AMD passes Intel in market cap | Hacker News Reader

AMD passes Intel in market cap

cnbc.com

This is absolutely crazy, I was at Intel back in 2016 and I knew that the company was in deep trouble but somehow continued to just truck along with (what I assume was) tricks to juice the share price. The markets Intel are in are very sticky, it's not a matter of "stick a different chip in it", there's whole software, support, supply chain, issues that make it very difficult to move.

I really wonder if Intel is still a coherent company any more. Every time they hit up the US gov for more money I think that they've lost their minds. I could easily see them forced to split out the foundry business from the fabless IP for CPUs and then having to compete. Difficult to see how either of those businesses survive as-is though - neither is market leading, and a nascent GPU offering isn't going to help.

Everything I've heard is Gelsinger is the person they need, but I think it's likely way too late, he'll be forced into financial engineering or quitting soon.

> Everything I've heard is Gelsinger is the person they need, but I think it's likely way too late, he'll be forced into financial engineering or quitting soon.

Agree. I also thought Pat was a good choice, given his knowledge of the company and deep technical expertise.

I've been surprised at Pat's poor leadership. I agree a leader should be optimistic, but he's acting irrationally exuberant. He is outwardly pretending Intel is 'back', that 'AMD is in the rear view mirror', and it's coming off as of he has completed underappreciated the magnitude of his challenge.

Intel should have given investors a heads up a miss of this size was coming. It's starting to appear that Intel leadership is hiding the problems.

> Every time they hit up the US gov for more money I think that they've lost their minds.

If the additional funding helps them build quicker, is that a bad thing?

Gelsinger secured ~tens of billions in funding for Intel, which may be the difference between catching up with TSMC and not. Even if that is his only accomplishment, its a major one.

This is a testament to the vision, strategy and execution by Lisa Su - probably the world's best female CEO and one of the best CEOs in general.

The seeds for this success were planted nearly a decade ago, and Intel mocked them relentlessly at the time for going down this path.

It also goes to show that you need an engineer in charge to be successful in the semi business. A pencil-pushing finance guy will torpedo your company long term in exchange for short term number juicing.

Do you mind elaborating on what seeds you’re referring to. Or just some pointers on what to search for or something. I’m ignorant to the history here but would like to learn more.

I'm not a HW person but as I understand it, the latest chips AMD produces seem to have something in common with NVIDIA GPUs .. they have these blocks that they can essentially copy and paste. In NVIDIA parlance, these are SMs. I think what the OP is referring to may be the interconnect and this sort of simple architecture. You get the power from scaling the blocks (not from a more complex individual block). My previous gen Ryzen is slower on an individual core basis than the comparable Intel part but I went for it because of the core count. What is interesting is that as TSMC improves their process and they both move to a smaller node, it makes it possible to fit more blocks on an area of silicon and it gets better (power-wise?) Would be interesting to hear from an EE if my thinking is on the spot or if I am in error.

I think they're referring to how AMD threw everything out and started from scratch on their Zen CPU architecture in 2012 (when their stock was near rock bottom)

This and the decision to go fabless (Intel mocked them relentlessly for it).

Which is pretty funny because Intel probably knew it was a smart move; AMD probably wanted to do this earlier. They spun GlobalFoundries out in 2009, but only after a settlement with Intel allowing them to do so. Part of their patent cross-licensing agreement with Intel was (allegedly) that they had to produce chips in-house.

Intel pretty much deserves to see themselves in the position they're in now. Microsoft made more headlines over the years with their anti-competitive behavior, but Intel was just as bad.

Different company, but Lam Research had a finance CEO, he had to 'resign' because he liked leading women on with career advancement promises more than running a critical infrastructure company. Now there's an ex-engineer/project-manager in the CEO position. So, according to the board members of these companies, finance heads are out, engineering-heads are in. Let's hope it works and lets hope it sticks for good.

When she took the helm in 2014 Intel’s market cap was 86 times higher than AMD’s. Her execution has been amazing at a time when Intel has made mistake after mistake.

I would say this applies to any business these days that uses technology, not just a tech business. Advertising, banking, etc. Funding models, bean counters, finance vs strategic, all go to making the business harder to deliver product quicker long term. I've been in these organisations, and it fails due to sheer bureaucracy and the numbers always needing to stack up.

The sad thing is transformation/turn around of businesses never stacks up finance wise. Its hard since the current business is a "sunk cost", and transformation is seen as a big expense with no additional value. i.e. it just puts you where you are. Its also usually requires understanding a business in full and untangling it which is expensive and usually requires significant changes and/or uplift. Most of the time they will ask - Why not just do what we've always done? Why not just use the old thing that works? etc etc.

Its the reason startup's can sometimes disrupt and take over large leaders in the field with much less capital. They have less to lose, and can just do the right thing for now. In some ways AMD had less to lose.

It's pretty crazy to see this day! I was just browsing Reddit and I saw there are now rumors that the next gen AMD chip will beat Intel in Single-Threaded performance[0], which is amazing to see.

I know that, at the end of the day, the magic is really because of TSMC (same with Apple), but it still makes me happy that Intel is getting some real competition after so many years of being complacent. It's good for consumers!

0: https://videocardz.com/newz/amd-ryzen-5-7600x-6-core-raphael...

> the magic is really because of TSMC

Why do people keep repeating this rubbish? There is not a shred of evidence that process accounts for anywhere near 100% of the perf/power difference.

Smaller node -> less heat -> higher clock -> higher performance

Correct but not complete.

Agree. It's inaccurate to miss AMD's superior architecture and execution.

Some grey area, but def not ‘inaccurate’

Are you suggesting that if AMD built on Intel's current Intel 7 process, and Intel built on AMD/TSMC's current N5 process, AMD would still have better perf/W?

I thought the key difference was the AMD chiplet system. They can make a cpu with the same area as intel but don't need it to come from the same contiguous piece of silicon. Therefore they would get much better yields even if using an identical process.

I’d buy intel right now honestly. their pe is 7.8, compared with AMDs 35. Intel is still investing in production capability and adding jobs. unless you believe intel is literally a dead company that PE makes no sense.

You could have said the same thing about GE and still have made a huge loss.

Absolutely unbelievable. What an achievement for AMD.

Not known to the public but China has invested quite a bit in AMD.

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