AMD's 5nm CPUs could be monsters
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AMD's 5nm CPUs could be monsters
1–10 of 19 posts
Re: AMD's 5nm CPUs could be monsters
#2As someone who hasn’t followed this space too closely, is there a good tl;dr explanation of how intel lost their lead? It doesn’t seem like an “innovator’s dilemma” situation since they seem to be getting beat at their core competency of laptop, desktop and server cpus.
Re: AMD's 5nm CPUs could be monsters
#3As someone who hasn’t followed this space too closely, is there a good tl;dr explanation of how intel lost their lead? It doesn’t seem like an “innovator’s dilemma” situation since they seem to be getting beat at their core competency of laptop, desktop and server cpus.
basically intel took too long getting to the next die shrink. they also failed to appreciate the advantage of amd's chiplet design (or couldn't pivot fast enough to do something similar). both of these allow amd to make more viable parts out of a single wafer, which means they can profitably sell more powerful CPUs at the same price.
it's worth noting that Intel still has faster individual cores (but only because they can clock higher). amd can sell you many more (slightly slower) cores for the money.
Re: AMD's 5nm CPUs could be monsters
#4As someone who hasn’t followed this space too closely, is there a good tl;dr explanation of how intel lost their lead? It doesn’t seem like an “innovator’s dilemma” situation since they seem to be getting beat at their core competency of laptop, desktop and server cpus.
They blew an incredible amount of effort and money on new processes that didn't pan out. The failure rate was too high for production. AMD doesnt fab their own chips so they can piggyback on the progress unlocked by the fabs that build for cellphones (TSMC in this case).
Also, transistor density is a better measure than 5nm/7nm/10nm. That feature detail in nanometers is more or less pure marketing term and doesn't compare accurately. Intels transistor density is still better than the latest Ryzen but it looks like they will be matched or surpassed by the next gen AMD.
Re: AMD's 5nm CPUs could be monsters
#5As someone who hasn’t followed this space too closely, is there a good tl;dr explanation of how intel lost their lead? It doesn’t seem like an “innovator’s dilemma” situation since they seem to be getting beat at their core competency of laptop, desktop and server cpus.
There are a few different factors that all added up, at least from my understanding/point of view:
- AMD tried something new (FX series), that didn't go as well as they had hoped (they tried doing something similar to the P4 arc and thought they could do it better than intel). Which resulted in sub-par processors. So people continued to prefer Intel processors.
- Intel having no real need to continue to advance its processors with no serious threat, continued to do smaller iterations on its line, moving from a tick-tock cycle (big improvements, followed by a yearly refresh for additional small improvements) to more of a tick tick tock cycle (more yearly refreshes with marginal improvements).
- Intel also had issues getting their fabs down to smaller processors, which may have contributed to the change in how their cycles were going.
- Intel has also had more issues lately with speculate execution attacks, which due to their current design in how they implemented OoO-execution, has lead them to disabling some of this functionality. This disabling decreases some of their previous performance advantages. AMD has also been hit with some, but not to the same extent with intel, and usually not to the same level of performance degradation.
Re: AMD's 5nm CPUs could be monsters
#6As someone who hasn’t followed this space too closely, is there a good tl;dr explanation of how intel lost their lead? It doesn’t seem like an “innovator’s dilemma” situation since they seem to be getting beat at their core competency of laptop, desktop and server cpus.
They blew an incredible amount of effort and money on new processes that didn't pan out. The failure rate was too high for production. AMD doesnt fab their own chips so they can piggyback on the progress unlocked by the fabs that build for cellphones (TSMC in this case). Also, transistor density is a better measure than 5nm/7nm/10nm. That feature detail in nanometers is more or less pure marketing term and doesn't co…
Intel is at 14nm and amd is at 7nm, yet the transistor densities are higher on the Intel side?
Do you have any source to back this claim? I know that node sizes are mostly meaningless at this point, but still this is invalidating 3 generations of node jumps on the TSMC/AMD side vs none on the intel side, surely it can't be that meaningless of a number?
Re: AMD's 5nm CPUs could be monsters
#7As someone who hasn’t followed this space too closely, is there a good tl;dr explanation of how intel lost their lead? It doesn’t seem like an “innovator’s dilemma” situation since they seem to be getting beat at their core competency of laptop, desktop and server cpus.
>is there a good tl;dr explanation of how intel lost their lead?
Poor Management, Culture and Denial. Nothing technical really. ( They lost their Only Paranoid Survives Culture )
10nm was initially expected to be in 2016, but since 14nm was delayed it was naturally assumed it would be 2017 instead. But it was delayed again and in 2018 they shipped 10nm CPU with incredibly low yield.
All while their management and CEO promising 10nm were fine.
If you are counting, that is 4 years of delay. Meanwhile, TSMC, the leading edge Foundry for non-Intel node / products ( That is everything from Qualcomm, Apple, Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom etc... ) has been keeping their head down and grinding. And so they went from roughly 1 node behind ( ~2 years ) to 1 node advance ( ~2 years ).
One thing to point out is while they might have lost their technical lead, their most recent financial results is still recording breaking.
Re: AMD's 5nm CPUs could be monsters
#8As someone who hasn’t followed this space too closely, is there a good tl;dr explanation of how intel lost their lead? It doesn’t seem like an “innovator’s dilemma” situation since they seem to be getting beat at their core competency of laptop, desktop and server cpus.
I have heard the Intel's 10nm node was overly ambitious and this caused their delays.
Re: AMD's 5nm CPUs could be monsters
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
They blew an incredible amount of effort and money on new processes that didn't pan out. The failure rate was too high for production. AMD doesnt fab their own chips so they can piggyback on the progress unlocked by the fabs that build for cellphones (TSMC in this case). Also, transistor density is a better measure than 5nm/7nm/10nm. That feature detail in nanometers is more or less pure marketing term and doesn't co…
Intel is at 14nm and amd is at 7nm, yet the transistor densities are higher on the Intel side? Do you have any source to back this claim? I know that node sizes are mostly meaningless at this point, but still this is invalidating 3 generations of node jumps on the TSMC/AMD side vs none on the intel side, surely it can't be that meaningless of a number?
Intel's 10nm does have a higher density than TSMC 7nm[1]. However, Intel's desktop chips are still on 14nm and that is closer in terms of density to TSMC's short lived 10nm node.
[1] https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/2408/tsmc-7nm-hd-and-hp-cells...
Re: AMD's 5nm CPUs could be monsters
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
They blew an incredible amount of effort and money on new processes that didn't pan out. The failure rate was too high for production. AMD doesnt fab their own chips so they can piggyback on the progress unlocked by the fabs that build for cellphones (TSMC in this case). Also, transistor density is a better measure than 5nm/7nm/10nm. That feature detail in nanometers is more or less pure marketing term and doesn't co…
Intel is at 14nm and amd is at 7nm, yet the transistor densities are higher on the Intel side? Do you have any source to back this claim? I know that node sizes are mostly meaningless at this point, but still this is invalidating 3 generations of node jumps on the TSMC/AMD side vs none on the intel side, surely it can't be that meaningless of a number?
Wikipedia claims MTr/mm^2s of:
Intel 14: 37.5
Intel 10: 100.8
TSMC 16/14/12: 28.88
TSMC 10: 52.51
TSMC 7: 96.5 to 113.9, depending on iteration.
TSMC 5: 173