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> This is an R&D economic disparity that cannot be sustained. AMD already has enormous scale that it can spread development costs over. Tenstorrent won’t ‘win’
by klelatti 3y ago
> This is an R&D economic disparity that cannot be sustained.
AMD already has enormous scale that it can spread development costs over. Tenstorrent won’t ‘win’ vs AMD solely because it needs fewer engineers and that reduces development costs (it might win for other reasons but that’s a separate argument).
Even if it does make a cheaper product then you have to take into account the fact that you’re asking hundreds of millions of users to switch ISAs with the corresponding economic costs in return for a small reduction in the purchase price.
- hajile 3y agoAMD and Intel are high-margin rather than high-volume products. AMD shipped 8M chips in Q4 of 2023 and Intel shipped 50M (not what the tech press would have you believe given how they rave about Zen). Even if we assume they shipped that many every quarter (Q4 is the high water mark), that's 32M chips for AMD and another 200M for Intel. Apple sold 235M smartphones in 2023 and total smartphone sales were around 1.2B. Apple alone outsold Intel and AMD combined and Apple is shipping their high-end cores in every one of those devices. Put simply, AMD and Intel aren't the big boys anymore. Everything you say about AMD/Intel's economies of scale apply even more to the rest of the industry. Why would a company make a risky expansion into the race-to-the-bottom Wintel market when the phone and server/AI markets are easier to penetrate and offer a great combination of massive economies of scale and super-high margins? Qualcomm is only trying to enter the PC market because they are dominating the phone market and are looking to expand their business. RISC-V won't be entering until ARM has done the hard part of forcing more ISA flexibility onto devs.