This guy might be the last CEO of Intel.
Intel was (and arguably still is) too large relative to its current technical capabilities. Yet even in this current “bad chips” era, Intel is only, at worst, about 10% behind in gaming performance (largely due to cache disparity) and is on par or better in most other workloads. From the K10 era until Zen 3, AMD processors were objectively worse (sometimes comically so) and AMD still managed to survive.
Intel’s mobile CPUs remain extremely competitive. Their integrated GPUs are the fastest in the x86 space. And their SoC+platform features: video decode/encode, NPUs, power management, wifi, and so on are the best in class for x86 CPUs; they are usually a solid second place or better regardless of architecture.
Subjectively, the most interesting “mainstream” laptops on the market are still, and historically have been, Intel-based. I understand that in an era where the M4 Max, Snapdragon 8 Elite, and Strix Halo each serve as best-in-class in different segments, “mainstream appeal” no longer equates to market dominance. And that is bad news for an Intel that historically just make a few CPUs (the rest being market segmented down versions of those chips), but still, to suggest they will disappear overnight seems... odd.
Gaming is irrelevant.
For AMD, gaming (both console and PC combined) is less revenue than embedded-- things like those routers you can get off of aliexpress and Synology NASes.
Enterprise, cloud, and AI are the only things that matter, and even enterprise is falling off.
Back in 2020 with the second wave of AMD EPYC Rome, after I had gotten a couple of R7525s in hand and put them through their paces I started saying that you are professionally negligent if you, as a technology professional, recommend an Intel solution unless you have some very specific use cases (AVX512/Optane-optimized options). In 2022 everyone started agreeing with me.
Now you are professionally negligent if you recommend Intel at all.
Enterprise cares about speed, cloud cares about clients per socket, and AI cares about bandwidth. Intel is not competitive in any of those.
Even in the consumer space, for running bullshit workloads like Copilot on a laptop the difference is negligible. Intel is ahead, by about 10%-- at ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY WATTS (if the OEM even allows it) while you trade that 10% for 75W on AMD.
No human being on earth cares that the scan to identify if there's a cute dog in the photo they just saved to disk takes .255 or .277 seconds. They do care about battery life.
And gaming isn't just irrelevant due to revenue, once you look at margins you start realizing that AMD could never again spend a single cent on marketing X3D chips to gamers and instead redirect that money to target other sectors and they would probably be better off for it.
Look at Nvidia. Gaming went from their cash crop to burdensome baggage in just a couple of years. Gaming went to less than 9% of revenue from like, 80%. They don't care about people buying an RTX card and having to deal with OEMs and distributors and retailers and marketing and RMAs and driver patches at whatever piss-poor margin it is due to everyone taking their cut when enterprise clients are putting in POs directly to them for tens of thousands of Data Center cards at a time at high margins-- and they didn't have to spend barely anything on marketing.
The very last thing, after figuring out absolutely everything else, that Intel should care about is what their chips are benchmarking at in the latest video game.
I had a friend who legitimately could not understand why Nvidia didn’t care about their reputation in the gaming market souring even after I showed him the numbers on how much nvidia is selling to corporations now.
I don’t know if it was an inability to deal with the numbers or if it’s just culture shock at going from being a valued client to as you said “baggage”, but it was a surprising number of people in that camp
Sooner or later, someone else will fill the need. That may be AMD, it could be Intel if they just focus for more than a year, or it'll be some cheap Chinese GPU from a company you've never heard of. (Likely named by mashing the keyboard while capslock is on.)
It's like how the mainframe market is bigger than it has ever been, despite being an irrelevant rounding error in the minds of the "Wintel" server providers, cloud vendors, etc...
As a parallel, imagine hearing that the IPhone 13 was the biggest selling device in history. Then suddenly the IPhone 14 is $4000 and mostly sold to enterprise. It doesn't make any logical sense without following the money. Even then it may not make much sense.
Huge gaming demand and easy retail availability of nvidia's cards was providing economies of scale. If a few professors were buying the GeForce 8800 to look at this new 'CUDA' thing that was mostly a marketing thing.
Around the same time there were also one or two Playstation 3 clusters - but a year or two later Sony removed support for that. HPC being inconsequential, and a distraction from their core business, presumably.
It's only in recent years the stuff that used to be marketing decoration has become reality.
To be fair, their marketing was all that gaming related BS you listed, plus developing and maintaining CUDA. Winning gaming got them the winning AI architecture and mindshare around it, and CUDA got them the winning developer interface to it and locked in that mindshare.
>Look at Nvidia. Gaming went from their cash crop to burdensome baggage in just a couple of years.
Yes, marking up your consumer hardware by 4-5x to appeal to crypto miners surely does have an effect on your market. Arguably, AI saved them from a crash due to their over investment on Crypto/NFTs. It's not like gaming demand diminished this decade.
Gaming isn't THE way out. But it's one avenue to consider. It does seem like companies c. 2025 prefer to fall into the AI bubble, though.
If the hype dies and they're back to selling 5090s to gamers, can they afford to pay those bills?
But we know that won't be enough for shareholders and their stock would tank regardless. Because 2020's speciation isn't about having a reasonable long term portfolio. It's just extremely abundant pumping until you need to dump and pump the next trend. It's not enough these days to be a good, sensible business.
Steam [1] tells me gamers use Intel by 59:41
Price-performance scatter plots [2] say although Intel isn't battling AMD for the >$1000 threadripper territory, they have some competitive products in the sub-$500 price band.
And while Intel missed out on the smartphone market, I've heard people comparing their N100 CPUs favourable to the latest Raspberry Pi hardware.
Sure, Intel has had major troubles with their next process node. And one of the best performing laptops is ARM-based. But Intel are nowhere near defeated.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ [2] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_available.html#xy_sca...
It really might be as bad a mistake as not having Intel Isreal's futher development of Pentium 3 would have been. (in other words, no Pentium M, no Core 2 Duo, no Nehalem...)
The current “bad chips that are only 10% behind” are fabbed by TSMC, not Intel.
Intel has a competitive iGPU in the low-power mobile space. Their iGPUs in general are also pretty solid for general desktop use. But even in the x86 space, AMD has better-performing iGPU options than anything Intel has ever offered.
I think the M4 is a fanless marvel of a chip and noticeably more interesting than the M4 Max. A fanless 6+2+10 configuration M5 with 128gb of ram would the most interesting thing in the mobile space.
But since we are splitting hairs, how good is an iGPU if you can't play most games? x86 -> windows or proton. One can't even run Linux, let alone proton, on an M4 (Asahi support stops at the M2).
Intel can’t rely on the same. They haven’t been directly impacted by another larger company, they rely too much on a single technology that’s slowly fading from the spotlight, and they can’t compete against AMD on price.
Maybe if they ended up in a small and lean desperation position they could pivot and survive, but their current business model is a losing eventuality.
As I said, AMD survived by going into a lean pivot out of desperation. Intel has that opportunity as well, but the deck is stacked against them due to their size and over-reliance on specific IPs.
2) Ok, so there is expensive workstation available. It is a step forward I guess.
3) Call me when it is available and I can buy it in any normal computer shop.
Look, I hate the x86 architectur with a passion, having grown up with MS-DOS and the horrors of real mode. But the truth is that if I want to buy a computer right now, today, it is either a x86 PC or an Apple, and I have zero interest in Apple's closed ecosystem, so a PC it is.
3) PM me your number.
The fact is just that x86-CPU gets less and less important in the overall picture. It's not shrinking in total volume but in relative volume and fabs get exponentially more expensive. If Intel can make it in this generation they can't finance the next generation making only their own CPUs. They missed the big growth markets. They lost Apple as a customer. They have no GPU and no mobile chip that matters. They invested billions and billions into technology that went nowhere. Now they have to ask TSMC already to manufacture competitive CPUs. The only way this could change if Apple and/or NVidia massively start buying future capacity at intel. But why would they?
The margins on their desktop products are also way down, their current desktop product isn't popular due to performance regressions in a number of areas relative to the previous generation (and not being competitive with AMD in general), and their previous generation products continue to suffer reliability problems.
And all this, while they're lighting billions of dollars on fire investing in building a foundry that has yet to attract a single significant customer.
Intel's not in a good spot right now.