Still wondering how AMD has only ~25% of desktop market share given recent Intel issues.
The first problem I ran into is that the majority of companies selling pre-built computers do not offer an AMD option (and pre-built is a must. We are not allowed to use grant money to buy all the parts and assemble ourselves, which would have been my preferred option). And when they do, they are often limited in selection and might only be older generation or budget-tier CPUs.
I did eventually manage to find an AMD option that fit our needs and my boss forwarded to billing for approval. We got significant push back with IT recommending various intel machines that they claimed were "better" (although also several hundred dollars more expensive), but were also available through the universities preferred sales partners.
We could probably fight and get them to allow us to purchase what we want (the fact that they have to "allow" it when 100% of our funding is non-university dollars is a separate, ridiculous issue), but honestly, at this point we have probably already spent more staff time on this than the real world differences, even including the micro-code problems, are worth.
I'd bet that a lot of corporate contexts, and even home enthusiast customers, operate on the same momentum: they have always bought intel and so they will continue to buy intel. Even in the absence of some strong belief that intel is "better".
https://www.intel.com/pressroom/legal/docs/NY_AG_v._Intel_CO...
Today, people's mindshare is still largely with Intel, mostly due to nearly 2 decades of associated brand new computers, and performance with Intel, since they were the only offered option 90% of the time.
Think about your typical non-technical person shopping for a computer. "I want Intel, they've always done well for me".
But it’s not a bad idea, the margins for PC building is really low for the general public though.
You also typically are not directly involved in the business - that is both too much work and too obvious: instead you get your brother-in-law/uncle/cousin/... to start the business so it looks independent. Then the relative does expensive family vacations, football games and other such things that you happen to be invited on along with all your friends in common. (that is you need to make it look like money is never given to you, but because it is paid for you save a lot of money).
The other common thing to do is a charity. If a politician's family is in any way involved with a charity you should assume it is a scam - the charity might otherwise do good work but the family member is there as a way to hide bribes. (again, the money never reaches the politician, but it reaches family members who the politician wants to do well). This of course makes life hard for honest family members of politicians - everything they do looks like the politician (not them!) asking for a bribe.
For IT departments I think a lot of it is that they want you to have processors they know work with their software stack. In addition, Intel has their own software stack that works with their processors that include features such as Remote Desktop and security. Intel, like Microsoft, has become very good at catering to the Corporate IT crowd.
I thought the world solved this problem with compilers like 30 years ago.
Also you're vastly overestimating the knowledge of the average computer users. Many of them can't even tell the difference between the CPU and GPU.
Huh. Why? This seems arbitrary.
Procurement rules often exist for good reasons, but they're one of the reasons I moved back to the private sector.
Happily it was a while ago and I purged most of the details from my brain.
The one I remember best from when I was working gov't contractors was that there were forms that certified we were currently complying with all current US trade embargoes and sanctions regimes. So we had to investigate and make sure that we were complying with them all- the State department has a searchable list of all the people and companies that are under various levels of sanctions. But that paperwork, times all of the other forms we had to fill out, times a competitive bidding process (with possibility for appeals) to make sure the government wasn't getting ripped off, etc.
This can happen in the private industry as well: I remember once seeing a whole bunch of level 2 managers in a conference room battling it out over exactly which laptop to buy for ~15 developers who needed special extra beefy hardware for a project, and commenting to my L1 manager that the price difference between the two laptops was less than the cost to the company of that meeting, so it would have been wiser to just buy the more expensive laptops and forget the argument.
We had some people at work buy parts and it was fine for a while, then became a nightmare, unstable machines where we could never figure out what part was to blame. It isn't worth paying Dev's salaries to let them debug their faulty hardware.
It's not out of concern for cost-benefit ratio (overhead from parts selection and assembly) or anything like that. Getting something useful done is solely the researcher's problem.
Don’t you just need to find 3-4 sellers to do a shopping comparison? Don’t need anything close to the “majority”
Sounds like its a no go anyway, but just in case this is not the one you already found.
and yes, threadripper is unfortunately quite expensive now, that's a decision AMD made back in 2019 with the 3000 series to go heavily upmarket on that. In most cases if you are a customer who is in the market for threadripper, you are better off just using epyc now, unless your highly-parallel workload also needs very high max clocks.
- Intel is still competitive for gaming and productivity (albeit at a somewhat higher power consumption)
- AMD does not have a good budget offering (competing with i3 at ~120$)
- People don't refresh their desktop as often as a laptop, especially for gaming where realistically an i7-7700k from 2017 coupled with a modern GPU will comfortably output 60fps+ at 1440p.
I can say by first hand this is not true for any modern MP game.
In general, I hate these "it does X FPS at Y resolution" claims. They're all so reductive and usually provably false with at least a few examples.
The exception is when I need dirt-cheap + lower-ish power consumption (which isn't gaming)
I ran a GTX 1080 and then an RTX 3080. The performance was not very good in modern games designed for current gen consoles like pretty much any BR game for example. Some games got high FPS at times but with low minimum FPS.
Ie Cyberpunk 2077 everything max apart from rtx stuff and its rarely below 80fps, dlss on good looks. Baldurs gate 3 slightly less but still smooth. God of war same. Usually first think I install is some HD texture pack, so far never any performance hit to speak of. Literally why upgrade?
Consoles and their weak performance are effectively throttling PC games last few years (and decade before), not much reason to invest into beefy expensive power hungry noisy setup for most gaming, just to have few extra shiny surface reflections?
0: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/cpu-vs-gpu-u...
Pretty big claim
> at least a few examples
Reasonable claim
Comfortably doesn't mean everything will be at 60fps, it means that most things will be at 60fps so someone with a 7700k will not be feeling pressure to change their CPU (the entire point of the thread).
If you're thinking recent as in the last few years, then because the performance and power issues with Intel aren't large enough to make any difference for regular desktop use. Most will be on a 3 - 5 year upgrade cycle, so your new office PC just needs to be better than a five year old one, which it will be.
What it might do it damage the used market. Prices on Intel based refurbished PCs needs to drop, by a lot, now that we know that many/most of those CPUs are damaged beyond repair and will continue to degrade.
I feel like the writing has been on the wall for Intel's downward trajectory and AMD's substantial improvements for a few years now, but I think a lot of trust and brand loyalty has papered over the signs for Intel enthusiasts.
On a hardware news site covering the recent news, I saw for the first time in Intel buyers... shock. Incredulity. Disappointment. It's the first time I've seen self-admitting Intel fans come out in numbers questioning their beliefs and perceptions.
I think in the next 4-year cycle as home PC builds turn over and Intel buyers are coming back to market, there's going to be a large influx of AMD converts. The Intel disaster lately will have turned erosion into an exodus. Maybe not a monumental one. But the AMD numbers are going to grow seriously over the next half decade.
1. I generally use the same CPU for 2-3 years. I have a 11700k right now.
2. AMD hasn't released the beefier versions of its new CPU. High-end consumer Intel chips have many more cores/threads (P + E), while AMD's top right now has 16 threads.
#2 Is why I'm holding off for now. I'm waiting for the X3D version of their chip with ~2x the core count and more threads.
Intel has nothing that comes close to it.
NUCs with AMD APUs are nearly double the price. AMD is top dog in the high performing PCs but not everyone buys high performance PCs.
I wouldn't consider it "high performance" but it's definitely good performance and far better than any Intel mini-pc options I've looked into.
Here's a random sample of 1: https://dr.bee-link.cn/?dir=uploads%2FSER%2FBIOS%2FSER6%20MA...
Definitely agree asst if you plan on actually using the minipc swinging a real mobile chip with 3x the perf of N100 class processors is almost certainly worth it.
I've had more than 0 clients in my career that might draw that kind of attention but not a lot more.
Odds are it would have been fine, they were just i3 worker bee boxes, but, it's not really worth the risk when there's a viable alternative.
Intel is facing a lot of threats and they rested on their laurels. At the same time, Intel is still 75-80% of the market - even as AMD started killing Intel in performance for several years. I'm less sure that Intel will hit its fab milestones than Intel's press releases, but I'm also not sure that AMD can really take advantage of that. AMD is reliant on TSMC's capacity and as we've seen recently, AMD often has to wait a year or two before it can use TSMC's latest processes. Even AMD's upcoming Zen 5 processors will be using TSMC's 4nm N4P process (with future Zen 5 processors expected to be 3nm). If Intel is able to get 18A out the door in 2025, Intel's fabrication will certainly be competitive with what AMD can get (and likely quite a bit better).
From what I've read (and I might be wrong), it sounds like Intel is moving to High NA EUV soon (now-ish/2025) while TSMC is waiting until around 2030 (https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/manufacturing/tsm...). Is TSMC falling into the trap of letting a competitor out-invest them - the same trap that Intel fell into ~2012-2022? Probably not, but it does seem likely that the advantage TSMC had will taper away over the next couple years - assuming Intel isn't full of crap about their progress.
Even if TSMC maintains a lead against Intel, can AMD take marketshare? Specifically, can AMD produce as many chips as demanded or are they somewhat limited by how much capacity they can get from TSMC? For example, if people want X number of AMD server chips, does AMD manufacture 25% of that number and 75% of customers buy Intel chips because that's what is available due to AMD's lack of fab capacity? I'm not saying that is the case - it's a genuine question for someone that knows more about the industry than I do.
We do know that TSMC has limited capacity. Apple tied up TSMC's 3nm capacity such Apple is the only company shipping 3nm parts. It looks like Intel will be the next company shipping 3nm parts with their Lunar Lake using TSMC's N3B process this fall.
I'd also note that Intel's fabs aren't unlimited either. Meteor Lake moved to Intel 4 in December 2023, but Emerald Rapids (server) remained on Intel 7 at the same time. Intel can't just churn out as many Intel 4 chips as they'd like.
I too wonder how/why AMD is still below 25% marketshare given Intel's issues. I wonder if AMD has limitations on how much fab capacity it can get which is stifling attempts at gaining marketshare. At the same time, it looks like Intel is on a course to fix its issues - if one can believe what Intel is saying. If Intel is able to ship 18A chips in 2025 at volume, it seems like it should fix the big issue that Intel has been facing - inferior fabs. AMD has been able to out-do Intel in part because it's been able to rely on TSMC's better fabrication. Is this just a blip where Intel looks bad 2020-2024? That's a genuine question because I don't really know enough about the industry. Maybe someone will say that Intel's PR is mostly bluster and that they're still being run by beancounters trying to optimize for short-term profits. Maybe someone will say that Intel is investing in the right direction, but there's still a lot of risk around pulling off High NA EUV for 2025. Maybe someone will say that Intel is likely to hit their milestones and will regain the title of best-fab.
However, given that AMD hasn't been able to really hammer Intel's marketshare, it feels like Intel has more staying power than I'd think. Again, like the parent comment, it's always puzzled me that AMD hasn't gained a ton of marketshare over the past 5 years.
Unlike many other cases of a company getting a bad culture, Intel hasn't seen its marketshare destroyed. They still have time to turn things around. Even if things go in a very bad direction, they could become a fabless company like AMD and compete for TSMC's capacity on equal terms with AMD.
If you look at a company like Yahoo, Google had already become dominant when it was trying to turn itself around. AMD hasn't even hit a third of the market.
Not only that, but it's probable that AMD isn't capable of becoming even 50% of the market due to capacity constraints. If AMD can make 25-30% of the market's processors and no more due to capacity constraints, even if Intel processors are inferior, they're still going to be the bulk of sales. By contrast, Google had basically infinite capacity to dominate search, Facebook had basically infinite capacity to crowd out MySpace and other rivals, etc. The point is that Intel has a lot more runway to turn itself around if it's essentially guaranteed 70% of the market.
In some ways, this resembles the Boeing/Airbus situation. While Boeing has been in a bad place recently, Airbus can't take advantage of it. That gives Boeing a long time to change its trajectory and is probably why Airbus is only worth around 15% more than Boeing. Even if airlines want to buy Airbus planes, they can't. Likewise, even if OEMs and datacenters want to buy AMD chips, maybe they can't because AMD doesn't have the capacity to make them.
In some cases, you need to rapidly change the culture and direction of a company because you're quickly dying. In Intel's case, it seems likely that they could waddle along for a long time if AMD isn't able to quickly grab marketshare. I think it's easier to gradually change the culture over a longer period of time if you have the ability to stave off collapse in the meantime.
For example, maybe we'll look back on Intel in a decade and say "yea, the change started around 2020 when Intel realized it had fallen behind. It continued to fall behind while it tried to correct things, but then turned a corner and in 2025 they'd regained the fab crown." Are we already close to that culture change showing up in the public view?
I just think I don't know enough about the industry to really know. Maybe someone would say "Intel has already done the culture change and we've seen that in things like Intel 4 and you're really going to notice it in 2025 and 2026 with Intel beating TSMC to High NA EUV." Maybe someone would say "No, intel hasn't changed its culture and you can see that Intel 4 is a niche where they can't even make enough volume to put out a server product with it." Or maybe Intel is focused on the more medium-term with 18A and not wanting to waste resources on a less-than-stellar interim process.
I guess my question isn't just whether Intel is capable of changing its culture, but whether that's already happened. The public perception is a lagging indicator. Most of the public didn't have a bad perception of Boeing 1996-2017. We only recognized the problems in hindsight. Likewise, we recognized Intel's shortcomings in hindsight. We won't recognize whether Intel has changed for years after it has already changed.
So, has Intel's culture already changed (and we're going to see some pretty awesome stuff from them in 2025 and 2026) or has Intel been on the same path to mediocrity for the past 4 years (and they've just gotten better at press releases announcing that they'll be better soon)?
Or Intel just cut prices on their server CPU so that they are sort of competitive despite much higher power usage to core ratio?
The data center shortage means hyperscalers want as much performance as possible per server (and ideally the best performance/watt because cooling is also a concern). This why AMD has double the ASP of Intel in the server market.
MKL, OpenAPI, Intel Optimization for sklearn, for pytorch, etc (there are many more). No equivilants exist from AMD but NVIDIA has an equivalent for all of these (i.e. CuPy).
Using AMD for AI stuff only makes sense if you never believe that you may want to do any kind of ML-like workload on or with the CPUs assistance. This is true for many folks though, but for those it's not true for, they will buy blue until Intel no longer exists.
Not to mention that most people have more RAM than they do VRAM.
Running MKL on your datacenter grade AMD processor technically violates some license and it relies tricks like this - https://danieldk.eu/Posts/2020-08-31-MKL-Zen
Technically, if your found to be allowing this as a cloud provider by Intel, they have grounds to sue you, so yes, you can use MKL on a Ryzen at home, but you put yourself at risk for lawsuits by doing this in a data center at scale
I sometimes pick Intel over AMD because I don't have AMD's CPU naming conventions memorized - and I'm in a hurry.
That's sort of what I'm up against.
AMD makes excellent products. If I have a day or two I can ask my son for recommendations. He knows AMD lines off the top of his head. If I have 10 minutes, I go with what I know.
No. It's when I have to quickly line up hardware for my customers.
I'll have 5 projects in play and I get an email from a client saying they need a workstation or notebook for a new hire ASAP. I can skim Intel CPUs among Lenovo offerings fairly quickly.
Back when I was a system builder, I knew every capability of every chip. When Intel had hobbling virtualization (VT/x, etc), I knew which chips were capable. In that day, I often chose AMD to save time because every AMD CPU was fully capable.