Gaming and enthusiast machines are only a fraction of AMD's market, most consumers and clients didn't care about the features AMD's marketing department lied about.
There's always a loud contingent of AMD fanboys, but then there's the silent majority who don't care and just buy on raw gaming performance per $, which is reflected in market share.
AMD wasn't even in the picture at that time really. Meaning their marketshare of desktop pc's were so low that no one had them. Back in those days it was Intel vs Cyrix.
AMD (Intel too, sometimes) often goes on talking about its new technology, yet customers have shown they don't care. There are literally only two things that matter to buyers: price and "speed." Anything else is just PR hype for the investors.
One problem with APUs is that they make it so difficult to rank offerings by performance. A convenient benchmark blend is a reasonably useful approximation of actual utility for conventional general purpose CPUs. But when GPU becomes part of the mix, you get a lot more uncertainty if you do not investigate the details. For an entry level system, where APUs are at home, few people are willing to invest that much effort into their buying decision.
AMD marketing tried to put GPU performance in the spotlight. The unfortunate effect was that a moderately informed consumer then had the choice between a somewhat predictable level of graphics performance paired with whatever CPU that came with it if buying AMD, versus a somewhat predictable level of CPU performance paired with whatever GPU that came with it if buying Intel. In most market segments, uncertainty about graphics performance has much less impact on buying decisions than uncertainty about general purpose compute. The (involuntarily, given their portfolio) focus of AMD's marketing on the graphics part of their APUs made it close to impossible to successfully communicate value-for-money advantages in their price range (assuming they had it).
AMD's (and Intel's) marketing teams are awfully enslaved to the gamer market - gamer aesthetics, big bold packaging, insane names that sound like something off of Tron, the whole RGB enchilada.
AMD started it with Ryzen. That name sounds like a character from the Lord of the Rings. And then we Threadripper - violent to say the least, and finally, EPYC - cheap play of the letters.
What happened to marketing like the IBM System 360? Elliot Noyes is rolling in his grave. I don't think the marketing teams are to be blamed, its the consumers and the Taiwanese influence around what a computer product should be marketed as such.
We all know AMD is losing market share to Intel and Nvidia, but it's interesting to see that there was so much loyalty to AMD GPUs among people who bought AMD CPUs. This is starting to decrease as Nvidia wins more of the GPU market. AMD CPUs were only included in 11% of PC builds in the last six months on PCPartPicker.
It is like every year one reads that this time AMD beats Intel or NVIDIA, but when it comes to "showing the goods", AMD products are not much more than eccentric room heaters.
Well AMD marketing turned out to be a joke, remember Poor Volta? I still think AMD haven't even recovered from that. There marketing for GPUs have been terrible since.
That report is so negatively biased it's suspicious. AMD finances were known to be dire for the last decade. They didn't established as just an intel competitor again, they won hard technical and market praises. The console and mining markets are not what to look at, what about the rest of the whole personal computer one ?
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