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Comment by Torkel | Hacker News Reader

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."

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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:

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

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