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This was a well-written article, but I don't think it came from someone with a deep understanding of semiconductor technology and fabrication. Intel hasn't los

This was a well-written article, but I don't think it came from someone with a deep understanding of semiconductor technology and fabrication. Intel hasn't lost to Apple and AMD because they employ idiots, or because of their shitty company culture (in fact, they're doing surprisingly well in spite of their awful company culture). Intel lost because they made the wrong bet on the wrong type of process technology. 10 years ago (or thereabouts), Intel's engineers were certain that they had the correct type of process technology outlined to successfully migrate down from 22nm to 14nm, then down to 10nm and eventually 7, 5, and 3nm. They were betting on future advances in physics, chemistry, and semiconductor processes. Advances that didn't materialize. EUV turned out to be the best way to make a wafer at lower transistor size. So now Intel's playing catch up. Their 10nm process is still error-prone and far from stable. There are no high-performance 10nm desktop or server chips. That's not going to continue forever though. Even on 14nm, Intel chips, while not as fast as Apple's M1 or AMD's Ryzen 5000 series, are still competitive in many areas. Intel's 14nm chips are over 6 years old. The first was Broadwell in October 2014. What do you think will happen when Intel solves the engineering problems on 10nm, and then 7nm? And then 5nm? It took AMD 5 years to become competitive with Intel, and over 5 to actually surpass them. If you think the M1 and 5950X are fast, then wait till we have an i9-14900K on 5nm. It'll make these offers look quaint by comparison. EDIT: I say this as a total AMD fanboy by the way, who bought a 3900X and RX 5700 XT at MicroCenter on 7/7/2019 and stood in line for almost five hours to get them, and as someone who now has a Threadripper 3990X workstation. I love AMD for what they've done... they took us out of the quad-core paradigm and brought us into the octa-core paradigm of x86 computing. But I am under no illusions that they're technically superior to Intel. Their process is what allows them to outperform Intel, not their design. I guarantee you that if Intel could mass produce their CPUs on their 7nm process (which is far, far more transistor dense than TSMC's 7nm), AMD would be 15-25% behind on performance. It isn't so much that AMD is succeeding because they're technically superior... they're succeeding because Zen's design team made the right bet and because Intel's engineering process team made the wrong bet.

adrian_b 6y ago
I agree with most of what you say, except that AMD was also technically superior during these last years. Intel certainly has the potential of being technically superior to AMD, but they do not appear to have focused on the right things in their roadmaps for CPU evolution. Many years before the launches of Ice Lake and Tiger Lake, the enthusiastic presentations of Intel about the future claimed that these will bring some sort of marvelous improvements in microarchitecture, but the reality has proven to be much more modest. While from Skylake in 2015 to Ice Lake in 2019 there was a decent increase in IPC, it was still much less than expected after so many years. While they were waiting for a manufacturing process, they should have redesigned their CPU cores to get something better than this. Moreover the enhancements in Ice Lake and Tiger Lake seem somewhat unbalanced and random, there is no grand plan that can be discerned about how to improve a CPU. On the other hand the evolution of Zen cores was perfect, every time the AMD team seems to have been able to add precisely all improvements that could give a maximum performance increase with a minimum implementation effort. Thus they were able to pass from Zen 1 (2017) with an IPC similar to Intel Broadwell (2014), to Zen 2 (2019) with an IPC a little higher than Intel Skylake (2015) and eventually to Zen 3 (2020) with an IPC a little higher than Intel Tiger Lake (2020). So even if the main advantage of AMD remains the superior CMOS technology they use from TSMC, just due to the competence of their design teams, they have passed from being 3 years behind Intel in IPC in 2017, to being ahead of Intel in IPC in 2020. If that is not technical superiority, I do not know what is. Like I have said, I believe that Intel could have done much better than that, but they seem to have done some sort of a random walk, instead of a directed run, like AMD.
oblio 6y ago
Interesting perspective. From a paradoxical perspective, I actually want Intel to stay relevant. I think that everyone will take advantage of the migration to ARM to push more lock in, despite the supposedly open ARM architecture. A sort of poison pill: "you get more performance and better battery life, but you can't install apps of type A, B and C and those apps can only do X, Y and Z".
quacker 6y ago
Agreed. I’m not super knowledgeable but AMD just caught up after years of Intel stumbling to get to 10nm. Intel’s 14nm chips are still very competitive with AMD, so it seems that Intel on 5nm should beat AMD on 5nm, for example. Intel will either solve its process issues in its own factories or, worst case, they outsource production to TSMC - either of which eliminates any process/manufacturing advantage held by AMD and Apple. On a 5-10 year timeline, I don’t see a reason for Intel to continue stumbling on 5nm and 3nm processes though.

adrian_b 6y ago

I agree with most of what you say, except that AMD was also technically superior during these last years. Intel certainly has the potential of being technically superior to AMD, but they do not appear to have focused on the right things in their roadmaps for CPU evolution. Many years before the launches of Ice Lake and Tiger Lake, the enthusiastic presentations of Intel about the future claimed that these will bring some sort of marvelous improvements in microarchitecture, but the reality has proven to be much more modest. While from Skylake in 2015 to Ice Lake in 2019 there was a decent increase in IPC, it was still much less than expected after so many years. While they were waiting for a manufacturing process, they should have redesigned their CPU cores to get something better than this. Moreover the enhancements in Ice Lake and Tiger Lake seem somewhat unbalanced and random, there is no grand plan that can be discerned about how to improve a CPU. On the other hand the evolution of Zen cores was perfect, every time the AMD team seems to have been able to add precisely all improvements that could give a maximum performance increase with a minimum implementation effort. Thus they were able to pass from Zen 1 (2017) with an IPC similar to Intel Broadwell (2014), to Zen 2 (2019) with an IPC a little higher than Intel Skylake (2015) and eventually to Zen 3 (2020) with an IPC a little higher than Intel Tiger Lake (2020). So even if the main advantage of AMD remains the superior CMOS technology they use from TSMC, just due to the competence of their design teams, they have passed from being 3 years behind Intel in IPC in 2017, to being ahead of Intel in IPC in 2020. If that is not technical superiority, I do not know what is. Like I have said, I believe that Intel could have done much better than that, but they seem to have done some sort of a random walk, instead of a directed run, like AMD.

oblio 6y ago

Interesting perspective. From a paradoxical perspective, I actually want Intel to stay relevant. I think that everyone will take advantage of the migration to ARM to push more lock in, despite the supposedly open ARM architecture. A sort of poison pill: "you get more performance and better battery life, but you can't install apps of type A, B and C and those apps can only do X, Y and Z".

quacker 6y ago

Agreed. I’m not super knowledgeable but AMD just caught up after years of Intel stumbling to get to 10nm. Intel’s 14nm chips are still very competitive with AMD, so it seems that Intel on 5nm should beat AMD on 5nm, for example. Intel will either solve its process issues in its own factories or, worst case, they outsource production to TSMC - either of which eliminates any process/manufacturing advantage held by AMD and Apple. On a 5-10 year timeline, I don’t see a reason for Intel to continue stumbling on 5nm and 3nm processes though.