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And they're about to drop their new 24 & 32-core threadripper CPUs in a few weeks, for which Intel has no economically viable response. AMD is going is going to

And they're about to drop their new 24 & 32-core threadripper CPUs in a few weeks, for which Intel has no economically viable response. AMD is going is going to crush their earning reports for the next few quarters.

zaarn 8y ago
Well, Intel does want to put out the 28 core i9 eventually. Hopefully with a free industrial chiller.
- mcny 8y ago
  This is what I don’t understand. I thought all Intel has to do is to price its offerings cheaper to become competitive with AMD. They have the margins, don’t they? Or is it not possible to lower prices? From all I’ve read it feels like Intel dug itself into a hole with price segmentation but that means it can dig itself out by simply not being as greedy?
  - zaarn 8y ago
    This is speculation to some extend, but I don't think it'll be that easy. Intel does have margins on their products but at the same time, the products are still expensive. I fault their production method for that. I bet that even if they sold their CPUs at a loss, AMD could undercut them in the important market segments at minimum. AMD has struck gold with being able to, in Intel's words, glue together a bunch of desktop CPUs. Intel's biggest CPU, a 28 core, is a monolithic die. All in one go. Which means the yields are bad. AMD produces basically 1 die and glues together as needed. The yields here are much better due to the smaller die and being able to use basically any die that has functioning 2 cores. Intel doesn't have a response to that since if their 28 core die has 26 defect cores, they don't have a housing for it to sell in. Their segmentation also means that they don't have compatible sockets in size to even conceivable put the 28 core to use at all. IMO Intel will have to come up with a similarly modular response or reduce their production cost. Of course, Intel has a while, they can idle a few years on marketshare and mindshare before they run a risk of loosing the CPU business (and they sell other silicon too where AMD doesn't compete). So likely, they will be able to do it. Question then is how much marketshare AMD will have eaten by then. (Personally, I hope AMD will release server cpus for the lower market segment, building an Intel-based Server that doesn't have the suck is rather expensive and low-cost baremetal would be a delight for hobbyists and SMB)
    - chemmail 8y ago
      The Zen architecture was built to be able to be glued together with their "Infinity Fabric." That is their trump card. Intels architectures just aren't built with this in mind, so it will be back to the drawing board for them.
    - etaioinshrdlu 8y ago
      The original Core 2 Quad processors were dual-die, and they got a lot of negativity for being a fake quad core... Funny how things change.
      - pantalaimon 8y ago
        My memory is cloudy on this one, but did they not use the Front Side Bus to communicate with each other and thus take a performance penalty?
        skgoa 8y ago
        That seems correct AFAIR.
    - tinus_hn 8y ago
      If one 28 core cpu is likely to have 26 defective cores then yields are going to be bad indeed.
    - cameldrv 8y ago
      What difference does monolithic vs. modular really make? If Intel has a core on their 28 core die that is defective, they just disable it and sell a 27 core chip. Perhaps it's easier for AMD to find 4 8 core chips with no defects than for Intel to find a 28 core chip with no defects, but Intel can just make a 34 core die sold as a 32 core chip with better yields than AMD's 8 core dies.
      - zaarn 8y ago
        There is a huge difference. The number of defects is an average over an area. So if you double your die area then you get double as many defective chips. Making a bigger chip means you throw away more dies. So Intel's 34 Core would be even more expensive to produce. Imagine it like taking a low res photo of a paper with dots drawn on it. The bigger the pixel the bigger the black spots on the paper will be. The higher resolution your camera is, ie the smaller the pixel, the more pixels that aren't black, ie defective silicon. AMD has the advantage here, their 4 core dies are very small so they can produce them with a high yield rate. The defect one with 1 or 2 defect cores but otherwise okay are recycled. Then everything is binned according to their performance (chips can have wildly different performance). Another advantage Intel does not have. If one core on the 28 core chip does not manage to run stable on 2.8 GHz (example if they sold the chip at that) that means either bin it on the next lower frequency to run at or trash the die. For AMD a low running chip means getting it into a lower bin. If they build a 32 core CPU with high core they just need to select from 4 core dies that run fast. The difference here is very surprising, IIRC AMD stated their yield rate is 98%. For comparison, a chip like the 28 core Intel Xeon would be expected to have around 60% if not worse. And Intel can't rebin a bad Xeon for a low power desktop CPU in the lowest market segment since the die is too big for those sockets.
  - adventured 8y ago
    They've got two problems in that scenario. First, anti-competitive. They're a monopolist in microprocessors for desktop / laptop. They've been allowed to retain that monopoly so long as they behave a certain way. They could try to squeeze AMD out of the market with very aggressive price cutting, and that would definitely be viewed as anti-competitive behavior by the US Government (and plausibly the EU and China; China is just starting to see the fruits of a very potent deal with AMD that could revolutionize their ability to build domestic processors to compete with Intel, zero chance they want to see Intel bury AMD now). Second, there are few things investors hate to see more than aggressive margin erosion in a core product. Intel will restrain themselves from using that as a competitive hammer until or unless there are no other options (and by then it may be too late). They have a very large amount of margin to give up, doing so would have very damaging consequences to their stock. Intel's stock was in a pit of hell for 15 years, since the dotcom implosion. They just finally climbed out of that in the last year. They're sporting 25-27% style net income margins, which are classic Intel solid figures. They could smoke AMD any day of the week by smashing their margins, making processors entirely unprofitable for AMD and driving them out of the business, and then raising prices back to where they were. It's likely they simply can't reasonably take the risk entailed in doing that (both regulatory and Wall Street).
  - slivym 8y ago
    There's lots of reasons why cutting margins is a bad idea. Firstly, Intel are meant to maximize share holder value - and reduced margins have a dramatic bad effect on share price, because it's very easy to lose margin but very difficult to regain. Even if they do gain market share by lowering margins, they also ensure that their high cost chips will canabalize their own lower performance chips. It also means that they'll canabalize future sales- if they sell you a 2 core 2GHz processor today, they can sell you a 4 core 2GHz processor in a year. Which is exactly what they've done with Apple, they're basically slowly releasing performance at a given price to ensure a certain refresh cycle. If they give you a 48 core 4GHz processor today they're not going to have anything else to sell you until 2050. Thirdly, if they start competing on Price they have to work against their entire brand as being leaders in the market. You can't say "We produce the top performance chips" and also "Buy this because it's cheaper than the other options". Again, once you have the reputation as the low cost solution, it's very hard to regain the performance lead reputation. Fourthly, a lot of the markets they're in aren't growing so they aren't going to increase total sales much by decreasing the margins, they're just going to make less money on what they do sell. So those lower margins don't really stimulate demand. Finally, Intel has a very strong company brand, but a weak product line brand. Everyone knows Intel - so Intel has to define itself by it's name. It can't say "This is the performance product line", "This is the value product line" because all anyone sees is "This is the Intel product".
    - ahartmetz 8y ago
      Poor Intel, man. Having competition is such a drag.
    - EliRivers 8y ago
      Firstly, Intel are meant to maximize share holder value Their mission statement [0] doesn't even mention shareholders anymore. [0] https://www.intel.co.uk/content/www/uk/en/support/articles/000015119/programs.html https://www.intel.co.uk/content/www/uk/en/support/articles/0... There's no law obliging companies to place "maximising shareholder value" above all else.
      - slivym 8y ago
pantalaimon 8y ago
Intel still has better single core performance which is what is desired by the majority of users. There is not much software yet to take advantage of 24 or 32 cores and single core performance will always be a direct benefit.
- hddherman 8y ago
  This argument is getting very old. Any sources for that first claim? The multithreaded workloads part is correct, but the argument falls apart when you remember that an average user has hundreds of different processes running in the background, or in other words a workload that can handily take advantage of those cores.
  - washadjeffmad 8y ago
    PCMR on Reddit, Intel marketing, and everyone who paid Intel's extreme processor mark-ups because it was "the best money could buy" when they were the biggest game in town and doesn't want to feel like a fool now that they're half the price.
  - redtuesday 8y ago
    Do you mean the single threaded part or that OP claims that it's what most users desire? If it's about the single threaded performance then OPs claim is true. default clocks: https://i.imgur.com/dU3aI35.png https://i.imgur.com/dU3aI35.png normalized clocks: https://i.imgur.com/wg3SQUd.png https://i.imgur.com/wg3SQUd.png (sadly they have not normalized memory clocks) In single threaded games this can be even more apparent. But Intel is mainly faster because of a significant clock advantage. Clock for clock the advantage is small. I'm looking forward to Zen 2 which could allow AMD to close the IPC gap or even get a bit ahead of Intel. Combined with the 7nm process which should allow better clocks it's looking good for AMD. Question is if AMD uses the high performance process which is touted to allow up to 5 ghz [0] at the cost of increased power usage, or if they use the low power process (which is also more affordable). Since Ryzen, Threadripper and Epyc use the same die probably the latter since power consumption is so important in the data center. [0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/12438/the-future-of-silicon-an-exclusive-interview-with-dr-gary-patton-cto-of-globalfoundries https://www.anandtech.com/show/12438/the-future-of-silicon-a...

zaarn 8y ago

Well, Intel does want to put out the 28 core i9 eventually. Hopefully with a free industrial chiller.

mcny 8y ago
This is what I don’t understand. I thought all Intel has to do is to price its offerings cheaper to become competitive with AMD. They have the margins, don’t they? Or is it not possible to lower prices? From all I’ve read it feels like Intel dug itself into a hole with price segmentation but that means it can dig itself out by simply not being as greedy?
- zaarn 8y ago
  This is speculation to some extend, but I don't think it'll be that easy. Intel does have margins on their products but at the same time, the products are still expensive. I fault their production method for that. I bet that even if they sold their CPUs at a loss, AMD could undercut them in the important market segments at minimum. AMD has struck gold with being able to, in Intel's words, glue together a bunch of desktop CPUs. Intel's biggest CPU, a 28 core, is a monolithic die. All in one go. Which means the yields are bad. AMD produces basically 1 die and glues together as needed. The yields here are much better due to the smaller die and being able to use basically any die that has functioning 2 cores. Intel doesn't have a response to that since if their 28 core die has 26 defect cores, they don't have a housing for it to sell in. Their segmentation also means that they don't have compatible sockets in size to even conceivable put the 28 core to use at all. IMO Intel will have to come up with a similarly modular response or reduce their production cost. Of course, Intel has a while, they can idle a few years on marketshare and mindshare before they run a risk of loosing the CPU business (and they sell other silicon too where AMD doesn't compete). So likely, they will be able to do it. Question then is how much marketshare AMD will have eaten by then. (Personally, I hope AMD will release server cpus for the lower market segment, building an Intel-based Server that doesn't have the suck is rather expensive and low-cost baremetal would be a delight for hobbyists and SMB)
  - chemmail 8y ago
    The Zen architecture was built to be able to be glued together with their "Infinity Fabric." That is their trump card. Intels architectures just aren't built with this in mind, so it will be back to the drawing board for them.
  - etaioinshrdlu 8y ago
    The original Core 2 Quad processors were dual-die, and they got a lot of negativity for being a fake quad core... Funny how things change.
    - pantalaimon 8y ago
      My memory is cloudy on this one, but did they not use the Front Side Bus to communicate with each other and thus take a performance penalty?
      - skgoa 8y ago
        That seems correct AFAIR.
  - tinus_hn 8y ago
    If one 28 core cpu is likely to have 26 defective cores then yields are going to be bad indeed.
  - cameldrv 8y ago
    What difference does monolithic vs. modular really make? If Intel has a core on their 28 core die that is defective, they just disable it and sell a 27 core chip. Perhaps it's easier for AMD to find 4 8 core chips with no defects than for Intel to find a 28 core chip with no defects, but Intel can just make a 34 core die sold as a 32 core chip with better yields than AMD's 8 core dies.
    - zaarn 8y ago
      There is a huge difference. The number of defects is an average over an area. So if you double your die area then you get double as many defective chips. Making a bigger chip means you throw away more dies. So Intel's 34 Core would be even more expensive to produce. Imagine it like taking a low res photo of a paper with dots drawn on it. The bigger the pixel the bigger the black spots on the paper will be. The higher resolution your camera is, ie the smaller the pixel, the more pixels that aren't black, ie defective silicon. AMD has the advantage here, their 4 core dies are very small so they can produce them with a high yield rate. The defect one with 1 or 2 defect cores but otherwise okay are recycled. Then everything is binned according to their performance (chips can have wildly different performance). Another advantage Intel does not have. If one core on the 28 core chip does not manage to run stable on 2.8 GHz (example if they sold the chip at that) that means either bin it on the next lower frequency to run at or trash the die. For AMD a low running chip means getting it into a lower bin. If they build a 32 core CPU with high core they just need to select from 4 core dies that run fast. The difference here is very surprising, IIRC AMD stated their yield rate is 98%. For comparison, a chip like the 28 core Intel Xeon would be expected to have around 60% if not worse. And Intel can't rebin a bad Xeon for a low power desktop CPU in the lowest market segment since the die is too big for those sockets.
- adventured 8y ago
  They've got two problems in that scenario. First, anti-competitive. They're a monopolist in microprocessors for desktop / laptop. They've been allowed to retain that monopoly so long as they behave a certain way. They could try to squeeze AMD out of the market with very aggressive price cutting, and that would definitely be viewed as anti-competitive behavior by the US Government (and plausibly the EU and China; China is just starting to see the fruits of a very potent deal with AMD that could revolutionize their ability to build domestic processors to compete with Intel, zero chance they want to see Intel bury AMD now). Second, there are few things investors hate to see more than aggressive margin erosion in a core product. Intel will restrain themselves from using that as a competitive hammer until or unless there are no other options (and by then it may be too late). They have a very large amount of margin to give up, doing so would have very damaging consequences to their stock. Intel's stock was in a pit of hell for 15 years, since the dotcom implosion. They just finally climbed out of that in the last year. They're sporting 25-27% style net income margins, which are classic Intel solid figures. They could smoke AMD any day of the week by smashing their margins, making processors entirely unprofitable for AMD and driving them out of the business, and then raising prices back to where they were. It's likely they simply can't reasonably take the risk entailed in doing that (both regulatory and Wall Street).
- slivym 8y ago
  There's lots of reasons why cutting margins is a bad idea. Firstly, Intel are meant to maximize share holder value - and reduced margins have a dramatic bad effect on share price, because it's very easy to lose margin but very difficult to regain. Even if they do gain market share by lowering margins, they also ensure that their high cost chips will canabalize their own lower performance chips. It also means that they'll canabalize future sales- if they sell you a 2 core 2GHz processor today, they can sell you a 4 core 2GHz processor in a year. Which is exactly what they've done with Apple, they're basically slowly releasing performance at a given price to ensure a certain refresh cycle. If they give you a 48 core 4GHz processor today they're not going to have anything else to sell you until 2050. Thirdly, if they start competing on Price they have to work against their entire brand as being leaders in the market. You can't say "We produce the top performance chips" and also "Buy this because it's cheaper than the other options". Again, once you have the reputation as the low cost solution, it's very hard to regain the performance lead reputation. Fourthly, a lot of the markets they're in aren't growing so they aren't going to increase total sales much by decreasing the margins, they're just going to make less money on what they do sell. So those lower margins don't really stimulate demand. Finally, Intel has a very strong company brand, but a weak product line brand. Everyone knows Intel - so Intel has to define itself by it's name. It can't say "This is the performance product line", "This is the value product line" because all anyone sees is "This is the Intel product".
  - ahartmetz 8y ago
    Poor Intel, man. Having competition is such a drag.
  - EliRivers 8y ago
    Firstly, Intel are meant to maximize share holder value Their mission statement [0] doesn't even mention shareholders anymore. [0] https://www.intel.co.uk/content/www/uk/en/support/articles/000015119/programs.html https://www.intel.co.uk/content/www/uk/en/support/articles/0... There's no law obliging companies to place "maximising shareholder value" above all else.
    - slivym 8y ago

pantalaimon 8y ago

Intel still has better single core performance which is what is desired by the majority of users. There is not much software yet to take advantage of 24 or 32 cores and single core performance will always be a direct benefit.

hddherman 8y ago
This argument is getting very old. Any sources for that first claim? The multithreaded workloads part is correct, but the argument falls apart when you remember that an average user has hundreds of different processes running in the background, or in other words a workload that can handily take advantage of those cores.
- washadjeffmad 8y ago
  PCMR on Reddit, Intel marketing, and everyone who paid Intel's extreme processor mark-ups because it was "the best money could buy" when they were the biggest game in town and doesn't want to feel like a fool now that they're half the price.
- redtuesday 8y ago
  Do you mean the single threaded part or that OP claims that it's what most users desire? If it's about the single threaded performance then OPs claim is true. default clocks: https://i.imgur.com/dU3aI35.png https://i.imgur.com/dU3aI35.png normalized clocks: https://i.imgur.com/wg3SQUd.png https://i.imgur.com/wg3SQUd.png (sadly they have not normalized memory clocks) In single threaded games this can be even more apparent. But Intel is mainly faster because of a significant clock advantage. Clock for clock the advantage is small. I'm looking forward to Zen 2 which could allow AMD to close the IPC gap or even get a bit ahead of Intel. Combined with the 7nm process which should allow better clocks it's looking good for AMD. Question is if AMD uses the high performance process which is touted to allow up to 5 ghz [0] at the cost of increased power usage, or if they use the low power process (which is also more affordable). Since Ryzen, Threadripper and Epyc use the same die probably the latter since power consumption is so important in the data center. [0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/12438/the-future-of-silicon-an-exclusive-interview-with-dr-gary-patton-cto-of-globalfoundries https://www.anandtech.com/show/12438/the-future-of-silicon-a...