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Lately Intel seems to be getting a lot of flack here. As a layperson in the space who's pretty out of the loop (I built a home PC about a decade ago), could som

by CSSer 5y ago

Lately Intel seems to be getting a lot of flack here. As a layperson in the space who's pretty out of the loop (I built a home PC about a decade ago), could someone explain to me why that is? Is Intel really falling behind or dressing up metrics to mislead or something like that? I also partly ask because I feel that I only really superficially understand why Apple ditched/is ditching Intel, although I understand if that is a bit off-topic for the current article.

tyingq 5y ago
Lots of shade because they first missed the whole mobile market, then got beat by AMD Zen by missing the chiplet concept and a successful current-gen process size, then finally also overshadowed by Apple's M1. The M1 thing is interesting, because it likely means the next set of ARM Neoverse CPUs for servers, from Amazon and others, will be really impressive. Intel is behind on many fronts.
- mhh__ 5y ago
  >likely means the next set of ARM Neoverse CPUs from Amazon and others will be really impressive M1 is proof that it can be done, however you can absolutely make a bad CPU for a good ISA so I wouldn't take it for granted.
  - tyingq 5y ago
    Might be a hint as to how much of M1's prowess is just the process size and how much is Apple.
s_dev 5y ago
>Is Intel really falling behind Intel is already behind AMD -- they have no product segment where they are absolutely superior. The means AMD is setting the market pace. On top of this Apple is switching to ARM designed CPUs. This also looks to be a vote of no confidence in Intel. The consensus seems to be that Intel who have their own fabs -- never really nailed anything under 14nm and are now being outcompeted.
- meepmorp 5y ago
  Apple designs it’s own chips, it doesn’t use ARM’s designs. They do use the ARM ISA, tho.
- totalZero 5y ago
  > Intel is already behind AMD -- they have no product segment where they are absolutely superior. There are some who would argue this claim, but I think it's at least a defensible one. Still, availability is an important factor that isn't captured by benchmarking. AMD has had CPU inventory trouble in the low-end laptop segment and high-end desktop segment alike. > The consensus seems to be that Intel who have their own fabs -- never really nailed anything under 14nm and are now being outcompeted. Intel has done well with 10nm laptop CPUs. They were just very late to the party. Desktop and server timelines have been quite a bit worse. I agree Intel did not nail 10nm, but they're definitely hanging in there. It's one process node at the cusp of transition to EUV, so some of the defeatism around Intel may be overzealous if we keep in mind that 7nm process development has been somewhat parallel to 10nm because of the difference in the lithographic technology.
yoz-y 5y ago
Intel was unable to improve their fabrication process year after year, while promising to do so repeatedly. Now, they have been practically lapped twice. Apple has a somewhat specific use case, but their cpus have significantly better performance per watt.
blackoil 5y ago
A perfect storm. Intel had trouble with its 10nm/7nm engineering processes, which TSMC has been able to achieve. AMD had a resurgence with Zen arch. and ARM/Apple/TSMC/Samsung put 100s of billions to catchup with the x86 performance. Intel is still biggest player in the game, because even though they are stuck at 14nm, AMD isn't able to manufacture enough to take bigger chunks of the market. Apple won't sell it to PC/Datacenter space, rest are still niche.
- ac29 5y ago
  > even though they are stuck at 14nm I think this isnt quite fair, their laptop 10nm chips have been shipping in volume since last year, and their server chips were released today, with 200k+ units already shipped (according to Anandtech). The only line left on 14nm is socketed Desktop processors, which is a relatively small market compared to laptops and servers.
  - colinmhayes 5y ago
    Hacker News users generally aren't very interested in laptop processors. Sure business wise they're incredibly important, but as far as getting flack on hacker news, laptop chips won't stop it. People here have been waiting for intel 10nm on server and especially desktop for 6 years now.
    - totalZero 5y ago
      Unless you have scraped past posts to perform some kind of sentiment analysis, this is pure speculation intended to move the goalposts on GP.
jimbob21 5y ago
Yes, quite simply they have fallen behind while also promising things they have failed to deliver. As an example, their most recent flagship release is the 11900k, which has 2 fewer cores (now 8) than its predecessor (had 10, 10900k), and almost no improvement to speak of otherwise (in some games its ~1% faster). On the other hand, AMD's flagship, which to be fair is $150 more expensive, has 16 cores, very similar clock speeds, and is much more energy efficient (intel and amd calculate TDP differently). Overall, AMD is the better choice by a large margin and Intel is getting flock because it sat on its laurels for the last decade(?) and hasn't done anything to improve itself. To put it in numbers alone, look at this benchmark. Flagship vs Flagship: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i9-11900K-vs-AMD-Ryzen-9-5950X/3904vs3862 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i9-11900K-vs-AMD-...
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  Naturally the 11900K performs quite a bit worse than the 10900K in anything which uses all cores, but the remarkable thing about the 11900K is that it even performs worse in a bunch of game benchmarks, so as a product it genuinely doesn't make any sense.
mhh__ 5y ago
Intel's processes (i.e. turning files on a computer into chips) have been a complete disaster in recent years, to the point of basically missing one of their key die shrinks entirely as far as I can tell. They are, in a certain sense, suffering from their own success in that their competitors have basically been nonexistant up until Zen came about (and even then only until Zen 3 have Intel truly been knocked off their single thread perch). This has led to them getting cagey, and a bit ridiculous in the sense that they are not only backporting new designs to old processes but also pumping them up to genuinely ridiculous power budgets. With Apple, AMD, and TSMC they have basically been caught with their trousers down by younger and leaner companies. Ultimately this is where Intel need good leadership. The mba solution is to just give up and do something else (e.g. spin off the fabs), but I think they should have the confidence (as far as I can tell this is what they are doing) to rise to the technical challenge - they will probably never have a run like they did from Nehalem to shortly before now, but throwing in the towel means that the probability is zero. Intel have been in situations like this before, e.g. When Itanium was clearly doomed and AMD were doing well (amd64), they came back with new processors and basically ran away to the bank for years - AMD's server market share is still pitiful compared to Intel (10% at most), for example.
- ac29 5y ago
  > Intel's processes (i.e. turning files on a computer into chips) have been a complete disaster in recent years, to the point of basically missing one of their key die shrinks entirely as far as I can tell. Which one? I dont believe they missed a die shrink, it just took a long time. Intel 14nm came out in 2014 with their Broadwell Processors, and the next node, 10nm came out in 2019 (technically 2018, but very few units shipped that year).
  - mhh__ 5y ago
    Cannon Lake I believe was basically cancelled.
    - chx 5y ago
      You wish. It was released because a bunch of Intel managers had bonuses tied to launching 10nm and so they released it.
chx 5y ago
Absolutely. Intel has been stuck on the 14nm node for a very, very long time. 10nm CPUs were supposed to ship in 2015, they did really only in late 2019, 2020. Meanwhile AMD caught up and Intel has been doing the silliest shenanigans to appear as if they were competitive, like in 2018 they demonstrated a 28 core 5GHz CPU and kinda forgot to mention the behind-the-scenes one horsepower (~745W) industrial chiller keeping that beast running. Also, the first 10nm "Ice Lake" mobile CPUs were not really an improvement over the by then many times refined 14nm chips "Comet Lake". It's been a faecal pageant.
ineedasername 5y ago
They can't get their next-gen fabs (chip factories) into production. It's been a problem long enough that they're not even next-gen anymore: it's current-gen, about to be previous-gen. So what you're seeing isn't really anti-Intel, it's probably often more like bitter disappointment that they haven't done better. Though I'm sure there's a tiny bit of fanboy-ism for & against Intel. There's definitely some of that pro-AMD fanboy sentiment in the gaming community where people build their own rigs: AMD chips are massively cheaper than a comparable Intel chip.
- MangoCoffee 5y ago
  >So what you're seeing isn't really anti-Intel, it's probably often more like bitter disappointment that they haven't done better. its back to where everyone design its own chip for their own product but don't need a fab 'cause of foundry like TSMC and Samsung.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    Yes, which is why I was practically shouting inside my head when Intel recently announced it would finally open its fabs for outside work the way TSMC operates. Finally! Considering the way Intel is structured around its own designs it might never be a significant source of profits for them, but it should at least help to cover their fixed costs during dry spells and production problems on their own designs.
- M277 5y ago
  Just a minor nitpick regarding your last paragraph, this is no longer the case. Intel is now significantly cheaper after they heavily cut prices across the board. For instance, you can now get an i7-10700K (which is roughly equivalent in single thread and better in multi thread) for cheaper than a R5 5600X.
  - robocat 5y ago
    Nitpick: you are comparing price where you should be comparing performance per dollar, or are you cherry-picking the wrong comparison? My cherry-pick is where the AMD chip is 30% more expensive, but multi-threaded performance is 100% better in this example: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i9-11900K-vs-AMD-Ryzen-9-5950X/3904vs3862 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i9-11900K-vs-AMD-... Edit: picking individual processors to compare (especially low volume ones) is often not useful when talking about how well a company is competing in the market.
JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
https://jamesallworth.medium.com/intels-disruption-is-now-complete-d4fa771f0f2c https://jamesallworth.medium.com/intels-disruption-is-now-co... I think that summarizes it pretty well in that one graph.
matmatmatmat 5y ago
Some of the other comments above have touched on this, but I think there is also a bit of latent anti-Intel sentiment in many people's minds. Intel extracted a non-trivial price premium out of consumers for many, many years (both for chips and by forcing people to upgrade motherboards by changing CPU sockets) while AMD could only catch up to them for brief periods of time. People paid that price premium for one reason or another, but it doesn't mean they were thrilled about it. Many people, I'd say especially enthusiasts, were quite happy when AMD was able to compete on a performance/$ basis and then outright beat Intel. Of course, now the tables have turned and AMD is able to extract that price premium while Intel cut prices. Who knows how long this will last, but Intel is still the 800 lb gorilla in terms of capacity, engineering talent, and revenue. I don't think we've heard the last from them.

by CSSer 5y ago

tyingq 5y ago

Lots of shade because they first missed the whole mobile market, then got beat by AMD Zen by missing the chiplet concept and a successful current-gen process size, then finally also overshadowed by Apple's M1. The M1 thing is interesting, because it likely means the next set of ARM Neoverse CPUs for servers, from Amazon and others, will be really impressive. Intel is behind on many fronts.

mhh__ 5y ago
>likely means the next set of ARM Neoverse CPUs from Amazon and others will be really impressive M1 is proof that it can be done, however you can absolutely make a bad CPU for a good ISA so I wouldn't take it for granted.
- tyingq 5y ago
  Might be a hint as to how much of M1's prowess is just the process size and how much is Apple.

s_dev 5y ago

>Is Intel really falling behind Intel is already behind AMD -- they have no product segment where they are absolutely superior. The means AMD is setting the market pace. On top of this Apple is switching to ARM designed CPUs. This also looks to be a vote of no confidence in Intel. The consensus seems to be that Intel who have their own fabs -- never really nailed anything under 14nm and are now being outcompeted.

meepmorp 5y ago
Apple designs it’s own chips, it doesn’t use ARM’s designs. They do use the ARM ISA, tho.
totalZero 5y ago
> Intel is already behind AMD -- they have no product segment where they are absolutely superior. There are some who would argue this claim, but I think it's at least a defensible one. Still, availability is an important factor that isn't captured by benchmarking. AMD has had CPU inventory trouble in the low-end laptop segment and high-end desktop segment alike. > The consensus seems to be that Intel who have their own fabs -- never really nailed anything under 14nm and are now being outcompeted. Intel has done well with 10nm laptop CPUs. They were just very late to the party. Desktop and server timelines have been quite a bit worse. I agree Intel did not nail 10nm, but they're definitely hanging in there. It's one process node at the cusp of transition to EUV, so some of the defeatism around Intel may be overzealous if we keep in mind that 7nm process development has been somewhat parallel to 10nm because of the difference in the lithographic technology.

yoz-y 5y ago

Intel was unable to improve their fabrication process year after year, while promising to do so repeatedly. Now, they have been practically lapped twice. Apple has a somewhat specific use case, but their cpus have significantly better performance per watt.

blackoil 5y ago

A perfect storm. Intel had trouble with its 10nm/7nm engineering processes, which TSMC has been able to achieve. AMD had a resurgence with Zen arch. and ARM/Apple/TSMC/Samsung put 100s of billions to catchup with the x86 performance. Intel is still biggest player in the game, because even though they are stuck at 14nm, AMD isn't able to manufacture enough to take bigger chunks of the market. Apple won't sell it to PC/Datacenter space, rest are still niche.

ac29 5y ago
> even though they are stuck at 14nm I think this isnt quite fair, their laptop 10nm chips have been shipping in volume since last year, and their server chips were released today, with 200k+ units already shipped (according to Anandtech). The only line left on 14nm is socketed Desktop processors, which is a relatively small market compared to laptops and servers.
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  Hacker News users generally aren't very interested in laptop processors. Sure business wise they're incredibly important, but as far as getting flack on hacker news, laptop chips won't stop it. People here have been waiting for intel 10nm on server and especially desktop for 6 years now.
  - totalZero 5y ago
    Unless you have scraped past posts to perform some kind of sentiment analysis, this is pure speculation intended to move the goalposts on GP.

jimbob21 5y ago

Yes, quite simply they have fallen behind while also promising things they have failed to deliver. As an example, their most recent flagship release is the 11900k, which has 2 fewer cores (now 8) than its predecessor (had 10, 10900k), and almost no improvement to speak of otherwise (in some games its ~1% faster). On the other hand, AMD's flagship, which to be fair is $150 more expensive, has 16 cores, very similar clock speeds, and is much more energy efficient (intel and amd calculate TDP differently). Overall, AMD is the better choice by a large margin and Intel is getting flock because it sat on its laurels for the last decade(?) and hasn't done anything to improve itself. To put it in numbers alone, look at this benchmark. Flagship vs Flagship: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i9-11900K-vs-AMD-Ryzen-9-5950X/3904vs3862 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i9-11900K-vs-AMD-...

formerly_proven 5y ago
Naturally the 11900K performs quite a bit worse than the 10900K in anything which uses all cores, but the remarkable thing about the 11900K is that it even performs worse in a bunch of game benchmarks, so as a product it genuinely doesn't make any sense.

mhh__ 5y ago

Intel's processes (i.e. turning files on a computer into chips) have been a complete disaster in recent years, to the point of basically missing one of their key die shrinks entirely as far as I can tell. They are, in a certain sense, suffering from their own success in that their competitors have basically been nonexistant up until Zen came about (and even then only until Zen 3 have Intel truly been knocked off their single thread perch). This has led to them getting cagey, and a bit ridiculous in the sense that they are not only backporting new designs to old processes but also pumping them up to genuinely ridiculous power budgets. With Apple, AMD, and TSMC they have basically been caught with their trousers down by younger and leaner companies. Ultimately this is where Intel need good leadership. The mba solution is to just give up and do something else (e.g. spin off the fabs), but I think they should have the confidence (as far as I can tell this is what they are doing) to rise to the technical challenge - they will probably never have a run like they did from Nehalem to shortly before now, but throwing in the towel means that the probability is zero. Intel have been in situations like this before, e.g. When Itanium was clearly doomed and AMD were doing well (amd64), they came back with new processors and basically ran away to the bank for years - AMD's server market share is still pitiful compared to Intel (10% at most), for example.

ac29 5y ago
> Intel's processes (i.e. turning files on a computer into chips) have been a complete disaster in recent years, to the point of basically missing one of their key die shrinks entirely as far as I can tell. Which one? I dont believe they missed a die shrink, it just took a long time. Intel 14nm came out in 2014 with their Broadwell Processors, and the next node, 10nm came out in 2019 (technically 2018, but very few units shipped that year).
- mhh__ 5y ago
  Cannon Lake I believe was basically cancelled.
  - chx 5y ago
    You wish. It was released because a bunch of Intel managers had bonuses tied to launching 10nm and so they released it.

chx 5y ago

Absolutely. Intel has been stuck on the 14nm node for a very, very long time. 10nm CPUs were supposed to ship in 2015, they did really only in late 2019, 2020. Meanwhile AMD caught up and Intel has been doing the silliest shenanigans to appear as if they were competitive, like in 2018 they demonstrated a 28 core 5GHz CPU and kinda forgot to mention the behind-the-scenes one horsepower (~745W) industrial chiller keeping that beast running. Also, the first 10nm "Ice Lake" mobile CPUs were not really an improvement over the by then many times refined 14nm chips "Comet Lake". It's been a faecal pageant.

ineedasername 5y ago

They can't get their next-gen fabs (chip factories) into production. It's been a problem long enough that they're not even next-gen anymore: it's current-gen, about to be previous-gen. So what you're seeing isn't really anti-Intel, it's probably often more like bitter disappointment that they haven't done better. Though I'm sure there's a tiny bit of fanboy-ism for & against Intel. There's definitely some of that pro-AMD fanboy sentiment in the gaming community where people build their own rigs: AMD chips are massively cheaper than a comparable Intel chip.

MangoCoffee 5y ago
>So what you're seeing isn't really anti-Intel, it's probably often more like bitter disappointment that they haven't done better. its back to where everyone design its own chip for their own product but don't need a fab 'cause of foundry like TSMC and Samsung.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  Yes, which is why I was practically shouting inside my head when Intel recently announced it would finally open its fabs for outside work the way TSMC operates. Finally! Considering the way Intel is structured around its own designs it might never be a significant source of profits for them, but it should at least help to cover their fixed costs during dry spells and production problems on their own designs.
M277 5y ago
Just a minor nitpick regarding your last paragraph, this is no longer the case. Intel is now significantly cheaper after they heavily cut prices across the board. For instance, you can now get an i7-10700K (which is roughly equivalent in single thread and better in multi thread) for cheaper than a R5 5600X.
- robocat 5y ago
  Nitpick: you are comparing price where you should be comparing performance per dollar, or are you cherry-picking the wrong comparison? My cherry-pick is where the AMD chip is 30% more expensive, but multi-threaded performance is 100% better in this example: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i9-11900K-vs-AMD-Ryzen-9-5950X/3904vs3862 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i9-11900K-vs-AMD-... Edit: picking individual processors to compare (especially low volume ones) is often not useful when talking about how well a company is competing in the market.

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago

https://jamesallworth.medium.com/intels-disruption-is-now-complete-d4fa771f0f2c https://jamesallworth.medium.com/intels-disruption-is-now-co... I think that summarizes it pretty well in that one graph.

matmatmatmat 5y ago

Some of the other comments above have touched on this, but I think there is also a bit of latent anti-Intel sentiment in many people's minds. Intel extracted a non-trivial price premium out of consumers for many, many years (both for chips and by forcing people to upgrade motherboards by changing CPU sockets) while AMD could only catch up to them for brief periods of time. People paid that price premium for one reason or another, but it doesn't mean they were thrilled about it. Many people, I'd say especially enthusiasts, were quite happy when AMD was able to compete on a performance/$ basis and then outright beat Intel. Of course, now the tables have turned and AMD is able to extract that price premium while Intel cut prices. Who knows how long this will last, but Intel is still the 800 lb gorilla in terms of capacity, engineering talent, and revenue. I don't think we've heard the last from them.