Intel's recent string of "what the fuck" failures are what happens when a monopolist emerges and goes unchallenged for a long enough period to become lazy.
May the market penalize them in kind.
May the market penalize them in kind.
Intel made innovative, security-enhanced CPU's such as i432 APX, i960, and Itanium. They lost billions as the market punished them for breaking backward compatibility among a few other things. Mainly backward compatibility with insecure architecture market depended on. Market also wanted chips to maximize speed per dollar which always trades against security. Market also rarely picks secure products over insecure products whenever offered a choice.
So, our current situation is the market's responsibility, not Intel's. The market punished Intel for trying to make better products. Say what you will about two, the i960MC was pretty nice design even if BiiN wasn't. A RISC chip with object-based protection and high availability should've taken off if market really cared about reliability and security. Instead, the market rewarded what met their price/performance (x86/POWER) or price/performance/watt (ARM or MIPS) punishing all else. They also built on it non-portably in a way that led to lock-in. Now, they're reaping what they sow with everything they've done up to this point making any investment in secure chips or OS's a risk not worth taking for most suppliers.
Good news is that all the recent bad news is encouraging some companies to try secure offerings again. Might get more buyers this time. Still high risk, though.
For consumer hardware most buyers are completely oblivious to the situation but they are most likely familiar with the Intel brand. For enterprise the inertia is a lot higher and they are probably waiting to see that AMD manages to deliver for an extended period (multiple generations) before considering wider scale adoption.
And in fact ryzen 5 2200/2400 is so cheap that competing offers price wise are i3 based (or i5 but with less ram, and 4 GB is just not enough in 2019, when windows want 2, chrome wants 2, office wants 2, ...). Ryzen 5 2xxx vs i3 is simply not a fair fight, it's not even a fight at all.
I guess I'm usually so focused on high / super high / server needs that it didn't fully hit me how intel was getting eaten alive even in the low / middle market right now. And medium sized business replacing office computers really don't care about the brand of their cpu, "cheaper, works better" is going to win every time.
I'm not sure if there's enough of that at going around now in order for AMD to gain any substantial market share fast. If Intel's response is anything short of Core 2 vs. Athlon then it might go AMD's way.
Also Ryzen performance really falls off in 4C configurations due to lack of cache (its memory performance is not great and once you fall below a critical level of cache you start leaning harder on the memory for performance). The 2400G and 2200G models (which are the only models with graphics) are particularly heavily affected but the 1500X is not a stellar performer either compared to the 6C and 8C configurations. Normally they fall somewhere around Haswell-level IPC, but as a ballpark let's say the 2200G/2400G is more like Sandy Bridge.
Finally, a lot of the 1000-series chips are subject to a manufacturing fault that causes random segmentation faults under heavy load. Compilation is a reliable way to trigger it, but it can occur in anything, it's basically a uop cache bug. Supposedly fixed after mid-2017, and it's RMA'able if you have it, but a few people still find it in their later-production processors.
As a matter of philosophy, a lot of "office stuff" really prefers fast cores to many cores. An i7 4770 or even one of the new quad-core i3s (no HT) is better suited to typical office tasks on paper, and includes onboard graphics.
With that said, "office stuff" doesn't really need high performance to begin with. Ryzen performance is fine, even the weaker -G processors. But in turn, a lot of users would be OK with even less performance - Intel's Goldmont Plus atom processors are now hitting between Core2 and Nehalem level performance, and that's more than fine for a lot of office stuff. You can pick up a barebones J4005 NUC for like $130 now, or a J5005 NUC for ~$170. Add memory and an SSD and you're done.
The prices on the first-gen stuff are really appealing. I've seen the 1700 for as low as $130. And a home user is probably going to be using a discrete GPU anyway, so that cost penalty doesn't really matter. But, that's not a deal that would be institutionally purchased in volume, that's max quantity 5 from newegg, and companies usually don't buy discrete GPUs if they don't have to.
The only thing "slow" abut is is running Windows. Every stupid update slows things down.