Displaying items by tag: Athlon

AMD has been something of an unusual company ever since they first decided to dive into the x86 market with their purchase of NexGen. The would-be CPU maker had an interesting knack of building CPUs that performed well, but were always just a pace behind their rivals. That was the case until AMD pulled off a minor miracle in the form of the Athlon and Athlon64 CPUs. AMD seemed to have stolen the crown from Intel and looked likely to keep it for a long time.

AMD has lowered the prices for a total of eighteen processors from older generations, mainly for FM1 and AM3 sockets. Within the A Series APU chips for FM1 socket prices were changed for six processors, ranging from a minimum of 3.7% for A6-3670K (from $80 to $77) to 21.7% ($46 to $36) for A4-3300.

AMD is one of those companies that really need to take a long hard look at its past to get a good handle on where it is going. My first experiences with AMD go pretty far back to when they were making 2x86 CPUs on license from Intel. At the time AMD was also a pretty big player in the DSP market and could be found in many of the early two-way radios and later in Cell phones (it was cool to show that to people that were skeptical of buying AMD for the first time. Still AMD was always considered the low cost alternative to Intel, but one that came with a performance hit (it was not completely true, but that was what the market thought).

It looks like AMD is putting some of the money they have been working to reclaim to good use (although we are not sure if this is the best time to do it). To help raise sales numbers of their APUs they have signed a deal with GameFly which gives a 30-day free membership and 20% of purchases. The move is a pretty smart one as we imagine the costs involved for AMD are small while the benefit could be pretty big especially in the mobile gaming arena.

Over the course of the last year or so we have watched as a once solid company has started to crumble into a shadow of its former self. Yes we are talking about AMD and although the trip down the path to where they are now started years ago we have to wonder if there was ever a chance to change things and get the company back on track.