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AMD has little stopping them from moving to 5nm or 6nm TSMC next year, possibly sooner than Intel can ship this. AMD could do a small run to win on both paper a

AMD has little stopping them from moving to 5nm or 6nm TSMC next year, possibly sooner than Intel can ship this. AMD could do a small run to win on both paper and ground. The real factor here is the third competitor, Apple, walking in with what is expected to be a 5nm 'no cost limits' CPU that they will ship on every machine based on A14 architecture. Because they own the design and just have TSMC do Fab it's likely that Apple will intentionally put what would be a $500-$1000+ monster core-count cpu spec in every base product, stealing the war. and possibly deflating the market for victors here.

mtgx 6y ago
Yeah, I can't help but think announcing its chips' performance 1-1.5 years in advance will allow the competition to demolish them at that time, because they'll know exactly what they need to do to beat Intel by a large margin. And that doesn't take into account Intel's own delays.
bryanlarsen 6y ago
Zen 3 will likely ship before Tiger Lake at least on EPYC, but it's TSMC N7+, Zen 4 is 5nm Samsung and/or TSMC but 2022. I do agree that Apple will likely take a hit to their margin if that's necessary to ensure that their new ARM laptops are clearly more performant per $ than their outgoing x86 ones. Whether that will be a significant spoiler is an interesting question.
ben-schaaf 6y ago
I don't see that happening. Apple needs to make money and they do so by having huge margins. They can certainly increase the CPU budget by taking out the Intel cut (though really they've just swapped that for the TSMC cut), but they're not going to chuck a $1000+ CPU in a ~$1200 laptop. This may be my lack of knowledge in CPU manufacturing, but from what I understand larger dies get you more performance not more efficiency, so considering their inability to build adequate cooling solutions and fondness for reducing thickness even if they chucked a 32core bohemeth in there it won't be running very fast. On top of that, since AMD are using the same nodes I don't really see how they wouldn't be able to compete. Especially considering Apple probably won't be selling their CPUs separately, leaving out large parts of the market.
- AgloeDreams 6y ago
  So by Mega-core-count I mean more than 10 and I'm including their big.little architecture (so maybe 6+ high performance, 8 efficiency, remember that Apple can use all cores grouped however, asymmetrical). The chip design and margin advantages here are massive. Apple sell's phones at $399 with the A13 (7nm) that outperforms (by any metric we currently have), some of Intels > $300 notebook processors, building using iPhone cores as a base means your margins are subsidized by one of the largest selling products and most massive R&D budgets in the world. Then you have the efficiency of all of this: sure, larger Dies won't get better efficiency but Apple's chips use massively modular power operations. They can bring cores on and offline dynamically, you can chop the GPU, core by core, when you don't need it. They could (important: could) ship chips that use 4, smartphone power-level cores in normal operations but can flash on 64 core performance for a second and lose it just as fast. Thats how the iPhone's A13 works right now. Notebook (unsustained) performance in a smartphone with no fan. It's why the iPad Pro outperforms the 13 inch MacBook Pro at video rendering. It's the advantages of ARM chip design in 2020 and I imagine they will play to every last one of their strengths. All the real money is in pre-built systems. AMD sells a ton of units but nothing like Qualcomm or even Intel with their notebook stronghold. I'm sure theres space, just that I believe the market will be decreased in size and if Apple is over there frying everyone, then it's gonna be hard to advertise your hard work beating Intel. I'm not saying all of this will happen or even will happen next year, it's just that the forces here are somewhat massive advantages.

mtgx 6y ago

Yeah, I can't help but think announcing its chips' performance 1-1.5 years in advance will allow the competition to demolish them at that time, because they'll know exactly what they need to do to beat Intel by a large margin. And that doesn't take into account Intel's own delays.

bryanlarsen 6y ago

Zen 3 will likely ship before Tiger Lake at least on EPYC, but it's TSMC N7+, Zen 4 is 5nm Samsung and/or TSMC but 2022. I do agree that Apple will likely take a hit to their margin if that's necessary to ensure that their new ARM laptops are clearly more performant per $ than their outgoing x86 ones. Whether that will be a significant spoiler is an interesting question.

ben-schaaf 6y ago

I don't see that happening. Apple needs to make money and they do so by having huge margins. They can certainly increase the CPU budget by taking out the Intel cut (though really they've just swapped that for the TSMC cut), but they're not going to chuck a $1000+ CPU in a ~$1200 laptop. This may be my lack of knowledge in CPU manufacturing, but from what I understand larger dies get you more performance not more efficiency, so considering their inability to build adequate cooling solutions and fondness for reducing thickness even if they chucked a 32core bohemeth in there it won't be running very fast. On top of that, since AMD are using the same nodes I don't really see how they wouldn't be able to compete. Especially considering Apple probably won't be selling their CPUs separately, leaving out large parts of the market.

AgloeDreams 6y ago
So by Mega-core-count I mean more than 10 and I'm including their big.little architecture (so maybe 6+ high performance, 8 efficiency, remember that Apple can use all cores grouped however, asymmetrical). The chip design and margin advantages here are massive. Apple sell's phones at $399 with the A13 (7nm) that outperforms (by any metric we currently have), some of Intels > $300 notebook processors, building using iPhone cores as a base means your margins are subsidized by one of the largest selling products and most massive R&D budgets in the world. Then you have the efficiency of all of this: sure, larger Dies won't get better efficiency but Apple's chips use massively modular power operations. They can bring cores on and offline dynamically, you can chop the GPU, core by core, when you don't need it. They could (important: could) ship chips that use 4, smartphone power-level cores in normal operations but can flash on 64 core performance for a second and lose it just as fast. Thats how the iPhone's A13 works right now. Notebook (unsustained) performance in a smartphone with no fan. It's why the iPad Pro outperforms the 13 inch MacBook Pro at video rendering. It's the advantages of ARM chip design in 2020 and I imagine they will play to every last one of their strengths. All the real money is in pre-built systems. AMD sells a ton of units but nothing like Qualcomm or even Intel with their notebook stronghold. I'm sure theres space, just that I believe the market will be decreased in size and if Apple is over there frying everyone, then it's gonna be hard to advertise your hard work beating Intel. I'm not saying all of this will happen or even will happen next year, it's just that the forces here are somewhat massive advantages.