Intel performance will always be one step ahead of AMD, intel have faster tech in their pocket waiting to be released.
No, they delayed time and time again because the 10nm process utterly failed to deliver the necessary yields and performance to be viable. It's not some ingenious display of sandbagging - only now in the past year or so has the 10nm process yields risen high enough to make low-power chips viable, and it is still not viable for high-power desktop chips, and probably will never be viable.
>Intel performance will always be one step ahead of AMD
A completely ridiculous assertion, and one that is already largely false at the present moment.
>intel have faster tech in their pocket waiting to be released.
Likely true, but only because of their failure to execute on 10nm. CPU designs are closely tied to the process they are designed to be manufactured on -- especially for Intel, who have never been concerned about being too tied to a single manufacturer (since it is themselves). This tight coupling can be good when the process is good, but the failure of 10nm meant that for years and years those architectural improvements you speak of are unshippable and useless.
Intel is not completely screwed by any measure, but the idea that they have the situation entirely under control and are intentionally not competing with now-superior AMD chips is entirely ridiculous.
I really had never imagined this could be so. Could you expand somewhat on why it is? Thanks.
This just isn't true. When Ryzen first came out Intel was still ahead in many use cases, especially if $$ was no object to you. But after several years AMD is now taking the crown from intel in all areas they compete in. If they really had some magical faster tech Intel would have released it years ago, much less this year, but they haven't.
Instead they announce the same old chips then hook them up to industrial strength cooling units to make it look like they can compete with AMD. This isn't the behavior of a company that is just biding its time.
They've even had processors that basically only shipped on paper.
https://twitter.com/chiakokhua/status/1258393158766886913 https://twitter.com/chiakokhua/status/1258393160784330754
Citation very much needed.
Show me an Intel CPU with PCIe 4.0 or with the performance per watt of the latest AMD Ryzen mobile chips. You can't, because to date they don't exist.
I think if they had anything in reserve it would have been released by now, because AMD is trouncing them in reviews.
After that the story is well known: their microarch were tied to their node, and Intel's 10nm was a failure, and still is not up to what the competition is doing. They started to backport the next microarch to 14 too late IMO. They may release new ones on 14nm; or they may suddenly manage to strongly improve their 10nm (not likely, it is usually very gradual at this stage)
And it is again obvious that even in the last 3 years, they had nothing (on the microarch side that they could produce on their mainstream node) they were able to rush as a fallback to counteract Zen, otherwise why would they not have done it?
Now they are clearly behind on the process, and on the microarch Zen 2 is good enough and does not need to compete much against Sunny Cove, plus if Intel releases a backport of Sunny Cove for their 14nm it may be against Zen 3...
Hmm. I think if Intel had a significant architecture enhancement waiting in the wings we would have seen it by now. They need it badly.
I just updated a 2013 quad core laptop with a late 2019 8 core laptop. Tasks that really use the cores are of course faster. Other than that, no substantial performance increase. 7 years and it is just incremental. Their process issues of late are horrific but there is not much happening architecturally either. Sad to see. They just seem a bit lost.
Meanwhile in a couple of months AMD will be on 7nm+
(However, it should be said that Intel 10nm is roughly equivalent to TSMC 7nm in terms of density. AMD is still ahead but not by as much as the numbers would imply).
https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/technology_node
"Recent technology nodes such as 22 nm, 16 nm, 14 nm, and 10 nm refer purely to a specific generation of chips made in a particular technology. It does not correspond to any gate length or half pitch."
"At the 45 nm process, Intel reached a gate length of 25 nm on a traditional planar transistor. At that node the gate length scaling effectively stalled; any further scaling to the gate length would produce less desirable results. Following the 32 nm process node, while other aspects of the transistor shrunk, the gate length was actually increased."
Nodes mean 3 things: density, elecrical performance (ion, max f, leakage, etc), and processing flexibility (how many supported feature primitives or designs).