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> Intel has clearly been caught out by its inability to get 10nm - which I understand was overambitious - to work and pretty much everything else follows on fro

> Intel has clearly been caught out by its inability to get 10nm - which I understand was overambitious - to work and pretty much everything else follows on from there. It's more than process node. Zen 3 now has superior IPC as well; the now unqualified performance lead of AMD devices happens at lower frequency. The process node problem is just the most visible and embarrassing problem Intel has. It is not the only problem. Intel's 10th gen is also still well behind the curve wrt side channel attacks. That gap will persist until Rocket Lake appears. The rot at Intel is old and runs deep. The one area that Intel has managed to maintain superiority is quality. Intel is still the thing to buy if you want minimum glitches.

klelatti 6y ago
Not disagreeing that Intel has deep problems but doesn't greater transistor density support more sophisticated architectures and hence superior IPC? Also the failure to get 10nm working has presumably been problematic for the architecture team who have to design for two processes at the same time rather than focus on just 10nm?
- topspin 6y ago
  > doesn't greater transistor density support more sophisticated architectures and hence superior IPC? Intel claims Rocket Lake will deliver 10% IPC improvement over Cannon Lake on the same 14nm node. Clearly 14nm hasn't been tapped out despite the five years and 3-4 (depending on who you ask) previous microarchitectures they've used it for. Yes, smaller devices enable better designs. Ironically if Rocket Lake actually delivers 10% then it's corroboration that Intel has been slacking on microarchitecture as well. > for the architecture team who have to design for two processes at the same time rather than focus on just 10nm? Intel has been designing devices for at least two nodes as SOP for 13 years now; they called it "tick-tock" which is the cycle of developing a new microarchitecture on one node and then porting to a smaller node. The difference this time is that they're going backwards... In any case the argument that there is some great difficulty with moving cores between nodes is tough to support given the history.
  - klelatti 6y ago
    > Yes, smaller devices enable better designs. Which is probably why AMD has better IPC now. > they called it "tick-tock" which is the cycle of developing a new microarchitecture on one node and then porting to a smaller node. The whole tick-tock cycle has been interrupted by the 10nm failure which has almost certainly thrown off their architecture development cycle. It's not about moving cores to a smaller node its about knowing whether you're designing for 10nm or 14 nm.
woofie11 6y ago
> The one area that Intel has managed to maintain superiority is quality. Intel is still the thing to buy if you want minimum glitches. This is kind of a big one, and why I prefer Intel. I can't see it continuing, though. Intel will feel pressure to: * spin products to seem even somewhat competitive * reduce their margins on clock speed (historically, they overclocked well because of conservative margins), and run a little too fast/too hot * push things out the door before they're ready I don't care very much about a 50% performance difference, but I do care a lot about stability. If Intel can maintain a quality lead, I'm likely to keep buying Intel. Few executive teams have that long-term discipline.
rstuart4133 6y ago
> The one area that Intel has managed to maintain superiority is quality. There are lots deliverables, and thus lots of things that can have superior quality I guess. But my recent experience has been the reverse of yours. Intel's early WiFi modules on a CPU board were so bad I was forced to buy a go down the suck it and see path, but a whole pile of them from various manufacturers on EBay, build a room of 60 machines so I could test failure point of the bloody things. Intel at about 10 clients or so, I didn't find the fail point of Atheros and it was 1/4 the price. Then there was the i915 which hardly worked for a year after laptops were being sold with it, followed by a seeming unending series of bugs from the Manage Engine, follow by Apple cancelling heir Macbook refresh because of Intel bugs. Then I had the misfortune of using Intels T265. To name but one bug, it you would not re-initialise it's USB bus (say after a CPU reset). Intels response is "won't fix, suggest you splice in a relay USB power line". You must be looking at a difference sort of quality to me. Right now, Intel is terrible. In the mean time I've had the pleasure of using a few 10's of AMD GX-420CA MPU's, and they are just working after 5 years, zero failures.
- broknbottle 6y ago
  I've got about 5 or 6 thin clients with AMD G series chips. They are quite the interesting little boxes for personal VM and container hosting

klelatti 6y ago

Not disagreeing that Intel has deep problems but doesn't greater transistor density support more sophisticated architectures and hence superior IPC? Also the failure to get 10nm working has presumably been problematic for the architecture team who have to design for two processes at the same time rather than focus on just 10nm?

topspin 6y ago
> doesn't greater transistor density support more sophisticated architectures and hence superior IPC? Intel claims Rocket Lake will deliver 10% IPC improvement over Cannon Lake on the same 14nm node. Clearly 14nm hasn't been tapped out despite the five years and 3-4 (depending on who you ask) previous microarchitectures they've used it for. Yes, smaller devices enable better designs. Ironically if Rocket Lake actually delivers 10% then it's corroboration that Intel has been slacking on microarchitecture as well. > for the architecture team who have to design for two processes at the same time rather than focus on just 10nm? Intel has been designing devices for at least two nodes as SOP for 13 years now; they called it "tick-tock" which is the cycle of developing a new microarchitecture on one node and then porting to a smaller node. The difference this time is that they're going backwards... In any case the argument that there is some great difficulty with moving cores between nodes is tough to support given the history.
- klelatti 6y ago
  > Yes, smaller devices enable better designs. Which is probably why AMD has better IPC now. > they called it "tick-tock" which is the cycle of developing a new microarchitecture on one node and then porting to a smaller node. The whole tick-tock cycle has been interrupted by the 10nm failure which has almost certainly thrown off their architecture development cycle. It's not about moving cores to a smaller node its about knowing whether you're designing for 10nm or 14 nm.

woofie11 6y ago

> The one area that Intel has managed to maintain superiority is quality. Intel is still the thing to buy if you want minimum glitches. This is kind of a big one, and why I prefer Intel. I can't see it continuing, though. Intel will feel pressure to: * spin products to seem even somewhat competitive * reduce their margins on clock speed (historically, they overclocked well because of conservative margins), and run a little too fast/too hot * push things out the door before they're ready I don't care very much about a 50% performance difference, but I do care a lot about stability. If Intel can maintain a quality lead, I'm likely to keep buying Intel. Few executive teams have that long-term discipline.

rstuart4133 6y ago

> The one area that Intel has managed to maintain superiority is quality. There are lots deliverables, and thus lots of things that can have superior quality I guess. But my recent experience has been the reverse of yours. Intel's early WiFi modules on a CPU board were so bad I was forced to buy a go down the suck it and see path, but a whole pile of them from various manufacturers on EBay, build a room of 60 machines so I could test failure point of the bloody things. Intel at about 10 clients or so, I didn't find the fail point of Atheros and it was 1/4 the price. Then there was the i915 which hardly worked for a year after laptops were being sold with it, followed by a seeming unending series of bugs from the Manage Engine, follow by Apple cancelling heir Macbook refresh because of Intel bugs. Then I had the misfortune of using Intels T265. To name but one bug, it you would not re-initialise it's USB bus (say after a CPU reset). Intels response is "won't fix, suggest you splice in a relay USB power line". You must be looking at a difference sort of quality to me. Right now, Intel is terrible. In the mean time I've had the pleasure of using a few 10's of AMD GX-420CA MPU's, and they are just working after 5 years, zero failures.

broknbottle 6y ago
I've got about 5 or 6 thin clients with AMD G series chips. They are quite the interesting little boxes for personal VM and container hosting