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Comment by chvid | Hacker News Reader

The real threat to intel comes from arm not amd. Amd is also threatened by arm.

If you compare with intels numbers. Then amd is a dwarf. And the growth figures are loosely following intels:

https://www.intc.com/investor-relations/investor-education-a...

ARM is an architecture and their competitors there are pretty much all fabless just like AMD. Even if there was a market shift to that architecture, they could just do this again:

https://www.amd.com/en/amd-opteron-a1100

I agree that ARM is a threat to AMD as well, but AMD has two things going for it:

1. Stronger x86 design: AMD's recent CPU releases have shown they are inching ahead of Intel on x86 design, and are able to achieve significantly better cost per $. At the same time, AMD are already well into shifting a big chunk their 7nm manufacturing to TSMC. Intel has only just started this process.

2. A strong GPU business: Yes, they are second to Nvidia, but given the design skills they are showing on the CPU side, I expect that gap will narrow very quickly. Both Sony and Microsoft have chosen AMD for CPU and GPU in the PS5 and Xbox Series X, with support for full 4k ray-tracing. Given how long this generation of consoles will be on the market for (likely 5-10 years at least), it is a strong forward indicator of roadmap strength.

tl;dr: I expect AMD will weather* the ARM storm better than Intel.

* Originally a typo as "whether". Thanks for the correction!

I wouldn't interpret Sony's and Microsoft's decision for AMD graphics as anything other than Nvidia being dickheads.

Keep in mind that Apple is also exclusively building Macs with AMD graphics cards. They don't even support Nvidia cards as eGPU anymore. The rumour is that Nvidia is not willing to do any customised designs and someone at Apple is very upset with Nvidia.

Nvidia simply not interested in consoles because how thin margins are:

https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/150892-nvidia-gave-amd-ps...

Unless it is their own one.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/shield/

Does everyone here forget that the Switch is a custom NVIDIA Tegra processor ?

Is that Tegra not off-the-shelf? I didn't think it was custom, due to said reluctance to do custom designs.

I may have been misled, but here's my source:

> "Nintendo Switch is powered by the performance of the custom Tegra processor."

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2016/10/20/nintendo-switch/

Same Tegra that was in Tesla MCU. Off the shelf.

No, but I rather pointed out the one which NVidia has full control, and uses to sell NVidia optimized games.

They were apparently interested because Nvidia is in the Nintendo Switch.

> Keep in mind that Apple is also exclusively building Macs with AMD graphics cards.

Any reason to believe that will continue to be true when Apple move to their own ARM chips? No technical reason they couldn't keep using AMD GPUs, but Apple seems to be leaning pretty hard into getting as vertically integrated as possible.

> I wouldn't interpret Sony's and Microsoft's decision for AMD graphics as anything other than Nvidia being dickheads.

I think that's a large component, but I'd like to add, ontop of maybe pricing and the like, Nvidia is being a dickhead in openness towards their hardware/software stack. Which, documentation of which is determined important for AAA game optimization over the course of operation of the console.

Additionally, there are important aspects of AMD's GPU architecture that are adventitious for teams squeezing the most amount of performance out of a fixed platform. Specifically, as far as I am aware, AMD's compute is much more flexible in context switching while the graphics pipeline is active, which at least used to be a problem for Nvidia's architecture.

Don't forget that almost every desktop and laptop CPU that Intel ships has a GPU. That probably gives Intel a larger installed base of GPUs than AMD and Nvidia. Intel is also entering the discrete GPU market for the first time in over 20 years.

How's better cost per $ better for AMD? Intel has much better margins; if AMD went with those margins they wouldn't sell shit.

I think that's the point. AMD sells compute power at a lower price point than Intel. If AMD can continue to lower the retail price of CPUs, they will chip away further at Intel's market share.

Margin means nothing if people don't buy your product.

Exactly this. AMD is willing to forgo on margin to make up for it in volume. Being ahead of Intel in outsourcing manufacturing will help them keep up with demand.

> Being ahead of Intel in outsourcing manufacturing will help them keep up with demand.

I don't think that follows. You realize the world is capacity constrained on leading-node fab capacity? And that by going fabless, AMD now has no guaranteed capacity?

*weather (sorry for nitpicking)

I think this has more to do with the irrationality of the customers than any legitimate technical reason. From a technical perspective, AMD is crushing Intel and will be for the foreseeable future.

Maybe there are enough suckers to keep Intel afloat. I couldn't say.

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