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I can't imagine what higher ups in Intel are feeling about the current state of things especially since they are spending nearly 10x on R+D as AMD is($1.5b AMD[

I can't imagine what higher ups in Intel are feeling about the current state of things especially since they are spending nearly 10x on R+D as AMD is($1.5b AMD[0] vs $13.1b Intel[1]). Of course AMD doesn't need to spend R+D money on the process they're using from TSMC although I'm sure some of the money they're handing over to them goes to R+D. I'd love to be a fly on the wall in the board meeting room. [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/267873/amds-expenditure-on-research-and-development-since-2001/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/267873/amds-expenditure-... [1] https://www.investopedia.com/news/amazons-23b-rd-budget-sets-record-recode/ https://www.investopedia.com/news/amazons-23b-rd-budget-sets...

beardedscotsman 6y ago
Realise that intel, has not been releasing chips with any major improvement either. They have delayed time and time again new chips and designs on purpose because they haven’t had the competition to be go up against. Intel performance will always be one step ahead of AMD, intel have faster tech in their pocket waiting to be released.
- kogepathic 6y ago
  > Intel performance will always be one step ahead of AMD, intel have faster tech in their pocket waiting to be released. Citation very much needed. Show me an Intel CPU with PCIe 4.0 or with the performance per watt of the latest AMD Ryzen mobile chips. You can't, because to date they don't exist. I think if they had anything in reserve it would have been released by now, because AMD is trouncing them in reviews.
  - snazz 6y ago
    If they were to have a revolutionary technology that they haven't released yet, they'd release it as soon as their OEM and enterprise sales actually started to take a nosedive. Even though PC enthusiasts are outspoken about it, Intel is still doing just fine in their much higher-volume areas.
    - ashtonkem 6y ago
      Isn’t there rumblings of AMD starting to make headway in data centers?
      - erinnh 6y ago
        I can speak only about our smallish datacenter (1TB Core Bandwidth concurrent) and we definitely have been moving towards more AMD in the past year or two. Currently we have roughly a 60/40 AMD/Intel split on new machines.
    - solotronics 6y ago
      they are only doing fine through inertia in enterprise and datacenter
    - willis936 6y ago
      Have you seen the numbers and prices on Epyc Rome? All signs point towards Intel's reign in all areas being over. Short of a miraculous turnaround, Intel won't be competitive in three years. I want Intel to do well, but they've demonstrated over the past ten years that they are not interested in doing well.
- bcrosby95 6y ago
  > They have delayed time and time again new chips and designs on purpose because they haven’t had the competition to be go up against. This just isn't true. When Ryzen first came out Intel was still ahead in many use cases, especially if $$ was no object to you. But after several years AMD is now taking the crown from intel in all areas they compete in. If they really had some magical faster tech Intel would have released it years ago, much less this year, but they haven't. Instead they announce the same old chips then hook them up to industrial strength cooling units to make it look like they can compete with AMD. This isn't the behavior of a company that is just biding its time.
  - ekianjo 6y ago
    AMD seems to have supply issues though. You can have the best chips on the market, if they are out of stock you don't really compete.
    - vlan0 6y ago
      That's not unique to AMD. Intel also goes through periods of supply issues. They've even had processors that basically only shipped on paper.
      - wincy 6y ago
        Yeah, like good luck trying to source a 9900KS for anywhere near MSRP, which was just a polished revised 9900K so Intel could still technically claim the “gaming crown” from AMD.
    - vonmoltke 6y ago
      Whatever supply issues AMD has, I can still get their chips at or below MSRP from a number of vendors. The latest generation of Intel chips, on the other hand, are hard to find and selling at a significant premium where they are available.
    - code_biologist 6y ago
      Have you tried to get your hands on any of the Intel HEDT parts? There's little to no supply and the supply that does exist is heavily marked up. 3950Xs and Threadrippers are in stock everywhere.
- dralley 6y ago
  >They have delayed time and time again new chips and designs on purpose because they haven’t had the competition to be go up against. No, they delayed time and time again because the 10nm process utterly failed to deliver the necessary yields and performance to be viable. It's not some ingenious display of sandbagging - only now in the past year or so has the 10nm process yields risen high enough to make low-power chips viable, and it is still not viable for high-power desktop chips, and probably will never be viable. >Intel performance will always be one step ahead of AMD A completely ridiculous assertion, and one that is already largely false at the present moment. >intel have faster tech in their pocket waiting to be released. Likely true, but only because of their failure to execute on 10nm. CPU designs are closely tied to the process they are designed to be manufactured on -- especially for Intel, who have never been concerned about being too tied to a single manufacturer (since it is themselves). This tight coupling can be good when the process is good, but the failure of 10nm meant that for years and years those architectural improvements you speak of are unshippable and useless. Intel is not completely screwed by any measure, but the idea that they have the situation entirely under control and are intentionally not competing with now-superior AMD chips is entirely ridiculous.
  - throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
    > CPU designs are closely tied to the process they are designed to be manufactured on I really had never imagined this could be so. Could you expand somewhat on why it is? Thanks.
    - anticensor 6y ago
      Hardware has layout constraints just like data have alignment constraints.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  Intel is literally on an older fabrication process right now, they’re on 10nm while AMD is on 7nm. They’re objectively behind.
  - brennanpeterson 6y ago
    That is literally not how process nodes work. They are objectively matched. Nodes mean 3 things: density, elecrical performance (ion, max f, leakage, etc), and processing flexibility (how many supported feature primitives or designs).
    - gowld 6y ago
      AMD and Intel do not use the same node designs.
    - russler23 6y ago
      A generalization, but accurate enough. Disappointing to see it getting downvotes. Intel 10nm and TSMC 7nm have similar characteristics, as a brief Wikipedia search reveals.
  - dralley 6y ago
    You're giving Intel a little too much credit. They're only "on 10nm" for tiny, low-power laptop chips. The yields are reportedly still too low to use it for desktop or server CPUs. Meanwhile in a couple of months AMD will be on 7nm+ (However, it should be said that Intel 10nm is roughly equivalent to TSMC 7nm in terms of density. AMD is still ahead but not by as much as the numbers would imply).
    - ashtonkem 6y ago
      Meanwhile AMD & TSMC are talking about 5nm for their Zen 4 architecture.
  - plasticchris 6y ago
    The nm numbers are marketing. Processes are too nuanced to boil down to a single number.
- rowanG077 6y ago
  Intel has faster tech in their pocket? 5 years ago I would have believed you. But they have seen the AMD zen architecture for years now and they can't meaningfully compete anymore. If they had tech ready to go they would have released it by now to crush AMD.
  - temac 6y ago
    I agree. 5 years ago Intel put Skylake out. This was what they had, and it was great; it was years ahead the competition. They did not have anything else secret even better and ready to go out, because that makes absolutely no sense: if you can crush the competition even more, just do it... After that the story is well known: their microarch were tied to their node, and Intel's 10nm was a failure, and still is not up to what the competition is doing. They started to backport the next microarch to 14 too late IMO. They may release new ones on 14nm; or they may suddenly manage to strongly improve their 10nm (not likely, it is usually very gradual at this stage) And it is again obvious that even in the last 3 years, they had nothing (on the microarch side that they could produce on their mainstream node) they were able to rush as a fallback to counteract Zen, otherwise why would they not have done it? Now they are clearly behind on the process, and on the microarch Zen 2 is good enough and does not need to compete much against Sunny Cove, plus if Intel releases a backport of Sunny Cove for their 14nm it may be against Zen 3...
- dev_tty01 6y ago
  >>intel have faster tech in their pocket waiting to be released. Hmm. I think if Intel had a significant architecture enhancement waiting in the wings we would have seen it by now. They need it badly. I just updated a 2013 quad core laptop with a late 2019 8 core laptop. Tasks that really use the cores are of course faster. Other than that, no substantial performance increase. 7 years and it is just incremental. Their process issues of late are horrific but there is not much happening architecturally either. Sad to see. They just seem a bit lost.
brennanpeterson 6y ago
Take a long view.AMD and others suffered through the 45nm delays at TSMC and they benefit from the acceleration currently. Intel is a very odd company, and for all that there are truly brilliant people there, it feels increadingly like IBM of 2003.
- dralley 6y ago
  TSMC 20nm failed process as well.
  - my123 6y ago
    TSMC 20nm didn't fail, it could be made in volume just fine, even if thermals were a bit disappointing. The bigger TSMC failure was on 32nm, which had to be killed outright.
    - dralley 6y ago
      I just remember that AMD and Nvidia canceled their plans to use 20nm for GPUs and skipped straight to 14/16nm.
- UncleOxidant 6y ago
  Having spent a few years inside of Intel, it's a company paralyzed by meetings and meetings about meetings. People seem to be afraid to make any decisions so they have meetings to talk about the decisions that need to be made and then schedule more meetings to follow up. Working there felt like swimming in molasses. People who come into the company with any experience realize that it's a mess, try to change things in their area, meet resistance and after a while just give up and leave. That's probably why they mostly hire NCGs at this point.
- Rury 6y ago
  >it feels increasingly like IBM of 2003 Probably explained by: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4 On another point. I'm not sure how much this is true, but I've read that most of AMD's chips are made from the same basic building blocks, and their different CPUs are mostly just a matter of how many these blocks are stitched together along with whatever tuning/other hardware. Such a design is probably very scalable, which simplifies manufacturing and reduces costs. Whereas I heard intel chips have more separate customizations requiring more separate tooling for each of their chipsets, which complicates manufacturing...
api 6y ago
The others are being "subsidized" by TSMC's R&D expenditures, which are being amortized across a larger market namely mobile and specialized chips.
mikepurvis 6y ago
I was recently putting together a desktop PC for some light gaming after being out of the market for a long time, and I couldn't believe how incremental Intel's progress has been in the CPU space over the past few years. I know there's a non-trivial mobile performance penalty, but a fourth gen mid-range i5 I got on eBay for $30 has nearly the performance of the 8750H in last year's Dell XPS (my work laptop). Even when you get away from mobile, compare two i7 chips that were released five years apart for basically the same price, and userbenchmark.com shows just a 21% overall performance difference in them: https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-4790-vs-Intel-Core-i7-9700/2293vsm816180 https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-4790-vs-... This windows shrinks even further when you look at what overclockers get out of the older chips with fancy cooling setups. But yeah, when else in the history of personal computing has five years of progress yielded such small gains? I know eventually I'll upgrade my system for real, probably to something AM4-based, but when I saw these numbers, it became a no brainer to just bump up the CPU on an old LGA1150 system I had lying around rather than spend a bunch of money on an all-new motherboard, new RAM, etc.
- dr_zoidberg 6y ago
  Userbenchmark is useless, it can barely compare between Intel microarchs. Best it can do is """help""" compare two processors from the same family. The last big microarch jump for intel was Skylake (6th gen) and then 7, 8, 9 and some of 10th gen (but not all, but they needed "10th gen" for marketing reasons) are just incremental improvemnts over it. So Skylake was about a 15-20% increase in performance (real) but took a few shortcuts (Meltdown and Spectre). From then on, you had a 5-10% performance improvement per generation (let's round it at 7%). That's not bad per se, but it was done out of comfort. The "cursed" 10nm node which never came is also part of the reason why Intel stalled, they insisted on "tick-tock" and were unwilling (or unable?) to deliver a new microarch over 14nm+++, the super refined node (and the extra refinement allowed them to pull the clock higher on each new gen, now alowing those sweet close-to and with this new weird turbo [that seems more marketing than substance] surpass the 5Ghz barrier). And that's how you come to Intel's situation on 2020: no 10nm node, no real new microarch in the last 5 years. Edit: As for why we never saw something like this... I think we never had a situation before where one of the competitors had such an advantage (the microarchs before Zen on AMDs part were bad, and that hit them hard for a long time) that they could pull this duckish moves for so long. For a long time, Intel chose not to improve their offering, because they were so far ahead of competition and they could keep milking the Whatever-Lake microarch family. They'd blame on the difficulty of extracting more IPC, Moores Law coming to an end (or not coming to an end, depending on what marketing was trying to sell). In the end it came to AMD+TSMC offering superb processors for Intel to slash the prices in half, and then still being crushed performance wise, in desktop, server and now mobile too. And all Intel has to show is AVX512, which after having it gatekeeped for years in the server market, they've released on consumer processors - but hey, nobody's using it because there was no support!
newacct583 6y ago
Actually in a relative sense the pandemic clearly helps Intel. Their problem right now is that they have an inferior process and their high margin datacenter parts[1] are in critical danger of facing competition from devices fabbed by TSMC and (to a lesser extent) Samsung. Their offerings in the market now, though, are still winning and Intel is making a ton of money. So the net effect of a downturn is that the future market, the one where AMD is competetive and Intel needs to drop prices, is going to shrink in total dollars. That's a win for Intel, comparatively. It means the window into which AMD could have jumped to steal revenue is smaller, and Intel has more time to catch up. [1] Remember that most of the money in the CPU industry is made in the datacenter. AMD having better desktop parts doesn't affect Intel's bottom line much as long as they remain competitive in servers. (AMD still lags with laptop devices too, which are also a bigger market than desktops).
- kolbe 6y ago
  Why wouldn't data centers switch when they can get more computing power for less energy and at a lower initial price point? That's happening now with the current offerings.
  - newacct583 6y ago
    > Why wouldn't data centers switch when they can get more computing power for less energy and at a lower initial price point? Uh... because their revenues are down 20%, they have a hiring freeze, and are delaying all capital expenditures? That was my point: there may be technical reasons for people to move away from Intel's products. But the economic reality means that fewer customers will.
inteloneoff 6y ago
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- lawfulcactus 6y ago
  Do you have any data to back this up? I should hope people would be embarrassed to post wildly unsubstantiated nonsense under a username linked to them.
  - azinman2 6y ago
    Ya this doesn’t really make any sense to me. Intels attempts at shrinking the node failed due to diversity hires? I have a very hard tome believing this. If you’re capable of working at that level at all, I can’t imagine skin tone or gender is holding you back...
    - deleted 6y ago
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- deleted 6y ago
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ksec 6y ago
While I agree Intel's R&D budget not giving enough returns, this isn't giving a correct perspective on the subject. Intel is Xilinx + AMD ( CPU + GPU ) + Nvidia ( Competing with CUDA ) TSMC ( And more since Intel does everything but TSMC relying on many of its partner forming an ecosystem ) + Qualcomm Modem / WIFi + AI Chip + Autonomous Vehicle + Broadcom's Networking ( Consumer to Enterprise Networking Controller ) and many many more smaller things that are not listed. And since the R&D budget happened during the era where current CEO was the CFO of the company. I wouldn't say Intel doesn't know much about it. And if we are looking at fiscal results, [1][2], Intel is earning exactly 10x the revenue from AMD. So in terms of dollar generated by R&D they are pretty much in line with industry standards. Now of course in reality Intel is earning likely 80% of their profits from ˜50% of the R&D budget purely on Fabs and x86 CPU. The rest of the R&D budget still provides little returns at the moment, but for example it has been a long time that anyone has the potential to challenge Nvidia 's CUDA or GPU/GPGPU dominance. And Intel's current leaked gigantic GPU offering seems to be just that. Having said all that. The other side of argument is that there is currently no reason why AMD cant doubl, triple or even 5 times the revenue with its existing R&D budget. Their EPYC line is still doing poorly by (my) standards, only at less than 5% marketing share. Their Desktop are doing well in consumer market but not OEM market ( The majority of Desktop Market ). And laptop has barely stated. And that is all due to AMD's ( comparatively speaking ) incompetence in Sales and Marketing. ( You could properly argue that it was Intel's Sales and Marketing doing its job far too well ). [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/15747/intel-reports-q1-2020-earnings-another-strong-quarter https://www.anandtech.com/show/15747/intel-reports-q1-2020-e... [2] https://www.anandtech.com/show/15754/amd-reports-q1-2020-earnings https://www.anandtech.com/show/15754/amd-reports-q1-2020-ear...
- mattashii 6y ago
  > Having said all that. The other side of argument is that there is currently no reason why AMD cant doubl, triple or even 5 times the revenue with its existing R&D budget. I would argue that fab capacity at TSMC is very much a limiting factor [0], putting AMD in the same spot as Intel by selling practically every working chip produced. This puts a cap on the amount of units sold, and with that a soft cap on the revenue. Doubling revenue at this point would mean doubling prices, which would be very unhealthy for their turnover. The fab production capacity problem is even worse if you consider that basically all current and coming products by AMD (CPUs and GPUs for any of PS5, laptop, PC, server, the new Xbox) are produced on 7nm or 7P, and therefore compete for the limited fab-capacity available. [0] https://wccftech.com/amd-7nm-wafer-production-set-to-double-in-2h-2020-7nm-capacity-at-tsmc-currently-fully-booked/ https://wccftech.com/amd-7nm-wafer-production-set-to-double-...

beardedscotsman 6y ago

Realise that intel, has not been releasing chips with any major improvement either. They have delayed time and time again new chips and designs on purpose because they haven’t had the competition to be go up against. Intel performance will always be one step ahead of AMD, intel have faster tech in their pocket waiting to be released.

kogepathic 6y ago
> Intel performance will always be one step ahead of AMD, intel have faster tech in their pocket waiting to be released. Citation very much needed. Show me an Intel CPU with PCIe 4.0 or with the performance per watt of the latest AMD Ryzen mobile chips. You can't, because to date they don't exist. I think if they had anything in reserve it would have been released by now, because AMD is trouncing them in reviews.
- snazz 6y ago
  If they were to have a revolutionary technology that they haven't released yet, they'd release it as soon as their OEM and enterprise sales actually started to take a nosedive. Even though PC enthusiasts are outspoken about it, Intel is still doing just fine in their much higher-volume areas.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    Isn’t there rumblings of AMD starting to make headway in data centers?
    - erinnh 6y ago
      I can speak only about our smallish datacenter (1TB Core Bandwidth concurrent) and we definitely have been moving towards more AMD in the past year or two. Currently we have roughly a 60/40 AMD/Intel split on new machines.
  - solotronics 6y ago
    they are only doing fine through inertia in enterprise and datacenter
  - willis936 6y ago
    Have you seen the numbers and prices on Epyc Rome? All signs point towards Intel's reign in all areas being over. Short of a miraculous turnaround, Intel won't be competitive in three years. I want Intel to do well, but they've demonstrated over the past ten years that they are not interested in doing well.
bcrosby95 6y ago
> They have delayed time and time again new chips and designs on purpose because they haven’t had the competition to be go up against. This just isn't true. When Ryzen first came out Intel was still ahead in many use cases, especially if $$ was no object to you. But after several years AMD is now taking the crown from intel in all areas they compete in. If they really had some magical faster tech Intel would have released it years ago, much less this year, but they haven't. Instead they announce the same old chips then hook them up to industrial strength cooling units to make it look like they can compete with AMD. This isn't the behavior of a company that is just biding its time.
- ekianjo 6y ago
  AMD seems to have supply issues though. You can have the best chips on the market, if they are out of stock you don't really compete.
  - vlan0 6y ago
    That's not unique to AMD. Intel also goes through periods of supply issues. They've even had processors that basically only shipped on paper.
    - wincy 6y ago
      Yeah, like good luck trying to source a 9900KS for anywhere near MSRP, which was just a polished revised 9900K so Intel could still technically claim the “gaming crown” from AMD.
  - vonmoltke 6y ago
    Whatever supply issues AMD has, I can still get their chips at or below MSRP from a number of vendors. The latest generation of Intel chips, on the other hand, are hard to find and selling at a significant premium where they are available.
  - code_biologist 6y ago
    Have you tried to get your hands on any of the Intel HEDT parts? There's little to no supply and the supply that does exist is heavily marked up. 3950Xs and Threadrippers are in stock everywhere.
dralley 6y ago
>They have delayed time and time again new chips and designs on purpose because they haven’t had the competition to be go up against. No, they delayed time and time again because the 10nm process utterly failed to deliver the necessary yields and performance to be viable. It's not some ingenious display of sandbagging - only now in the past year or so has the 10nm process yields risen high enough to make low-power chips viable, and it is still not viable for high-power desktop chips, and probably will never be viable. >Intel performance will always be one step ahead of AMD A completely ridiculous assertion, and one that is already largely false at the present moment. >intel have faster tech in their pocket waiting to be released. Likely true, but only because of their failure to execute on 10nm. CPU designs are closely tied to the process they are designed to be manufactured on -- especially for Intel, who have never been concerned about being too tied to a single manufacturer (since it is themselves). This tight coupling can be good when the process is good, but the failure of 10nm meant that for years and years those architectural improvements you speak of are unshippable and useless. Intel is not completely screwed by any measure, but the idea that they have the situation entirely under control and are intentionally not competing with now-superior AMD chips is entirely ridiculous.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
  > CPU designs are closely tied to the process they are designed to be manufactured on I really had never imagined this could be so. Could you expand somewhat on why it is? Thanks.
  - anticensor 6y ago
    Hardware has layout constraints just like data have alignment constraints.
ashtonkem 6y ago
Intel is literally on an older fabrication process right now, they’re on 10nm while AMD is on 7nm. They’re objectively behind.
- brennanpeterson 6y ago
  That is literally not how process nodes work. They are objectively matched. Nodes mean 3 things: density, elecrical performance (ion, max f, leakage, etc), and processing flexibility (how many supported feature primitives or designs).
  - gowld 6y ago
    AMD and Intel do not use the same node designs.
  - russler23 6y ago
    A generalization, but accurate enough. Disappointing to see it getting downvotes. Intel 10nm and TSMC 7nm have similar characteristics, as a brief Wikipedia search reveals.
- dralley 6y ago
  You're giving Intel a little too much credit. They're only "on 10nm" for tiny, low-power laptop chips. The yields are reportedly still too low to use it for desktop or server CPUs. Meanwhile in a couple of months AMD will be on 7nm+ (However, it should be said that Intel 10nm is roughly equivalent to TSMC 7nm in terms of density. AMD is still ahead but not by as much as the numbers would imply).
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    Meanwhile AMD & TSMC are talking about 5nm for their Zen 4 architecture.
- plasticchris 6y ago
  The nm numbers are marketing. Processes are too nuanced to boil down to a single number.
rowanG077 6y ago
Intel has faster tech in their pocket? 5 years ago I would have believed you. But they have seen the AMD zen architecture for years now and they can't meaningfully compete anymore. If they had tech ready to go they would have released it by now to crush AMD.
- temac 6y ago
  I agree. 5 years ago Intel put Skylake out. This was what they had, and it was great; it was years ahead the competition. They did not have anything else secret even better and ready to go out, because that makes absolutely no sense: if you can crush the competition even more, just do it... After that the story is well known: their microarch were tied to their node, and Intel's 10nm was a failure, and still is not up to what the competition is doing. They started to backport the next microarch to 14 too late IMO. They may release new ones on 14nm; or they may suddenly manage to strongly improve their 10nm (not likely, it is usually very gradual at this stage) And it is again obvious that even in the last 3 years, they had nothing (on the microarch side that they could produce on their mainstream node) they were able to rush as a fallback to counteract Zen, otherwise why would they not have done it? Now they are clearly behind on the process, and on the microarch Zen 2 is good enough and does not need to compete much against Sunny Cove, plus if Intel releases a backport of Sunny Cove for their 14nm it may be against Zen 3...
dev_tty01 6y ago
>>intel have faster tech in their pocket waiting to be released. Hmm. I think if Intel had a significant architecture enhancement waiting in the wings we would have seen it by now. They need it badly. I just updated a 2013 quad core laptop with a late 2019 8 core laptop. Tasks that really use the cores are of course faster. Other than that, no substantial performance increase. 7 years and it is just incremental. Their process issues of late are horrific but there is not much happening architecturally either. Sad to see. They just seem a bit lost.

brennanpeterson 6y ago

Take a long view.AMD and others suffered through the 45nm delays at TSMC and they benefit from the acceleration currently. Intel is a very odd company, and for all that there are truly brilliant people there, it feels increadingly like IBM of 2003.

dralley 6y ago
TSMC 20nm failed process as well.
- my123 6y ago
  TSMC 20nm didn't fail, it could be made in volume just fine, even if thermals were a bit disappointing. The bigger TSMC failure was on 32nm, which had to be killed outright.
  - dralley 6y ago
    I just remember that AMD and Nvidia canceled their plans to use 20nm for GPUs and skipped straight to 14/16nm.
UncleOxidant 6y ago
Having spent a few years inside of Intel, it's a company paralyzed by meetings and meetings about meetings. People seem to be afraid to make any decisions so they have meetings to talk about the decisions that need to be made and then schedule more meetings to follow up. Working there felt like swimming in molasses. People who come into the company with any experience realize that it's a mess, try to change things in their area, meet resistance and after a while just give up and leave. That's probably why they mostly hire NCGs at this point.
Rury 6y ago
>it feels increasingly like IBM of 2003 Probably explained by: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4 On another point. I'm not sure how much this is true, but I've read that most of AMD's chips are made from the same basic building blocks, and their different CPUs are mostly just a matter of how many these blocks are stitched together along with whatever tuning/other hardware. Such a design is probably very scalable, which simplifies manufacturing and reduces costs. Whereas I heard intel chips have more separate customizations requiring more separate tooling for each of their chipsets, which complicates manufacturing...

api 6y ago

The others are being "subsidized" by TSMC's R&D expenditures, which are being amortized across a larger market namely mobile and specialized chips.

mikepurvis 6y ago

I was recently putting together a desktop PC for some light gaming after being out of the market for a long time, and I couldn't believe how incremental Intel's progress has been in the CPU space over the past few years. I know there's a non-trivial mobile performance penalty, but a fourth gen mid-range i5 I got on eBay for $30 has nearly the performance of the 8750H in last year's Dell XPS (my work laptop). Even when you get away from mobile, compare two i7 chips that were released five years apart for basically the same price, and userbenchmark.com shows just a 21% overall performance difference in them: https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-4790-vs-Intel-Core-i7-9700/2293vsm816180 https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-4790-vs-... This windows shrinks even further when you look at what overclockers get out of the older chips with fancy cooling setups. But yeah, when else in the history of personal computing has five years of progress yielded such small gains? I know eventually I'll upgrade my system for real, probably to something AM4-based, but when I saw these numbers, it became a no brainer to just bump up the CPU on an old LGA1150 system I had lying around rather than spend a bunch of money on an all-new motherboard, new RAM, etc.

dr_zoidberg 6y ago
Userbenchmark is useless, it can barely compare between Intel microarchs. Best it can do is """help""" compare two processors from the same family. The last big microarch jump for intel was Skylake (6th gen) and then 7, 8, 9 and some of 10th gen (but not all, but they needed "10th gen" for marketing reasons) are just incremental improvemnts over it. So Skylake was about a 15-20% increase in performance (real) but took a few shortcuts (Meltdown and Spectre). From then on, you had a 5-10% performance improvement per generation (let's round it at 7%). That's not bad per se, but it was done out of comfort. The "cursed" 10nm node which never came is also part of the reason why Intel stalled, they insisted on "tick-tock" and were unwilling (or unable?) to deliver a new microarch over 14nm+++, the super refined node (and the extra refinement allowed them to pull the clock higher on each new gen, now alowing those sweet close-to and with this new weird turbo [that seems more marketing than substance] surpass the 5Ghz barrier). And that's how you come to Intel's situation on 2020: no 10nm node, no real new microarch in the last 5 years. Edit: As for why we never saw something like this... I think we never had a situation before where one of the competitors had such an advantage (the microarchs before Zen on AMDs part were bad, and that hit them hard for a long time) that they could pull this duckish moves for so long. For a long time, Intel chose not to improve their offering, because they were so far ahead of competition and they could keep milking the Whatever-Lake microarch family. They'd blame on the difficulty of extracting more IPC, Moores Law coming to an end (or not coming to an end, depending on what marketing was trying to sell). In the end it came to AMD+TSMC offering superb processors for Intel to slash the prices in half, and then still being crushed performance wise, in desktop, server and now mobile too. And all Intel has to show is AVX512, which after having it gatekeeped for years in the server market, they've released on consumer processors - but hey, nobody's using it because there was no support!

newacct583 6y ago

Actually in a relative sense the pandemic clearly helps Intel. Their problem right now is that they have an inferior process and their high margin datacenter parts[1] are in critical danger of facing competition from devices fabbed by TSMC and (to a lesser extent) Samsung. Their offerings in the market now, though, are still winning and Intel is making a ton of money. So the net effect of a downturn is that the future market, the one where AMD is competetive and Intel needs to drop prices, is going to shrink in total dollars. That's a win for Intel, comparatively. It means the window into which AMD could have jumped to steal revenue is smaller, and Intel has more time to catch up. [1] Remember that most of the money in the CPU industry is made in the datacenter. AMD having better desktop parts doesn't affect Intel's bottom line much as long as they remain competitive in servers. (AMD still lags with laptop devices too, which are also a bigger market than desktops).

kolbe 6y ago
Why wouldn't data centers switch when they can get more computing power for less energy and at a lower initial price point? That's happening now with the current offerings.
- newacct583 6y ago
  > Why wouldn't data centers switch when they can get more computing power for less energy and at a lower initial price point? Uh... because their revenues are down 20%, they have a hiring freeze, and are delaying all capital expenditures? That was my point: there may be technical reasons for people to move away from Intel's products. But the economic reality means that fewer customers will.

inteloneoff 6y ago

lawfulcactus 6y ago
Do you have any data to back this up? I should hope people would be embarrassed to post wildly unsubstantiated nonsense under a username linked to them.
- azinman2 6y ago
  Ya this doesn’t really make any sense to me. Intels attempts at shrinking the node failed due to diversity hires? I have a very hard tome believing this. If you’re capable of working at that level at all, I can’t imagine skin tone or gender is holding you back...
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ksec 6y ago

While I agree Intel's R&D budget not giving enough returns, this isn't giving a correct perspective on the subject. Intel is Xilinx + AMD ( CPU + GPU ) + Nvidia ( Competing with CUDA ) TSMC ( And more since Intel does everything but TSMC relying on many of its partner forming an ecosystem ) + Qualcomm Modem / WIFi + AI Chip + Autonomous Vehicle + Broadcom's Networking ( Consumer to Enterprise Networking Controller ) and many many more smaller things that are not listed. And since the R&D budget happened during the era where current CEO was the CFO of the company. I wouldn't say Intel doesn't know much about it. And if we are looking at fiscal results, [1][2], Intel is earning exactly 10x the revenue from AMD. So in terms of dollar generated by R&D they are pretty much in line with industry standards. Now of course in reality Intel is earning likely 80% of their profits from ˜50% of the R&D budget purely on Fabs and x86 CPU. The rest of the R&D budget still provides little returns at the moment, but for example it has been a long time that anyone has the potential to challenge Nvidia 's CUDA or GPU/GPGPU dominance. And Intel's current leaked gigantic GPU offering seems to be just that. Having said all that. The other side of argument is that there is currently no reason why AMD cant doubl, triple or even 5 times the revenue with its existing R&D budget. Their EPYC line is still doing poorly by (my) standards, only at less than 5% marketing share. Their Desktop are doing well in consumer market but not OEM market ( The majority of Desktop Market ). And laptop has barely stated. And that is all due to AMD's ( comparatively speaking ) incompetence in Sales and Marketing. ( You could properly argue that it was Intel's Sales and Marketing doing its job far too well ). [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/15747/intel-reports-q1-2020-earnings-another-strong-quarter https://www.anandtech.com/show/15747/intel-reports-q1-2020-e... [2] https://www.anandtech.com/show/15754/amd-reports-q1-2020-earnings https://www.anandtech.com/show/15754/amd-reports-q1-2020-ear...

mattashii 6y ago
> Having said all that. The other side of argument is that there is currently no reason why AMD cant doubl, triple or even 5 times the revenue with its existing R&D budget. I would argue that fab capacity at TSMC is very much a limiting factor [0], putting AMD in the same spot as Intel by selling practically every working chip produced. This puts a cap on the amount of units sold, and with that a soft cap on the revenue. Doubling revenue at this point would mean doubling prices, which would be very unhealthy for their turnover. The fab production capacity problem is even worse if you consider that basically all current and coming products by AMD (CPUs and GPUs for any of PS5, laptop, PC, server, the new Xbox) are produced on 7nm or 7P, and therefore compete for the limited fab-capacity available. [0] https://wccftech.com/amd-7nm-wafer-production-set-to-double-in-2h-2020-7nm-capacity-at-tsmc-currently-fully-booked/ https://wccftech.com/amd-7nm-wafer-production-set-to-double-...