5 ms·

I find AMD's decline a little sad, but Intel has plenty of reasons to keep improving their products. Even though their fab tech is ≈18 months ahead of everyone,

by chroma 12y ago

I find AMD's decline a little sad, but Intel has plenty of reasons to keep improving their products. Even though their fab tech is ≈18 months ahead of everyone, they can't seem to get a foothold in the mobile space. Cheap, low-power, ARM-based SoCs dominate mobile. ARM-based laptops are making inroads (Chromebooks), and there's a good chance they'll start getting into the server market. Intel makes the fastest, most efficient x86 CPUs, but fewer and fewer people are stuck on that architecture. If nobody needs x86, Intel's only differentiator is their fab advantage, which they could easily lose.

detaro 12y ago
The server market is going to get interesting. Right now Intel wins relatively easily against the first ARM servers, but you can tell from their recent developments that they feel the pressure (Atom C2000-series, upcoming Xeon D, ...)
raverbashing 12y ago
Yeah, that's the issue Nobody buys desktops anymore. Profits are falling Mobile is the new competition area. And if Intel wants to sell x86 there they'll have to earn it.
- StillBored 12y ago
  "Nobody buys desktops anymore." Nobody buys desktops anymore because they haven't gotten faster in any real way in the last 5 years. Probably about 80% of intel's product line can be beaten by a 5 year old intel machine. Sure at the absolute top, there has been a few percent gain, but most people don't seem willing to buy a couple thousand dollar machine to gain a few percent. Sure it may be more power efficient, but I don't think most people buying desktops really care if the CPU draws 30 watts or 80 watts, as its plugged into the wall and the cost savings over years isn't enough to pay for the upgrade. Intel could be pushing features into the desktop space (say ECC for example) but that would further cannibalize their high profit chips.
  - agumonkey 12y ago
    Beside performance is not a marketing driver anymore since mainstream usage doesn't require anything faster than 5yo CPU, except maybe for HD Video. CPU is not a bottleneck since ages, memory / storage bandwidth is. With heat being a problem, manufacturers improve where it can be seen. A SSD has more impact on your life than the latest CPU. I've seen it numerous times. My neighbors latest SONY i5 laptop doesn't hold a candle to my uber aging ThinkPad simply because of this (and an OS that doesn't accumulate crap over time) And people bought desktops because that's how it was. Under the slightly fallacious upgrade-ability of towers. But a fanless mini-itx would please anybody in less space. I don't know how important this is for people, do they prefer to have a dedicated area for a large box vs tiny imac / vesa mounted box somewhere.
    - StillBored 12y ago
      "Beside performance is not a marketing driver anymore since mainstream usage doesn't require anything faster than 5yo CPU" Because software is constrained by the lack of performance improvement. If someone managed to double single threaded performance every 18 months for the next 5 years, I can assure you that it would force an upgrade cycle. If for no other reason than than FF/chrome/websites would bloat up enough that people would have to upgrade. Its not like people sat around for hours waiting for their 286's to boot, or to print word processing documents. Faster technology enables "features" which suddenly people cannot live without which drives the upgrade cycle. There are plenty of technologies which are not yet "mature" and could benefit from more single threaded computing power. Speech recognition, compression, and on and on, are algorithms which are tuned for available computing power rather than the best compression ratio, or the most accurate recognition.
      - agumonkey 12y ago
        Agreed, but few things: 1) I firmly believe we've reached a plateau, I'm having a hard time imagining what new complex feature people would need that much. That's anecdotal and subjective but even amazing things like computer vision or speech recognition ended up in the gimmick side of things to me. The web is becoming bloated for no reason, old websites had more content, less chrome. Fast web is easy, no javascript, text. ps: bloated websites are enabled by more capacity. 2) Speed is not everything, there's a sweet spot between instantaneous and unusable. Most people aiming for speed are after user conversion, in the fear that response time would lower their numbers. For real usage, speed is not a real factor as long as its predictable and meaningful. I have soft machines with jaggy and unreliable behavior which annoy me more than my old 350MHz machine. 3) Hardware constraints are good. Without limitation nobody would have cared about space or time efficient algorithms (jpeg, mp3, or even zip). See how late Microsoft has been trying to improve storage use of its OS. All in all it goes both ways. I'm really open to ideas, but I'm failing to see what I'm doing now that I couldn't do under win2k days (except for HD video, 3D). I used to render cgi animation, compose multitrack, abuse photoshop...
higherpurpose 12y ago
Actually, Intel has very little reason to improve its chips in performance, and as we've seen basically since Ivy Bridge, their focus has mainly been dropping the power consumption of their chips, not increasing the overall performance of their chips (sure they've increased the IPC a bit more, but does it really count if the actual shipping chips then come out with a lower base frequency than the previous generation, making the overall performance at best stagnant, at worst significantly less than before - such as with Core M).
- CHY872 12y ago
  Not totally true. Intel obviously builds its chips to fit its markets, and while the consumer chips have been improving mostly in power consumption (because of the shift to laptops and the miniaturisation of those laptops) their server chips have been improving in performance also, where there are no such constraints. For example, Intel will happily sell you an 18 core 2.3GHz Haswell Xeon with a design power of 145W, or a 10 core 3.1Ghz processor that puts out 160W.
agumonkey 12y ago
AMD fate is a little dramatic. The ATi merge wasn't pragmatically useful, but a financial burden. The idea of having CPU/GPGPU in one SoC was good[1], but AMD couldn't flip the market with their products at that time, they put a lot of efforts swimming against the mainstream, and now the mainstream is going their way, they lost steam while Intel seems unstoppable[2]. [1] AMD SoC architecture reviews showed originality and value, but you needed a different software stack to take advantage of it. Without that, it's just slower, hotter silicon. I think that's how mantle started. Again, it's not a competitive advantage anymore now that Vulcan is a standard. [2] I may be wrong, but I don't think ARM SoC are really a threat to Intel. They did eat a nice chunk of his lunch though, but Intel's IP and assets seem so huge...

by chroma 12y ago

detaro 12y ago

The server market is going to get interesting. Right now Intel wins relatively easily against the first ARM servers, but you can tell from their recent developments that they feel the pressure (Atom C2000-series, upcoming Xeon D, ...)

raverbashing 12y ago

Yeah, that's the issue Nobody buys desktops anymore. Profits are falling Mobile is the new competition area. And if Intel wants to sell x86 there they'll have to earn it.

StillBored 12y ago
"Nobody buys desktops anymore." Nobody buys desktops anymore because they haven't gotten faster in any real way in the last 5 years. Probably about 80% of intel's product line can be beaten by a 5 year old intel machine. Sure at the absolute top, there has been a few percent gain, but most people don't seem willing to buy a couple thousand dollar machine to gain a few percent. Sure it may be more power efficient, but I don't think most people buying desktops really care if the CPU draws 30 watts or 80 watts, as its plugged into the wall and the cost savings over years isn't enough to pay for the upgrade. Intel could be pushing features into the desktop space (say ECC for example) but that would further cannibalize their high profit chips.
- agumonkey 12y ago
  Beside performance is not a marketing driver anymore since mainstream usage doesn't require anything faster than 5yo CPU, except maybe for HD Video. CPU is not a bottleneck since ages, memory / storage bandwidth is. With heat being a problem, manufacturers improve where it can be seen. A SSD has more impact on your life than the latest CPU. I've seen it numerous times. My neighbors latest SONY i5 laptop doesn't hold a candle to my uber aging ThinkPad simply because of this (and an OS that doesn't accumulate crap over time) And people bought desktops because that's how it was. Under the slightly fallacious upgrade-ability of towers. But a fanless mini-itx would please anybody in less space. I don't know how important this is for people, do they prefer to have a dedicated area for a large box vs tiny imac / vesa mounted box somewhere.
  - StillBored 12y ago
    "Beside performance is not a marketing driver anymore since mainstream usage doesn't require anything faster than 5yo CPU" Because software is constrained by the lack of performance improvement. If someone managed to double single threaded performance every 18 months for the next 5 years, I can assure you that it would force an upgrade cycle. If for no other reason than than FF/chrome/websites would bloat up enough that people would have to upgrade. Its not like people sat around for hours waiting for their 286's to boot, or to print word processing documents. Faster technology enables "features" which suddenly people cannot live without which drives the upgrade cycle. There are plenty of technologies which are not yet "mature" and could benefit from more single threaded computing power. Speech recognition, compression, and on and on, are algorithms which are tuned for available computing power rather than the best compression ratio, or the most accurate recognition.
    - agumonkey 12y ago
      Agreed, but few things: 1) I firmly believe we've reached a plateau, I'm having a hard time imagining what new complex feature people would need that much. That's anecdotal and subjective but even amazing things like computer vision or speech recognition ended up in the gimmick side of things to me. The web is becoming bloated for no reason, old websites had more content, less chrome. Fast web is easy, no javascript, text. ps: bloated websites are enabled by more capacity. 2) Speed is not everything, there's a sweet spot between instantaneous and unusable. Most people aiming for speed are after user conversion, in the fear that response time would lower their numbers. For real usage, speed is not a real factor as long as its predictable and meaningful. I have soft machines with jaggy and unreliable behavior which annoy me more than my old 350MHz machine. 3) Hardware constraints are good. Without limitation nobody would have cared about space or time efficient algorithms (jpeg, mp3, or even zip). See how late Microsoft has been trying to improve storage use of its OS. All in all it goes both ways. I'm really open to ideas, but I'm failing to see what I'm doing now that I couldn't do under win2k days (except for HD video, 3D). I used to render cgi animation, compose multitrack, abuse photoshop...

higherpurpose 12y ago

Actually, Intel has very little reason to improve its chips in performance, and as we've seen basically since Ivy Bridge, their focus has mainly been dropping the power consumption of their chips, not increasing the overall performance of their chips (sure they've increased the IPC a bit more, but does it really count if the actual shipping chips then come out with a lower base frequency than the previous generation, making the overall performance at best stagnant, at worst significantly less than before - such as with Core M).

CHY872 12y ago
Not totally true. Intel obviously builds its chips to fit its markets, and while the consumer chips have been improving mostly in power consumption (because of the shift to laptops and the miniaturisation of those laptops) their server chips have been improving in performance also, where there are no such constraints. For example, Intel will happily sell you an 18 core 2.3GHz Haswell Xeon with a design power of 145W, or a 10 core 3.1Ghz processor that puts out 160W.

agumonkey 12y ago

AMD fate is a little dramatic. The ATi merge wasn't pragmatically useful, but a financial burden. The idea of having CPU/GPGPU in one SoC was good[1], but AMD couldn't flip the market with their products at that time, they put a lot of efforts swimming against the mainstream, and now the mainstream is going their way, they lost steam while Intel seems unstoppable[2]. [1] AMD SoC architecture reviews showed originality and value, but you needed a different software stack to take advantage of it. Without that, it's just slower, hotter silicon. I think that's how mantle started. Again, it's not a competitive advantage anymore now that Vulcan is a standard. [2] I may be wrong, but I don't think ARM SoC are really a threat to Intel. They did eat a nice chunk of his lunch though, but Intel's IP and assets seem so huge...