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It's amazing how AMD, which once seemed a company on their knees, now seems to be kicking Intel's butt, and I find myself worrying about Intel now. Why do they

It's amazing how AMD, which once seemed a company on their knees, now seems to be kicking Intel's butt, and I find myself worrying about Intel now. Why do they seem to be failing on so many projects? Itanium, Larabee, XScale, the Modem Division? Why is one of the world's largest and most successful CPU companies noncompetitive now on pretty much everything, except their mainstay x86 processor, where they seem to be stalling. Is there something wrong with Intel management/culture that's allowing other firms to run rings around them?

vkazanov 7y ago
I don't think a work "failing" is relevant here. The reality is that AMD is still well behind Intel in many, many things. Projects fail. It's expected. The only way to have no failing projects is not to create experimental projects. But AMD is definitely catching up and that's a good thing.
ernst_klim 7y ago
> It's amazing how AMD, which once seemed a company on their knees, now seems to be kicking Intel's butt That's how competition works. You are constantly making decisions, each of which could bury you, even if you was a total winner only yesterday. Intel put its bet on own fab and single die design. AMD outsourced the fab and focused on chiplet design. And AMD gain a benefit. Though Intel still has some advantage, and would move to chiplet design soon most likely, so we would yet see a very tight competition.
beetwenty 7y ago
With respect to their core CPU business, they were executing on a monopoly playbook since the start of the decade - 4 core desktops and 5% generational improvements on the same architecture, every generation - which made them organizationally unfit to stay competitive. When the Ryzen chips first launched they quickly moved to punch up the core counts to keep pace, but were still waiting on their 10nm process to come through, so they ran out of breathing room really quickly. For the past year it's just been "run hotter and engage in FUD", and now that AMD has got onto 7nm process there's really no comparison to be made. Could they have seen it coming? Absolutely, and they could have had a new architecture ready earlier or adjusted their process plans to de-risk, but again, multiple years of uncontested dominance in their main business tends to make things that aren't next quarter top-line a lower priority. And I think that really is at the heart of the issue with their projects failing so frequently. Intel's pursued anti-competitive practices for decades, and when it works, they coast along without urgency, letting marketing call the shots, and when it doesn't they use their economic moat to rush a solution. But this time, with everything running late, Intel is going to face several quarters ahead without having a real response on the CPU front. They are not going anywhere, though. Their foundry channel is needed to meet global demand for new chips - a good deal will still find buyers. They still have plenty of existing agreements to work with, and can negotiate their way through a lean patch. And they have their new GPU stuff coming soon which should hopefully give them a piece of a different market. There will be plenty of stress to re-org along the way, though, so Intel could come out of this looking very different.
- cromwellian 7y ago
  Given the supposed "only the paranoid survive" mantra of Andy Grove, one would have expected them to not be complacent, especially with the Asian silicon fabs eroding their once, core competitive advantage.
  - The_rationalist 7y ago
    It's like Intel executives wanted to give AMD a second chance.
- qubex 7y ago
  Their pipeline has stalled but they’ve got good stuff in the L2 cache.
lm28469 7y ago
> which once seemed a company on their knees Weren't AMD cpus a good alternative to intel for most consumers ? If I remember correctly athlon, phenom, FX were pretty good for the price. Or are you talking about earlier times ? edit: "good alternative" perf/price wise, yes intel used to have the advantage in raw performance but their pricing made AMD cpus look very interesting for most consumers.
- pmjordan 7y ago
  Phenom got soundly beaten by the first few Core i generations (Nehalem, Sandy Bridge) in terms of both peak performance and power efficiency. Bulldozer (The basis for AMD's FX and "A" series CPUs) was mostly a misstep that was doomed to feed the very low end of the market. The only truly successful devices based on it were Xbox One and PS4. (Incidentally, those processors used "Jaguar" cores which evolved from Bulldozer but actually didn't inherit the shared execution units (CMT) that were Bulldozer's headline feature that turned out not to work as well as intended.) So between about 2010 and the introduction of Ryzen in 2017, there really was no alternative to Intel if you were building a PC that was either fast or energy efficient. In terms of performance, the 1000 & 2000 series Ryzens roughly attained parity with Intel, while the 3000 series now pulls ahead in many multithreaded and some singlethreaded disciplines, and definitely has better performance-per-watt under load. Ryzen still draws significantly more power than Intel's CPUs when idle though - the PCIe 4.0 transition has counteracted the improvements from the 7nm shrink in this regard, and the APU variants lagging the GPU-less SKUs by almost a year in terms of process and microarchitecture means you also have to power budget for a discrete GPU, which adds a few idle watts. (The most power efficient at idle Ryzen build I'm aware of is the Asrock DeskMini A300, which uses no chipset, combined with a low end APU - this draws about 7W when idle. In terms of performance and expandability, this system isn't any better than a NUC, which draws somewhat less power when idle. You can't buy a full size A300/X300 motherboard though, for some reason, even though this would actually be quite an interesting setup.)
  - 1996 7y ago
    About the asrock mini, have bios issues been solved? https://www.newegg.com/Product/SingleProductReview?item=N82E16856158064&parentCount=1&TabType=1 https://www.newegg.com/Product/SingleProductReview?item=N82E...
Symmetry 7y ago
According to Charlie yes, Intel does have serious management problems right now. https://semiaccurate.com/2018/06/29/intels-firing-of-ceo-brian-krzanich-is-a-cover-for-deeper-problems/ https://semiaccurate.com/2018/06/29/intels-firing-of-ceo-bri...
robbyt 7y ago
Intel's inertia ran out, and AMD surpassed them because they're actively innovating. This is what happens when an incumbent company delays new products because of mismanagement or to maximize profits. (See also, Apple) A CPU isn't like a database, it's easy for customers to switch to a competitor.

vkazanov 7y ago

I don't think a work "failing" is relevant here. The reality is that AMD is still well behind Intel in many, many things. Projects fail. It's expected. The only way to have no failing projects is not to create experimental projects. But AMD is definitely catching up and that's a good thing.

ernst_klim 7y ago

> It's amazing how AMD, which once seemed a company on their knees, now seems to be kicking Intel's butt That's how competition works. You are constantly making decisions, each of which could bury you, even if you was a total winner only yesterday. Intel put its bet on own fab and single die design. AMD outsourced the fab and focused on chiplet design. And AMD gain a benefit. Though Intel still has some advantage, and would move to chiplet design soon most likely, so we would yet see a very tight competition.

beetwenty 7y ago

With respect to their core CPU business, they were executing on a monopoly playbook since the start of the decade - 4 core desktops and 5% generational improvements on the same architecture, every generation - which made them organizationally unfit to stay competitive. When the Ryzen chips first launched they quickly moved to punch up the core counts to keep pace, but were still waiting on their 10nm process to come through, so they ran out of breathing room really quickly. For the past year it's just been "run hotter and engage in FUD", and now that AMD has got onto 7nm process there's really no comparison to be made. Could they have seen it coming? Absolutely, and they could have had a new architecture ready earlier or adjusted their process plans to de-risk, but again, multiple years of uncontested dominance in their main business tends to make things that aren't next quarter top-line a lower priority. And I think that really is at the heart of the issue with their projects failing so frequently. Intel's pursued anti-competitive practices for decades, and when it works, they coast along without urgency, letting marketing call the shots, and when it doesn't they use their economic moat to rush a solution. But this time, with everything running late, Intel is going to face several quarters ahead without having a real response on the CPU front. They are not going anywhere, though. Their foundry channel is needed to meet global demand for new chips - a good deal will still find buyers. They still have plenty of existing agreements to work with, and can negotiate their way through a lean patch. And they have their new GPU stuff coming soon which should hopefully give them a piece of a different market. There will be plenty of stress to re-org along the way, though, so Intel could come out of this looking very different.

cromwellian 7y ago
Given the supposed "only the paranoid survive" mantra of Andy Grove, one would have expected them to not be complacent, especially with the Asian silicon fabs eroding their once, core competitive advantage.
- The_rationalist 7y ago
  It's like Intel executives wanted to give AMD a second chance.
qubex 7y ago
Their pipeline has stalled but they’ve got good stuff in the L2 cache.

lm28469 7y ago

> which once seemed a company on their knees Weren't AMD cpus a good alternative to intel for most consumers ? If I remember correctly athlon, phenom, FX were pretty good for the price. Or are you talking about earlier times ? edit: "good alternative" perf/price wise, yes intel used to have the advantage in raw performance but their pricing made AMD cpus look very interesting for most consumers.

pmjordan 7y ago
Phenom got soundly beaten by the first few Core i generations (Nehalem, Sandy Bridge) in terms of both peak performance and power efficiency. Bulldozer (The basis for AMD's FX and "A" series CPUs) was mostly a misstep that was doomed to feed the very low end of the market. The only truly successful devices based on it were Xbox One and PS4. (Incidentally, those processors used "Jaguar" cores which evolved from Bulldozer but actually didn't inherit the shared execution units (CMT) that were Bulldozer's headline feature that turned out not to work as well as intended.) So between about 2010 and the introduction of Ryzen in 2017, there really was no alternative to Intel if you were building a PC that was either fast or energy efficient. In terms of performance, the 1000 & 2000 series Ryzens roughly attained parity with Intel, while the 3000 series now pulls ahead in many multithreaded and some singlethreaded disciplines, and definitely has better performance-per-watt under load. Ryzen still draws significantly more power than Intel's CPUs when idle though - the PCIe 4.0 transition has counteracted the improvements from the 7nm shrink in this regard, and the APU variants lagging the GPU-less SKUs by almost a year in terms of process and microarchitecture means you also have to power budget for a discrete GPU, which adds a few idle watts. (The most power efficient at idle Ryzen build I'm aware of is the Asrock DeskMini A300, which uses no chipset, combined with a low end APU - this draws about 7W when idle. In terms of performance and expandability, this system isn't any better than a NUC, which draws somewhat less power when idle. You can't buy a full size A300/X300 motherboard though, for some reason, even though this would actually be quite an interesting setup.)
- 1996 7y ago
  About the asrock mini, have bios issues been solved? https://www.newegg.com/Product/SingleProductReview?item=N82E16856158064&parentCount=1&TabType=1 https://www.newegg.com/Product/SingleProductReview?item=N82E...

Symmetry 7y ago

According to Charlie yes, Intel does have serious management problems right now. https://semiaccurate.com/2018/06/29/intels-firing-of-ceo-brian-krzanich-is-a-cover-for-deeper-problems/ https://semiaccurate.com/2018/06/29/intels-firing-of-ceo-bri...

robbyt 7y ago

Intel's inertia ran out, and AMD surpassed them because they're actively innovating. This is what happens when an incumbent company delays new products because of mismanagement or to maximize profits. (See also, Apple) A CPU isn't like a database, it's easy for customers to switch to a competitor.