Intel is going to start thrashing around now, adding a million features to try to beat ARM and AMD on various microbenchmarks and special use cases. Meanwhile A

Intel is going to start thrashing around now, adding a million features to try to beat ARM and AMD on various microbenchmarks and special use cases. Meanwhile ARM and AMD will keep winning on throughput, price/performance, and (for ARM particularly) performance/watt. Any win all these features bring can also be achieved with ARM or Zen by adding more cores, with the exception of those few cases where you have huge computational tasks that cannot be efficiently parallelized and where there are few discrete jobs to allow for coarse grained (job/task) parallelization. There are not many of these. Meanwhile all these features are going to make Intel chips even more complex, making bugs more likely and making iteration more costly. My read is that Intel is shooting for maximum possible single threaded performance because they can't compete on power efficiency or many-core. They can't compete in those areas because their process nodes are not as small as what TSMC can offer, and both (most) ARM chips and AMD are using TSMC and fabricating at 7nm and soon 5nm. (Yes I know nm node sizes are no longer directly comparable, but they are ahead of Intel and likely to stay ahead unless Intel can really push hard on fab engineering.)