Will be interesting to see how Intel recovers if at all. Actually, is there today (or since 1 or 2 years) any reason to go with Intel on desktop or server?
That said, Intel really has nothing to fall back on. Internally, it is very much like many of the other big companies - run by executive whim papered over with justifications that are tissue thin. There are a lot of companies like this - Cisco, Intel, whatever the hell is left of IBM, Nokia, Lattice, NetApp, etc. - that will probably die this decade if they fail to reboot their executive and managerial cultures.
I have a lot of friends who have been in the great parts of Intel (the CPU design teams and, believe it or not, fabrication) and the crap parts (everything else, especially networking and storage [what's left of it], except maybe the perenially suffering ICC team). Pat has failed to make things materially better because the system that is the body of Intel is resilient to disruptions of the sort he is trying. A massive replacement and flattening of culture is required there and he has not been able to execute on it.
Turnover is coming for all the companies I list above. If I had to go out on a limb and suggest a longterm survivor from the list above, it might be Lattice. Otherwise everyone listed is driving hard straight to the ground internally, whether the market sees it or not.
Not high enough that it can't go higher.
Maybe somebody should make a betting site around when the next order-of-magnitude increase on the rent of AS/400 hardware will come. With 6 months granularity.
IMO, the people without a plan are crazy. But yeah, there's plenty of them.
Their hardware is actually fairly remarkable. If you have a certain kind of mission, it really makes sense to build a bunker around some mainframes.
IMHO the best outcome for these companies is to go for spin-offs route. Phillips did that with a lot of business units they had and struggle to run (ASML, NXP, their semiconductor fabs etc) and all these businesses turned out to be successful after 4-5 years of tough times. Freshly spun-off companies sometimes went for selling a while project and its dev team to others, or in some cases these projects became spin-offs on their own right. A lot of dead weight (mid-to-high management layers) got fired in the process. It was the right thing to do. Now Phillips is mainly a medical device company, tiny compared to what it used to be, and it is still struggling.
The next couple of years will be interesting. If Intel can pull off 18a they will very likely retake the lead, however if 18a underwhelms Intel will be in real trouble. There is also the possibility that AMD chooses Intel as a fab in the future, which would feel a bit like when Sonic showed up on a Nintendo console (for some reason it just feels wrong).
I would think the grounds are much more even now.
[1]: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cpu-hierarchy,4312.html...
For instance a slow 5.5 GHz Zen 5 matches or exceeds a 6.0 GHz Raptor Lake in single-thread performance. The faster Zen 5 models, which will be launched in a couple of days, will beat easily any Intel.
Nevertheless, in a couple of months Intel will launch Arrow Lake S, which will have a very close single-thread performance to Zen 5, perhaps very slightly higher.
Because Arrow Lake S will be completely made by TSMC, it will have a much better energy efficiency than the older Intel CPUs and also than AMD Zen 5, because it will use a superior TSMC "3 nm" process. On the other hand, it is expected to have the same maximum clock frequency as AMD Zen 5, so its single thread performance will no longer be helped by a higher clock frequency, like in Raptor Lake.
Will they? Intel Innovation event was postponed "until 2025"[1], so I assumed there is not going to be any big launch like that in 2024, anymore? Arrow Lake S was supposed to debut at Intel Innovation event in September [2]
[1] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/events/on-event-seri...
[2] https://videocardz.com/newz/intel-says-raptor-lake-microcode...
Since the chips of Arrow Lake S are made at TSMC and Intel does only packaging and testing, like also for Lunar Lake, there will be no manufacturing problems.
The only thing that could delay the Arrow Lake S launch would be a bug so severe that it would require a new set of masks. For now there is no information about something like this.
Also, for a while, it was more competitive in the mid range than AMD's equivalent from a price/performance point of view.
The 9800X3D and 9950X(3D) options will really carry this cycle if they're good and the pricing adapts appropriately. I'm not holding my breath. I've been holding on with my 5950X since it's release and likely going to continue unless the 9950X(3D) is compelling enough. Not to mention the DDR5 memory issues with larger sizes or more sticks. 96gb is probably enough, but at what cost.
Their energy efficiency is much better that for any previous x86 CPUs and for those who use applications that benefit from AVX-512 the desktop Zen 5 brings an increase in throughput higher than for any new CPU of the last five years (the last time when a desktop CPU had a double throughput over its predecessors was in 2019, with Zen 2 over Coffee Lake Refresh). Also in the applications like Web browsers or MS Office, which prefer single-thread performance, they beat even the top Raptor Lake Refresh of 6.0 GHz, which is much more expensive and it consumes a power several times greater.
Moreover, as shown by TechPowerUp, the performance of Zen 5 under Windows is suboptimal in comparison with Intel in the programs that use a small number of active threads, like the games, because the Windows scheduler uses a policy that favors power savings over performance, even if that is a bad choice for a desktop CPU. That means that the scheduler prefers to make both threads of a core active, while keeping idle the other cores, even if the right policy (which is used on Intel) is to begin to use the second threads of the cores only after all the cores have one active thread.
This should be easy to correct in the Windows scheduler, which does the right thing for Intel, where first one thread is made active on each P-core, the all the E-cores are made active, and only if more active threads are required the second threads of the P-cores are made active too.
That would be like asking how many MPG's a rebuilt 1969 Ford Mustang Boss 429 gets... it was not built for efficiency - it was built for performance.
Is a 1969 Ford Mustang Boss 429 really something to compare an x600 class CPU to all the same? Even then, a gamer is more likely to get 6000/6400 memory, properly balance the fclk and run with PBO. I still wouldn't suggest the 9600X, given the current pricing compared to other options... Just like I wouldn't recommend people pay $20k markup on a Ford Bronco.
So, much like a class muscle car, people buy them to go fast, not be efficient.
It is amazing to see how Intel has faltered. This was all laid in stone a decade ago when Intel was under delusions that its biggest competitor was itself, and the only thing it cared about was ensuring that their lower power and lower cost devices didn't compete with their cash-cow high end products. They optimized for the present and destroyed their future.