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I wouldn't say AMD is closing the gap in CPUs. They're ahead of Intel and are widening that lead. For whatever reason, Nvidia hasn't stagnated the way Intel ha

I wouldn't say AMD is closing the gap in CPUs. They're ahead of Intel and are widening that lead. For whatever reason, Nvidia hasn't stagnated the way Intel has. Nvidia has continued rapid progress in GPUs even though they have a dominant position (and a near monopoly in the datacenter). Perhaps because they don't have as much of a lead as Intel used to? Intel was a monopoly, plain and simple, but AMD has always been a contender when it comes to GPUs.

neogodless 8y ago
The market made it pretty clear that as long as Nvidia was increasing performance substantially with each release, they could collect a healthy margin of profit. There was no incentive to artificially slow down their progress. (Additionally, the benefits of GPU power were clear to gamers, and new benefits from parallel processing units became apparent in the areas of cryptocurrency and machine learning.) Intel, however, ran into engineering issues with their process improvement, while having limited market-driven incentive to spend and innovate improvements to their efficiency (IPC) beyond a certain level (or to increase core count.) So their "tick-tock" cycle was broken.
- lozaning 8y ago
  Nvidia came to my place of work to do a presentation on the stuff they were working on around AI and Deep learning. More than anything, I took away the message that regardless of how large your budget is, they've got a way for you to spend all it on GPU compute.
gwbas1c 8y ago
> They're ahead of Intel and are widening that lead. For awhile in the early 2000's, AMD's CPUs were supposedly better than Intel's CPUs. There was a lot of doom and gloom predicted. I briefly worked for Intel during this period. At an internal quarterly meeting, they shared some confidential information. It was very simple, and very damning to AMD. (In short, Intel very quickly came back on top for reasons that were very obvious to anyone paying attention.) I'd love to be a fly on the wall at Intel right now. I wonder if they really are falling behind, or if they know some things that we don't?
- ttctciyf 8y ago
  I think your comment would sit better if you indicated the information, since otherwise it just reads "he said, she said, and what they said was FUD."
  - TomVDB 8y ago
    Why does he need to say that? We already have the benefit of being able to look back. Isn't it totally obvious today that Intel had non-Netburst successors to in the pipeline that were superior than anything AMD had to offer?
  - gwbas1c 8y ago
    I'd rather not repeat confidential information in a public forum, but the advantage had very little to do with a specific feature, technology, or performance.
- necubi 8y ago
  I'm sorry, that's deeply revisionist history. Intel kept their dominance through illegal market practices [0], despite AMD's tech advantage at the time. Intel eventually paid out >$1B, but by then the damage was done and it would take AMD almost 10 years to come back. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc._v._Intel_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc._v....
  - TomVDB 8y ago
    > I'm sorry, that's deeply revisionist history. Intel kept their dominance through illegal market practices [0], despite AMD's tech advantage at the time. While that may be true at the time, it doesn't negate the point that Intel knew internally, long before others, that technically superior solutions where coming. And, of course, that's exactly what happened.
    - lovich 8y ago
      Are you skipping over the part about illegal business practices that have nothing to do with the technology?
sliken 8y ago
Nvidia hasn't? Looks like the big PR push for the GTX 20X0 has turned into double the price and 15% increase in performance on the average game.
- slivym 8y ago
  Well yeah, specifically the gaming sector seems to be driven by huge margins for tiny gains. The volume production will go to industry.
zanny 8y ago
AMD is still behind per core in both clocks and per clock performance. Intel has demonstrated the ability to just keep pushing cores to match AMDs largest offerings by just jacking up architectures they have been milking cheap for high margins for years. TSMCs 7nm node will be the first legitimate tech advantage over Intel and if Intel does get their act in gear and manages to deploy their 10nm next year they will at least keep parity. I am a huge AMD fan and will almost certainly be considering a Zen 2 build next year (though the fact I can disable Intel ME and can't remove AMD PSP will temper my interest) but thats more to support the underdog and get better value for money than getting the absolute best possible performance.
- astrodust 8y ago
  Intel has been the undisputed champion of process since the 80486 days so it's surprising to see how badly they're scrambling to hit even 10nm, let alone 7nm. I would never have bet money that the tiny little CPU designed by Acorn Computers that ended up powering the Newton would be the first CPU to jump two nodes ahead of Intel in terms of process, but here we are. ARM's doing great work and I hope they continue to push core counts to even more ridiculous levels.
  - slivym 8y ago
    It's 'let alone'
    - astrodust 8y ago
      Fixed?
  - innocenat 8y ago
    You know that Intel 10 is roughly the same, if not better than TSMC 7, right?
    - astrodust 8y ago
      When Intel ships a consumer part at 10nm we'll talk. Until then TSMC is ahead because they're shipping. The current generation i9 processors are all 14nm.
belltaco 8y ago
>I wouldn't say AMD is closing the gap in CPUs. They're ahead of Intel and are widening that lead. Intel is still king in high-end gaming performance, albeit not as much as Nvidia is ahead of AMD in GPUs.
- cgag 8y ago
  When I built my PC it seemed like Intel had a pretty small single core edge but amd had twice the cores per dollar. Easy choice if you do anything but gaming imo. I really hope they catch up the GPU space soon.
  - blackstrips 8y ago
    Interesting enough, a lot of productivity PCs still go for Intel in the form of the 18-core i9-7980XE. AMD isn’t necessarily a shoe-in in productivity either.
    - electrograv 8y ago
      “A lot of productivity PC” builds are going for $1700 Intel CPUs... really? Even if the $1700-CPU PC market was really popular, tell me: why would they choose the slower of the $1700 CPUs, other than corrupt or beurocrafic business practices? And don’t try to argue how Intel’s $1700 18-core CPU is faster than AMD’s similarly priced 32-core CPU because Intel’s has slightly faster per-core performance. Such an argument would be absolutely absurd: the point of an 18-32 core CPU is NOT the single threaded performance :)
      - blackstrips 8y ago
        This guy uses it: https://youtu.be/jweQNDCe218 https://youtu.be/jweQNDCe218 Don’t know about you but his builders actually benchmark the CPUs. Dansgaming uses the 18 core i9 for his streaming box. Not every application a person uses scales to high core counts, in such situations a CPU with good single thread performance (in addition to high core counts) would be beneficial. Cache performance matter too. AMD’s CPUs have a split L3 cache. Some applications might not like that.
commandar 8y ago
>For whatever reason, Nvidia hasn't stagnated the way Intel has. Nvidia doesn't fab their own chips and never had a process lead. People underestimate just how huge a deal Intel's traditional lead in fabrication tech was. I've long argued that the real casualty of Intel's anticompetitive tactics in the early 2000s was AMD being forced to spin off GloFo. Far more than AMD's near term marketshare at the time, it lead to a situation where AMD couldn't really even fall back to their traditional position of competing on price at the low end of the market and played a direct hand in Intel's decade-plus domination of the market.
- ksec 8y ago
  >Nvidia doesn't fab their own chips and never had a process lead. I would argue that is nothing to do with Intel stagnation. Look at Intel's leadership and management. Look at Jensen Wong. The last time Intel had any energy at management level were Pat Gelsinger, and they pushed him out.

neogodless 8y ago

The market made it pretty clear that as long as Nvidia was increasing performance substantially with each release, they could collect a healthy margin of profit. There was no incentive to artificially slow down their progress. (Additionally, the benefits of GPU power were clear to gamers, and new benefits from parallel processing units became apparent in the areas of cryptocurrency and machine learning.) Intel, however, ran into engineering issues with their process improvement, while having limited market-driven incentive to spend and innovate improvements to their efficiency (IPC) beyond a certain level (or to increase core count.) So their "tick-tock" cycle was broken.

lozaning 8y ago
Nvidia came to my place of work to do a presentation on the stuff they were working on around AI and Deep learning. More than anything, I took away the message that regardless of how large your budget is, they've got a way for you to spend all it on GPU compute.

gwbas1c 8y ago

> They're ahead of Intel and are widening that lead. For awhile in the early 2000's, AMD's CPUs were supposedly better than Intel's CPUs. There was a lot of doom and gloom predicted. I briefly worked for Intel during this period. At an internal quarterly meeting, they shared some confidential information. It was very simple, and very damning to AMD. (In short, Intel very quickly came back on top for reasons that were very obvious to anyone paying attention.) I'd love to be a fly on the wall at Intel right now. I wonder if they really are falling behind, or if they know some things that we don't?

ttctciyf 8y ago
I think your comment would sit better if you indicated the information, since otherwise it just reads "he said, she said, and what they said was FUD."
- TomVDB 8y ago
  Why does he need to say that? We already have the benefit of being able to look back. Isn't it totally obvious today that Intel had non-Netburst successors to in the pipeline that were superior than anything AMD had to offer?
- gwbas1c 8y ago
  I'd rather not repeat confidential information in a public forum, but the advantage had very little to do with a specific feature, technology, or performance.
necubi 8y ago
I'm sorry, that's deeply revisionist history. Intel kept their dominance through illegal market practices [0], despite AMD's tech advantage at the time. Intel eventually paid out >$1B, but by then the damage was done and it would take AMD almost 10 years to come back. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc._v._Intel_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc._v....
- TomVDB 8y ago
  > I'm sorry, that's deeply revisionist history. Intel kept their dominance through illegal market practices [0], despite AMD's tech advantage at the time. While that may be true at the time, it doesn't negate the point that Intel knew internally, long before others, that technically superior solutions where coming. And, of course, that's exactly what happened.
  - lovich 8y ago
    Are you skipping over the part about illegal business practices that have nothing to do with the technology?

sliken 8y ago

Nvidia hasn't? Looks like the big PR push for the GTX 20X0 has turned into double the price and 15% increase in performance on the average game.

slivym 8y ago
Well yeah, specifically the gaming sector seems to be driven by huge margins for tiny gains. The volume production will go to industry.

zanny 8y ago

AMD is still behind per core in both clocks and per clock performance. Intel has demonstrated the ability to just keep pushing cores to match AMDs largest offerings by just jacking up architectures they have been milking cheap for high margins for years. TSMCs 7nm node will be the first legitimate tech advantage over Intel and if Intel does get their act in gear and manages to deploy their 10nm next year they will at least keep parity. I am a huge AMD fan and will almost certainly be considering a Zen 2 build next year (though the fact I can disable Intel ME and can't remove AMD PSP will temper my interest) but thats more to support the underdog and get better value for money than getting the absolute best possible performance.

astrodust 8y ago
Intel has been the undisputed champion of process since the 80486 days so it's surprising to see how badly they're scrambling to hit even 10nm, let alone 7nm. I would never have bet money that the tiny little CPU designed by Acorn Computers that ended up powering the Newton would be the first CPU to jump two nodes ahead of Intel in terms of process, but here we are. ARM's doing great work and I hope they continue to push core counts to even more ridiculous levels.
- slivym 8y ago
  It's 'let alone'
  - astrodust 8y ago
    Fixed?
- innocenat 8y ago
  You know that Intel 10 is roughly the same, if not better than TSMC 7, right?
  - astrodust 8y ago
    When Intel ships a consumer part at 10nm we'll talk. Until then TSMC is ahead because they're shipping. The current generation i9 processors are all 14nm.

belltaco 8y ago

>I wouldn't say AMD is closing the gap in CPUs. They're ahead of Intel and are widening that lead. Intel is still king in high-end gaming performance, albeit not as much as Nvidia is ahead of AMD in GPUs.

cgag 8y ago
When I built my PC it seemed like Intel had a pretty small single core edge but amd had twice the cores per dollar. Easy choice if you do anything but gaming imo. I really hope they catch up the GPU space soon.
- blackstrips 8y ago
  Interesting enough, a lot of productivity PCs still go for Intel in the form of the 18-core i9-7980XE. AMD isn’t necessarily a shoe-in in productivity either.
  - electrograv 8y ago
    “A lot of productivity PC” builds are going for $1700 Intel CPUs... really? Even if the $1700-CPU PC market was really popular, tell me: why would they choose the slower of the $1700 CPUs, other than corrupt or beurocrafic business practices? And don’t try to argue how Intel’s $1700 18-core CPU is faster than AMD’s similarly priced 32-core CPU because Intel’s has slightly faster per-core performance. Such an argument would be absolutely absurd: the point of an 18-32 core CPU is NOT the single threaded performance :)
    - blackstrips 8y ago
      This guy uses it: https://youtu.be/jweQNDCe218 https://youtu.be/jweQNDCe218 Don’t know about you but his builders actually benchmark the CPUs. Dansgaming uses the 18 core i9 for his streaming box. Not every application a person uses scales to high core counts, in such situations a CPU with good single thread performance (in addition to high core counts) would be beneficial. Cache performance matter too. AMD’s CPUs have a split L3 cache. Some applications might not like that.

commandar 8y ago

>For whatever reason, Nvidia hasn't stagnated the way Intel has. Nvidia doesn't fab their own chips and never had a process lead. People underestimate just how huge a deal Intel's traditional lead in fabrication tech was. I've long argued that the real casualty of Intel's anticompetitive tactics in the early 2000s was AMD being forced to spin off GloFo. Far more than AMD's near term marketshare at the time, it lead to a situation where AMD couldn't really even fall back to their traditional position of competing on price at the low end of the market and played a direct hand in Intel's decade-plus domination of the market.

ksec 8y ago
>Nvidia doesn't fab their own chips and never had a process lead. I would argue that is nothing to do with Intel stagnation. Look at Intel's leadership and management. Look at Jensen Wong. The last time Intel had any energy at management level were Pat Gelsinger, and they pushed him out.