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Wow it must suck to be Intel right now. It wasn't so long ago that the trope was while others had better multi-core performance "...Intel still holds the lead

Wow it must suck to be Intel right now. It wasn't so long ago that the trope was while others had better multi-core performance "...Intel still holds the lead for single core performance" Now not only do AMD have a better product, but also Apple now offer equal or better performance than the best that Intel can offer. I wonder what is next for Intel now their £1000+ CPUs are firmly in third place. Looking forward to some new innovation and competitive (inc pricing!) products from them.

patentatt 6y ago
Not long ago at all, like just a few weeks ago right before zen3 was out in the wild! A double whammy for sure for Intel, tough times ahead indeed. Apologists can hand wave AMD off by citing the huge lead in sales that Intel still enjoys, but that argument falls flat with Apple, a trillion dollar company. Maybe Intel will start to compete on price like AMD used to.
- whizzter 6y ago
  I think they announced a short while back that they're "looking at trying to outsource manufacturing of some high end parts", ie they've known that they were falling behind in too many areas due to their shrinkage problems so they're taking in help from the outside to not become irrelevant. M1 is running on "5nm", looking at specs Intel 10NM is 100Mtr/mm2 vs TSMC's Apple 5nm chips being 173Mtr/mm2 (So even if Intel nomenclature seems more conservative they still lag by a lot in manufacturing capacity)
  - the_lucifer 6y ago
    Yes, even if Intel moves to 7nm, it's at ~202Mtr/mm2. Current TSMC 5nm is between Intel's 10 and 7nm density wise.
- arvinsim 6y ago
  As someone who owns both Mac and PC, I am excited on what Ryzen can offer on 5nm. If Apple has these gains, I am sure Ryzen will have great performance leaps too.
  - mcintyre1994 6y ago
    I’m not massively familiar with CPU architectures, would you expect to see similar performance gains going to 5nm on x86 as you do on ARM?
    - hajile 6y ago
      Not strictly because of 5nm itself. 5nm will be Zen 4 which should bring 10-20% IPC uplift if AMD's current trend continues. TSMC's N5 5nm transistors are 85% smaller than their N7 transistors which should lower power consumption significantly though SRAM only shrinks a modest 35% (this especially affects desktop Ryzen with tons of cache compared to their laptop versions). AMD currently makes the Zen 2/3 IO die on Global Foundries 12nm for contractual reasons. When they finally shrink that to 7 or 5nm, the power savings should be significant. Zen 4 is expected to bring DDR5 support which will both drastically increase bandwidth and lower RAM power consumption. Likewise, it is expected to support PCIe 5 which doubles the bandwidth per lane to a little shy of 4GB/s. All of these things together could mean a decent improvement in IPC and total performance and a very big improvement in performance per watt. Meanwhile, I suspect we'll start seeing large "Infinity Cache" additions to their APUs that is shared between the CPU and GPU as the bus width of DDR just doesn't offer the bandwidth to keep larger GPUs from fighting the CPU for bandwidth. This should not only improve APU total performance, but fewer trips to RAM has a significant effect on power consumption (it costs more to move 2 bytes than to add them together).
    - sliken 6y ago
      Not really. AMD could make a 7nm version of the Apple core, but they instead build more cores. Much how AMD outmaneuvered intel with smaller chiplets (more flexible in design, higher volume, more tolerant of process errors, higher yield, etc). Apple has done similar with their design. It's better in obvious ways, larger caches, larger number of rename registers, more outstanding transactions, more memory channels, etc. Apple could make a core just as fast, maybe slightly less power efficient if it spent less on the neural cache, image processing, or GPU. Another big win is that apple runs the memory at 4500 MHz, standard, without overclocking. Even the Zen 3 often runs the ram at 3200 MHz, and standard support goes up to 3800 MHz or so. You can run it higher, but then you have to decouple the memory clock from the CPU clock, which reduces performance. The DDR4x also supports 2 channels, instead of 1. So you get as many memory channels as the AMD threadripper, which is an expensive, hot, and low volume chip.
stuff4ben 6y ago
At some point one wonders if Intel will just cede the desktop and enthusiast markets to AMD and/or Apple and just focus on server and high-end computing? As an IBMer this feels familiar for some reason...
- LegitShady 6y ago
  Amd 2qe on the market for decades practically as second in the performance tier. I'm not sure why Intel who should ostensibly have lower unit costs would abandon a market for a possibly temporary situation one or two deign nodes away might now be able an issue.
- ginko 6y ago
  What would keep AMD or Nvidia from eventually eating Intel's lunch in the server market as well?
  - breakfastduck 6y ago
    Nothing, they'd just die a lot slower
- Aperocky 6y ago
  No reason why servers will always stick with Intel. Amazon already has their own Graviton ARM chips - And that's EC2, cloud native workflows might have already migrated.
  - m4rtink 6y ago
    Not to mention HPC, with the top three supercomputers being Power & ARM.
    - sliken 6y ago
      Intel isn't doing to well in HPC either. The top intel system is now at #6, and the vast majority of the performance in inside the matrix-2000 accelerator. The highest pure Intel system is at #9. Even with high end servers Intel seems to be losing to AMD Epyc.
bstar77 6y ago
Don't forget to add that Apple is now doing this on their version of a "budget" laptop that has no active cooling, that gets 18-20 hours of battery life, that runs emulated x86 code with almost no performance hit and is a 1st gen product. I don't think any of these details can be understated. Even AMD's 1st gen Ryzen kind of sucked and look where that is now.
- kllrnohj 6y ago
  > Don't forget to add that Apple is now doing this on their version of a "budget" laptop that has no active cooling The Anandtech tests were on an actively-cooled Mac Mini and the power draw numbers they were observing were far outside of what can be passively cooled in a laptop. You'd need to wait for Air-specific results before drawing too many conclusions on how it performs.
  - bstar77 6y ago
    AnandTech isn't the only one providing benchmarks, they are rolling in from all over the place now. People are running 15 minute finale cut pro jobs and the fan isn't kick in on the macbook pro.
    - offtop5 6y ago
      Any word on if Final Cut and Logic X are recompiled for Arm ?
      - andy_ppp 6y ago
        If they are Apple they are Universal apps I believe?
        xsmasher 6y ago
        That's the same question being asked - have they been recompiled as universal apps?
KoftaBob 6y ago
That's the consequence of resting on your laurels and getting complacent. They relied too much on being the large incumbent, and they reap what they sow.
- yborg 6y ago
  They reaped billions in profits. The issue is that organizations can't turn it on and off based on competition, once you are rich and lazy, the organization fills up with coasters and before they know it they no longer have a higher gear. Remains to be seen if Intel can come back, but I doubt it under their current leadership.
- headeffects 6y ago
  Their biggest problems came from their foundry, which they definitely weren’t resting on.
blunte 6y ago
This happens to every giant eventually (and to countries or civilizations). They get climb to the top, and then they hold such dominant positions that they aren't forced to try. They get lazy or sloppy (and in Intel's case, I'm not suggesting the engineers were the sloppy ones... more likely strategic decisions from management and quarterly earnings per share-focused execs). Eventually they are dethroned, and some never return to power. Intel will never go away, but they definitely will become laggards for the foreseeable future. In their industry it takes years or even a decade to see the fruits of your effort.
- amelius 6y ago
  > In their industry it takes years or even a decade to see the fruits of your effort. So how long has Apple been working on this chip?
  - ghshephard 6y ago
    Roughly 10 years on this particular processor line: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple-designed_processors#A_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple-designed_processors#A_se... (According to Anandtech, the M1 is a rough equivalent to the A14)
MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
Market share x86 overall (mobile + desktop + server), AMD vs Intel: Q3/2020 20,2% vs. 79,8% Q2/2020 19,7% vs. 80,3% Q1/2020 17,5% vs. 82,5% I don't know why the OEM business works that way, but it is very slow to shift, so Intel still has time. Self-built consumer PCs for gaming are already overwhelmingly AMD though.
- JAlexoid 6y ago
  Discounts and design lead time. Unlike modular desktops - you can't just drop in an AMD CPU into a laptop chassis and expect everything to work.
copperx 6y ago
Why, exactly? As long as Apple keeps their chips to themselves, Intel or AMD will have nothing to worry about.
- mthoms 6y ago
  Because Apple (theoretically at least) should start increasing their market share. Don't assume that they only downside for Intel is losing Apple as a customer... That could end up being the least of their worries.
  - nomel 6y ago
    > Because Apple (theoretically at least) should start increasing their market share. Should that be a serious goal for Apple though? Is there that much more money for them if they jump into the race-to-the-bottom budget market, where I assume much of the remaining share is? It seems there is some added value in being a luxury product.
    - headeffects 6y ago
      They could gain more of the premium market. Or they could just stick an” year old a14 and make a slightly lower end 799 macbook in search of more market. They don’t necessarily need to start making 299 cheapo laptops to gain market share.
    - mthoms 6y ago
      If Apple weren't constantly trying to increase their market share, I imagine their shareholders would like to have a word with them :-) I get what you're saying though. I don't think they should go after the budget PC market. There's still lots of room for growth at the mid to high end. There's also servers.
      - nomel 6y ago
        The goal for the investors isn't to increase market share though, it's to increase profit. I'm questioning the assumption that market share and profit are directly, and linearly, related. The average smartphone price worldwide is around $300 [1]. I don't have access to the full report at that link, but with the graphs shown, some significant portion must be below that price. My naive assumption is that market share in the top end is the most important, with a movement into the lower end eventually leading to the destruction of the perception of quality that they seem to work hard for, and operating costs that would cut into profits. \shrug\ 1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/934471/smartphone-shipments-by-price-category-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/934471/smartphone-shipme...

patentatt 6y ago

Not long ago at all, like just a few weeks ago right before zen3 was out in the wild! A double whammy for sure for Intel, tough times ahead indeed. Apologists can hand wave AMD off by citing the huge lead in sales that Intel still enjoys, but that argument falls flat with Apple, a trillion dollar company. Maybe Intel will start to compete on price like AMD used to.

whizzter 6y ago
I think they announced a short while back that they're "looking at trying to outsource manufacturing of some high end parts", ie they've known that they were falling behind in too many areas due to their shrinkage problems so they're taking in help from the outside to not become irrelevant. M1 is running on "5nm", looking at specs Intel 10NM is 100Mtr/mm2 vs TSMC's Apple 5nm chips being 173Mtr/mm2 (So even if Intel nomenclature seems more conservative they still lag by a lot in manufacturing capacity)
- the_lucifer 6y ago
  Yes, even if Intel moves to 7nm, it's at ~202Mtr/mm2. Current TSMC 5nm is between Intel's 10 and 7nm density wise.
arvinsim 6y ago
As someone who owns both Mac and PC, I am excited on what Ryzen can offer on 5nm. If Apple has these gains, I am sure Ryzen will have great performance leaps too.
- mcintyre1994 6y ago
  I’m not massively familiar with CPU architectures, would you expect to see similar performance gains going to 5nm on x86 as you do on ARM?
  - hajile 6y ago
    Not strictly because of 5nm itself. 5nm will be Zen 4 which should bring 10-20% IPC uplift if AMD's current trend continues. TSMC's N5 5nm transistors are 85% smaller than their N7 transistors which should lower power consumption significantly though SRAM only shrinks a modest 35% (this especially affects desktop Ryzen with tons of cache compared to their laptop versions). AMD currently makes the Zen 2/3 IO die on Global Foundries 12nm for contractual reasons. When they finally shrink that to 7 or 5nm, the power savings should be significant. Zen 4 is expected to bring DDR5 support which will both drastically increase bandwidth and lower RAM power consumption. Likewise, it is expected to support PCIe 5 which doubles the bandwidth per lane to a little shy of 4GB/s. All of these things together could mean a decent improvement in IPC and total performance and a very big improvement in performance per watt. Meanwhile, I suspect we'll start seeing large "Infinity Cache" additions to their APUs that is shared between the CPU and GPU as the bus width of DDR just doesn't offer the bandwidth to keep larger GPUs from fighting the CPU for bandwidth. This should not only improve APU total performance, but fewer trips to RAM has a significant effect on power consumption (it costs more to move 2 bytes than to add them together).
  - sliken 6y ago
    Not really. AMD could make a 7nm version of the Apple core, but they instead build more cores. Much how AMD outmaneuvered intel with smaller chiplets (more flexible in design, higher volume, more tolerant of process errors, higher yield, etc). Apple has done similar with their design. It's better in obvious ways, larger caches, larger number of rename registers, more outstanding transactions, more memory channels, etc. Apple could make a core just as fast, maybe slightly less power efficient if it spent less on the neural cache, image processing, or GPU. Another big win is that apple runs the memory at 4500 MHz, standard, without overclocking. Even the Zen 3 often runs the ram at 3200 MHz, and standard support goes up to 3800 MHz or so. You can run it higher, but then you have to decouple the memory clock from the CPU clock, which reduces performance. The DDR4x also supports 2 channels, instead of 1. So you get as many memory channels as the AMD threadripper, which is an expensive, hot, and low volume chip.

stuff4ben 6y ago

At some point one wonders if Intel will just cede the desktop and enthusiast markets to AMD and/or Apple and just focus on server and high-end computing? As an IBMer this feels familiar for some reason...

LegitShady 6y ago
Amd 2qe on the market for decades practically as second in the performance tier. I'm not sure why Intel who should ostensibly have lower unit costs would abandon a market for a possibly temporary situation one or two deign nodes away might now be able an issue.
ginko 6y ago
What would keep AMD or Nvidia from eventually eating Intel's lunch in the server market as well?
- breakfastduck 6y ago
  Nothing, they'd just die a lot slower
Aperocky 6y ago
No reason why servers will always stick with Intel. Amazon already has their own Graviton ARM chips - And that's EC2, cloud native workflows might have already migrated.
- m4rtink 6y ago
  Not to mention HPC, with the top three supercomputers being Power & ARM.
  - sliken 6y ago
    Intel isn't doing to well in HPC either. The top intel system is now at #6, and the vast majority of the performance in inside the matrix-2000 accelerator. The highest pure Intel system is at #9. Even with high end servers Intel seems to be losing to AMD Epyc.

bstar77 6y ago

Don't forget to add that Apple is now doing this on their version of a "budget" laptop that has no active cooling, that gets 18-20 hours of battery life, that runs emulated x86 code with almost no performance hit and is a 1st gen product. I don't think any of these details can be understated. Even AMD's 1st gen Ryzen kind of sucked and look where that is now.

kllrnohj 6y ago
> Don't forget to add that Apple is now doing this on their version of a "budget" laptop that has no active cooling The Anandtech tests were on an actively-cooled Mac Mini and the power draw numbers they were observing were far outside of what can be passively cooled in a laptop. You'd need to wait for Air-specific results before drawing too many conclusions on how it performs.
- bstar77 6y ago
  AnandTech isn't the only one providing benchmarks, they are rolling in from all over the place now. People are running 15 minute finale cut pro jobs and the fan isn't kick in on the macbook pro.
  - offtop5 6y ago
    Any word on if Final Cut and Logic X are recompiled for Arm ?
    - andy_ppp 6y ago
      If they are Apple they are Universal apps I believe?
      - xsmasher 6y ago
        That's the same question being asked - have they been recompiled as universal apps?

KoftaBob 6y ago

That's the consequence of resting on your laurels and getting complacent. They relied too much on being the large incumbent, and they reap what they sow.

yborg 6y ago
They reaped billions in profits. The issue is that organizations can't turn it on and off based on competition, once you are rich and lazy, the organization fills up with coasters and before they know it they no longer have a higher gear. Remains to be seen if Intel can come back, but I doubt it under their current leadership.
headeffects 6y ago
Their biggest problems came from their foundry, which they definitely weren’t resting on.

blunte 6y ago

This happens to every giant eventually (and to countries or civilizations). They get climb to the top, and then they hold such dominant positions that they aren't forced to try. They get lazy or sloppy (and in Intel's case, I'm not suggesting the engineers were the sloppy ones... more likely strategic decisions from management and quarterly earnings per share-focused execs). Eventually they are dethroned, and some never return to power. Intel will never go away, but they definitely will become laggards for the foreseeable future. In their industry it takes years or even a decade to see the fruits of your effort.

amelius 6y ago
> In their industry it takes years or even a decade to see the fruits of your effort. So how long has Apple been working on this chip?
- ghshephard 6y ago
  Roughly 10 years on this particular processor line: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple-designed_processors#A_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple-designed_processors#A_se... (According to Anandtech, the M1 is a rough equivalent to the A14)

MrBuddyCasino 6y ago

Market share x86 overall (mobile + desktop + server), AMD vs Intel: Q3/2020 20,2% vs. 79,8% Q2/2020 19,7% vs. 80,3% Q1/2020 17,5% vs. 82,5% I don't know why the OEM business works that way, but it is very slow to shift, so Intel still has time. Self-built consumer PCs for gaming are already overwhelmingly AMD though.

JAlexoid 6y ago
Discounts and design lead time. Unlike modular desktops - you can't just drop in an AMD CPU into a laptop chassis and expect everything to work.

copperx 6y ago

Why, exactly? As long as Apple keeps their chips to themselves, Intel or AMD will have nothing to worry about.

mthoms 6y ago
Because Apple (theoretically at least) should start increasing their market share. Don't assume that they only downside for Intel is losing Apple as a customer... That could end up being the least of their worries.
- nomel 6y ago
  > Because Apple (theoretically at least) should start increasing their market share. Should that be a serious goal for Apple though? Is there that much more money for them if they jump into the race-to-the-bottom budget market, where I assume much of the remaining share is? It seems there is some added value in being a luxury product.
  - headeffects 6y ago
    They could gain more of the premium market. Or they could just stick an” year old a14 and make a slightly lower end 799 macbook in search of more market. They don’t necessarily need to start making 299 cheapo laptops to gain market share.
  - mthoms 6y ago
    If Apple weren't constantly trying to increase their market share, I imagine their shareholders would like to have a word with them :-) I get what you're saying though. I don't think they should go after the budget PC market. There's still lots of room for growth at the mid to high end. There's also servers.
    - nomel 6y ago
      The goal for the investors isn't to increase market share though, it's to increase profit. I'm questioning the assumption that market share and profit are directly, and linearly, related. The average smartphone price worldwide is around $300 [1]. I don't have access to the full report at that link, but with the graphs shown, some significant portion must be below that price. My naive assumption is that market share in the top end is the most important, with a movement into the lower end eventually leading to the destruction of the perception of quality that they seem to work hard for, and operating costs that would cut into profits. \shrug\ 1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/934471/smartphone-shipments-by-price-category-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/934471/smartphone-shipme...