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Comment by m-p-3 | Hacker News Reader

I'm wondering why Intel is withdrawing so much of their money from different projects like this and OpenStack.

Maybe AMD is putting a lot of financial pressure on them, and they have to put more funds in R&D?

But these money are tiny compared to the Impact they will/should get from AMD Ryzen.

To remain price competitive with AMD Ryzen, Intel's Gross margin will likely take a dive from the current 60% to below 50% over the next few years. The Data Center Group represent 30% of the Revenue, and my guess it represent 60%+ of the profits.

OpeX is increasing, R&D required for each node is increasing. They are not in Smartphone, they are not opening up their Fab. Basically their future looks pretty grim to me. They wont disappeared all of a sudden, they will likely have 3 to 5 years more time to figure it out.

But, again none of this has to do with Intel withdrawing from so many project. I cant believe saving money from these event / project are the motives.

Why can't that be the motive? Panic makes companies like Intel execute lots of quick short-sighted changes in the hopes of turning the boat.

Something like cancelling a developer's conference would totally fit this scenario.

I question how much pressure intel really feels from AMD.

Intel: 60b in revenue, of which over 50b is from processors.

AMD: 4b revenue. It's impossible tell what part of that is ATI and processors... since AMD mixes desktop cpus with ATI revenue; and mixes server cpus with embedded and soc revenue. So they're playing a bit of a game to hide their cpu sales. If we assume 1/2 is from cpus, that's 2B.

Does Intel really feel pressure to reduce their prices because of a competitor that sells (perhaps) 1/25th of their revenue?

Well, anyone that's going to build their own PC in the near future is going to put Ryzen in there. The only hold Intel has over the desktop market comes from pre-build systems. Those are probably the majority, but if some of them start budging, that market might flip faster than you think.

That remains to be seen.

I just built a new PC and put an i7 in it. The Ryzen 1800x is more expensive than an i7-7700k, while having worse performance.

Obviously AMD makes cheaper versions where that comparison doesn't hold.. but the advantage for AMD here isn't clear cut, and so there's no reason to believe there will be a mass migration to AMD.

Besides I've heard this kind of rhetoric about AMDs cpus before.. and yet I've never seen the sort of switch like you're describing. If it were true that everyone was switching to Ryzen CPUs, they would be sold out everywhere and AMD would be talking about how to scale up by an order of magnitude to meet demand.. none of that has happened.

AMD did a good job with Ryzen, and they'll probably post some great numbers next quarter... maybe they'll get to 5 or 6b over the next year... but Ryzen hasnt changed the selling proposition for AMD. It is still: in the low to mid end desktop processor market, AMD is cheaper and has similar performance.

I'm not a Intel or AMD fanboy by any stretch (only ever built with Intel), but I don't know what benchmarks you've been reading and I've read a lot and you'll have to clarify what you mean by worse performance.

In any multithreaded application the Ryzen 1600(x) are just as good if not better. The 1800x to 1700 are even more multithreaded performance and the 1700 is priced a little cheaper than 7700k and able to be OC to the same performance as the 1800x (the entire Ryzen lineup seems to be capable of the same OC, but also capped pretty heavily). The only place that is showing Intel winning are in single threaded scenarios and in gaming scenarios. The gaming scenarios are interesting as one of the more recent benchmarks I saw (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VvwWTQKCZs) was showing in many cases the worse case FPS is better than the 7600k. Additionally, several games have received engine updates that seem to put Ryzen on par with Intel now.

Yes, you are right that the 1800x has better multithread performance.. In my workload, the single thread performance was what mattered, so that's what I paid attention to.

I went the other way with the 1700. Though I do game it's not my main motivation. This is a workstation first and foremost. And every benchmark I saw the 7700K got crushed by the 1700 (in linux productivity benchmarks).

If you are gamer, the 7700K is the right choice though.

The fact that there are some workloads that amd is good for and others where it falls short only reinforces my point.. which is that the selling proposition for amd hasn't changed.

They haven't unseated intel with that strategy in 40 years... and they aren't going to do it today either.

Ryzen is a good start. But to unseat intel they needed a clear performance advantage and/or additional products that match intels other major product lines with similar or better performance.. and demonstrate they can do that over the long term.

In other words, it's going to take them years

Custom built PC is a small slice of a shrinking market. Until AMD recaptures the server and OEM markets they won't be unseating Intel anytime soon, and they just don't have the resources to get started yet.

> Well, anyone that's going to build their own PC in the near future is going to put Ryzen in there

I think you overstate success of Ryzen. It's only clearly better in price/performance ratio of you compare it to overpriced Intel's top monsters. There are other processors from Intel which are comparable to Ryzen, plus the question of multithreaded/singlethreaded performance, whichever you need more.

It's not necessarily AMD or something new. Last year I was wondering why there was no party. In 2015, they had a big one, with a couple of trendy bands on stage. Somebody has probably been looking at return on investment for these events for at least a year or more.

I'd be surprised if Intel needs to withdraw things in such a hurry. Aren't they still wealthy ? they could take the blow for a while, then react.

Also killing the IDF is not very developer / designer friendly. You're reducing the community vibe and life.

To be fair, IDF was all over the place. I suspect I'm not the only one who felt that only a fraction of the talks were relevant to my interests. On the other hand, it was great for networking.

I used to attend IDF regularly and, while larger shows are always a bit of a grab bag, I do think that it used to have a more coherent identity than it did the last time I went a few years ago. It probably doesn't help that a lot of IDF talks are very low-level so if you're not directly involved, you're likely to be completely uninterested.

To give you an idea, last year you had talks about anything from silicon photonics, memory validation or Thunderbolt, all the way to indie games.

Isn't that how most larger conferences are?

As shows get bigger, there's a definite tendency for them to get more diffuse. There are a lot of economic incentives to grow, add a broader range of partners, etc. And before you know it they're about everything and nothing. Vendor shows have some natural resistance to getting too diffuse but there are still a lot of events I attend and I'll see some booth and think "What the heck are they doing here?"

True. That's the main reason, for example, that I didn't get a ticket to I/O. GCP Next had a lot more topics relevant to my interests, despite it having a more "commercial" or "salesy" feel to it. I/O seems to be mostly about Android and Firebase these days.

The food was OK ;-)

Networking was great too, and lots of old friends to meet.

No. Intel's R&D budget is larger than AMD's company-wide budget. If anything, Intel is moving to save face, and not because of finances.

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