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Pretty incisive article, and I agree.
In retrospect, I think the marketing/sales/finance corporate leadership idiocy that’s intensified over the last couple decades is the single biggest contributor to my deep sense of frustration and ennui I’ve developed working as a software engineer. It just seems like pretty much fucking nobody in the engineering management sphere these days actually values robust, carefully and thoughtfully designed stuff anymore - or more accurately, if they do, the higher-ups will fire them for not churning out half-finished bullshit.
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2009 era was also when Intel leveraged their position in the compiler market to cripple all non-Intel processors. Nearly every benchmarking tool used that complier and put an enormous handicap on AMD processors by locking them to either no SSE or, later, back to SSE2.
My friends all thought I was crazy for buying AMD, but accusations had started circulating about the complier heavily favoring Intel at least as early as 2005, and they were finally ordered to stop in 2010 by the FTC… Though of course they have been caught cheating in several other ways since.
Everyone has this picture in their heads of AMD being the scrappy underdog and Intel being the professional choice, but Intel hasn’t really worn the crown since the release of Athlon. Except during Bulldozer/Piledriver, but who can blame AMD for trying something crazy after 10 years of frustration?
Historically AMD has only been able to take the performance crown from Intel when Intel has made serious blunders. In the early 2000s, it was Intel commiting to Netburst in the belief that processors could scale past 5Ghz on their fab processes, if pipelined deeply enough. Instead they got caught out by unexpected quantum effects leading to excessive heat and power leakage, at the same time that AMD produces a very good follow-on to their Athlon XP line of CPUs, in the form of the Athlon 64.
At the time, Intel did resort to dirty tricks to lock AMD out of the prebuilt and server space, for which they ultimately faced antitrust action. But the net effect was that AMD wasn’t able to capitalize on their technological edge, Ave ended up having to sell off their fabs for cash, while Intel bought enough time to revise their mobile CPU design into the Core series of desktop processors, and reclaim the technological advantage. Simultaneously AMD was betting the farm on Bulldozer, believing that the time had come to prioritize multithreading over single-core performance (it wasn’t time yet).
This is where we enter the doldrums, with AMD repeatedly trying and failing to make the Bulldozer architecture work, while Intel coasted along on marginal updates to the Core 2 architecture for almost a decade. Intel was gonna have to blunder again to change the status quo – which they did, by betting against EUV for their 10nm fab process. Intel’s process leadership stalled and performance hit a wall, while AMD was finally producing a competent architecture in the form of Zen, and then moved ahead of Intel on process when they started manufacturing Zen2 at TSMC.
Right now, with Intel finally getting up to speed with EUV and working on architectural improvements to catch up with AMD (and both needing to bridge the gap to Apple Silicon now) at the same time that AMD is going from strength to strength with Zen revisions, we’re in a very interesting time for CPU development. I fear a bit for AMD, as I think the fundamentals are stronger for Intel (stronger data center AI value proposition, graphics group seemingly on the upswing now that they’re finally taking it seriously, and still in control of their destiny in terms of fab processes and manufacturing) while AMD is struggling with GPU and AI development and dependent on TSMC, perpetually under threat from mainland China, for process leadership. But there’s a lot of strong competition in the space, which hasn’t been the case since the days of the Northridge P4 and Athlon XP, and that’s exciting.
Intel was ahead of AMD ever since core 2 duo, in 2006. Amd was behind for almost 10 years and it wasnt until ryzen and especially zen 2 that AMD pulled ahead. And then with zen 3 and zen 4, AMD wiped the floor with intel.
7800x3d is the best cpu ever made for gaming and it succeeded the 5800x3d which was already a legendary cpu. Intel has been getting wrecked so hard that they are literally using tsmc to manufacture their cpus, an obvious admission that their manufacturing is behind the competition(amd is fabless and is also using tsmc).
Intel has the ability to come back on top, at least as far as x86 cpus are concerned. The question is whether x86 is even relevant anymore, considering the insane efficiency gains shown by apple’s m series and even qualcomm’s upcoming snapdragon x series.
The question is whether x86 is even relevant anymore
Also RISC-V, though that is probably a few years away at least.
this is what i was thinking. the article opens by saying it was ubiquitous in the 2000s, but thats only because of aggressive marketing and unfair monopolistic practices.
athlons were faster at lower clockspeeds for a big chunk of the 2000s and no one batted an eye.
Not just that - intel did dual core CPUs as a response to AMD doing just that, by gluing two cores together. Which is pretty funny when you look at intels 2017 campaign of discrediting ryzen by calling it a glued together CPU.
AMDs Opteron was wiping the floor with intel stuff for years - but not every vendor offered systems as they got paid off by intel. I remember helping a friend with building a kernel for one of the first available Opteron setups - that thing was impressive.
And then there’s the whole 64bit thing which intel eventually had to license from AMD.
Most of the big CPU innovations (at least in x86 space) of the last decade were by AMD - and the chiplet design of ryzen is just another one.
Admired AMD since the first Athlon, but never made the jump for various reasons–mostly availability. Just bought my first laptop(or any computer) with an AMD chip in it last year, a ryzen7 680m. There is no discrete graphics card and the onboard GPU has comparable performance to a discrete Nvidia 1050gpu. In a 13" laptop. The AMD chip far surpassed Intel’s onboard GPU performance, and Intel laptop was ~30% more from any company. Fuck right off.
Why doesn’t this matter to Intel? Part of why they always held mind space and a near monopoly is their OEM computer maker deals. HP, DELL, etc. it was almost impossible to find an AMD premade desktop, laptops were out of the question.
I believe my first amd was a desktop athlon around 2000. I needed a fast machine to crunch my undergraduate thesis and that was the most cost effective.
In recent years I can’t buy amd for a strong desktop, went with xps and there’s no options. Linux is a requirement for me, so it narrowed down my choices a lot. As you’d expect, it’s a horrible battery life compounded by being forced to pay and not choose an NVIDIA card that also has poor drivers and power management.
x86 and it’s successor amd86 instruction set is a Pandora box and a polished turd, hiding things such as micro instructions, a full blown small OS running in parallel and independent of BIOS, and other nefarious bad practices of over engineering that is at the roots of spectre and meltdown.
What I mean is I prefer AMD over Intel, but I prefer riscv over both.
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Cheap intel stock going then
I’d be very surprised if they don’t find a way to bounce back, they’ve done it before
Maybe. In the past they have always been able to rely on their dominance in the PC market. With consumers shifting away from this, I don’t think it’s so straight forward and in other emerging markets like AI they are way behind.
At least they are finally putting actual money into R&D. This article was a really good read. Will be interesting to see how and if Intels investments pay off.
Yup, they need to fund engineering. That’s what AMD did, and it turns out that’s a good strategy. Companies need to provide value to customers, and then marketing’s job is easy.
I am also betting they will bounce back; hopefully this is indeed a good opportunity to buy the stock for cheap.
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Nice read. Thanks OP!
Appreciate it 🙏.
Either they make a phone chip … or they continue to rot to obscurity.
Why? AMD doesn’t make phone chips, yet they’re dominating Intel. Likewise for NVIDIA, who is at the top of the chip maker list.
The problem isn’t what market segments they’re in, the problem is that they’re not dominant in any of them. AMD is better at high end gaming (X3D chips especially), workstations (Threadripper), and high performance servers (Epyc), and they’re even better in some cases with power efficiency. Intel is better at the low end generally, by that’s not a big market, and it’s shrinking (e.g. people moving to ARM). AMD has been chipping away at those, one market segment at a time.
Intel entering phones will end up the same way as them entering GPUs, they’ll have to target the low end of the market to get traction, and they’re going to have a lot of trouble challenging the big players. Also, x86 isn’t a good fit there, so they’ll also need to break into the ARM market a well.
No, what they need is to execute well in the spaces they’re already in.
When AMD introduced the first Epyc, they marketed it with the slogan: “Nobody ever got fired for buying Intel. Until now.”
And they lived up to the boast. The Zen architecture was just that good and they’ve been improving on it ever since. Meanwhile the technology everyone assumed Intel had stored up their sleeve turned out to be underwhelming. It’s almost as bad as IA-64 vs. AMD64 and at least Intel managed to recover from that one fairly quickly.
They really need to come to with another Core if they want to stay relevant.
Actually, AMD do make phone chips. That is, they design the Exynos GPUs, which are inside some Samsung devices
Huh, TIL. It looks like they basically put Radeon cores into it.
Lol … AMD dominates ? They have half the revenue .
Yes, and 5 years ago, they had very little of it. I’m talking about the trajectory, and AMD seems to be getting the lion’s share of new sales.
I hope for the best for AMD … they make great products… I own several AMD machines.
But ARM and the trust built around it … continues to eat their market … I see Intel as having more of a fighting chance.
IF THEY RESTRUCTURE … or whatever the fuck their strategy is.
I don’t really see ARM as having an inherent advantage. The main reason Apple’s ARM chips are eating x86’s lunch is because Apple has purchased a lot of capacity on the next generation nodes (e.g. 3nm), while x86 chips tend to ship on older nodes (e.g. 5nm). Even so, AMD’s cores aren’t really that far behind Apple’s, so I think the node advantage is the main indicator here.
That said, the main advantage ARM has is that it’s relatively easy to license it to make your own chips and not involve one of the bigger CPU manufacturers. Apple has their own, Amazon has theirs, and the various phone manufacturers have their own as well. I don’t think Intel would have a decisive advantage there, since companies tend to go with ARM to save on costs, and I don’t think Intel wants to be in another price war.
That’s why I think Intel should leverage what they’re good at. Make better x86 chips, using external fabs if necessary. Intel should have an inherent advantage in power and performance since they use monolithic designs, but those designs cost more than AMD’s chiplet design. Intel should be the premium brand here, with AMD trailing behind, but their fab limitations are causing them to trail behind and jack up clock speeds (and thus kill their power efficiency) to stay competitive.
In short, I really don’t think ARM is the right move right now, unless it’s selling capacity at their fabs. What they need is a really compelling product, and they haven’t really delivered one recently…
It’s not just node, it’s also the design. If I remember properly, ARM has constant instruction length which helps a lot with caching. Anyway, Apple’s M CPUs are still way better when it comes to perf/power ratio.
Yes, it’s certainly more complicated than that, but the lithography is a huge part since they can cram more transistors into a smaller area, which is critical for power savings.
I highly doubt instruction decoding is a significant factor, but I’d love to be proven wrong. If you know of a good writeup about it, I’d love to read it.
Lol
The intel atom had a 4w tdp … a snapdragon 855 has 5 w tdp …
Intel is out of the smartphone market because Google built and optimized…( not as much as Apple ) … android for the arm shit.
This fucked everyone and helped android… since now we are dependent on the chip vendors . Android can’t be replaced on the damned things … and every 3 years you ha e to buy another piece of crap.
They used to, but they weren’t very good.
Lol … If they don’t manage to make a decent one … they’re done.
That being said I would love an "not so good " x86 smartphone with usb video out and desktop mode.
But clearly that ain’t going to happen… all the ARM shit must be sold .
Intel GPUs are still ahead in some ways. They need to work on getting Intel GPUs in datacenters
I also like that they are working on creating a more open AI hardware platform
In what ways? Transcoding?
HDMI 2.1 support on Linux 😂😭
Maybe in some niche performance matrices. However they still are more expensive for the same performance. AMD is cheaper and same in terms of power.
While I used AMD since fx bulldozer and currently using laptop with Ryzen 7 5700u and really enjoying it, downfall of intel saddens me because they keeping the GPUs prices down, i mean, would AMD and Nvidia offer 16gb GPUs in 300$ price range if intel wouldn’t bring a770 16gb for 300$ on the table first, p.s AMD always deserved first place and still deserves it now, while intel is good as catching up player which keeping the prices down
I tried to always use AMD, 386SX33, 486DX4/100, Duron 1000, Athlon XP 2200, then went a laptop life with Intel, but since COVID/WFH I went back to AMD, I have a 5600H in a miniPC
That has pretty much nothing to do with Intel’s decline though. Losing the enthusiast market to AMD was a small blow, the bigger blow was losing a lot of server market to AMD. And now AMD is starting to dominate in pretty much every CPU market there is, outside of the very low power devices where ARM is dominant and expanding.
Don’t you mean relative decline?
A decline is ALWAYS relative to something, otherwise it wouldn’t make sense. So what is it really that you mean?
Intel used to be the undisputed leader both on CPU design and production process. Those positions are both lost, Intel also always used to have huge profits, but has had deficits lately, that used to be absolutely unheard of. They have lost both their economic and technological lead and they have lost marketshare, So how is that not a decline by every measure?
Agree
Actually no. If I am standing still and people move past me, I’m not moving backwards.
Your analogy is very incomplete. No one is saying that Intel’s products or technology is “moving backwards”, but rather that their market share and performance as a company are declining.
Take your person “standing still” and imagine they were previously in the lead during a marathon and suddenly stopped before the finish line. They’re not moving backwards, but their position in the race is dropping from first, to second, to third, and they will eventually be last if they don’t start moving again.
Don’t you mean standing relatively still? /s
