So MS has interest in AMD. And seems like that is bought cheaper then Minecraft.
Crazy times, isn’t it.
Well, Minecraft comes with a steady supply of money. AMD is currently a sink-hole for cash.
I’m just not sure what AMD can do to get back in the game. At least their GPUs are still almost at parity with Nvidia GPUs, although the elastic is starting to stretch. It’s snapped completely with its CPUs. If MS have a large pot of cash, great. Maybe something can be done.
However, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that this is just a way to ensure the supply of AMD chips in its console, and perhaps cutting out Sony.
Yes. Though I don’t get why AMD has let its CPU buisness slip this way. If they can make good GPUs they surely are able to create CPU silicon thats worth buying. It would be grewsome if there is only one company left making desktop CPUs, one can imagine what happens if a monopole is created.
Or maybe desktops switch to ARM too.
I don’t know if that’s true any more either. It used to be that Nvidia’s cards were generally superior, but AMD/ATI beat them out on value for money. Even that isn’t true any more given how cheap the GTX900s are. Nvidia’s next set of hardware is also rumoured to be hefty step up from these too.
AMD/ATI may need to shift into the mobile and console hardware market entirely. This would be terrible for the PC, since there would no longer be any competitor. Worse if MS acquire them - they’d have incentive to stop their future OSs working with Intel / Nvidia hardware 
You all have to remember that AMD has High Bandwidth Memory. Nvidia cant even use the first 4 gig version let alone the 16/32 gig versions of hbm. It and it’s mantle api has proven amd to be a huge contender. Vicariously amd is going to boost nvidia’s cards performance thanks to dx12 and vulkan both stemming from mantle roots. Plus look at their apu’s, just wait until an apu with hbm comes out that’s a perfect chip for a console/phone/tablet ect ect. Microsoft could use amd to there benefit quite well.
Nvidia’s 1000 series will also use HBM, but at present it’s irrelevant; Nvidia GPUs still massively outperform AMDs current offerings.
Microsoft shouldn’t be allowed to acquire AMD. It essentially allows them to create a hardware and software monopoly.
Mantle is dead, and as far as HBM goes, in the benchmarks of AMD’s new GPU’s it hasn’t made much of a difference, the Fury X is priced the same as the GTX 980 Ti yet it usually performs as well or slightly worse.
Nvidia will be using hbm (the 4gb version) in 2016 only if there is enough produced. I think both of you should actually take a look at what hbm is. its not about out performance, it’s about putting that ram on the interposer directly next to the gpu die. that it self is the important part of hbm.
do you notice the size difference of a 980ti and a furyx ? regardless of thermal design power,
that furyx is insane for the space it takes up, a 980ti is almost twice the size.
Mantle is dead yes, but reread what i said “Vicariously amd is going to boost nvidia’s cards performance thanks to dx12 and vulkan both stemming from mantle roots.” no where did i say mantle was alive, both dx12 and vulkan took from mantle in huge ways.
If you think boosting your competitors in huge ways is a success, we have very different definitions of success! 
Also, I don’t think AMD APUs are going to be a winner for phones and tablets. The power requirements are whole orders of magnitude apart.
As an on-going company, AMD is betting the farm on Zen. I hope it is a success.
Yep same here 