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The fact that Intel can sell their CPU higher price than AMD means that supply is the bottleneck.
by Nokinside 7y ago
The fact that Intel can sell their CPU higher price than AMD means that supply is the bottleneck.
- NeutronStar 7y agoCitation needed.
- kuzimoto 7y agoI believe that AMD relies on another company to produce its CPUs which may limit their supply. If they can't produce enough, and there is still a demand then there will be no choice but to go with Intel. This is some guessing on my part, since I don't have any economic background.
- jason46 7y agoIs it still TMC?
- velox_io 7y agoI don't think it is purely a TSMC supply issue. To put it bluntly; AMD isn't used to selling that many CPUs. Zen 1/+ brought them parity with intel performance-wise (something AMD has been laking for over a decade). It's only with Zen 2/ the 3000 series that AMD has had both core-count and single-threaded. Before you had to choose between lots of slower cores or fewer/ faster cores. I do wonder if the 3900x/ 3950x shortage is at least partially manufactured (they're so hard to get they must be good right?). Intel halved their prices pre-lunch which is something that has never happened before, but they still can't match AMD for price/ performance. AMD has both good CPUs & GPUs (something that is very rare!). Being an owner of an RX 5700, I'm surprised how low the power usage is. If they put a cut-down RX 5000 on a low-power CPU, they could make some decent laptops that don't need dedicated GPUs (memory speed is a bottle-neck especially on a laptop with a single memory channel). That could pose a problem for Intel. I'm actually a little surprised it hasn't been more of a priority for AMD, all Intel can do to compete right now is to literally give their CPU/ APUs away (better to make a loss than lose a customer to AMD). Next year will be a good time to buy a laptop. It looks as though Zen 3 will first launch on laptops, that may pose a problem for Intel...
- arvinsim 7y agoThe Radeon Pro 5000 cards on the new 16" MBPs seem to have some good reviews
- anon73044 7y agoHonestly, I feel that Intel could have the better laptop chips if they get 10nm in a better state. And I say this after building a 3600X +RX 5700 XT desktop this year. Intel's R&D budget is several times larger then AMD's revenue so they'll always be able to squeeze a little more out of their current chips. Could just be a timing issue though. Intel might abandon their current 10nm leaving AMD as the default winner by mid/late 2020. Disclaimer: I'm long on AMD and wishing I bought more 5 years ago.
- dragontamer 7y ago> Intel's R&D budget is several times larger then AMD's revenue so they'll always be able to squeeze a little more out of their current chips. But Intel has to compete with TSMC. Since TSMC is making Apple, AMD, NVidia, and Qualcomm chips, TSMC's R&D Budget seems to have won over in this generation.
- srcmap 7y agoAgree. TSMC amortizes its RD/CapEx/Op costs over Apple, Qualcomm, NVida, Broadcom, Xilinx, etc. Apple, Qualcomm paid for most of the heavy 7nm RD/Capex long before to AMD's 7nm production commitments. AMD basically got the 7nm production advantage without the RISK on Fab investments like Intel. It was good that the AMD 's board had the foresight to divest fab to Global Foundry a few years back. Intel has to amortizes its fab cost over Altera and x86 CPU. Altera part is probably trivial. Intel's huge 10nm investment in RD, Capex depending entirely on one x86 product line to recover. When execute well like 15 years before 2017, it was big advantage. Any execution misses, the FAB RD/Cap cost became a liability. "Only the Paranoid Survive" - Last few years, Intel was definitively not Paranoid enough.
- jcranmer 7y agoThere are only two companies capable of fabricating the most advanced processor technologies: TSMC and Intel. The disaster of 10nm at Intel has meant that all of its product lineup has had to internally compete for 14nm fab space, greatly constraining supply there. Meanwhile, Global Foundries' decision to abandon chasing smaller nodes means that fabrication for pretty literally everybody else has had to compete for space in TSMC, so smartphones, GPUs, CPUs, TPUs, etc. are all vying for the same fabrication capacity. Furthermore, it is extremely expensive--$10 billion or so--to make a new fab, so there are few companies that could even afford to throw money at TSMC to expand production. Put more succinctly: there is literally not enough semiconductor fabrication supply today to meet demand, and the supply is very inelastic.
- sudosysgen 7y agoYou forget Samsung.
- aoeusnth1 7y agoYes, but Samsung’s latest nodes have faced delays, so they are slightly behind TSMC. I believe NVIDIA was hurt by this.
- sudosysgen 7y agoAnd yet they still are ahead of Intel.
- dbuder 7y agoDo you really need a citation for AMD not having the fab capacity to supplant Intel?
- lmilcin 7y agoAs I understand Intel significantly cut their prices due to third generation Ryzen.
- Nokinside 7y agoThey cut prices, but that was not what I was saying. They don't have to undercut AMD to sell CPU's if they can deliver more volume. They may cut prices for total $3 billion worth, but they start from so high profit levels ($21 billion) that they can outmuscle AMD financially and stay profitable.
- Fjolsvith 7y agoBut who isn't going to wait for their Ryzen when Intel still costs more and is riddled with performance issues.
- Nokinside 7y agoEveryone who wants to sell product with processors. Data center upgrades etc. Retail market is insignificantly small. AMD can win it but it does not matter in Intel vs AMD fight.
- snovv_crash 7y agoRetail market is where the developers are. Once you win developer mindshare, it turns into a trickle-up exercise and before you know it a single developer workstation turns into a datacenter.
- anon73044 7y ago>Everyone who wants to sell product with processors. Data center upgrades etc. Not when Speculative Execution mitigations cut performance literally in half in some cases.
- zanny 7y agoYou can only play financial trickery with obsoleted the h for so long and Intel's entire product stack is dead in the water except for low cost consumer class CPUs with the lowest realtime latencies in the world (and those are mostly used for gaming). At no price point are they competitive with AMDs offerings and they kind of cursed themselves with their legacy of inflated unchanging prices - they tear apart a decade of profit margin and consumer confidence to shortchange their product stack into staying relevant. C levels at Intel must still be dissatisfied with this outcome.
- anon73044 7y agoIntel has been having supply issue all year, to the point that it is and will have an effect on their bottom line. https://www.techspot.com/amp/news/82415-over-year-later-intel-cpu-shortage-expected-last.html https://www.techspot.com/amp/news/82415-over-year-later-inte... https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/27/intel-chip-shortage-pulls-down-pc-makers-revenue-expectations.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/27/intel-chip-shortage-pulls-do...
- ksec 7y agoThat is the problem, AMD is not taking all the advantage of Intel's misstep. In that regards I think the Sales and Marketing department in AMD is no where near Intel's. I think it has to do with AMD being way too conservatives with their estimate and not booking enough 7nm Capacity. Now we know AWS is using those 7nm Capacity as well for AWS, and given Amazon has shown they intend to have all their SaaS running on their ARM CPU, I think their order are going to be big. Edit: One thing I forgot was It could also be GF's problem where they cant keep up with the I/O Die.