Castanet

They've teamed up to make a new chip for laptops. Unbelievable as this may be it's real. They have been arch rivals for decades and now working together. The laptops will not be low cost but more likely mid-high end. They will be amazingly powerful and energy efficient. Lighter, smaller and incredibly versatile. If you are thinking of a new laptop you may want to wait just a bit. First quarter of 2018 they should hit the market.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3235934 ... tk.rss_all

Booo!

It would be different if there were other players in the game but with only 2 I'm not happy to see this. For consumers competition is better than cooperation in this scenario.

I understand what you are saying and do, somewhat, agree. I like competition as well. But it is a win for consumers in one big way and that is the best tech available for a laptop. Intel has been winning the war on the CPU side but AMD has an edge with the CPU/GPU combos. Having those 2 now paired and adding all the other innovations like EMIB or HBM2 will make the next laptops a powerful yet power stingy beast. I thought of upgrading this Boxing Day but now I will wait.

One other benefit is no longer (hopefully) will the chip makers be spending so much time in court. Maybe they can put those dollars into R&D instead of lawyers pockets.

JagXKR wrote:I understand what you are saying and do, somewhat, agree. I like competition as well. But it is a win for consumers in one big way and that is the best tech available for a laptop. Intel has been winning the war on the CPU side but AMD has an edge with the CPU/GPU combos. Having those 2 now paired and adding all the other innovations like EMIB or HBM2 will make the next laptops a powerful yet power stingy beast. I thought of upgrading this Boxing Day but now I will wait.

One other benefit is no longer (hopefully) will the chip makers be spending so much time in court. Maybe they can put those dollars into R&D instead of lawyers pockets.

if we could only have both competition and cooperation we'd be set.

I'd argue that intel has not been winning the CPU game lately. Last I heard AMD has been kicking *bleep* lately with their Ryzen lineup. Benchmarking better than intel at a lower pricepoint. Been a few months tho.

Totally agree. Ryzen lineup is sweet and in time may really take a big share of the market. Almost went and upgraded my 8-core AMD system but there's no "real" need as I've never maxed it out. Love the specs on the Ryzen line, especially the amount of processing power compared to power consumed. Maybe next year, after the new laptop of course.

High end. Powerful, efficient and light?

Sounds like a Mac to me - tee hee lol!

Fun aside, other than AMD or Intel - are there really any other big players out there?

Dizzy1 wrote:are there really any other big players out there?

ARM?

Dizzy1 wrote:High end. Powerful, efficient and light?

Sounds like a Mac to me - tee hee lol!

Fun aside, other than AMD or Intel - are there really any other big players out there?

Not really any other competition for the laptop market other than Intel-AMD.

Mac has been using Intel for a while now, ever since they ditched Motorola. The old laptops used Nvidia but have now switched to AMD Radeon. So for Mac there may also be a good news story in 2018 as they will most likely get on the Intel/AMD bandwagon. I think that the big deal will be that Macbooks and regular laptops may only be different in operating systems and price. Seems like all other specs can be completely equal.

As for ARM, they are most effective in the smaller tablet, phone, other mobile devices and even TV's. The phone arena they are basically king of the castle, 95% of the market.

With the rise of Chromebooks, and phones/tablets starting to rival low end laptops, there is plenty of competition from ARM based chips at the low end of the market.
AMD may well sell far more cores this way and it stems the tide of Nvidia domination in the high end graphics chip end of things, so I really don't see it as a bad thing. It would be great to see AMD doing better on both fronts, but they are up against it on both. This might allow them to make inroads into Nvidia and that could then help their general processor business.

Didn’t see that coming. Although, nvidia makes great graphic chips and are branching in to AI and learning, and intel may see that as a threat. Still, Intel has very small die process, best energy efficiency, and have just developed their 3D crosspoint phase change memory, perhaps teaming with AMD will give them a graphic boost in an area they have always lagged. Stay tuned for next gen. The Intel chips perform better per watt.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/deep-learning-ai/

Then again, they poached a key AMD designer.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-hires-amds-raja-koduri-to-work-on-high-end-discrete-graphics/