In an interview with VR-Zone, AMD’s VP of channel sales, Roy Taylor sat down to debate the future of AMD’s APUs, and also discussed how their competitor, Nvidia, was doing with its proprietary technologies.
Taylor thinks that the days of proprietary technology in games are numbered and feels that technologies like OpenCL are the future.
Roy Taylor
Taylor said there is a struggle within the market to define AMD’s products. He says that AMD and Intel need to come to an agreement on how their technologies are defined and how they will be marketed, as the companies today are neck-and-neck in terms of what they’re doing with processors and how they’re going about solving issues with their designs.
“Any conversation we have about an APU needs to begin with an agreed upon definition. An APU, to us, is any processor which includes a serial processor — a CPU and GPU in one package. By that definition, not only are Trinity and Richland APUs, but so are Ivy Bridge, Sandy Bridge, and Haswell. Those comparisons I think are starting to be made. But I don’t know why more aren’t making them,” said Taylor.
More specifically, it appears that AMD is not aiming to be paired up with Intel at the same level because their products don’t always line up in benchmarks, but they prefer that people would address their products in a similar manner. Mind share is almost as important as market share and AMD’s APUs are indeed viewed in a different light to Intel’s processors with embedded HD graphics.
Taylor said that AMD has noticed their APUs gaining traction in the budget markets, slowly taking up market share for people who would previously have bought a separate processor and graphics card. He also told VR-Zone that with the next-generation consoles both powered by AMD APUs, the company hopes that the term will take off more with consumers and that they will begin to realise the benefits of AMD’s products.
Taylor also laments the existence of proprietary graphics technology that takes away experiences from gamers who don’t have the right hardware. “I think CUDA is doomed,” said Taylor, adding that “our industry doesn’t like proprietary standards. PhysX is an utter failure because it’s proprietary. Nobody wants it. In the early days of our industry, you could get away with it and it worked. But its unhealthy.”
Taylor’s position on the subject of CUDA and Physx is rather interesting given that he previously worked for Nvidia and was part of the development team that helped integrate parts of Ageia Physx into the company. He fondly remembers his time at Nvidia, but adds that Physx, while capable of doing many things that weren’t possible with hardware at the time, hasn’t lived up to its full potential under Nvidia.
Source: VR-Zone
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I use to have mostly AMD products when I was a student, but it’s been many years since the AMD products have been able to compete with Intel and Nvidia replacements. If that changes I will look at AMD devices again, but they need to offer me better price/performance. Also they could improve in the driver arena, haven’t had a days troubles with Nvidia, but I had tons of issues with a AMD card a few years back.