Intel is in a better position financially than AMD was, and could catch up again. I tend to think it depends a lot on the organization and the people.
IC: A few people consider you 'The Father of Zen', do you think you’d scribe to that position? Or should that go to somebody else?
JK: Perhaps one of the uncles. There were a lot of really great people on Zen. There was a methodology team that was worldwide, the SoC team was partly in Austin and partly in India, the floating-point cache was done in Colorado, the core execution front end was in Austin, the Arm front end was in Sunnyvale, and we had good technical leaders. I was in daily communication for a while with Suzanne Plummer and Steve Hale, who kind of built the front end of the Zen core, and the Colorado team. It was really good people. Mike Clark's a great architect, so we had a lot of fun, and success. Success has a lot of authors - failure has one. So that was a success. Then some teams stepped up - we moved Excavator to the Boston team, where they took over finishing the design and the physical stuff, Harry Fair and his guys did a great job on that. So there were some fairly stressful organizational changes that we did, going through that. The team all came together, so I think there was a lot of camaraderie in it. So I won't claim to be the ‘father’ - I was brought in, you know, as the instigator and the chief nudge, but part architect part transformational leader. That was fun.
If Intel only had a competitive advantage during that era because they traded performance for security, was there ever really an advantage?
I personally don't think Gelsinger is going to be able to fix their culture issues. He's been more intent on pumping stock and asking for handouts than innovating, which is part of what got them where they are in the first place, for good or ill.
Security is important, I would always prefer a secure product. But given design habits that elide security for performance, as well as a compromised supply chain, the only choice we have is to side with the devil(s) we know.
Even with longer fulfillment timelines, availability isn't necessary worth the surprise cost of competitiveness.
Lifecycling early and having to buy additional hardware to meet capacity was passed onto our customers.
After being ahead of Intel in the Pentium 4 era. The problem back then was marketing and giant amount of (probably illegal now) bundling that was rampant back then.
AMD had to make a much better product to get manufacturers to consider it, not just being price competitive. It took the P4 train wreck to get the market to shift but Intel had enough lock-in to make it to the Core generation without losing too much market share because so many of the vendors had those contracts.
Thunderbird was released in 1999 and from there to the Core 2 Duo release in 2006, AMD was the performance leader (certainly at a huge discount compared to intel offerings).
Their top performance was lower than Intel in many cases, but it was certainly not "absolute garbage". For low- to mid-range they offered similar performance with usually a (much) lower price point. For normal "average person" usage they were often the better choice in terms of "bang for your buck".
The main reason we were selling Intels is because we got a rebate from Intel for every CPU we sold. Financially it didn't really matter if we sold a €400 computer, €500, or €600 computer: the profit margin for us was roughly identical (a little bit more, but not much), but with Intel you got a rebate back-channelled, so then it did matter.
Intel can build ARMs and RISC-Vs as well as anybody. Harder will be adapting their salespeople to non-monopoly conditions.