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But not being hyperbolic doesn't drive clicks. Sort of like all of the headlines about Musk no longer being the richest man because the stock prices fell. Whoopee friggin boohoo. He still has more money than >99% of all humans on the planet.

In sports it's fun to say that 2nd place is just the first loser, but that's all in jest and friendly banter. When making things like this overly dramatic, it serves nobody except those trying to short the stock.

Side note: we, here on HN, all likely have more money than 99% of all humans on this planet [0] (the link is about income; wealth is even more unequally distributed).

Earning more than $60k/year puts you in the 1% already. [1]

[0] https://income-inequality.info/

[1] https://howrichami.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i

Some people on HN in fact have salaries under $60K. Not everyone here is an American or works in the private sector, either.

I would be fairly surprised if $60K is top 1%, even if you have the entire world population in the denominator. But when I checked your link, it's not using the entire population for the denominator, (which is correct, IMO) so I don't think it's even close.

In the US, there are about 110M fulltime wage earners, (out of 330M population) with median being ~$50K and top quartile ~$80K. My very rough estimate based on that might be 45M people >$60K. That is a lot more than 110/330 * 1% * 7.8B = 26M before adding in Europe (lower wages but twice the population) or anywhere else.

Source: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf

Thanks for specifying the numbers and the underlying assumptions!

Median in the US is not clear to me - I saw a figure of 60K and 35K within 2 minutes of searching. I think wage earning gets divided across family size, so those 45M people in your calculation, after dividing by family size, would have a much smaller income.

That sounds like the claim is "if the income per capita within your household is > $60K, then your household is in the top 1% of all households in income per capita".

I think the difference between this convoluted statement and normal measures of inequality could be approximately translated to "most people making > $60K have dependents". It seems like a bad way to talk about inequality, because what goal would it imply to reduce inequality? Prevent people from having dependents, or prevent them from not having dependents?

I think income is a proxy for something like "financial freedom" (which is presumably the eventual goal for why we want higher incomes).

Having an income of $60k while having a dependent is very different than when not having a dependent. I seems correct to say that without a dependent, you're in the top 1% of the world's wage earners (with respect to your financial freedom); while if you have a dependent, your income is no longer fully yours - and you are no longer in the top 1% of the world's wage earners.

> He still has more money than >99% of all humans on the planet.

Understatement much? You could also say Elon has more money than 50% of humans on the planet.

I don't understand your point. 99% > 50%. My original statement is more exclusive. Want to elaborate on what your point is?

They're making the very pedantic point that you need more 9s e.g. 99.9999999%

Fast forward a few years. Look at the time it takes to design chips. Look at where the market and tech is going (M1 and AMD especially). Compare with RIM and Nokia. There is a "roadrunner" effect where a colossal company will continue for a few years on pure momentum. There are so many things speaking against Intel. And the facts you bring up as speaking for Intel seams more like short term momentum to me. I would guess at the following conversation in 5-10 years:

- "How did Intel die?"

- "Well, first slowly. Then quickly."

Semiconductor demand is so high right now that any company that makes processors is going to print money in the short term. It's a "right place, right time" situation. Intel's long-term problem is loss of market share, but if you're going to lose market share, you're more likely to survive if it happens when the whole market is growing.

There's not much that a company so heavily invested in x86 can do in the face of Apple Silicon, aside from executing well on 7nm and bringing it to market ahead of schedule.

I don't see much of a similarity between Intel CPUs and Blackberry phones, considering that many flagship notebooks (even Apple's) have Intel inside. I for one am heralding the new era of voracious semiconductor demand, and am rooting for Intel to get its game face on and turn things around before the opportunity passes.

Intel's chip designs are still fine, though. Tiger Lake's IPC gains are right in line with Zen 3's IPC gains over Zen 2. And Xe looks to be a great iGPU.

Which means Intel is more or less on equal design footing with AMD, they're just having trouble getting it built.

And Intel has multiple huge revenue streams that are not in question at all. All their networking stuff, for example (everyone, even on AMD, still goes for motherboards with Intel LAN instead of anyone else's, and same with wifi). And things like Optane. And all their tooling & software suites. Intel's CPU division is struggling to get wins, but Intel overall as a company isn't.

Throw in power consumption and Intel's stagnation starts to show. Look at their lasted chips having a 250W power limit when turboing -- almost double AMD! That's a pretty hard barrier to overcome without catching up on process technology.

The idea here must be that somehow Apple or AMD have figured out the magic sauce to making faster processors, while Intel of all companies is oblivious to it and won't be able to catch up.

In reality, there is nothing that Apple or AMD are doing that Intel could not also do, isn't already doing, or isn't in a hurry to also do.

Consider that at 14nm+++++, Intel still manages to outpace AMD with its 7nm CPUs and latest architecture. AMD competes mainly on price, which is not a great position to be in. Intel's profit margins are massively better.

It's possible that x86 will become less relevant in the future, but in that case Intel will still be one of the be best chip designers in the industry. They will once again produce ARM chips, perhaps borrow one or two insights from Apple's architecture. They will continue to outsource manufacturing to other fabs, perhaps even become fabless.

>In reality, there is nothing that Apple or AMD are doing that Intel could not also do, isn't already doing, or isn't in a hurry to also do.

On the contrary, Intel has refused to do any architectural innovation for nearly 20 years. They are capable, but overly conservative. They should have been in a hurry 10 years ago. It's well documented that they weren't and were resented for it. AMD came up with a winning strategy (multi-die packaging) and Intel still doesn't seem in a hurry to catch up. You could swap "AMD" in that sentence with "Apple" and maintain the meaning.

When superscalar or simultaneous multithreading came out you didn't see competitors mill about waiting for the customers to forget about the advantages.

The question is, are they in a hurry to catch up? What is the market that AMD is actually taking over with its multi-chip packages, and at what cost?

Just because AMD may be winning in Cinebench doesn't mean it's winning in the business side.

Multi-chip packages have downsides that become obvious in certain enterprise workloads, so the question becomes: Is it worth giving up on the monolithic approach, or adding multi-chip products, in order to completely dominate the market, even when that is not more profitable?

Clearly, the answer for Intel must be "no", otherwise they would being doing it.

I think the reason Intel is not doing multi-die packages is because the R&D to make it work is large and they don't want to take on that risk.

What are the downsides, exactly? Thread-to-thread latency is the key one that comes to mind. It is far cheaper to make a multi-die package because yields are so much higher for any given node. The business advantages are great. The bleak picture for Intel that is being painted is warranted.

AMD got downgraded today because Intel has new CEO. I don't know why the new CEO would be better, but they say fish rots from the head.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AMD?p=AMD&.tsrc=fin-srch

> Consider that at 14nm+++++, Intel still manages to outpace AMD with its 7nm CPUs and latest architecture. AMD competes mainly on price, which is not a great position to be in. Intel's profit margins are massively better.

Have you been living under a rock for this past year? This is not true. AMD is beating Intel in performance in every market segment right now.

I am talking about the latest Intel architecture which admittedly has not shipped on the Desktop yet, so benchmarks are not independently verified.

If you look at the mobile chips that did ship on 10nm, Intel is ahead as well.

Intel's "latest" architecture is basically the same Skylake from 2015 except they just pulled a Prescott with it and simply cranked up the power and heat until it reaches a desired x% extra performance over last gen.

Preliminary benchmarks show them surpassing Zen3 on the desktop with only a slight frequency bump.

Only in cherry-picked benchmarks that already favored Intel on their past-gen chips. If you assume that performance is improved everywhere evenly, and extrapolate from those prerelease benchmarks and existing benchmarks for their older chips, their new chip will end up being ~5% slower than Zen3 overall.

Also, never compare chips that are actually on the market to unreleased ones. Zen3 might well get a small frequency boost when Intel finally releases Rocket Lake.

My point is not that Intel is "crushing" AMD or anything, but that they manage to outpace (or at least keep pace with) AMD on a much larger node.

> Also, never compare chips that are actually on the market to unreleased ones.

Watch me do it:

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Rocket-Lake-S-vs-Zen-3-Geekben...

Am I going to gamble my house on this being true? Of course not. We're having a nerdy discussion on IPC. It doesn't really matter either way.

Perhaps you're right and these chips won't "improve evenly" across all benchmarks, but then again nobody has "even" workloads. Rocket-Lake-S has some machine learning acceleration that's going to be useless for many people, valuable for others. It has a GPU onboard, which can come in handy. I'm personally interested in AVX-512. No, I don't need to know why you think AVX-512 sucks.

> My point is not that Intel is "crushing" AMD or anything, but that they manage to outpace (or at least keep pace with) AMD on a much larger node.

This is an entirely valid position, and I agree that it bodes well for Intel that they are able to do this. However, it is a very different statement from your original:

> Consider that at 14nm+++++, Intel still manages to outpace AMD with its 7nm CPUs and latest architecture. AMD competes mainly on price, which is not a great position to be in. Intel's profit margins are massively better.

AMD is in no way "competing mainly on price". In fact, if you look at prices on the market instead of MSRP, they are generally the more expensive option right now, and are still sold out on most models almost everywhere.

It was a mistake not to make clear that I am talking about CPUs that have not shipped yet.

Otherwise, I do not see any issue with what I said. I am looking at Intel as a company, and there I see massively better profit margins. Street prices may not reflect this during periods of shortages, but it is the dealers who are pocketing that difference, not AMD.

Zen3 ipc is higher than ice lake , and profit margin will be higher too , amd just increased prices and still sell out, 10nmsuperfin perfectly comparable to tsmc 7nm

Indeed, a similar situation happened in the mid 2000's before Intel moved to the Core architecture. I wouldn't be surprised if something like this happened again.

The Core Architecture in the mid 2000's was such an incredible shot back to the top. I remember seeing the benchmarks absolutely dominate AMD on every level, power, performance, TDP, Cost, etc. etc. This is almost immediately after Athlon 64 and the Athlon 64X2 started to gain market share, spanking Intel's Pentium 4 at the time. IIRC Intel ended up dropping the Prescott architecture, moving to the Pentium M architecture for development of the Core CPU's. Moving away from chasing max frequencies, and instead looking at IPC. Then Nehalem Dropped, (The first Core i CPU's) making the gap even larger. Q6600, Quad Core, Low power, decent cost. That was the CPU to have at the time. I miss the days reading about all of this.

This just puts into perspective how stagnate cpus have been, ~14 years and we are just starting to move to more than 4 core processors on prosumer systems.

Sad really. I was so passionate about hardware then. I lost interest because the innovation just dropped off a cliff. We were nearly exponential before the Core i series. Interestingly during that period Servers have had many-core CPU's. It just seems that Intel hasn't had a reason to push the envelope on the consumer side.

Pour one out for Denard scaling.

To be fair, the move started a while back (arguably in 2017 with the introduction of the Ryzen CPUs).

For instance, Steam's hardware report indicates that 1/3 of their install base already has 6 cores or more [1].

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/cpus/

Mozilla's Firefox Hardware Report shows that most Firefox users (55%) still have only two cores! Four cores is slowly climbing at 34%. Firefox users surely have older hardware than Steam gamers, but it's another data point showing just how slowly hardware turns over.

https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware#goto-os-and-arch...

Before Ryzen even, FX-6300 and -8350 series (6-core and 8-core respectively) were used heavily in cheap pre-builts and beginner PC bulding during early 2010+

That's monopoly power for you. Right now there's competition to Intel again which means processors will probably start getting much faster again.

That's one of the few great things about capitalism - competition drives innovation.

> That's one of the few great things about capitalism - competition drives innovation.

Just so long as the aforementioned monopolies don't choke out competition. Sadly, we seem to end up with a lot of pseudo-monopolies in the tech industry.

I wonder how much more competition we could have with strict monopolies regulation on acquisitions and mergers?

If you let companies acquire close to 100% market share then monopolies are guaranteed to happen because one company is always more cost efficient than two but with the obvious problem that monopolies don't act in the interest of consumers. Limits on company size can definitively prevent monopolies.

At that time, Intel had a lead with the Tualatin microarchitecture on the PIII. This was developed into the Pentium M and Core. As far as I can tell, they don’t really have anything of that sort on the market right now that they could “evolve” into something new.

I retired my Q6600 a few weeks ago, because CyberPunk 2077 couldn't run on it (lacking AVX instructions). Worked fine up until then in my gaming rig :)

I still have my Core2 Duo in my HTPC... it's starting to feel doggy though.

I still have my Q6600, what an incredible processor at its time.

And you could overclock them almost 50% and at factory speeds they didn't need a fan, just a heatsink. Those were the days.

Intel has been bleeding engineers to other firms for a while now, and new talent has been skipping them altogether. These are not good developments for a company that depends on brain power to make their products.

> new talent has been skipping them altogether

I'd be interested in hearing more about this. Are new graduates actually not applying?

Intel is an enormous company with over 100,000 employees and an enormous stockpile of cash. I think they'll be okay.

The Titanic was a state of the art ship. It still sunk.

> Indeed, a similar situation happened in the mid 2000's before Intel moved to the Core architecture. I wouldn't be surprised if something like this happened again.

Though that may have been a bit easier for them to solve, because the main thing they had to do was scrap NetBurst (Pentium 4) and return to a derivative their old architecture (which they were still using for the notebook market).

Correct, they only had to quit being led by their own marketing BS about "higher clock rates are faster"

I’m almost positive Intel have tech ready to deploy to be on top again. They will have been developing it... but not needed to use it until they came under competition pressure.

Jim Keller's apparent rage quit has me questioning that.

I was bullish on Intel until quite recently. I was able to convince myself that they were taking the L on 10nm to focus completely on a full, true EUV transition, in order to be at the top of the game just everyone else was hitting that wall in order to dominate again. That turned out to be overly optimistic.

Yes I agree. Jim Keller was the canary in the coal mine. When he left without finishing his assignment, after a decades long reputation for excellence at multiple companies, that was a clear signal to sell your Intel stock. Intel could be the new Northern Telecom (though I felt the same way about Microsoft ten years ago and ... it didn't turn out as expected)

I agree. From an investment perspective though, there is enormous potential in Mobileye. They're way off in Israel, so they don't get the attention of the valley SDC companies, but they are way ahead of many, many others.

If so I believe this would be the second time that Israel has saved Intel's bacon. The first time being a microprocessor replacement for the power hungry Pentium III in the early 2000's.

They can do it but will they? Intel isn't known for being a well managed company internally.

But there's the new CEO. Only the CEO can improve the overall management of the company

> might even take back dominance (in a 2-3 years)

Well, they won't even have that EUV capacity in 2-3 years. ASML is almost fully booked at this point.

The way the industry is moving to custom chips won't wait for Intel. And realistically, the trend is already there, next stage of cloud evolution would be application specific chips for cloud native services, like storage/DB/ML, etc. There is zero chance it would scale back.

And I am not sure why everyone here is taking 'dying' so literally. Losing influence is another form of dying. It will take a long time for a company to cease to exist after it becomes irrelevant.

Side note, you probably mean "lag behind" rather than "lack behind", i.e. a time delay rather than an omission.

> I mean AMD for years survived in a situation much worse then Intel currently is.

Yeah, a lot of people seem to ignore the fact that AMD was not killing it in the CPU market for a while a few years back. I wouldn't be surprised if Intel makes a comeback eventually. It's not a huge deal to me who's in the lead at any given time, I'm more interested in competitive CPUs.

I'm most interested in the future of x86 as a whole. It's definitely got a while left, but I wonder how much market share will start to be taken by ARM (and hopefully RISCV).

Intel is certainly not dying. They are taking hits. But unlike AMD, Intel has a LOT of enemies over the years. Most large OEMs have been bullied and pushed around by Intel in the past. So I expect there will not be much good will to help a struggling Intel.

Intel is not just about CPU's.

Intel is ABSOLUTELY just about CPUs. I can’t think of a single thing that they produce that I would ever pay them money for other than CPUs, especially if they aren’t relevant in the CPU world anymore. Intel has tried to get into so many other markets over the years, but the company’s culture and the nature of their high margin, high R&D business made it impossible to compete in those other markets.

Intel's productions nodes might be behind TSMC's but they are still quite valuable, not all chips need 5nm processes. Heck we could say most chips don't need it.

That’s a very different market with very different margins. If they shrank so much that they became like Maxim or something, then that’s really not much different than going out of business altogether.