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Remember the Pentium 4/Netburst era? They bounced back pretty well from that with the Core CPUs. Intel is still tons more successful than 99.9% of companies ou

by arp242 2y ago

Remember the Pentium 4/Netburst era? They bounced back pretty well from that with the Core CPUs. Intel is still tons more successful than 99.9% of companies out there. Specifically, they're still doing a $54 billion/year revenue, making it the ~260th largest company in the US (by revenue). This entire "if you're not leading, then you're losing" type of winner-takes-all mindset is fairly silly.

whatever1 2y ago
For processors it’s a bit different I believe. We care about cost, efficiency and raw power. If you are not leading in at least one dimension you are completely dead. You are literally leaving money on the table if you pick a processor not leading one of these (or being very good at 2-3 of these).
- wizzwizz4 2y ago
  Ability to source replacements. Behavioural predictability (or, more specifically, correctness). Backwards-compatibility. Side-channels, or preferably lack thereof. So-called "trusted execution environments". Sure, Intel isn't leading in any of these either – except maybe backwards-compatibility –, but there are more characteristics we care about than just the three you listed.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- HelloNurse 2y ago
  It's simply the Pareto frontier: whatever you want, an option that is inferior in all possible ways is not preferable and nobody should choose it.
Guthur 2y ago
The Core were good but also AMD fumbled with bulldozer which left them floundering until the Zen era. AMD has been doing pretty well from a strategic point of view, specifically in high volume data centre SKUs, and so it's hard to see Intel being given as wide a window this time. And there are now also other players looking to take some market share, most notably Nvidia, but also all the big players are looking at their own in house ARM silicon. The road back for Intel is not going to be nearly as wide and smooth as it was for Core.
panick21_ 2y ago
Well Intel used its massive monopoly and market domination to prevent all the biggest providers from using AMD. To a point where AMD literally couldn't give away chips for free. In some years Dell profitability basically depended on them not selling any AMD, because if they did, they would get the massive subsidy from Intel. These company were losing market share because they couldn't sell AMD systems, but that was preferable to not getting rebates. This lead to massive anti-trust style lawsuits in Europe, the US, Japan and other places, and basically it lead to a 10 year legal battle that only ended because AMD was simply out of money to continue to fight the legal fight. So the made a settlement to get some cash. If intel didn't have such insane market dominance, incredibly balance sheet and high margin for all the legal battle and all the fines, AMD would have really, really hurt them in the 2000s. But they could sustain the fight long enough and when AMD made a misstep, and Intel didn't, AMD crushed. AMD kind of saved itself with consoles sales and then managed to turn it around with Zen.
xbmcuser 2y ago
The problem is not today but tomorrow where it's competitors are going to smaller and smaller nodes. Also Tsmc keeps 50+% margin so does Amd so actual cost of processor is less than 20% of sale price. Intel foundry seems uncompetitive let alone it's current processor architecture.
ywvcbk 2y ago
> successful than 99.9% of companies out there Depends on how you define that, I’d bet that 99.9% of all companies aren’t losing billions of $ every quarter while their revenue is declining even more. Also while simultaneously failing in pretty much every market segment they operate in..

by arp242 2y ago

whatever1 2y ago

For processors it’s a bit different I believe. We care about cost, efficiency and raw power. If you are not leading in at least one dimension you are completely dead. You are literally leaving money on the table if you pick a processor not leading one of these (or being very good at 2-3 of these).

wizzwizz4 2y ago
Ability to source replacements. Behavioural predictability (or, more specifically, correctness). Backwards-compatibility. Side-channels, or preferably lack thereof. So-called "trusted execution environments". Sure, Intel isn't leading in any of these either – except maybe backwards-compatibility –, but there are more characteristics we care about than just the three you listed.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
HelloNurse 2y ago
It's simply the Pareto frontier: whatever you want, an option that is inferior in all possible ways is not preferable and nobody should choose it.

Guthur 2y ago

The Core were good but also AMD fumbled with bulldozer which left them floundering until the Zen era. AMD has been doing pretty well from a strategic point of view, specifically in high volume data centre SKUs, and so it's hard to see Intel being given as wide a window this time. And there are now also other players looking to take some market share, most notably Nvidia, but also all the big players are looking at their own in house ARM silicon. The road back for Intel is not going to be nearly as wide and smooth as it was for Core.

panick21_ 2y ago

Well Intel used its massive monopoly and market domination to prevent all the biggest providers from using AMD. To a point where AMD literally couldn't give away chips for free. In some years Dell profitability basically depended on them not selling any AMD, because if they did, they would get the massive subsidy from Intel. These company were losing market share because they couldn't sell AMD systems, but that was preferable to not getting rebates. This lead to massive anti-trust style lawsuits in Europe, the US, Japan and other places, and basically it lead to a 10 year legal battle that only ended because AMD was simply out of money to continue to fight the legal fight. So the made a settlement to get some cash. If intel didn't have such insane market dominance, incredibly balance sheet and high margin for all the legal battle and all the fines, AMD would have really, really hurt them in the 2000s. But they could sustain the fight long enough and when AMD made a misstep, and Intel didn't, AMD crushed. AMD kind of saved itself with consoles sales and then managed to turn it around with Zen.

xbmcuser 2y ago

The problem is not today but tomorrow where it's competitors are going to smaller and smaller nodes. Also Tsmc keeps 50+% margin so does Amd so actual cost of processor is less than 20% of sale price. Intel foundry seems uncompetitive let alone it's current processor architecture.

ywvcbk 2y ago

> successful than 99.9% of companies out there Depends on how you define that, I’d bet that 99.9% of all companies aren’t losing billions of $ every quarter while their revenue is declining even more. Also while simultaneously failing in pretty much every market segment they operate in..