I'm a person who has had all kind of hardware over the years running a wide variety of operating systems. I like to think every hardware type, every operating system has something that makes it unique or worth using. That may or may not always be true, but that is my mindset.
I think that many hardware and gaming enthusiasts are very down on AMD because of the products they have released over the past 2 or 3 years. They feel "let down" because of performance issues that have plagued the new (young) architecture that AMD is pursuing.
I had been (primarily) an Intel CPU enthusiast for many years and despite a foray into AMD with a Phenom, I remained convinced that Intel had it right and they were going to continue to dominate and eradicate all other CPU designers / manufacturers. A little extreme, I know. But when AMD began talking about "Bulldozer" and the new architecture I became intrigued. Still, it was NEW and had not been tested so I held off and stayed with Intel. I was, in fact, glad that I did because the performance levels of Bulldozer were a step backward as far as practical applications go. Despite that I held onto the idea of the direction CPUs were heading in regards to distributing processing over more threads and when Piledriver arrived I took the plunge.
But I did so KNOWING that Piledriver would give way to Steamroller, and then to Excavator. But it hasn't. Instead AMD ran into manufacturing issues (moving from 32nm to 28nm die) and partway through decided to restructure and refocus. My AM3+ platform suddenly became obsolete. I wasn't very happy about THAT but I STILL held out hope... and I am glad that I did.
Tomorrow the FM2+ based A10-7850K APU (more on that later) will be released for sale and I plan on continuing with AMD. When AMD started releasing figures for the new CPU people became excited with some of the numbers being bandied about. Then CES arrived, no new data, but several companies that had the APUs in hand ran some test and posted the results and ... ffffzzzzzzzzzzzzttttttttttttt. The results were terrible. At first glance the new APUs seemed slower than the previous models they were replacing. People began ranting and raving and complaining and swearing and... well you get the picture. The internet was awash with nay-sayers. That has changed today, as other groups have run (and leaked) more extensive and impressive tests indicating that yes, Kaveri is better. Some of the figures appear identical to "Richland" (the APU predecessor) but Kaveri is underclocked... that is, it runs at around 400Mhz slower than Richland. Even running slower, the vast majority of tests have proven out that it is indeed faster than its predecessor and in some cases blows it away. Even compared to an Intel i3 with a discrete graphics card, it wins.
That leads me to what an "APU" is. It stands for "Accelerated Processing Unit". What it is, is a combination of CPU cores and "next generation" GPU cores that are linked by special memory and other architectural mechanics allowing processing to be off-loaded (in some cases) to the GPU when it is not being used. Effectively, instead of having 4 CPU cores and 8 GPU cores you have a combination of 12 cores capable of sharing on-die memory and instructions. AMD has also produced APIs and drivers that will take advantage of their HSA compliant CPU/GPU sharing. This allows the APU to provide exceptional graphics performance (without a discrete graphics card) and also to perform a wide variety of computational algorithms that take advantage of the combination of processing units. If that wasn't enough, they've added sound preprocessing... it provides very good 3D sound to the user (sort of like surround sound, but not really... it manages the sound to produce a very realistic surge and fade depending on how the sound would effectively move around the user).
AMD has taken what started as a very promising (if not implemented well the first time around) idea and forged into something that could very well drive the industry in new directions.
For my part, I plan on building out an FM2+ system, which is risky since FM2+ is already becoming an old architecture and while AMD claims Excavator will be backward compatible, I have to think it very well might NOT be since Intel is quickly advancing the motherboard chipsets to be able to handle the ever increasing bandwidth and speed of PCI, SATA, USB and other bus technologies, especially memory bus technology. So AMD will HAVE to address a new bus architecture and soon if it wants to continue to compete and enjoy any amount of success (and I do believe they will as this APU, while well hyped, seems to be the "real deal" offering very good performance at a decent price).
Going back to my own hardware preferences over the years (as opposed to operating systems) I did have one that thrilled me and that was the Amiga PC. Amiga understood YEARS ago that off-loading functions from the CPU allowed them to split processing and allow chips that specialized to do a far better job than the CPU alone could have done. In a way that is where CPU/GPU/APUs are headed now... but instead of divvying up the processing they are recombining various types of processing units into a single die, all of them able to quickly and efficiently communicate with one another, off-loading math, sound and graphic processing to improve speed and efficiency.
It's an idea that worked well for Amiga, implemented in a far more efficient and powerful way.
To me these are exciting times.
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