much less. Better sue the rich guys. So far, at least during the recent few years, the EU and the US governments don't seem to care much about AMD losing and sinking. Intel's not doing very well, either. It's still growing and making more processors each year, but ARM's and Samsung, and Apple are growing far faster in the CPU market. Some things will happen in the coming few years like this. AMD's right now firing its heads in Taiwan and China.

And here are attached some more pictures to indicate what the coming computers will look like. The original source for those is Japanese Impress. This page also provides great explanations, but most characters are only in Korean. Those are for phones, not desktops or TV sets.

Yes ... we all recall the glory days for AMD, back in the days of the Pentium 3 & Pentium 4, where Intel totally dropped the ball, but came out swinging with the Core 1's, and the core2's .. and eventually trampled AMD into the ground with their i-series CPU's.

But AMD dropped the ball magnificently, after short sightedly selling off their fabrication plants, forever separating their fabrication expertise from their design teams, resulting in CPU/GPU designs that are beyond the capabilities of their fabrication partners, resulting in very low yields in high-performance CPU's & GPU's.

By the time that their fabrication partners are on-board and producing decent quantities of high performance PU/GPU's, they've missed the boat for sales, and the next series is already released by their competitors.

I doubt that AMD will be around in a few years, lets say 5years at most.
- AMDs mainstream APU's are under-powered and energy hungry, compared to intels i3/i5 series
- AMDs energy efficient series CPUs are under attack by cheaper, and sufficiently capable ARM designs from tens/hundreds of low end counterparts.
AMDs high-end CPU's are under-powered and energy hungry, compared to intels i5/i7 series.

The only place AMD is still treading water, is the GPU business, and even then, it's being heavily eroded by onboard/on-die video processors by it's own and intels APUs, and then the GPU's still have production problems from fabrication partners.

Whether Intel has been playing dirty 5years ago is now irrelevant, AMD is drowning, and there's serious competition from all angles.

AMD needs a serious hit to get it out of these issues. GPUs can't be counted upon, because they're only "king of the hill" for a week, and AMDs' CPUs have been underwhelming for a very long time.

Assuming that they have a massive hit, coming from left-field, they probably can't produce it in decent quantities for the next year anyway, leaving their competitors to catch up & swamp them.

But honestly, for AMD I can see misses all the way to obscurity.

Well I guess we'll see how it shakes out. I agree they were stupid to sell their fab plants so now they are dependent on third parties who may not care as much as they would in house and it takes longer to get anything done. I'm plenty happy with my 1090t and old 4870x2 video card on a decent Asus board, and the video card plays whatever games I like on a pretty good setting so for myself I don't mind being a generation or two back, I save a lot of money and still get a pretty zippy machine. My friend and I argue all the time about whether AMD has any real top end chips coming, if they do he will build one just to see how good or bad it is, and he does the same with Intel boxes too. He pretty much says Intel has the fastest chips out now for quite a while but their top end stuff is still stupid expensive, they do have quite a few chips that are cheap and fast too.
He also steered folks to AMD for the value but I think he now mainly builds Intel again for the speed most users want, though we both hope AMD stays in the game and does bring something groundbreaking out.
If nothing else we need another maker just to help keep prices in check. I still remember the dark days when memory was so expensive gangs would do armed robberies of computer shops just to steal all the RAM they could get, and the good chips and things weren't much cheaper.

Maybe you forgot somehow AMD didn't really have enough money to build the fabrication plants of Dresden and then continue expanding and building another... under debt. It was billions of dollars to build one fab when AMD's entire quarterly revenue was 2 billion when their business was very good, but under 1 billion when not. It's a little over 1 billion for 2012 2Q while Intel achieved a little over 13 billion for the same quarter - and everyone said Intel was losing and being slow because of recessions and low demand and all that in Europe and China.

Samsung Electronics plans to spend over $100 billion over the next few years to build and expand fabs, a little over $20 billion for 2012 alone, though that includes non-semiconductor as well. Making CPU is about fabs mostly, not the design part. Intel's spending about $10 billion for this year directly on CPU fabs. Most of what Samsung spends on its semiconductor manufacturing goes to DRAM and NAND, so Intel's still safely ahead of everyone else.

Intel still sells some of their latest and high-end processors at excessively high prices. I had to pay over $300 on this 3820 Sandy Bridge E processor and that was the lowest-end of that line. I couldn't really afford the mid-range even (at $600.) But it's still much more sensible to pay $1,000 on a late technology Intel processor than to spend $1 million on an Italian car - that's what people here spend on what they like to term supercars, and they are very proud, not ashamed, of their smart buys. Meanwhile, there are still those endless lists of Xeon line processors. They are still reasonably priced and offer reasonable performance. Even when Intel was selling Northwood and Prescott lines, they also had others and more in development. It was obvious, destined for AMD to lose even when AMD was making $2 billion quarterly revenue. Only M&A could have saved, but AMD chose to buy ATi instead of selling themselves to richer and larger companies. AMD also has remaining debt, and that's yet the current AMD management's preoccupation while the revenue's threatened from all sides. Current balance is a little better than what you can see on the attached sheet image, and AMD continues to call that progress. It is, sure, but that state of being in near permanent debt has been going on for several years.

Yes, Intel has been the speed king since basically Mid-2006 to date. once their 'core 2 duo' line of CPU's came out which was about mid-2006 Intel has been faster than AMD since then but prior to that i think AMD was the speed king over Intel for roughly 5-6 years (i want to say roughly the year 2000-2001 til mid-2006).

when i built my previous PC which was March 2006, AMD had faster CPU's (i had a AMD Athlon X2 3500+ 2.2ghz (overclocked to 2.4ghz) single core) than Intel, but roughly a few months later Intel was on top.

p.s. but about 3 months ago i upgraded from my 6 year old setup (although i did upgrade that CPU there in 2010 to a AMD Athlon X2 3600+ dual core (2.0ghz overclocked to 2.4ghz)) to a Intel i3-2120 CPU (for $115) and it was a big upgrade as my performance at least tripled and might even be 5-ish times higher based on x264.exe video encoding tests as on the AMD Athlon X2 3600+ (2.0ghz overclocked to 2.4ghz) dual core i typically got between 15-20fps (probably under 20 most of the time) where as on the i3-2120 i typically get 60-80fps (almost always at least 50+ or higher) but i would imagine some of that performance is from the hyperthreading as it appears that feature actually noticeably boosts performance with the x264.exe where as gaming it appears to basically do nothing.

The i2 and i3 series (i3-2, i5-2, i7-2, i3-3, i5-3, i7-3) CPU's have a hardware H264 encoder whacked onto the CPU.

The AMD CPU's/APU's either don't have any acceleration or are relying on the inbuilt graphics chips for video encoding acceleration, but a GPU is designed for number parallel number crunching, but it's not dedicated hardware for video compression, so performance doesn't compare favourably.

Traditionally, video encoding is where most consumers are likely to feel a difference between a high-end CPU and low-end CPU, and it's a nail in AMD's coffin that they haven't addressed this in the last 2-3 years since Intel introduced it.

Despite the fact that intel's quicksynch video encoding is NOT archival quality encoding, most people don't care, because it's for ripping dvd/bluray to a 10" tablet, or even 4-5" phone, and the encoding is "good enough".

The great thing about the hardware h264 encoder is that people that DO use their pc's for encoding video's to their iphone/android phones don't need to buy a >>$500 processor solely for crunching video's. Now the average person really needs a low end $150 cpu in their PC (case in point). I personally bought an i7 laptop, for that very reason, to encode blurays/dvds for my 7" Tablet. It's a power hog *all the time* so that I can encode videos *occasionally*. I'd have much preferred an i3-2 for battery life, except intel didn't release the second generation "i" series cpu's for six months after I bought my laptop

The fact that most AMD CPU's or APU's are faster than intels low-end cpu's for similar prices is irrelevant, because they're noticeably much slower where it matters to most people - video encoding ... and they chew up more power to boot.

Even if AMD release a new CPU with super-quick, ultra-high quality, hardware H264 encoding tomorrow, and it absolutely smokes intels quicksync, it's not going to be anything other than a catchup ... it's been 2 years since intel introduced quicksync ....

I now feel Intel is best platform and have felt for a long time Nvidia is best for gaming - period.

So I agree with survey based on my experience.

Catalyst driver is a mess of bloat. Most developers seem testing with Nvidia first for compatibility and feature.

Safer to buy Intel / Nvidia