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Comment by rydre | Hacker News Reader

If Intel has another delay, they're dead. They'll be like Boeing (but their mistake won't directly kill people). It'll mean that all engineering culture is dead and the best minds have already left the company. Everyone who at Intel who predicted the wrong schedule and not a realistic one should be fired. They have destroyed a national champion in their short term greed.

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Agreed, the Opteron completely destroys the Pentium 4, there's no coming back from that!

Their best minds have definitely not left the company. Probably, just like with Boeing, they're just watching the clock, waiting for their retirement and for the quarterly bonus to come in.

Let's not pretend Intel is dead, they just had a record quarter and my friends working there still got sizable bonuses.

Companies have growth even after they're dead. When the growth slows, by then it's too late.

According to your logic, AMD was also dead a few years ago.

AMD is the exception, not the norm. There are very few companies that can do that turn around. And AMD was lucky that Intel wasn't able to continue their progress. Had Intel still been ahead of AMD, AMD's revenue's wont be growing.

What’s the best case scenario for them though? The mobile market is already permanently blown for them. Best case AMD chips are heavily defective next gen and Intel price/performance blows AMD out of the water with 7nm...which AMD has now already shipped.

My pet theory is that the Trump funds to keep American microchip manufacturing afloat has made a Intel complacent. Maybe they’re just dunces though.

Best case for them is TSMC continues to be heavily capacity constrained for the next few years, handicapping AMD's ability to pick up significant market share while Intel resolves their fab issues. Intel may also have to heavily lean into backporting new designs that have been sitting on the shelf waiting for new nodes. 14nm is finally moving past Skylake-based architectures with Rocket Lake, and there should be opportunities to backport 7nm designs to 10nm as well. Not ideal, but if they can remain roughly competitive with AMD and just out-ship them, that could get them through the next few years without losing much market share.

A US government injection of cash to Intel's fab business seems like it could get bipartisan support if Taiwan/China continue to lead the market, but Intel's problems don't appear to be be cashflow related.

Intel has about 10x the revenue and 10x the employees of AMD. AMD is doing well lately, but if times get tough Intel can survive for a very long time just on inertia, just like IBM and HP are surviving. AMD probably can't.

Intel also has plenty of time to get their mojo back if they still have the drive to succeed. A lot of very smart people work there. They just need leadership that can execute. In a lot of ways Intel was a victim of its own success, having a virtual monopoly on good CPUs until Ryzen came out. Leadership got lazy. Leadership needs to fix that. It's not fair to say that the engineering culture there is dead.

AMD has been around since 1969 and has survived rough times just fine.

Yeah, but they need those Intel patents.

As Intel needs theirs!

Without AMD's access to Intel patents we would all be using Itaniums by now, and I doubt AMD can manage to ever drive Intel to the ground.

For all we know Itanium was never meant to trickle down.

Servers were where the money was to reboot a CPU linage.

Without Intel's access to AMD64-bit patents, Intel wouldn't have anything better than a 32-bit Pentium4.

Intel and AMD have each other in a MAD (mutually assured destruction) patent hold. If either pulls either patent portfolio from each other, they both die dramatic deaths.

Intel owns 32-bit x86 patents... while AMD owns the 64-bit patents. Modern x64 chips cannot function unless both parts are together.

AMD64 would never happen without Intel licenses, so Intel wouldn't never need to worry to access to something that legally could never happen.

So how are those AVX instructions support going on AMDs?

I'd assume the RAX register is more imporant, and in more widespread use than the YMM0 register.

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