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Intel's pants seemed to be glued to their for pretty much the whole run of the Pentium 4. AMD invented the 64 bti x86 and crushed Itanium during this time. Then

by sqeaky 9y ago

Intel's pants seemed to be glued to their for pretty much the whole run of the Pentium 4. AMD invented the 64 bti x86 and crushed Itanium during this time. Then Intel sorted their problems out and we saw Core 2. They haven't let up on incremental advances since and AMD dropped the ball a few times. Pricing seems to be Intel's biggest problem today. With AMD stomping them on price for performance I am curious what Intel will do over the next year. Intel just needs to keep releasing solid products at slightly reduced prices and they will be fine. Likely they won't be happy with that and they take some risks. They could release another Itanium, fail with another Larrabee or release something that we all hail as the spritua; successor to Core or the Pentium. I hope both companies continue to do well, the only better thing for industry would be a third major CPU vendor popping up with their own innovations.

lawrenceyan 9y ago
Intel has way bigger problems to deal with in the shift from CPU to GPU computation that's been happening these past few years, which is really starting to ramp now with the increasing advent of neural networks being practically used. I think AMD is in a much better position longer term not just aside from it hitting the mark with its upcoming CPU architecture release, but really because it has an additionally strong GPU department along side that. We've pretty much reached the limit in terms of single core CPU performance, though I'm sure quantum breakthroughs will happen at some point. For now though, the next 5-10 years will be centered around increasing core counts and minimizing overhead resulting from that in CPUs along with GPUs. Assuming AMD can execute, they are perfectly poised within both industries against Intel and Nvidia. I posit that the lines will become more and more blurred as time goes in relation to "CPU" versus "GPU", with something akin to AMD's APU offerings or Intel's Iris integrated graphics. I wonder what Nvidia will do in terms of direction whether going further all in on pure GPU offerings or look to potentiallly acquire/be acquired. Something with ARM maybe? Whatever happens, you're definitely right that these are exciting times right now.
- sqeaky 9y ago
  I mostly agree that Intel has a two pronged problem. Will CPUs become a commodity when GPUs are where the real competition is at? What does Intel look like in that world? Could Nvidia make a "good enough" CPU?
  - lawrenceyan 9y ago
    Yeah, that's why I think if AMD can execute, they're going to be in an extremely strong position within the next few years. There definitely was a time when AMD was a mess internally, but it really seems like they've managed to gather their proverbial shit together both in their engineering and management sides. AMD is for sure a sleeping giant. Let's just hope they don't forget to wake up haha.

by sqeaky 9y ago

lawrenceyan 9y ago

Intel has way bigger problems to deal with in the shift from CPU to GPU computation that's been happening these past few years, which is really starting to ramp now with the increasing advent of neural networks being practically used. I think AMD is in a much better position longer term not just aside from it hitting the mark with its upcoming CPU architecture release, but really because it has an additionally strong GPU department along side that. We've pretty much reached the limit in terms of single core CPU performance, though I'm sure quantum breakthroughs will happen at some point. For now though, the next 5-10 years will be centered around increasing core counts and minimizing overhead resulting from that in CPUs along with GPUs. Assuming AMD can execute, they are perfectly poised within both industries against Intel and Nvidia. I posit that the lines will become more and more blurred as time goes in relation to "CPU" versus "GPU", with something akin to AMD's APU offerings or Intel's Iris integrated graphics. I wonder what Nvidia will do in terms of direction whether going further all in on pure GPU offerings or look to potentiallly acquire/be acquired. Something with ARM maybe? Whatever happens, you're definitely right that these are exciting times right now.

sqeaky 9y ago
I mostly agree that Intel has a two pronged problem. Will CPUs become a commodity when GPUs are where the real competition is at? What does Intel look like in that world? Could Nvidia make a "good enough" CPU?
- lawrenceyan 9y ago
  Yeah, that's why I think if AMD can execute, they're going to be in an extremely strong position within the next few years. There definitely was a time when AMD was a mess internally, but it really seems like they've managed to gather their proverbial shit together both in their engineering and management sides. AMD is for sure a sleeping giant. Let's just hope they don't forget to wake up haha.