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Intel is dying and we can’t save it

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Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#251

Post by eggsome »

TwoBit wrote: post #145
schmookeeg wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh it's reality. My experience at Sony was about 1:25, but other big dumb companies I have worked for have met and exceeded the 1:40 rule. It is amazing how process generates dead weight and worthless humans and nobody seems to care. At one point I posited that Sony USA were merely a political pawn for Sony Japan. Hire a few tens of thousands of Americans, gain political capital -- and care not what they actually do…

Wow I worked at Oculus and the ratio was at least 30/40, if not higher.

Did you see much change after the attempt to move the software guys out of Texas?

Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#252

Post by TheBigSalad »

monocasa wrote: post #6

Any analysis that says that Intel's death is being precipitated by AMD and Apple rather than by TSMC is pretty much worth ignoring. The fact that they're almost equivalent to those two at 5nm when Intel is at 14nm+++++++++ shows how killer the RTL and tape out folk are at Intel. The real fight has always been at the fab layer.

I'm out of my league here, but I get the impression that Intel can't take their same design and pass it off to TSMC to print up chips at 5nm. I think it's more than that, but correct me if I'm wrong.

Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#253

Post by llampx »

throwawaytolk wrote: post #197

It always blows me away to see so much brand loyalty about cpus. I really couldn't care less what architecture my chips are, or who fabricates them. All I care about is price and performance. I write application software, the underlying hardware is pretty irrelevant to me and most of my peers too. I think that as we lost national sources of pride and community structures at a local level, people transferred their loy…

> I think that as we lost national sources of pride and community structures at a local level, people transferred their loyalties to brands. LETS RISE ABOVE!

Fully agree. This is a phenomenon that goes beyond tech.

Personally I have always rooted for AMD as the underdog and because Intel was the Goliath that held back CPU performance so it could squeeze more dollars out of consumers.

Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#254

Post by llampx »

Nacdor wrote: post #54

Does AMD really dominate the gaming market? I was still under the impression that AMD is what you buy when you're on a budget and Intel is what you get if you care about gaming performance. I just did a quick search and it looks like most people are still saying single core performance is better on Intel chips?

AMD has been dominating the gaming market since the Ryzen 3000 series. The Ryzen 3600X was the gaming chip to beat last year.

Also if you were not playing at 4K or competitive e-sports, you probably wanted an 8-core Ryzen chip for multi-threaded tasks even if it was marginally worse at CS:GO with >200 fps.

Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#255

Post by Tuna-Fish »

incrudible wrote: post #245
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel's "latest" architecture is basically the same Skylake from 2015 except they just pulled a Prescott with it and simply cranked up the power and heat until it reaches a desired x% extra performance over last gen.

Preliminary benchmarks show them surpassing Zen3 on the desktop with only a slight frequency bump.

Only in cherry-picked benchmarks that already favored Intel on their past-gen chips. If you assume that performance is improved everywhere evenly, and extrapolate from those prerelease benchmarks and existing benchmarks for their older chips, their new chip will end up being ~5% slower than Zen3 overall.

Also, never compare chips that are actually on the market to unreleased ones. Zen3 might well get a small frequency boost when Intel finally releases Rocket Lake.

Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#256

Post by mardiyah »

henry_bone wrote: post #34

Is it sensible (viable, potentially profitable, possible) for Intel to build RISC-V CPUs? Could they collaborate with Dell or Lenovo and make RISC-V based SoCs to go into laptops to compete with the macs?

for - ROI/profit?

as RISC-V CPUs are rolling out in hundred PCs now

Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#257

Post by incrudible »

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #255
incrudible wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Preliminary benchmarks show them surpassing Zen3 on the desktop with only a slight frequency bump.

Only in cherry-picked benchmarks that already favored Intel on their past-gen chips. If you assume that performance is improved everywhere evenly, and extrapolate from those prerelease benchmarks and existing benchmarks for their older chips, their new chip will end up being ~5% slower than Zen3 overall. Also, never compare chips that are actually on the market to unreleased ones. Zen3 might well get a small frequenc…

My point is not that Intel is "crushing" AMD or anything, but that they manage to outpace (or at least keep pace with) AMD on a much larger node.

> Also, never compare chips that are actually on the market to unreleased ones.

Watch me do it:

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Rocket-Lake-S-vs-Zen-3-Geekben...

Am I going to gamble my house on this being true? Of course not. We're having a nerdy discussion on IPC. It doesn't really matter either way.

Perhaps you're right and these chips won't "improve evenly" across all benchmarks, but then again nobody has "even" workloads. Rocket-Lake-S has some machine learning acceleration that's going to be useless for many people, valuable for others. It has a GPU onboard, which can come in handy. I'm personally interested in AVX-512. No, I don't need to know why you think AVX-512 sucks.

Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#258

Post by alimbada »

ChrisIsTaken wrote: post #82
josephg wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That'll sort itself out pretty quickly. TSMC is flush with cash from the premium pricing they've been able to charge for their 5nm fabs. Every day TSMC doesn't have enough capacity is a day they funnel easy money straight to their competitors at Samsung and Intel. Investing into increasing their fab capacity is the easiest business decision they'll ever make. And if they need finance they could get investors lining u…

TSMC's capacity problems have been directly caused by still ongoing covid shutdowns at ASML.

Do you have any sources for this? From what I've been reading the last couple of weeks, the shortages are due to ABF substrate shortages[1].

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-chip-shortage-packagin...

Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#259

Post by Tuna-Fish »

incrudible wrote: post #257
Tuna-Fish wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only in cherry-picked benchmarks that already favored Intel on their past-gen chips. If you assume that performance is improved everywhere evenly, and extrapolate from those prerelease benchmarks and existing benchmarks for their older chips, their new chip will end up being ~5% slower than Zen3 overall. Also, never compare chips that are actually on the market to unreleased ones. Zen3 might well get a small frequenc…

My point is not that Intel is "crushing" AMD or anything, but that they manage to outpace (or at least keep pace with) AMD on a much larger node. > Also, never compare chips that are actually on the market to unreleased ones. Watch me do it: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Rocket-Lake-S-vs-Zen-3-Geekben... Am I going to gamble my house on this being true? Of course not. We're having a nerdy discussion on IPC. It doesn'…

> My point is not that Intel is "crushing" AMD or anything, but that they manage to outpace (or at least keep pace with) AMD on a much larger node.

This is an entirely valid position, and I agree that it bodes well for Intel that they are able to do this. However, it is a very different statement from your original:

> Consider that at 14nm+++++, Intel still manages to outpace AMD with its 7nm CPUs and latest architecture. AMD competes mainly on price, which is not a great position to be in. Intel's profit margins are massively better.

AMD is in no way "competing mainly on price". In fact, if you look at prices on the market instead of MSRP, they are generally the more expensive option right now, and are still sold out on most models almost everywhere.

Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#260

Post by Shorel »

m-p-3 wrote: post #104
ChrisIsTaken wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel has a very impressive balance sheet for a failing company, it has almost no debt and is generating double-digit billions in free cash flow from almost state of the art fabs. They are still number three on process technology, and number one on volume. The fact that Intel's management have chosen to spend two decades flushing that amazing free cashflow down the M&A toilet instead of fixing their workplace culture…

And they're still the dominant CPU vendor in most end-user corporate systems. I'm happy to see some Ryzen laptops finally coming out and breaking that dominance, but let's not kid ourselves that Intel is still in a great position, and that won't change overnight.

True. At this point both companies, Intel and AMD, are basically selling every single chip they can make.
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