For whatever reason, Nvidia hasn't stagnated the way Intel has. Nvidia has continued rapid progress in GPUs even though they have a dominant position (and a near monopoly in the datacenter).
Perhaps because they don't have as much of a lead as Intel used to? Intel was a monopoly, plain and simple, but AMD has always been a contender when it comes to GPUs.
Intel, however, ran into engineering issues with their process improvement, while having limited market-driven incentive to spend and innovate improvements to their efficiency (IPC) beyond a certain level (or to increase core count.) So their "tick-tock" cycle was broken.
TSMCs 7nm node will be the first legitimate tech advantage over Intel and if Intel does get their act in gear and manages to deploy their 10nm next year they will at least keep parity.
I am a huge AMD fan and will almost certainly be considering a Zen 2 build next year (though the fact I can disable Intel ME and can't remove AMD PSP will temper my interest) but thats more to support the underdog and get better value for money than getting the absolute best possible performance.
I would never have bet money that the tiny little CPU designed by Acorn Computers that ended up powering the Newton would be the first CPU to jump two nodes ahead of Intel in terms of process, but here we are.
ARM's doing great work and I hope they continue to push core counts to even more ridiculous levels.
The current generation i9 processors are all 14nm.
it's surprising to see how badly they're scrambling to hit even 10nm, little lone 7nm
The feature size there is a bit misleading – "Intel 10nm" and "TSMC 7nm" are roughly equivalent, with IIRC the Intel 10nm process actually having a higher transistor density. The TSMC chips aren't really "two nodes ahead" – but it is likely that Intel will lose its process lead for maybe a year or so.
I get the impression that Intel overextended on their 10nm process, in that they were perhaps a bit more ambitious that other manufacturers and it came back to bite them when there were scaling problems. On the other hand, last I heard was that the scaling problems experienced with the 10nm node haven't held up Intel's 7nm node, which could well see them re-establish their process lead.
At the end of the day, it's great that the market is seeing some more competition, so hopefully we will all be able to enjoy the benefits from a variety of manufacturers soon!
Quite possibly they are, but to be fair ARM processors were the first to launch on 7nm.
Intel's largely "secret sauce" process has been their greatest asset. Now it looks like a huge liability.
I’m no micro-electronic expert but I wonder if we are hitting limits in clock speed scaling with regards to feature size - i.e. shrinking pass a certain feature size clock speeds actually have to drop for the chip to be stable.
Intel’s priority is clock speed first and foremost due to what they produce - desktop and server CPUs. A new process is pointless for them if they can’t get at least equal clock speeds out of it as their old process.
TSMC caters to mobile CPU and GPU production - those will never boost to 5Ghz like CPUs; the former for power efficiency reasons (and heat) and the later tends to go for more “cores” as it focuses on parallizable workloads.
It's more that making many very long conductors with very short insulators between them becomes problematic. But that was the case at any process size, but now we are pushing the limits as far as possible to try to make bigger chips.
AMD's Zen architecture is leaps and bounds above Intel's offering, not only performance-wise but also where it matters the most: product design and production costs.
Yes, that's true but the per clock performance is close. They are only 5-10% behind in single threaded tasks without AVX (depending on the workload). The IPC increase is expected to be 10-15% (will of course depend on the workload). And their achilles heel, the AVX performance, will also improve with Zen 2 (256 bit instead of 128 bit etc.)
Due to 7nm the clocks (for consumer hardware like Ryzen and Threadripper) will probably also increase (not 5 to 5.2 ghz after overclocking like Intel, but up to 4.7 ghz overclocks could be possible seeing that 4.3 ghz is possible on the current node which is mobile optimized).
Depending on how much the clocks increase I believe they can close the gap. Maybe even pass Intel. The future certainly looks promising for AMD.
I wonder if they will revive their X APUs for the Server. In the past they had Opteron X APUs to increase the compute density of servers. Now with Zen and Vega this could be a nice combo in addition to discrete GPUs.
For example this system: https://i.imgur.com/yt5FasA.jpg?1
Imagine replacing these two 32 core Epyc CPUs made in 14nm with two 32 core Epyc APUs (Zen 2) made in 7nm, which would use the saved space due to 7nm for Compute Units, and you might get an additional 10-16 TFlops per System. Which is basically one additional GPU.
AMD's 7nm might get them close to on par with Intel's current 14++ nm chips, but it's not like AMD has really figured out how to make the entire CPU half the size.
It's been all over the town for months that TSMCs 7nm is estimated to be worse than Intels ambitious failure that is 10nm [0][1][2][3] but quite a bit better than Intel 14nm (with the exception of clocks), and that 7nm+ with EUV for cost savings (which TSCM already taped out last month) is estimated to be equal or even slightly better.
So I'm not really sure what to make of your comment?
> AMD's 7nm might get them close to on par with Intel's current 14++ nm chips, but it's not like AMD has really figured out how to make the entire CPU half the size.
No they didn't, but they don't claim that, do they? From what they say they decided on the IO die exactly because IO doesn't scale as much, and that decision allowed them to double the number of cores. Since 7nm is expected to be much more expensive than previous nodes this seems really clever from a money standpoint as well. The core only Zen 2 chiplets are expected to be around 70 mm² which is mobile SoC territory.
AMD is already close in IPC to Intel even though AMD uses a worse node (GloFos mobile optimized 14nm is more like Intel 22 then Intel 14nm) and wins in multithreaded workloads because their SMT implementation seems to scale better than Intels. They also seem to have better performance/watt when under load. I have not seen numbers for idle wattage for Xeons but Intels desktop CPUs are slightly (5 - 10 watt) better when idle.
So I'm looking forward to them having the better node for the first time ever.
[0] https://www.semiwiki.com/forum/content/7544-7nm-5nm-3nm-logi...
[1] https://www.semiwiki.com/forum/content/6713-14nm-16nm-10nm-7...
Nvidia doesn't fab their own chips and never had a process lead.
People underestimate just how huge a deal Intel's traditional lead in fabrication tech was. I've long argued that the real casualty of Intel's anticompetitive tactics in the early 2000s was AMD being forced to spin off GloFo. Far more than AMD's near term marketshare at the time, it lead to a situation where AMD couldn't really even fall back to their traditional position of competing on price at the low end of the market and played a direct hand in Intel's decade-plus domination of the market.
I would argue that is nothing to do with Intel stagnation. Look at Intel's leadership and management. Look at Jensen Wong. The last time Intel had any energy at management level were Pat Gelsinger, and they pushed him out.
Intel is still king in high-end gaming performance, albeit not as much as Nvidia is ahead of AMD in GPUs.
And don’t try to argue how Intel’s $1700 18-core CPU is faster than AMD’s similarly priced 32-core CPU because Intel’s has slightly faster per-core performance. Such an argument would be absolutely absurd: the point of an 18-32 core CPU is NOT the single threaded performance :)
Don’t know about you but his builders actually benchmark the CPUs.
Dansgaming uses the 18 core i9 for his streaming box.
Not every application a person uses scales to high core counts, in such situations a CPU with good single thread performance (in addition to high core counts) would be beneficial.
Cache performance matter too. AMD’s CPUs have a split L3 cache. Some applications might not like that.
But do you know what really scales to high core counts? Running more than one application at a time.
Depends on how much memory bandwidth and how much CPU cache your applications are using.
Wouldn’t what to trash the L3 cache and worsen the situation with a saturated memory bus.
Not really if you consider the price per core. Normally designed games utilize all cores, and something like Ryzen 7 2700X provides a major benefit. Comparable Intel CPUs are a lot more expensive. Their only advantage is higher overclock frequency. But if you need to overclock your CPU to play something, that game is already poorly designed and is probably not using all cores properly.
No they don’t. Most games barely scale to use 4 cores - some struggle to use even 2.
Even games with tons of threads tend to have a one thread that is ultra heavy which become the limiting factor - i.e. you need single thread performance.
It’s moot regardless since Intel’s i9-9900K has 8 cores and 16 threads too.
It means they are poorly designed which is exactly my point. It's not really a measure of CPU quality, but rather the measure of those games quality. Normal games today use something like Vulkan to saturate the GPU and should not be CPU bound.
So if you need a single thread performance that requires overclocking, it's a poor engine design.
> It’s moot regardless since Intel’s i9-9900K has 8 cores and 16 threads too
And costs a lot a lot more. That's why I mentioned price per core above. I'd use such price difference to get a better GPU instead.
Multithreading hasn’t gotten any easier.
Even when games are forced to multithread like on consoles. Said games run on PCs with half the cores (admittedly at nearly twice the clock speed and higher IPC) outpace consoles with 2x the frame rates.
> And costs a lot a lot more. That's why I mentioned price per core above. I'd use such price difference to get a better GPU instead.
Of course, it’s the best on the market. Intel would be stupid not to charge a premium. It’s how such things are priced.
BUT there are people that want the absolute best available and have the money to afford it ... /shrug
> There are some games that are very poorly optimized, but I see them as edge cases which you can skip if it becomes an issue.
There are a lot of games that aren’t well threaded.
Well multithreaded games are primarily by rich AAA developers - and not even all of them do it; some just don’t have the programming talent for it and some have games that have ran for decades that are too old to multithread without rewriting the whole game.
PS: Sorry for late reply. Apparently people disagreed with me and I had negative Karma for a while. Which slows down posting?
Basic software architecture is not handled in crunch time.
I think that will slowly change over time though, especially for big-budget titles that want to scale with performance better. Architectures like Unity's Job System and the specs package in Rust[1] with a stronger emphasis on staged data processing can help with utilizing cores and cache.
For awhile in the early 2000's, AMD's CPUs were supposedly better than Intel's CPUs. There was a lot of doom and gloom predicted.
I briefly worked for Intel during this period. At an internal quarterly meeting, they shared some confidential information. It was very simple, and very damning to AMD. (In short, Intel very quickly came back on top for reasons that were very obvious to anyone paying attention.)
I'd love to be a fly on the wall at Intel right now. I wonder if they really are falling behind, or if they know some things that we don't?
We already have the benefit of being able to look back.
Isn't it totally obvious today that Intel had non-Netburst successors to in the pipeline that were superior than anything AMD had to offer?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc._v....
While that may be true at the time, it doesn't negate the point that Intel knew internally, long before others, that technically superior solutions where coming.
And, of course, that's exactly what happened.
But illegal business practices only have impact on economics. They don't change the fact that Intel had a technologically superior solution in the pipeline that would eventually trump AMD's offerings.
That would have resulted in Intel taking the economic crown anyway, irrespective of their illegal business practices.
That's patently false. As OP stated, the biggest impact of Intel's illegal business practices was getting rid of any competition for over a decade in spite of having a technically inferior and underperforming product line.