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Comment by Areading314 | Hacker News Reader

Yes, they will have to make do with their huge profit margins, huge free cash flow, dominant market position, and strong balance sheet. I hope they'll be OK!

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AMD has already significantly disrupted and diluted Intel's hold on the market. They have literally forced the market from anemic 2 core chips on laptops held in place without movement for 5 years by Intel.

And on the desktop to 4 cores as a minimum and 8 cores for performance at a fraction of the price Intel demands. There cannot be more disruption to Intel than this.

Intel's days of micro gains and controlled markets as progress and with it oversize profits are over.

>There cannot be more disruption to Intel than this

Yes there is and it is called server chips.

The AMD chips in question are also being sold into the server market, packaged as four dies per socket. Server product cycles and validation cycles are slow. HP and Dell and several ODMs are selling servers with AMD EPYC CPUs, they can be rented on Microsoft Azure, they're being deployed by Baidu. They're having about as much impact as could be expected from a CPU platform that's less than a year old.

I hope AMD are able to stay afloat. My main concern is that their pattern seems to heavily revolve around hiring Jim Keller repeatedly, putting the hurt on a stagnating Intel for one generation, and then fading into mediocrity as Intel are able to leverage their billions of dollars and larger, parallel tick-tock US/Israel teams to snap back. If AMD can secure a coup like Zen or K8 without him I could see this being a sustainable approach, but I'm skeptical.

Not to mention AMD's commitment to long term support for their flagship socket, AM4. While Intel might squeeze two generations out of a socket before forcing the market into yet another revision and retooling, AMD seems likely to go four or more generations of Zen processors for their desktop socket.

This may not mean much to the average user buying off the shelf complete PCs and laptops, but for those who want to maximize the lifetime they get out of a custom build, it paints a prettier picture than sticking with Intel and buying a new motherboard every CPU revision or two.

For those of us who only occasionally upgrade our hardware, its not a huge advantage either way.

In the early 2000s it was really nice being able to replace a dead Socket A motherboard (bad capacitors) with one that was several years newer, not only bringing a system back to life but adding new capabilities and improving performance, and for competitive retail prices instead the premiums you pay for new-in-box EOL hardware.

Yep, on the desktop Intel managed to only offer 4 core mainstream chips all the way from the Core 2 days up until Kaby Lake I think? Finally they've had to start releasing 6 core parts, that's a 50% bump.

It is not a good article for a couple of reasons and disappointing for the Economist. While Intel is being challenged both in the mainstream (by ARM) and by applications like AI, the driver of NVidia profits for the last few years had been crypto coin mining.

While AI is great and all, it doesn't consume the sheer number of chips like the blockchain craze does. If history is any guide, once the block chain thing burns out or blows over, the number of available GPUs on the aftermarket is going to be pretty incredible.

I agree on the assessment of the article, however not with the conclusion that blockchain is driving this market alone - its certainly there, but I don't know any ML practitioner who answers 'how many gpu's' with anything other than 'how many can I have/afford ?' We're starting to get more and more projects reporting their processing time in GPU/years - the singularity is bull, but ML ain't going away:-) That said, if people start dumping their mining rigs, I'm on ebay looking for them :-D

I always figured that the singularity idea might work in theory but in practice it would likely take an ungodly amount of time for it to work.

> the driver of NVidia profits for the last few years had been crypto coin mining.

Do you have a source for this statement? Crypto currency demand is not the "driver" of Nvidia profits.

“We’re sold out of many of our high-end SKUs, and so it’s a real challenge keeping [graphic cards] in the marketplace for games,” he said, adding “At the highest level the way to think about that is because of the philosophy of cryptocurrency — which is really about taking advantage of distributed high-performance computing — there are supercomputers in the hands of almost everybody in the world so that no singular force or entity that can control the currency.” -- https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/27/nvidia-ceo-comments-on-gpu...

It is the mining of crypto currency that anyone can do in their garage and maybe mine a bitcoin worth thousands or some other coin of the day.

Again, Nvidia only became a real option for serious crypto miners in the last 18 months.

Until then anyone doing cost/profit analysis would have gone with AMD cards.

When Bitcoin was worth mining on GPU (ie 2011), AMD cards were much better suited than Nvidia cards.

It was about 2x difference for cards costing the same amount.

Which vendors will be hurt/helped by the GPU/blockchain hangover?

While Nvidia has benefitted from the crypto craze in the last 18 months, it is debatable that crypto mining was the primary driver.

First of all, AMD cards have been historically better suited for crypto mining(I had multiple AMD rigs in 2011) and yet still it did not drive the profits for AMD until 2017.

Nvidia's cash cow has been the workstation cards(Quattro) and Tesla computing cards(used just for processing not video) which carry much higher margins than the gaming chips while carrying the same architecture underneath.

I think it is all about future and whether Intel will be able to adequately respond to new challenges in order to avoid the fate of Nokia or Kodak.

Well Intel has faced Nokia and Kodak moments literally 6-7 times in the past and survived. Granted not always because their tech was better. But survival has nothing to do with just cheaper prices and better tech. Evidence of that is all over the place.

> Well Intel has faced Nokia and Kodak moments literally 6-7 times in the past and survived.

It's ironic, Kodak invented the Kodak moment but in the end the real Kodak moment was not the positive kind of thing they envisioned when they coined that term in their marketing.

Intel has mostly just had issues with a specific design, the core approach of better process = better chips is failing for the first time. If being a 18 months ahead means their chip is 5% faster that's not going to maintain huge margins by default. Without those margins they can't stay 18 months ahead.

Which means they need to compete on design for the first time in decades and I have plenty of doubts they can do so.

I don't think that's a good summary of Intel's past approach. The Pentium 4 to Core and Core 2 by way of Pentium M for example - Intel abandoned raw clock counts (what process bought them before) and started targeting IPC, which requires more engineering than pure process improvement.

Yes, there are still gains from getting more transistors for your buck, but you still have to put those transistors to work, and Intel hasn't been a slouch here. The process improvements didn't give them their advantage over AMD.

A large part of why Core/Core 2 worked was very large caches which take extreme transistor counts, but not much else. If they had been forced to cut them in half their performance would have been significantly worse.

P4 Willamette was 42M transisters December 2000, i7 2600k from January 2011 (almost exactly 10 years) is arguably the peak of their Core dominance as progress dropped to a standstill over the last 7 years had 8 MiB of cache. That's 4 cores for 1.16 billion transistors or 290 Million each.

After 1Ghz it's really just a latency game, faster ram does not do much so CPU's without massive caches just starve. Which is why the P4 eventually moved to 130 Million transistors and a relatively large cache.

I'm optimistic that they'll be able to almost solely based on their poaching of Jim Keller. If there's a major revolution in instruction sets or architecture to support ML or energy efficient HPC, he's one of the few people with the technical experience and political clout to change the future of Intel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_(engineer)

The point of the economist article is that those reliably huge profit margins and free cash flows may not be so reliable in the future. Nvidia is doing a great job and has released some amazing technology.

Exactly. It's like when people says apple/google/ms is in trouble.

But even if they suddenly made no profit for the new 50 years, they would survive with the money they already have in bank anyway.

It’s like saying IBM is in trouble in 1980. Of course it’s not, it’s a very strong company. But...

IBM is a perfect example. The trouble was really not trouble at all. They felt the tremor, but that's it.

IBM is a withered husk of it's former self.

Adjusting for inflation IBM is worth more now than it was in 1980 and it's been kicking off a lot of dividends. Calling it a husk is misleading. Sure it failed to keep up with the growing size of the PC market, but that's a long way from failure.

The pie has become gigantic but their share of the pie has reduced to pretty much zero% from close to 100%.

They never got close to 100% and they still make ~1/4 what google does so that's far from nothing.

I've heard on the grapevine that they've been selling off real estate and other capital to stay in the black.

I don't see how that's generating 10+ billion per year in profits. Their P/E is 12 and they are worth ~130 billion. It would be one thing if they where nominally profitable, but that's a lot of money.

If you stop R&D and coast you can have outside profits for a while until your share erodes completely.

I don't think IBM has positive ROI for their R&D costs. They are mostly just a consulting shop so cutting R&D is probably a long term net gain.

IBM is not the same company it was in the 1980’s. Lou Gerstner laid off 100,000 people in the early 1990’s. Now most of its employees are non-US based:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/technology/ibm-india.html

I think that was exactly the point :)

I agree some people seem to say these things with an unrealistically short timeframe in mind. But I think when most people say a very large company is in trouble, they're talking much more meta, because they understand that 50+ billion dollars takes decades to burn through.

Alan Mulally, arguably one of the most effective modern day leaders, has a great quote about his [former] company: "We have been going out of business for 40 years." This is what most people are talking about.

Was he talking about Boeing, Ford, or both?

He said this about Ford[0].

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2007-06-03/the-new-h...

Are we talking about blackberry or Nokia here?

None of those things matter if you are competing in a shrinking market.

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