Too little, too late.
After years of ruthlessly milking us I just hope they loose a big market share and become equals with AMD. The consumers can only benefit from that.
After years of ruthlessly milking us I just hope they loose a big market share and become equals with AMD. The consumers can only benefit from that.
Edit: To clarify, I will not argue that intel has a clean record of competitiveness. My point is that they didn't "ruthlessly milk" the consumer with high prices. Instead, they stuck a knife in their own back by charging excessively high prices without sufficiently innovating. This created an opportunity for AMD and motivated them to create something better.
You're talking about the Intel that was used for monopoly practices, right?
Intel engaged in a lot of anti-competitive practices, lost a civil lawsuit over it and was fined 1bn by the EU. [1]
They almost killed AMD in the process.
Every company this size with a quasi-monopoly (in a certain segment) will squeeze the market and try to buy or push out competition any way they can get away with.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel#Litigation_and_regulator...
This is...not accurate. Extensive cross-licensing agreements between AMD and Intel formed over the years are the only thing that permit AMD to compete. New competitors are effectively locked out of the x86-64 market entirely at this point. There is a decided lack of freedom to compete in this market at the moment.
Intel has also been found to have illegally engaged in anticompetitive measures on a number of occasions in order to lock AMD out of competing in many market segments.
> I'm finding it hard to escape the suspicion that Spectre and (to a lesser extent) Meltdown is another failure of expertise on the same rough scale as the run-up to the financial crisis, the decades of bad or poorly-justified dietary advice, and the statistical problems in experimental psychology. On the face of it, it seems obvious that speculation + cache + protected mode was a combination likely ripe for exploitation, but the response seems to have been "nah, it'll be fine, probably"? And even if it for some reason wasn't obvious, it's now clear that it actually was the case. So the academic and industrial and bad-boy "security community" collectively more or less let the CPU manufacturers take a flyer on this for, what, a decade?
Think of market share as a fragile glass or ceramic cup sitting right at the edge of the table. You're usually oblivious cz it hasn't fallen (or you're busy with other stuff). Then you notice it has tipped over and is now in free fall. If you have very good reflexes, as a big market share company, you catch it mid-air (you lower the prices to the point where it prevents the drop from breaking anything). If you succeed, now you have the cup in your hand; it didn't hit the floor, and it didn't shatter. Great. Now you slowly raise that cup back to the tabletop level (you raise the prices back to the same level in a few years) and place it at the table. Done.
- AMD revenue is between $5-10b,
- nVidia, between $10-20b
- Intel, over $50b.
Intel and nVidia can eat AMD alive anytime they want. Invidually or together. Once, or many times.
Intel's still going it on their own and struggling.
Except they can't.
1) Since I'm assuming you're talking about CPUs, nVidia can't make x86-64 processors. Only AMD and Intel can. Literally. They can't use that ISA. Maybe they can take them in the GPU market, but again, they probably still can't.
2) Intel looks like they can, and they do in fact have the funds to do it. But that's just not how it works. AMD has decoupled their tapping and design long ago. Intel still hasn't. The speed at which Intel can innovate is becoming very limited. So while they might catch up, and follow suit, it looks like Intel can't "eat" AMD at this point in time. At least not product wise. Maybe in 5 or 10 years, if AMD starts slacking off again.