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Intel is reducing server chip pricing in attempt to stem the AMD tide

tomshardware.com

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Re: Intel is reducing server chip pricing in attempt to stem the AMD tide

#61

Post by Guthur »

Lol, this stinks of PR BS.

It's Intel's vertical integration that has hamstrung its chip design for about half a decade. 10nm transition was an unmitigated disaster and because of it Intel has haemorrhaged technical dominance and has only really maintained market dominance due to entrenched and slow moving decision cycles within the data centre space and to a lesser extend the consumer market.

Intel will likely stablise over time but they won't enjoy the market dominance they had for most of the last decade.

Re: Intel is reducing server chip pricing in attempt to stem the AMD tide

#63

Post by zamadatix »

jes wrote: post #58

What’s happening with respect to any class-action lawsuits against Intel for the performance-damaging Spectre / Meltdown mitigations? I had expected these lawsuits to be significant, yet I haven’t heard much about them.

I haven't heard much about them in a long time either but even if I had I wouldn't be expecting anything significant. Meltdown affected Intel, IBM, and ARM processors while spectre affected any processor that used branch prediction up until that point. Both were patched the best they could be on all target platforms via combinations of microcode and kernel patches.

Significant class action suits tend to result from intentionally hidden and operated longstanding fraud or discrimination such as Enron or the tobacco settlements or Volkswagen. Even if Intel and every other manufacturer were found negligent for some part of spectre/meltdown it wasn't industry wide multi decade conspiracy to defraud.

Re: Intel is reducing server chip pricing in attempt to stem the AMD tide

#64

Post by dbatten »

mrjin wrote: post #41

Have been with Intel for almost two decades, I finally moved to AMD for the very first time recently and I'm glad I did. Intel is being called "Toothpaste Company" for a reason. It has deliberately slowed down its innovation since gained performance advantage over AMD with CORE, for over a decade now. Between each iteration, there was not many changes but kept adding fancy instruction sets such as AVX512 useless to m…

For those who (like me) didn't get the "toothpaste company" reference - it seems to be a reference to Intel trying to squeeze every last bit of performance out of an old architecture (as one would squeeze every bit of toothpaste out of a tube), rather than innovating with new architectures and technologies.

It's hard to figure out exactly where the toothpaste reference originated, but at least one source makes it sound like it was a mis-translation of materials published by AMD. See https://www.hardwaretimes.com/amd-takes-a-jab-at-intel-we-do...

Re: Intel is reducing server chip pricing in attempt to stem the AMD tide

#65

Post by gtirloni »

mrjin wrote: post #41

Have been with Intel for almost two decades, I finally moved to AMD for the very first time recently and I'm glad I did. Intel is being called "Toothpaste Company" for a reason. It has deliberately slowed down its innovation since gained performance advantage over AMD with CORE, for over a decade now. Between each iteration, there was not many changes but kept adding fancy instruction sets such as AVX512 useless to m…

What tangible benefits are you getting from choosing AMD now? Honest question as I'm curious if there's another benefit besides price (which Intel is fighting now).

Re: Intel is reducing server chip pricing in attempt to stem the AMD tide

#67

Post by lvl100 »

swalsh wrote: post #44
lvl100 wrote: post #25

Intel is NOT competing against AMD only. In the past couple of years, we’ve seen a number of big tech companies developing their own chips. Focusing on AMD would be quite myopic from a strategic pov. This market is only getting more competitive. Either you compete on performance or price.

After purchasing an M1, i'm starting to realize how viable ARM is as a main platform. Nearly everything I want to run on it has a natively built version, and runs great on it. I could easily move anything I've built to a server running ARM with little frustration. I think that may be a bigger part of the coming future.

Depending on the next iteration of Apple silicons, I am seriously considering a Mac Mini farm for compute heavy tasks.

Re: Intel is reducing server chip pricing in attempt to stem the AMD tide

#68

Post by uluyol »

giuliomagnifico wrote: post #21

Intel needs better (especially with less energy consumption) chips not lower price. If Intel will lower the price they will have less cash for R&D and this is the trouble for intel now: not much competitive chips. And where are again at the beginning of the circle. I hope they will make an internal review of their offices/laboratories/whatever, is not a price issue with the chips, is a performance and technical issue…

There have been big leadership shakeups at Intel over the past few months (see the CEO change). Long term, if they execute well, they should be back in a good position technically. In the meantime, their only option to offer competitive perf/$ is to lower cost.

AMD managed to recover with a much smaller budget than Intel. I don't think that lower margins for a couple of years will prevent a recovery long term.

Re: Intel is reducing server chip pricing in attempt to stem the AMD tide

#69

Post by galangalalgol »

starfallg wrote: post #56
christophilus wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did they? I thought they made a heavy bet that hasn’t paid off (and maybe never will).

You're right for the 10nm (7nm) process development. They focused on shrinking the wrong parts and ended up with an inferior product. Instead of changing direction, they doubled down.

Was this a case of a leader refusing to be wrong, or engineers thinking "we almost have this, give us another shot."

Re: Intel is reducing server chip pricing in attempt to stem the AMD tide

#70

Post by elorant »

buitreVirtual wrote: post #66
elorant wrote: post #62

I got an i3 10100f the other day for a mere €80. For a four core cpu that sounds like a steal to me. Way to go Intel.

Is that a good bang for the pound even after the price drop? (cost/performance ratio)

The processor is very efficient. Four cores at 3,6GHz, and can support up to 128GB of RAM. Even AMD can't beat that.
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