Re: Forgive the ignorance...

Advanced Processing Unit. A touted successor to the CPU that brings the GPU back on board for closer integration.

In olden days there was the CPU and it could do integer arithmetic faster than anyone's abacus, so it was good and flourished. But it was bad at floating point, so Intel introduced the maths co-processor. A friendly little thing built differently to the CPU that sat next to it and took on all the floating point stuff its friend struggled with. The maths co-processor bit might seem like a tangent, but its relevant as you'll see shortly.

Then came graphics cards: voodoo and Matrox and all that jazz. GPUs and CPUs grew together but were separate. And that was good because different people wanted different things: gamers wanted to splurge extra money on a super GPU. The rest of us just cared about traditional processing and did not. Again, all was good.

Then people realized that as well as enabling them to shoot ever more realistic aliens, their GPU was actually a highly sophisticated parallel processing bastard that could do things a regular CPU could not. Just like our old friend the maths co-processor. Various projects to use the GPU took off and programmers realized that it was capable of much more.(at least for certain application spaces). And all was good.

AMD bought ATI giving them decent CPU market capability (not on Intel's scale, but they've not been knocked out yet) and OUTSTANDING GPU market capability. And so they began bringing the GPU and the CPU back together, cozied up on the same bit of sillicon and called it the APU. It means no separate graphics card unless you really want to splurge on something fancy. It means you don't even need a separate graphics chip which is good for all the mobile markets. And it also brings in that massively parallel processing power that the GPU has which is good for a number of application spaces. So you're down from two chips to one, in practice not a lot of CPU-style power has been lost and you've gained an extra processing capability that you didn't have before without a separate graphics card (and not all of them supported the instruction sets that were needed to make use of them outside of games anyway).

And all was good. ;)

Re: In the battle of CPUs, they focus on GPU?

The reality in most offices, is that most office workers now have enough processing power for all their needs. Progression at this point - for a company buying for most of its employees - is going to be about energy consumption and purchase cost (primarily the latter, outside of the server market). And AMD have always been competitive in terms of cost. They're doing well on energy consumption too. I have a fanless AMD board running my home server (M1 Hudson) and it draws very little power. It would be plenty powerful enough to act as someone's day to day work machine as well (if they were just doing spreadsheets, etc.). Cost about £150 incl. processor, memory, etc. (Rather more for all the high-capacity hard drives, mind you)

So I think AMD already are competitive with Intel for most business desktop users. I think the focus on the GPU side of things is because it helps them be competitive in the home and portable market. APU is significantly better in both cost and power consumption, than CPU + GPU. That's a plus for laptops and tablets. And better graphics is also a plus for the home market. Not everyone can afford (or wants) to buy a Radeon 7970 graphics card. But the AMD chips come with graphics that are better than an Xbox built in. They make great media centres or light games machines. Basically, AMD can't compete with Intel for high-end performance right now and they've admitted this. But they've found an edge they can exploit and they're going for it. I think they'll actually do pretty well.

Re: and still they

I agree with you that I would love to see AMD matching Intel chips at the high-performance end, but it's not going to happen in the immediate future. What AMD are doing, and they've been open about this, is taking on Intel at the medium to low end. And they have the better solutions here! Bulldozer / Piledriver architecture is very well suited to the server market, being extremely paralllel. The APU designs provide integrated graphics in a way that Intel simply cannot match. And that gives them a massive edge in ultraportables, tablets and home computers other than the enthusiast market. Yes, a hard-core gamer with lots of money is going to have the latest separate graphics card, but right now I can buy a motherboard with onboard processor and integrated graphics for £100. And it's capable of games playing, HDMI output, SATA 6Gb/s, et al. Intel just can't match AMD for anything other than the enthusiast or very high performance market, where they win. Even my six-core AMD 1100T is plenty powerful enough for all my needs outside 3D modelling, and I run two Linux VM's within Windows 7 on it!

So we might see AMD best Intel in performance some day, but right now they're focusing on what they need to do which is besting Intel at the middle and low-end market which is probably larger anyway. If AMD can get their production problems sorted and actually meet demand, then I think they're going to do great. Bulldozer is a 1st gen of an actual new design, not another iteration of an old one. So it's had a few bumps, but equally it has a lot more room to grow and I think it will. I'll probably get one of the Piledrivers when it comes out. That's another nice thing with AMD. The latest chip will just drop right into the same socket my non-Bulldozer chip currently sits on: no m/board or memory replacement. Another big saving! :)