# Intel Internal Memo Reveals that even Intel is Impressed by AMD's Progress



## W1zzard (Jun 26, 2019)

Today an article was posted on Intel's internal employee-only portal called "Circuit News". The post, titled "AMD competitive profile: Where we go toe-to-toe, why they are resurgent, which chips of ours beat theirs" goes into detail about the recent history of AMD and how the company achieved its tremendous growth in recent years. Further, Intel talks about where they see the biggest challenges with AMD's new products, and what the company's "secret sauce" is to fight against these improvements.



 

The full article follows:



*Introduction*
We are now entering the latest chapter of the tech industry's single longest-running business rivalry. Intel and AMD have been competing for many of the same chip customers for more than 50 years.

Both firms were launched within just a few miles and a few months of each other in Silicon Valley in July 1968 (Intel) and May 1969 (AMD).

Although over the last five decades Intel has grown to more than 10 times the size of AMD - $70.1 billion versus $6.48 billion in the most recently reported annual revenues - the two companies are now competing fiercely across several market segments.

By most accounts, the competitive threat to Intel from AMD is the greatest it has been in years.

At the same time, CEO Bob Swan reminded employees just last week that "our ambitions are as big as they've ever been." In his June One Take video, Bob said that that our transformation to a "customer obsessed" company will serve us especially well as we "deliver the best partnerships" in the industry to confront a variety competitive threats.

This is the context in which the latest AMD vs Intel struggle is playing out.

Following AMD's recent product announcements at Computex and the E3 gaming conference, this profile - the latest in a Circuit News series on Intel's major competitors such as TSMC - examines AMD and the challenges that company is posing to some of our businesses.



 

*Why AMD is now a formidable competitor*
AMD is getting bigger. The company's most recent annual report notes that 2018 marked the firm's "second straight year of greater than 20% annual revenue growth," in large part due to its newest Ryzen products for desktop, and EPYC for enterprise, cloud, and datacenter.

As Intel's major CPU competitor focuses on Intel's enviable share across several market segments, AMD is attracting increasing interest on Wall Street. It was the best-performing stock on the S&P 500 in 2018, and to date this year the stock price has risen significantly.

What accounts for AMD's resurgence as a formidable Intel competitor? In part, it may be the company's strategic re-focus on premium high-performance products for the desktop, datacenter, and server market segments. (Dive deeper on this and related questions in the Q&A below with Intel competitive expert Steve Collins.)

*Key AMD competitive threats are from high-end products*
At a high level, the experts on Intel's Performance, Power and Competitive Analysis team say that the competitive threats that AMD poses to Intel can be summarized as follows:


AMD offers high performance CPUs, posing direct competition to Intel in both our core client and datacenter CPU businesses. With our announced ambitions to bring new discrete graphics to market, we are bringing new competition to both AMD's and NVIDIA's graphics businesses.
AMD has recently been gaining some traction in winning public cloud offerings. And competition from AMD is shaping up to be especially tough in high performance computing. HPC performance is usually driven by the number of cores and the number of memory channels (or memory bandwidth). Intel is challenged on both fronts.
AMD's upcoming next-generation Zen-core products, codenamed Rome for servers and Matisse for desktop, will intensify our desktop and especially server competition. The latter is likely to be the most intense in about a decade. At Computex, AMD announced that Matisse, the company's 3rd Gen Ryzen 3000 series processors, would be available starting July 7. (See "Related links" section below for details on Intel's Computex news relating to our gaming and client competitiveness.)
Outside of desktop and servers, Intel's competitive position in notebooks and business PCs is stronger as customers value specific aspects such as productivity performance, battery life, and overall manageability where Intel has clear advantages versus the competition.
By leveraging TSMC's 7nm manufacturing - AMD no longer manufactures its own chips - AMD can drive higher core counts and higher performance than it could previously with Global Foundries as its in-house manufacturer. These 7nm products will amplify the near-term competitive challenge from AMD. At Computex, Intel launched our own 10nm "Ice Lake" products - 10th Gen Intel Core - to strongly positive reviews.

*Challenging period ahead*
What is Intel's positioning regarding these multiple competitive threats? Today and into the near future, says Intel's AMD competitive expert Steve Collins, "we will be facing tough competitive challenges."

These are a few key points on how Intel's products compare to AMD's, points that Intel will be underscoring in the challenging period ahead.


Intel 9th Gen Core processors are likely to lead AMD's Ryzen-based products on lightly threaded productivity benchmarks as well as many gaming benchmarks. For multi-threaded workloads, such as heavy content creation workloads, AMD's Matisse is expected to lead.
In the longstanding industry debate over benchmarks - whose to use? - Cinebench is often used by AMD, since it favors high core/thread count and represents one of the best-case benchmarks for AMD. Intel believes that Cinebench is not a representative benchmark for general platform evaluations and real life workloads. Intel continues to work with press on using real applications for evaluating performance, to produce pieces such as this one from PCPerspective.
In general, Intel's mainstream Xeon server products will be challenged on throughput-oriented benchmarks that scale well with core count. Architecturally, AMD's Rome product for servers is improved over 1st generation EPYC, but Xeon is still expected to have cache and memory latency advantages. For this reason, Intel still expects Xeon to be competitive on applications that require fast response times and are sensitive to memory latencies like database, analytics, web serving, and so on.

*Intel's secret sauce*
Intel's secret sauce is not a single ingredient. Rather, it is the six pillars of innovation - process, architecture, memory, interconnect, security, and software - that the company laid out at last year's Intel Architecture Day. Intel is uniquely positioned, given our assets, to to deliver leadership products leveraging these six pillars.

Our competitive experts believe that Intel's ambition to achieve long-term leadership will hinge on successful execution to these six pillars.

Software, one of the six pillars, has long been an unheralded Intel advantage. A key piece of our company's competitive strategy is to highlight our software smarts vis-à-vis AMD. Intel-designed software or software code contributions - which can touch everything from the Linux kernel to Adobe Lightroom - can capitalize on unique features in Intel architecture.

These often under-the-hood software assets differentiate Intel from AMD and can deliver a better experience to end users and customers. One metric of Intel's software strength: Our company's 15,000 software developers. That number is more than all of AMD's employees.

A final but essential point that Intel's competitive team underscores is that Intel versus AMD is not just a chip-to-chip matchup. Intel's unique strengths lie in the unequalled breadth of our overall portfolio across business, mobile, desktop, gaming-as well as platform advantages including Optane memory, WiFi, Thunderbolt, Turbo Boost 2.0, and other technologies.

A high-profile example of Intel's focus on platforms is Project Athena, a multi-year innovation program that aims to deliver a new class of advanced laptops. Another key Intel advantage is all the built-in acceleration for emerging workloads such as networking and AI. Features like Intel Deep Learning Boost, along with all the software and framework optimizations, create clear differentiation versus AMD.

*Steve Collins Q&A: Why AMD is resurgent, and what we must do next*
To provide additional color and context on the Intel-AMD competitive environment, we talked recently with Steven Collins. He is the Director of the Data-centric Competitive Assessment group on our company's Performance, Power and Competitive Analysis team.

*Q. Why does it matter that AMD is going to TSMC for manufacturing?*

It means that they have the flexibility to use whatever process technology they want, whatever process is best for their products. TSMC offers an advantage in terms of process node advancements. [See the Circuit News competitive profile on TSMC.] They're using their 7 nm process, and with that they get a per-core frequency bump and lower power, which means they can scale to more cores per processor.
On top of that, AMD made improvements in their 2nd generation Zen core and their disaggregated chiplet-based architecture scales cores efficiently. Therefore, on workloads that are heavily threaded, including heavy content creation and most server workloads, they'll get great performance results. And on price, we expect their pricing to be significantly below ours. So they'll likely get good performance-per-dollar. That's what they're going to compete on, and that's the risk to Intel.

*Q. So that raises the obvious point: How do we respond when people say "Wow, AMD is charging a lot less for their products than Intel."*

It's not well understood that Intel actually offers the market a larger selection of product pricing. While the press often likes to focus on Intel's top price points being higher than AMD's top price, few people recognize that Intel also offers lower entry pricing than AMD. So Intel offers more price point choices to our customers.
Additionally, I would say users don't buy a chip. They buy a system. They buy a whole solution that includes software enabling, vendor enabling, validation, technical support, manageability, out-of-box experience, supplier sustained consistency, and more. So, yes, while an OEM or ODM might buy a chip, the end user doesn't generally buy only a chip. We believe that our product pricing vis-à-vis AMD reflects the great deal of added value that specifically comes from buying Intel with our decades of unmatched investments in validation, software, and security.
Especially for enterprise customers, acquisition cost is just one part of the total cost of ownership. Customers using an alternative solution may need additional validation, optimization, debugging, and certifications - all normal cost adders when introducing a new solution in an IT environment. Additionally, some software is licensed per core and therefore more cores from the AMD solution results in higher licensing costs.
Performance challenges absolutely exist, but we will continue to position our value and our advantages. Some innovations we bring to the table that deliver customer value may not always result in higher performance benchmark scores, or the value of the innovation goes beyond standard benchmark results. We price to what our customers value.
Intel is a premium brand. At times, and on some workloads, we might dip below on performance, like the second half of this year. At other times, and on other workloads, we are 3x or more the performance. Our pricing will continue to reflect the value we deliver to our customers.

*Q. What accounts for AMD's competitive resurgence? Did TSMC turn AMD into our biggest competitor, or is it AMD's focus on higher-end desktop and server parts?*

From 2006 to 2017, AMD had positive net income only three of the twelve years. I'm not sure we can point to a single thing that turned AMD around. But I do think it's was absolutely rooted in the strategic changes AMD initiated in 2015/2016 that narrowed and simplified their focus. AMD shifted to focus on higher margin or premium segments, specifically high-end client, datacenter, graphics for gaming. And they continued their investment in their semi-custom and console business.
Rather than going after lower-margin, low-end products, they refocused on how to win higher-margin business. AMD added much-needed clarity since they were previously distracted by markets that didn't align with their strengths. They simplified their investments and roadmap and started leveraging best-in-class foundries. Most importantly, they executed to that strategy. Having a clear focus and direction helps enable great execution.
I also believe AMD's comeback was a result of being very product-centric. A top priority for AMD was building great products - high-performance compute and graphics solutions - from definition to development to delivery.

*Q. How do you think we should be looking overall at the Intel-AMD competitive picture right now?*

Well, first, it's clearly a challenging time. We have significant competitive challenges to navigate. That said, I think we have a great strategy and a great roadmap.
While it has been a number of years since we've faced a similar competitive environment (in the early 2000s with 1 GHz barrier, integrated memory controller, 64-bit, and so on) Intel has risen to every situation and almost always emerged better and stronger.
Our focus needs to be on getting our execution in shape as soon as possible. We're in a competitive time partly because of our execution issues, whether that's related to our process technology node, or to our products that intercept those nodes. So I think that execution to our roadmap and strategy will help tremendously.
Beyond product execution, we need to lean on our software expertise and strength and amplify our software differentiation - now more than ever.
Finally, in competitive times, overall marketing, ensuring our customers understand our differentiated value proposition, along with customer obsession, are critical. Now more than ever, we need to lean into our sales and marketing teams to help carry us through these product challenges.

*Q. And your last point touches on our cultural transformation, too.*

Yes. AMD's next gen 7nm-based products amplify our competitive challenges. While it has been a number of years since we've faced similar competition, Intel has risen to every situation and almost always emerged better and stronger. Are we acting as One Intel or are we stepping on each other's toes? Are we facing our challenges with truth and transparency?
Are we listening to our customers and designing the right things in the first place? I think it all goes back to these things. As we succeed at these cultural transformations, I believe our overall competitiveness will improve too.
I'd encourage all employees to browse the Intel resources at the bottom of this story, especially competition.intel.com. This is where, for example, we will publish data on AMD's upcoming Zen 2-based systems.
Finally, I would say that even in the face of strong competitive challenges, when all 107,000 of us behave as One Intel, as CEO Bob Swan has said, we are unstoppable.

*View at TechPowerUp Main Site*


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## Mamya3084 (Jun 26, 2019)

Is this the memo the sales team need to imprint in there brain when they start hitting the data centers and oems to sign new sales contracts?

It's pretty good wording.  If I worked there I wouldn't be worried about AMD at all.


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## birdie (Jun 26, 2019)

What a long post to say, "We've completely fücked up the transition to 10nm, it is backfiring in a major way and we don't know how to compete with vastly superior AMD offerings but we believe our old partners will still keep on choosing our solutions because we deem ourselves "premium" and in some rare workflows we are faster".

WTF, Intel? You've had five fücking years to hone the 10nm node. You very well understood all the way that it didn't work. Why didn't you renege on it and try something completely different? Why do TSMC and Samsung seemingly have no issues with their comparable 7nm nodes (considering the volume of 7nm products including Vega VII and Ryzen 3)? You had all the money in the world to develop and offer the 10nm node years before TSMC/Samsung. And you still haven't caught up.


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## Fabel (Jun 26, 2019)

This totally wan't intended to be leaked from the let go of course, but what is it, the script for an infomercial?

While giving some credit to AMD, and I think some unnamed recognition to Lisa Su, they are totally disconnected from reality if they really think this thing paints their new reality.


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## HwGeek (Jun 26, 2019)

IMO AMD couldn't even dream on such great circumstances when they were working on Zen2, They thought they will compete with 10nm parts with better IPC as Intel's showed so they thought it will be the same situation like first Gen EPYC 32C vs Xeon 8180 and Ryzen 2700X VS 9900K, but now they see that there is no competition from Intel since it's 10nm parts are delayed again and show less frequency.

So looks like Intel themselves made Zen2.0 such a winner product.
And you you consider the number of employs Intel has over AMD- it's just makes Intel look even worse.


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## 64K (Jun 26, 2019)

The only way that I can figure Intel is that they got complacent being on top for so long. Tech progression stagnated and they were for a long while selling 4 core 8 thread CPUs for what they should have been selling 6 core 12 thread CPUs for. It's the same lesson over and over again. When there is a lack of competition then the company on top charges more for less value and tech stagnates.


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## dorsetknob (Jun 26, 2019)

Between the lines reading 
" Short Term Buy AMD Shares.
long term Buy more AMD Shares"


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## Crackong (Jun 26, 2019)

That's is some really tidy "Shouldn't be leaked Internal Memo"


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## oxidized (Jun 26, 2019)

birdie said:


> What a long post to say, "We've completely fücked up the transition to 10nm, it is backfiring in a major way and we don't know how to compete with vastly superior AMD offerings but we believe our old partners will still keep on choosing our solutions because we deem ourselves "premium" and in some rare workflows we are faster".
> 
> WTF, Intel? You've had five fücking years to hone the 10nm node. You very well understood all the way that it didn't work. Why didn't you renege on it and try something completely different? Why do TSMC and Samsung seemingly have no issues with their comparable 7nm nodes (considering the volume of 7nm products including Vega VII and Ryzen 3)? You had all the money in the world to develop and offer the 10nm node years before TSMC/Samsung. And you still haven't caught up.



_Vastly superior

_


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## TheLostSwede (Jun 26, 2019)

birdie said:


> What a long post to say, "We've completely fücked up the transition to 10nm, it is backfiring in a major way and we don't know how to compete with vastly superior AMD offerings but we believe our old partners will still keep on choosing our solutions because we deem ourselves "premium" and in some rare workflows we are faster".
> 
> WTF, Intel? You've had five fücking years to hone the 10nm node. You very well understood all the way that it didn't work. Why didn't you renege on it and try something completely different? Why do TSMC and Samsung seemingly have no issues with their comparable 7nm nodes (considering the volume of 7nm products including Vega VII and Ryzen 3)? You had all the money in the world to develop and offer the 10nm node years before TSMC/Samsung. And you still haven't caught up.



That's now how you conjugate it, it's https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/german-english/ficken



64K said:


> The only way that I can figure Intel is that they got complacent being on top for so long. Tech progression stagnated and they were for a long while selling 4 core 8 thread CPUs for what they should have been selling 6 core 12 thread CPUs for. It's the same lesson over and over again. When there is a lack of competition then the company on top charges more for less value and tech stagnates.



Well, yes and no. They didn't become complacent in that sense, but rather, they believed they were so far ahead, so even though their first 10nm process was a mess, they thought they would have time to fix it, but alas... Hence why they started a second 10nm process, as we know. On top of that, they decided to focus on a million other things, like FPGAs, AI co-processors, GPUs, wireless data modems (3G/4G, but clearly 5G was another mess), IoT (another huge failure), mobile phone SoCs (failure), photonics and what not. This means that they somewhat lost focus on the CPU business, as it was only part of what Intel made. Then they got a huge order for 4G models (and an expected order for 5G modems) from Apple, due to them falling out with Qualcomm and this ate up a lot of their production capacity. In other words, it's not so much being complacent, as having too many different businesses that don't quite fit and which used up a lot of resources. If you take a good look, it's not hard to see why Intel are in their current position. Yes, some of their "new" businesses have helped them make more money, but at the same time, they've lost focus on the good old x86 CPU.


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## voltage (Jun 26, 2019)

maybe providing amd IP to Intels X86 many years ago wasn't such a smart long term move after all?


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## XiGMAKiD (Jun 26, 2019)

birdie said:


> What a long post to say, "We've completely fücked up the transition to 10nm...


This


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## kings (Jun 26, 2019)

HwGeek said:


> IMO AMD couldn't even dream on such great circumstances when they were working on Zen2, They thought they will compete with 10nm parts with better IPC as Intel's showed so they thought it will be the same situation like first Gen EPYC 32C vs Xeon 8180 and Ryzen 2700X VS 9900K, but now they see that there is no competition from Intel since it's 10nm parts are delayed again and show less frequency.
> 
> So looks like Intel themselves made Zen2.0 such a winner product.
> And you you consider the number of employs Intel has over AMD- it's just makes Intel look even worse.



Intel will compete just fine, they have CPUs to cover all the market. Sure, AMD will have more cores in the high-end, but this does not always translate into higher performance for some tasks and the majority of consumers don´t buy CPUs with more than 6/8 cores.

To say that AMD has no competition from Intel, it's like saying that Nvidia has no competition from AMD, which is wrong. They just don´t have the supremacy like the past 10 years or pré-Ryzen era!

But overall, this is going to be good to help AMD distance itself from the impression many people have that they are "a second tier brand".


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## HwGeek (Jun 26, 2019)

"AMD has no competition from Intel " in terms of the planned competitive products at 10nm from Intel, current 14nm+++++ wasn't ment to compete with new 7nm Zen2.0/3.0 at 2020.
They can compete yes, but that wasn't the plan.


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## TheLostSwede (Jun 26, 2019)

All the replies makes it very clear that Intel loves acronyms...


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## wizyy (Jun 26, 2019)

I don't know.. all this looks fishy to me.
Like one person typed it all, including employee responses.


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## dj-electric (Jun 26, 2019)

TheLostSwede said:


> All the replies makes it very clear that Intel loves acronyms...


ikr? nvm,  CPU's fubar atm. tyvm AMD


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## oxidized (Jun 26, 2019)

Employees responses do in fact look very stupid and weird, not really sure whether to trust this or not.


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## Fabel (Jun 26, 2019)

No longer leading in process.
An architecture stagnant and not very efficient.
Not leading in innovation (chiplets, IO die...).
Lower core/Thread count.
Losing the advantage they had in IPC.
Higher price per core.

They just keep the MHz crown... by now.

AMD was barely able to compete with Intel, and suddenly is Intel who can't compete with AMD the way they used and liked to. 

While in datacenter added value services are important in desktop it is mostly about the the performance/$ and how your products are perceived for gaming. 
The mindset that allowed them to charge more for the same just because Intel has been almost completely eroded in a couple years.

Some kids didn't even know there was a second CPU manufacturer, those same kids now are looking for Zen2.


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## Deathy (Jun 26, 2019)

voltage said:


> maybe providing amd IP to Intels X86 many years ago wasn't such a smart long term move after all?


When I read posts like this I sometimes wonder if English being my second language is the cause of me not understanding them or if the poster is just talking gibberish.


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## TheLostSwede (Jun 26, 2019)

Deathy said:


> When I read posts like this I sometimes wonder if English being my second language is the cause of me not understanding them or if the poster is just talking gibberish.



I think what he's on about was when things went 64-bit, or something...
AMD cross licensed AMD64 with Intel, so they could go on making x86 compatible CPUs.


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## dj-electric (Jun 26, 2019)

I'm going to be the devil's advocate here. This is regarding ICL mobile for now.
Most of these? Positive indeed for the desktop market. That said, for mobile starting very soon:



Fabel said:


> No longer leading in process.


Their new 10nm lithography is actually quite nice.



Fabel said:


> An architecture stagnant and not very efficient.


ICL is incredibly efficient.



Fabel said:


> Not leading in innovation (chiplets, IO die...).


Built-in Thunderbolt 3 controller, large cache, iGPU that competes with Ryzen 3700U's one, on-MCM PCH controller with FIVR fed power.



Fabel said:


> Lower core/Thread count.


Similar here on 25W



Fabel said:


> Losing the advantage they had in IPC.


They did no quite lose it yet with ICL

Again, on desktop and server - mostly agree with what you said. This is something they are going to have to take their sweet time on for many months on now to make a comeback


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## TheEmptyCrazyHead (Jun 26, 2019)

> We believe that our product pricing vis-à-vis AMD reflects the great deal of added value that specifically comes from buying Intel with our decades of unmatched investments in validation, software, and *security*.


I really like the security part.


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## XiGMAKiD (Jun 26, 2019)

Deathy said:


> When I read posts like this I sometimes wonder if English being my second language is the cause of me not understanding them or if the poster is just talking gibberish.


I think it's about Intel licensing x86 to AMD


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## TheoneandonlyMrK (Jun 26, 2019)

At least it's clear all at Intel Are aware of their challenges eh.


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## Tassadar_ (Jun 26, 2019)

Additionally, I would say users don't buy a chip. They buy a system. They buy a whole solution that includes software enabling, vendor enabling, validation, technical support, manageability, out-of-box experience, supplier sustained consistency, and more. So, yes, while an OEM or ODM might buy a chip, the end user doesn't generally buy only a chip. We believe that our product pricing vis-à-vis AMD reflects the great deal of added value that specifically comes from* buying Intel with our decades of unmatched investments in validation, software, and security*



Spoiler


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## Fabel (Jun 26, 2019)

dj-electric said:


> I'm going to be the devil's advocate here. This is regarding ICL mobile for now.
> Most of these? Positive indeed for the desktop market. That said, for mobile starting very soon:
> 
> 
> ...


Their 10nm is almost non existent by now, and way inferior to their arguably awesome 14++, I will be pretty surprised if in its current incarnation it is able to match clocks, so yeah pretty well suited for mobile, where they are still leading. And of course at low clocks it is easy to stay efficient.

But Innovation? TB?! Really? oh please they failed miserably on TB and had to open source  to salvage it in USB4, and playing catch up in the iGPU isn't innovating either.. 

Yeah they are pushing partners to try to keep AMD out of the mobile segment, but not by the means of innovation. Intel Athena blah blah blah

IMHO no real innovation.

Funny enough AMD powered notebooks are better balanced in terms of CPU/GPU power at least for gaming workloads. All those i7 with low end discrete GPUs are pretty ridiculous, when an i5 with a better discrete  GPU can do the job... and then game. But of course that does not benefit their bottom line.


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## Deleted member 158293 (Jun 26, 2019)

Memo to refocus their employees and talk to the press at the same time I guess.  Kinda reads like Intel acknowledges they were out engineered. 

Also...  Funny having the pcperspective website called out by name...  wonder why?


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## PanicLake (Jun 26, 2019)

Deathy said:


> When I read posts like this I sometimes wonder if English being my second language is the cause of me not understanding them or if the poster is just talking gibberish.


The first one... English isn't my first language too, but I understood what he meant.


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## Digital Dreams (Jun 26, 2019)

Mamya3084 said:


> It's pretty good wording.  If I worked there I wouldn't be worried about AMD at all.


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## bug (Jun 26, 2019)

If you remove all the BS in there, all that's left is: go Zen2, there's no point in waiting for Ice Lake. That's sad, Intel. That's sad.


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## Steevo (Jun 26, 2019)

They should check the security pillar. I think it's made of jello.


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## human_error (Jun 26, 2019)

Fabel said:


> This totally wan't intended to be leaked from the let go of course, but what is it, the script for an infomercial?
> 
> While giving some credit to AMD, and I think some unnamed recognition to Lisa Su, they are totally disconnected from reality if they really think this thing paints their new reality.



To be fair it reads like the internal posts we see where I work (another very large global tech company) - lots of marketing speak as sales tend to read these and paraphrase the responses to customers where needed. The materials here will be re-used in competitive playbooks for sales as well. It's also necessary to acknowledge the threat so that employees know that the business is aware of the problem and looking at how to fight back. The employee responses I usually see internally are either people looking to suck up to whichever exec had their name on the post (which will have been ghost written), or disgruntled employees looking for somewhere to vent.

Intel know they're weak in the CPUs themselves so need to make sure that everyone knows the other value props they go to customers with (valid or not). If they didn't communicate these messages internally then they may as well give up as these messages will be repeated internally to people who don't bother reading these blogs, some of whom will be customer facing to some extent.


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## DeathtoGnomes (Jun 26, 2019)

dorsetknob said:


> Between the lines reading
> " Short Term Buy AMD Shares.
> long term Buy more AMD Shares"




Thats a "secure" bet!


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## EarthDog (Jun 26, 2019)

Steevo said:


> They should check the security pillar. I think it's made of jello.


There are pills for that.


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## dont whant to set it"' (Jun 26, 2019)

This made my day and the comment section ^3, all in good spirit.


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## trparky (Jun 26, 2019)

TheLostSwede said:


> They didn't become complacent in that sense, but rather, they believed they were so far ahead


This is what happens when a company drinks so much of their own Kool-Aid that they get drunk on it, they lose focus and direction and most importantly they lose sight of what the market and their customers want.


Fabel said:


> Their 10nm is almost non existent by now, and way inferior to their arguably awesome 14++


Except for the fact that their 14nm+++ (++++++++++++) runs as hot as the surface of the sun when you pack more cores onboard.

Sure, when you're dealing with only four cores it's not so bad but once you ramp up to six and eight cores the thermals quickly get out of hand. Look at the 8700K, it runs as hot as a mofo (partly due to the paste TIM that they use) but even the 9900K run hot too when being put under load. This isn't exactly spelling out a win here for Intel, they desperately need 10nm and their load temperatures show it. Too bad they failed pretty damn hard when it comes to 10nm, they should have been able to do it. Like @birdie said, they have all the money in the world and some of the best engineers in the world; how the fuck did they fail so hard at this?


Fabel said:


> Funny enough AMD powered notebooks are better balanced in terms of CPU/GPU power at least for gaming workloads. All those i7 with low end discrete GPUs are pretty ridiculous, when an i5 with a better discrete GPU can do the job... and then game. But of course that does not benefit their bottom line.


Linus talked about this, I'd have to find the YouTube video though.


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## zlobby (Jun 26, 2019)

They lost me on their 5th pillar - 'security'. ROFL

Not that their process is any better either...


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## Slizzo (Jun 26, 2019)

Did you guys see this part?



> Brian said:
> 
> 
> I'm on P2CA team supporting our DCG business. I can't speak knowledgeably about our perception in the client enthusiast world. In the data center we're perceived positively as taking security seriously. Second Generation Xeon Scalable processors include hardware fixes for existing side-channel vulnerabilities. And based on my experience working on the L1TF response, we have a world class team in IPAS [editor: Intel Product Assurance and Security] that proactively works with customers ahead of citing disclosures to ensure they understand the situation and have a viable mitigation strategy.



Brian appears to have is head so far up his own ass he can't see the forest for the trees.

The fact that in the data center the customers are evaluating and buying AMD instead after being Intel shops for so long speaks to them not being confident in Intel's security and performance per dollar.


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## HD64G (Jun 26, 2019)

This memo proves something that most of us didn't suspect: The Intel fanboys are worse than Intel empoyees in their blindness for the reality CPU market is facing. So, the next reply to any Intel fanboy should be: "You are worse than an Intel employee and although they have a serious reason to protect their company they see clearer than you"


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## Tassadar_ (Jun 26, 2019)

zlobby said:


> They lost me on their 5th pillar - 'security'. ROFL
> 
> Not that their process is any better either...



You didn't understood. As I posted before, Intel has a great sense of humour and this...

*buying Intel with our decades of unmatched investments in validation, software, and security. *

this is an hilarious comment that proves that Intel can laught about himself.

*decades of unmatched investments *---> A decade selling the same quad cores spending near to zero on research and development, only reducing manufacturing process to reduce manufacturing cost and increase profit. Of course, changing the motherboard compatibility every year of two maximum (a great way to demonstrate that they're a company "focused on the customer satisfaction"*).

software* --> Do you know what "great software" are they talking about? (I don't) Does this software make their plattform better than the AMD?

*security: *you see? they're clearly joking.

Regards


----------



## bug (Jun 26, 2019)

HD64G said:


> This memo proves something that most of us didn't suspect: The Intel fanboys are worse than Intel empoyees in their blindness for the reality CPU market is facing. So, the next reply to any Intel fanboy should be: "You are worse than an Intel employee and although they have a serious reason to protect their company they see clearer than you"


You think you can rank fanboys and conclude Intel's are worse/better than AMD's, Nvidia's, Apple's or whoever's?


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## laszlo (Jun 26, 2019)

seems intel employees build for themselves amd pc's lol


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## bug (Jun 26, 2019)

laszlo said:


> seems intel employees build for themselves amd pc's lol


It's been like this back in Netburst's days. It took Intel a few years to ready their answer. In the meantime, AMD was able to move Athlon -> AthlonXP -> Athlon64 -> Athlon 64 X2/X4. And Intel didn't have any fab woes during that time, so you do the math.


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## john_ (Jun 26, 2019)

> Additionally, some software is licensed per core and therefore more cores from the AMD solution results in higher licensing costs.



Wow! Really? Is this a real argument? 
Single core CPUs for servers NOW, to lower licensing costs!


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## EarthDog (Jun 26, 2019)

john_ said:


> Wow! Really? Is this a real argument?
> Single core CPUs for servers NOW, to lower licensing costs!


Yes. It is and can be a good one depending on use cases. It can EASILY blow the monetary savings of the cpu (core vs core and thread vs thread) right out the door. Over buying on cores and threads in a DC environment can be quite detrimental to the bottom line on many fronts.


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## trparky (Jun 26, 2019)

The easy way of getting around that is to limit the visible cores inside the virtual machine where the licensing cost limited software is running. 


EarthDog said:


> Over buying on cores and threads in a DC environment can be quite detrimental to the bottom line on many fronts.


I don't see it that way, I see it as a way to pack more computing power into less space and remember, space (specifically, rack space) is limited in a data center. More cores and more threads means you can run more virtual machines while consuming less rack space.


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## Zareek (Jun 26, 2019)

If this is real, this is really good for Zen 2. Intel is internally preparing to stop the bleeding before the bleeding has even started. Like I said with the price cut rumors, this is so good for us the buying public. We can expect at least a few years of innovation and competition! I still find it disturbing that Intel needs AMD to push them along.


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## EarthDog (Jun 26, 2019)

trparky said:


> I don't see it that way, I see it as a way to pack more computing power into less space and remember, space (specifically, rack space) is limited in a data center. More cores and more threads means you can run more virtual machines while consuming less rack space.


To those not in the data center/capacity planning/licensing side of things, we can see how one can jump to your conclusion.


----------



## trparky (Jun 26, 2019)

Zareek said:


> this is so good for us the buying public


Now if only they can get their thermals under control because many of Intel's enthusiast chips run very damn hot. This is where 10nm is desperately needed.


Zareek said:


> I still find it disturbing that Intel needs AMD to push them along.


This has always been the case with companies that have sat on the golden throne for too long, they get drunk on their own Kool-Aid. It's happened across dozens of industries, not just the computing industry.



EarthDog said:


> To those not in the data center/capacity planning/licensing side of things, we can see how one can jump to your conclusion.


Again, as I said previously, you can limit the number of cores that the software sees inside the virtual machine. For instance, if you only have an MSSQL server license for six cores then limit the virtual machine to six cores and be done. There are ways around software licensing issues while thinking intelligently about how to pack as much computing power as possible in as little space as necessary. More servers equal more required physical space, power usage, cooling, and other added costs. If you can reduce that you can spend the saved money on other parts of your business.


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## HD64G (Jun 26, 2019)

bug said:


> You think you can rank fanboys and conclude Intel's are worse/better than AMD's, Nvidia's, Apple's or whoever's?


Thing is that even the employees are much fairer in their judgements, a thing that we haven't seen even in PC industry. And I think that is worth noted. Aren't you impressed at all I suppose?


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## EarthDog (Jun 26, 2019)

trparky said:


> Again, as I said previously, you can limit the number of cores that the software sees inside the virtual machine. For instance, if you only have an MSSQL server license for six cores then limit the virtual machine to six cores and be done. There are ways around software licensing issues while thinking intelligently about how to pack as much computing power as possible in as little space as necessary. More servers equal more required physical space, power usage, cooling, and other added costs. If you can reduce that you can spend the saved money on other parts of your business.


If I say the earth is flat twice, it doesnt make it a correct statement. 

It depends on the licensing of the software and how it works. I get what you are saying and in some cases that is generally correct, but it isn't as black and white as it seems. 

In a DC environment (ive worked for major phrama, a huge water utility in DC area, and AWS) the only 'way around software licensing'is doing things the right and legal way (smaller companies can be dubious). I'm not saying your example isn't legal, note, just generically speaking.

But it isnt as easy as stuffing high density units in racks and spinning them up for success.


----------



## dont whant to set it"' (Jun 26, 2019)

> spending near to zero on research and development, only reducing manufacturing process to reduce manufacturing cost and increase profit




makes lots esnce,yet delivered much? well dfferent approaches, monotitihc desight encompassing much of not all, vs modular, scalble design.
le: performance for and or per user/ vs mass amounts of calculus capabilityes per chip ie Intel /AMD, I 've done the same thing since I have found  that a Cpu Core is way smaaler that the chip within It resides soI went scalar, I/o' ing to another chip jst for compute sake, tought experiment decade ago at least.


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## trparky (Jun 26, 2019)

EarthDog said:


> It depends on the licensing of the software and how it works.


This I understand, it depends upon how restrictive the licensing is. If you run open source software you tend to not run into these pesky licensing issues.


----------



## hat (Jun 26, 2019)

trparky said:


> Now if only they can get their thermals under control because many of Intel's enthusiast chips run very damn hot. This is where 10nm is desperately needed.



A die shrink alone isn't going to be enough. You can't just, for example, produce a 9900k on 10nm and get lower temps. We're packing billions of transistors into a very small space with processes like 14nm and smaller. Ideally, along with that node shrink you should also have a more efficient architecture which can do more work with less clock cycles. Think of the jump between Netburst P4 chips and the Core 2 Duo chips that followed. You had a hot, inefficient chip that ran at a high clock speed followed by a cooler, much more efficient chip that outperformed the previous lineup with around half the clock speed, depending on which two chips in particular you're comparing.

Zen is efficient because it runs at a low clock speed, produced by a low power process not intended for high performance PC parts. It's a pretty good architecture, so it's competitive, but the high end Intel chips, like the 9900k, still outperform it... but it does so while running hotter and gulping more power. Intel is simply at the end of the line of what they can do with the *lake architecture. They need another Core 2 Duo. They need a chip that, at 3GHz or so, can perform competitively with the 9900k, with room to clock higher.


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## trparky (Jun 26, 2019)

hat said:


> You can't just, for example, produce a 9900k on 10nm and get lower temps.


I'm not expecting a massive reduction in thermal output, even five to ten degrees lower while running at the same clock gives you a little more breathing room when it comes to cooling the chip down.


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## kings (Jun 26, 2019)

HD64G said:


> This memo proves something that most of us didn't suspect: The Intel fanboys are worse than Intel empoyees in their blindness for the reality CPU market is facing. So, the next reply to any Intel fanboy should be: "You are worse than an Intel employee and although they have a serious reason to protect their company they see clearer than you"



Fanboys are in the forums shouting at each other... for the people who work in these big companies, it's just a job.

In some companies, employees are even encouraged to use some products from the competition, to have a sense of how they work and to have more critical thinking.


----------



## Shatun_Bear (Jun 26, 2019)

Intel are scrambling. Worse position they've been in since Athlon 64, maybe even worse as this time they're helmed by a band-aid choice of a CEO, Bob Swan. A man that has no understanding of the main products Intel develops vs a MIT powerhouse who studied electrical engineering for her PhD.


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## Jism (Jun 26, 2019)

Shatun_Bear said:


> Intel are scrambling. Worse position they've been in since Athlon 64, maybe even worse as this time they're helmed by a band-aid choice of a CEO, Bob Swan. A man that has no understanding of the main products Intel develops vs a MIT powerhouse who studied electrical engineering for her PhD.



And that swordblade type of competition mentaliy is exactly what consumers and enterprises, need.

That Ryzen 3 is going to kick ass. It's confirmed already. The initial zen base paves the frigging future for AMD, led by Jim Keller, lol.


----------



## Manu_PT (Jun 26, 2019)

Shatun_Bear said:


> Intel are scrambling. Worse position they've been in since Athlon 64, maybe even worse as this time they're helmed by a band-aid choice of a CEO, Bob Swan. A man that has no understanding of the main products Intel develops vs a MIT powerhouse who studied electrical engineering for her PhD.



Not worse than Athlon 64 days, because by that time there was literally no reason to buy Intel, they were done. And right now as you can read from their own employees that reckon AMD is more competitive, Intel still has the big sharks for high-end/enthusiasts 9700k and 9900k, wich still dominate on high refresh gaming. Once AMD can beat them, then Intel is done.


----------



## Fabel (Jun 26, 2019)

Jism said:


> And that swordblade type of competition mentaliy is exactly what consumers and enterprises, need.
> 
> That Ryzen 3 is going to kick ass. It's confirmed already. The initial zen base paves the frigging future for AMD, led by Jim Keller, lol.


And now Jim Keller is at Intel...


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## Fatyen (Jun 26, 2019)

What a bunch of non sense in that article, Intel superior security, more core server CPUs carry more costs (inter alias). The way I see Intel's superiority is by milking the hard earned cash if their customers for unrespectable improvements. 
Thanks to Hector Ruiz, AMD went fabless (post ATI acquisition). They were still struggling to churn out competitive products at that time. However, with the hiring of Lisa Su and Jim Keller, the whole team got a new direction and concentrated all their focus on their strengths, one step at a time (introducing Llano etc..). What we see today is a complete different AMD, with product offerrings giving sleepless nights to Intel and joy to customers and clients. This is only the start of AMD, Intel will have even more migraine from them and the market will continue to increasingly benefit. Zen 2 is not even released and such disruption in performance, efficiency and price have been attained. That architecture is so radical that Zen 3 will annihilate Intel like never before. When, Zen 2 and APU based Zen 2 will be released, there will be further waves of greatness.


----------



## Shatun_Bear (Jun 26, 2019)

Manu_PT said:


> Not worse than Athlon 64 days, because by that time there was literally no reason to buy Intel, they were done. And right now as you can read from their own employees that reckon AMD is more competitive, *Intel still has the big sharks for high-end/enthusiasts 9700k and 9900k, wich still dominate on high refresh gaming.* Once AMD can beat them, then Intel is done.



That's one hell of a niche. Either way, the 12-core 3900X or 16-core 3950X are coming. Judging by the leaked review, AMD now has a sizeable IPC advantage as well as core count advantage, Intel's only hope is the frequency on that 9900K pushed way past it's optimum resulting in a hot and inefficient mess.


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## trparky (Jun 26, 2019)

Manu_PT said:


> Intel still has the big sharks for high-end/enthusiasts 9700k and 9900k, wich still dominate on high refresh gaming.


High refresh gaming may be the cool thing to have around these parts and other enthusiast circles but if you ask most casual gamers high refresh gaming is classified as one of those "nice things to have" but certainly not something that's worth breaking the bank to get it. For those "casual gamers" AMD is certainly well past the point of being good enough, and that scares Intel for the market for high refresh gaming isn't exactly big.


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## Fatyen (Jun 26, 2019)

What a bunch of non sense in that article, Intel superior security, more core server CPUs carry more costs (inter alias). The way I see Intel's superiority is by milking the hard earned cash if their customers for unrespectable improvements. 
Thanks to Hector Ruiz, AMD went fabless (post ATI acquisition). They were still struggling to churn out competitive products at that time. However, with the hiring of Lisa Su and Jim Keller, the whole team got a new direction and concentrated all their focus on their strengths, one step at a time (introducing Llano etc..). What we see today is a complete different AMD, with product offerrings giving sleepless nights to Intel and joy to customers and clients. This is only the start of AMD, Intel will have even more migraine from them and the market will continue to increasingly benefit. Zen 2 is not even released and such disruption in performance, efficiency and price have been attained. That architecture is so radical that Zen 3 will annihilate Intel like never before. When, Zen 2 and APU based Zen 2 will be released, there will be further waves of greatness.


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## Shatun_Bear (Jun 26, 2019)

Fabel said:


> And now Jim Keller is at Intel...



The fruits of his work there will not be seen for 3 years at least.


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## Manu_PT (Jun 26, 2019)

Shatun_Bear said:


> That's one hell of a niche. Either way, the 12-core 3900X or 16-core 3950X are coming. Judging by the leaked review, AMD now has a sizeable IPC advantage as well as core count advantage, Intel's only hope is the frequency on that 9900K pushed way past it's optimum resulting in a hot and inefficient mess.





trparky said:


> High refresh gaming may be the cool thing to have around these parts and other enthusiast circles but if you ask most casual gamers high refresh gaming is classified as one of those "nice things to have" but certainly not something that's worth breaking the bank to get it. For those "casual gamers" AMD is certainly well past the point of being good enough, and that scares Intel for the market for high refresh gaming isn't exactly big.



Agreed, casuals will go AMD 100% and they don´t even need to wait for ZEn 2. Ryzen 5 2600 at 120€ right now in my country, that´s the best perf vs price product, R5 3600 won´t beat that.

What I mean is that there are still reasons to get Intel. We can see from the early reviews that latencies are still an issue. and altho they don´t affect every application, they do affect a lot still. Wether high refresh gaming is a niche or not (wich I honestly doubt according to twitch communities), there are still reasons to grab Intel. While on the Athlon 64 days there were none, not a single one, only fanboyism or "brand preference" (for some silly reason).


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## Fabel (Jun 26, 2019)

Shatun_Bear said:


> The fruits of his work there will not be seen for 3 years at least.


Coincidentally there is no real answer to AMD on Intel roadmaps until 2022+


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## Shatun_Bear (Jun 26, 2019)

Fabel said:


> Coincidentally there is no real answer to AMD on Intel roadmaps until 2022+



Yeah, Intel's desktop roadmap looking ahead is 14nm+++, then 14nm++++, then 10nm in 2021/22. Shocking.


----------



## trparky (Jun 26, 2019)

Manu_PT said:


> What I mean is that there are still reasons to get Intel.


Oh most definitely, certainly if you want the best of the best of the best and you don't care how much you have to pay to get that kind of performance then Intel is going to be the one to go to to get that kind of performance.


Manu_PT said:


> Whether high refresh gaming is a niche or not


OK, it may not be a niche market in the traditional sense but when you compare the size of the high refresh gaming market to the *whole* of the *entire* gaming market, the high refresh gaming market is quite small. All things are relative here.

So with that in mind, the way I see it is that Intel is scared here because they're simply not accustomed to being no longer the king of the market in every single market segment. For the longest time, Intel was your only choice if you wanted to be a gamer, high end or otherwise. This has changed, Intel is no longer sitting on the golden throne of every single market segment and they can't handle that; their ego can't handle it. AMD came along and popped it and now Intel doesn't know what to do. Like the schoolyard bully that just took a punch to the gut, they're looking like a deer in the headlights.


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## Xuper (Jun 26, 2019)

Do you mean an unknown user stole a secret article ?


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## 64K (Jun 26, 2019)

AMD is definitely gaining CPU marketshare but they are still way behind Intel especially in the server market. Personally I hope to see AMD continue gaining market share.

2018 In billions of dollars:             

*Platform CPU Segment Breakdown**Intel**AMD*Desktop$ 12,220$ 946Notebook$ 20,930$ 1,218Server$ 21,155$ 312*Total CPU Revenue**$ 54,305**$ 2,476*Total Company Revenue$ 70,800$ 6,475CPU % of Total77%38%




			https://seekingalpha.com/article/4247790-intel-vs-amd-battle-market-share


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## trparky (Jun 26, 2019)

64K said:


> Personally I hope to see AMD continue gaining market share.


I don't think AMD will have to worry about that, I see a lot of growth in AMD's future. I just wish I had gotten in at the ground floor with AMD stock back in 2015, I would have made some serious gains.


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## 64K (Jun 26, 2019)

trparky said:


> I don't think AMD will have to worry about that, I see a lot of growth in AMD's future. I just wish I had gotten in at the ground floor with AMD stock back in 2015, I would have made some serious gains.



No doubt. I remember their share price fell to under $2 at their low point. It's just under $30 now. A 1,500% profit in 3 years.


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## trparky (Jun 26, 2019)

64K said:


> No doubt. I remember their share price fell to under $2 at their low point. It's just under $30 now. A 1,500% profit in 3 years.


Yeah, most definitely. If it was anatomically possible I'd kick my own ass for not buying in on AMD back then.


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## Crustybeaver (Jun 26, 2019)

kings said:


> Intel will compete just fine, they have CPUs to cover all the market. Sure, AMD will have more cores in the high-end, but this does not always translate into higher performance for some tasks and the majority of consumers don´t buy CPUs with more than 6/8 cores.
> 
> To say that AMD has no competition from Intel, it's like saying that Nvidia has no competition from AMD, which is wrong. They just don´t have the supremacy like the past 10 years or pré-Ryzen era!
> 
> But overall, this is going to be good to help AMD distance itself from the impression many people have that they are "a second tier brand".



Well in the world of GPUs, they very much are second tier.


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## Jism (Jun 26, 2019)

Crustybeaver said:


> Well in the world of GPUs, they very much are second tier.



Not for long. The 5700XT is about to be released and the later Navi (kraken) is coming as well.

Vega was a product that initially was designed for the compute and not gaming space. However with some tweaks you could apply it as a gaming GPU but with lots of overhead.


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## EarthDog (Jun 26, 2019)

Jism said:


> Not for long. The 5700XT is about to be released and the later Navi (kraken) is coming as well.



I wouldnt call a 2070 competitor high-end...


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## shovenose (Jun 26, 2019)

Finally AMD is competing and I'm really happy about it. Seems like desktop CPU performance and price per $ was stagnant, and each generation was only a few % faster with a bit lower power draw, and now we're going to have real competition again. Currently I run mostly Intel stuff (primary PC, home server, 2x ThinkPads) while my secondary PC is an AMD... But I feel like my next primary PC is going to be AMD Ryzen.


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## StrayKAT (Jun 26, 2019)

Jism said:


> Not for long. The 5700XT is about to be released and the later Navi (kraken) is coming as well.
> 
> Vega was a product that initially was designed for the compute and not gaming space. However with some tweaks you could apply it as a gaming GPU but with lots of overhead.



I think it's quite nice for the gaming space: Because of Freesync. That has nothing to do with Compute obviously. This appears to be compelling enough that TVs now have that feature (which is why I bought a Samsung with it). Sure, I'm missing the raw performance of Nvidia, but this stuff wins me over.

I still stick with Intel on the cpu/mobo end because of the surrounding features too.. even if they're slouching on performance. Mostly U.2/Optane, but it seems XMP works better as well. I'm probably forgetting something. But the point is, I like both companies for their ecosystem in these spaces.


----------



## Fluffmeister (Jun 26, 2019)

EarthDog said:


> I wouldnt call a 2070 competitor high-end...



I keep forgetting the 2070 uses a 106 tier chip too, ouch.


----------



## Vayra86 (Jun 26, 2019)

I absolutely love how they say Intel offers additional value due to their investments in security.

Security

SECURITY


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## thebluebumblebee (Jun 26, 2019)

When you aren't paying attention, and your competitor bets the company, you're almost guarantied to lose.  I had to use the wayback machine to grab the following.  This was an executive at Intel.  Am I the only one who sees a problem?







How much time and resources do you put into desktop processor development when you're goal is to implement "...Intel’s long-term strategy to transform from a PC-centric company..."?


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## Jism (Jun 26, 2019)

StrayKAT said:


> I still stick with Intel on the cpu/mobo end because of the surrounding features too.. even if they're slouching on performance. Mostly U.2/Optane, but it seems XMP works better as well. I'm probably forgetting something. But the point is, I like both companies for their ecosystem in these spaces.



Really, there is nothing wrong with a decent Ryzen based setup. I have a 2700X with 32GB of DDR4 @ 3400Mhz and a NVME SSD of 1TB crunching at 3GB speeds. It's up 24/7 and the only time it encountered an issue was when undervolting was a bit too agressive. But this system does what it is supposed to and there is nothing wrong with a Ryzen based platform let alone the previous FX i've bin on to for 3+ years. It's stable, it's even better related to security and performance then intel with the patching going.

building a computer requires a bit of a homework. Yes XMP can be a pain but if you have a proper board and you've carefully readed the QVL list those things shoud'nt cause an issue. My board would refuse going over 2933 Mhz related to memory even with XMP enabled, but that was due to improper selection of memory slots (it's supposed to be 2 and 4 and not 1 and 3). Once properly installed everything works out of the box as it should.


----------



## StrayKAT (Jun 26, 2019)

thebluebumblebee said:


> When you aren't paying attention, and your competitor bets the company, you're almost guarantied to lose.  I had to use the wayback machine to grab the following.  This was an executive at Intel.  Am I the only one who sees a problem?
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Good find. I didn't know anything about that.

I don't want to naysay her too much though - maybe at the time, it really did seem that PCs lost their luster. There's a whole wing of IT people (think Larry Ellison) who want to kill PCs and only think consumers need thin clients or something to that effect (when this person headed Intel, it seemed that tablets were all the rage.. in addition to the smartphones). And before that, it was terminals. They'll always be with us.


----------



## Mamya3084 (Jun 26, 2019)

Digital Dreams said:


>


Lol, it's all about keeping the team in check...even if part of the ship is sinking. *Insert everythingisfine.png*


----------



## xorbe (Jun 26, 2019)

"Intel believes that Cinebench is not a representative benchmark for general platform evaluations and real life workloads."

Hahaha, they pushed CB so hard while it was on their side.  Now that it's not, it's no longer a valid benchmark.


----------



## GoldenX (Jun 26, 2019)

xorbe said:


> "Intel believes that Cinebench is not a representative benchmark for general platform evaluations and real life workloads."
> 
> Hahaha, they pushed CB so hard while it was on their side.  Now that it's not, it's no longer a valid benchmark.


Besides, Cinebech is a real world test, or is any rendering job a benchmark for Intel?


----------



## thebluebumblebee (Jun 26, 2019)

StrayKAT said:


> I don't want to naysay her too much though


I'm not saying anything negative about her.  I'm criticizing Intel's plan, not the person in charge of implementing it.


----------



## StrayKAT (Jun 26, 2019)

thebluebumblebee said:


> I'm not saying anything negative about her.  I'm criticizing Intel's plan, not the person in charge of implementing it.



Oh, I know. Rather, I'm just stopping myself from doing it. 

I think these people think they see "trends" when all they're doing is trying to implement their own plans for the tech industry. It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy. The "trends" that they're seeing is the very same crap they themselves implemented in the first place. But sooner or later, it leaves a bad taste in the mouth of consumers and they spit it out and the market shows that it's still viable for end users to have a lot of raw power in their hands. But this particular tech segment never learns. They have some stick up their ass about average users having all of this...and have wrecked companies in the process.


----------



## redeye (Jun 26, 2019)

great!... but intel already has my money from the i9-9900k


----------



## bug (Jun 26, 2019)

HD64G said:


> Thing is that even the employees are much fairer in their judgements, a thing that we haven't seen even in PC industry. And I think that is worth noted. Aren't you impressed at all I suppose?


As a non fanboy, no, I'm not impressed. Imho people that aren't blindly following a logo have a much clearer view of things.


----------



## trparky (Jun 26, 2019)

Post removed, posted in the wrong thread; I have two tabs open with two threads from this site open in them and I posted it in the wrong tab.


----------



## zlobby (Jun 26, 2019)

thebluebumblebee said:


> When you aren't paying attention, and your competitor bets the company, you're almost guarantied to lose.  I had to use the wayback machine to grab the following.  This was an executive at Intel.  Am I the only one who sees a problem?
> 
> 
> 
> ...


I believe that other than greed, intel's only weak point is their interal lack of business integrity, for the lack of better phrase. 

To me it looks like like they are in an enormous internal struggle for power and money. Business and technology come latter in their minds, much latter.


----------



## trparky (Jun 26, 2019)

I think the phrase "burning the candle at both ends" applies here. The internal resources of the company have been spread too thin on too many projects. It's time for Intel to start focusing their resources back on what makes them oodles of cash, the processor market.


----------



## Fluffmeister (Jun 26, 2019)

Presumably one of their employees also noted; "it's a shame we are a duopoly, becuase we could just buy them".


----------



## trparky (Jun 26, 2019)

Fluffmeister said:


> Presumably one of their employees also noted; "it's a shame we are a duopoly, becuase we could just buy them".


Oh, I don't like the sound of that one, not one bit.


----------



## StrayKAT (Jun 26, 2019)

It wouldn't have been so bad years ago. It's remarkable just how few CPU companies/designers are around anymore.


----------



## trparky (Jun 26, 2019)

We'd still have Cyrix if only they didn't shit the bed with Cyrix 6x86 | Wikipedia.


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## Mamya3084 (Jun 27, 2019)

trparky said:


> We'd still have Cyrix if only they didn't shit the bed with Cyrix 6x86 | Wikipedia.



Shitrix more like it. I remember the days of my first PC with a Shitrix PR300 and a voodoo banshee. Counter strike at 10Fps.


----------



## trparky (Jun 27, 2019)

Mamya3084 said:


> Counter strike at 10Fps.


That's slideshow territory right there.   

I remember Cyrix... I mean Shitrix. Damn, I just showed my age.


----------



## GoldenX (Jun 27, 2019)

We also have VIA Master Race, they even do GPUs.


----------



## StrayKAT (Jun 27, 2019)

Mamya3084 said:


> Shitrix more like it. I remember the days of my first PC with a Shitrix PR300 and a voodoo banshee. Counter strike at 10Fps.



Heh.. my first PC was a Cyrix 486-50. Seemed straightforward enough though. Things got more complicated after Pentium.


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## RealNeil (Jun 27, 2019)

64K said:


> The only way that I can figure Intel is that they got complacent being on top for so long. Tech progression stagnated and they were for a long while selling 4 core 8 thread CPUs for what they should have been selling 6 core 12 thread CPUs for. It's the same lesson over and over again. When there is a lack of competition then the company on top charges more for less value and tech stagnates.


This.
Intel rested for far too long on their laurels and the urgency to innovate wasn't strong enough.
Now they're ~real~ interested,.....urgently.

I love it.



trparky said:


> Look at the 8700K, it runs as hot as a mofo (partly due to the paste TIM that they use)


8700K, note the temps
240mm AIO cooled


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## trparky (Jun 27, 2019)

What are your temps when doing MPEG4 h.264 encoding/transcoding using Handbrake? Because that’s when I see the higher than like-able temps.

I’m ripping some DVDs (that I have to stress, *I own them!*) and when compressing down the content from the raw MKV files I see high temps.

*Edit:* I've done some research and Handbrake's h.264 encoder does indeed use AVX 256-bit instructions.


			
				Intel said:
			
		

> Accelerating x265 with Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (Intel® AVX-512)
> The x264 project for Advanced Video Coding (AVC) encoding and the x265 project for High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) encoding are the two widely used media libraries that extensively use multiple generations of SIMD instructions on Intel architecture processors, from MMX technology all the way up to Intel AVX2.


AVX instructions, especially the 256-bit kind, can very much heat a processor up.


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## john_ (Jun 27, 2019)

EarthDog said:


> Yes. It is and can be a good one depending on use cases. It can EASILY blow the monetary savings of the cpu (core vs core and thread vs thread) right out the door. Over buying on cores and threads in a DC environment can be quite detrimental to the bottom line on many fronts.


AMD sells models of server CPUs with 8 cores, not only models with 32-64 cores. And at lower prices compared to Intel. If there is a market where more than 2 or 4 cores are a negative, I am pretty sure they can start selling models with a limited number of cores.  So, where is the problem?


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## bug (Jun 27, 2019)

StrayKAT said:


> It wouldn't have been so bad years ago. It's remarkable just how few CPU companies/designers are around anymore.


Actually there's quite a lot of them. Just not in the PC business.


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## StrayKAT (Jun 27, 2019)

bug said:


> Actually there's quite a lot of them. Just not in the PC business.



I had some of those in mind too. Up until the recession or a bit before, it seemed like every UNIX company had their own chips. I don't even know what's around anymore except Power.


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## bug (Jun 27, 2019)

StrayKAT said:


> I had some of those in mind too. Up until the recession or a bit before, it seemed like every UNIX company had their own chips. I don't even know what's around anymore except Power.


While it's true those went the way of the Dodo, we now have ARM based designs creeping their way into that market.


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## lexluthermiester (Jun 27, 2019)

StrayKAT said:


> Heh.. my first PC was a Cyrix 486-50. Seemed straightforward enough though. Things got more complicated after Pentium.


Cyrix CPU's were very solid BITD.


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## waltc (Jun 27, 2019)

Steevo said:


> They should check the security pillar. I think it's made of jello.



I liked that...  Funny...  Apropos!



EarthDog said:


> Yes. It is and can be a good one depending on use cases. It can EASILY blow the monetary savings of the cpu (core vs core and thread vs thread) right out the door. Over buying on cores and threads in a DC environment can be quite detrimental to the bottom line on many fronts.




*cough* For every piece of software that charges _by the core _for using it, there are at least four competing pieces of software that charge according to _other metrics_--like, uh, perceived *quality and professional reputation*, for instance, or, uh *compatibility with varying software standards*, or even, in some cases,  _*security*_*.* Or some combination thereof! Unless the software is in the "my business cannot survive without this software" category, my sincere recommendation is to eschew these "licensed by the x86 core" applications as if they are spreading plague...



Shatun_Bear said:


> Intel are scrambling. Worse position they've been in since Athlon 64, maybe even worse as this time they're helmed by a band-aid choice of a CEO, Bob Swan. A man that has no understanding of the main products Intel develops vs a MIT powerhouse who studied electrical engineering for her PhD.



Bingo!  So much of a company's fate is inextricably applied to the man at the top--After the highpoint of A64, @ AMD, the point at which the company should have taken off like a bat out of hell, putting the wrong person at the top of the stack in the CEO position came darn close to killing the company off, instead--which would have been a tragedy--would have set general computing back maybe 50 years.  It didn't happen, thankfully---investors largely kept the clock ticking at AMD until the right CEO could be landed, and _she had one foot in engineering and one foot in the consumer markets_ and she understood AMD's situation perfectly!   Lisa Su was ideal on so many levels it defies description.  The right ma--er, lady, for the job!  In spades!  Lots of CEO candidates might have identified AMD's problems correctly but few of them would have _known how to solve them_!   But _CEO mismanagement_ is the #1 cause of computer companies expiring--a la Commodore--just one example--Cyrix, and many more.  I mean, for years at AMD the company had a CEO so utterly clueless about "What to do?--where to go?" that at one point _AMD was actually selling Intel servers under the AMD brand!_  *talk about face palm*   I thought at the time it was finally curtains for AMD as selling servers for Intel had to be the bottom--but Lisa Su came on deck, ready to knock the ball out of the park, little did I know....    AMD simply doesn't have the money to toss away like Intel has and wastes, but the interesting thing is that Intel's mistakes today are going to begin exacting penalties   that have far greater short-term and long term effects on Intel--and it's all because of the fact that AMD is making Intel appear to be the quite second-rate tech company.    It's AMD executing on a dime these days--certainly not Intel.   ATM Intel has a huge cash warchest to sit on, but the flip side is that a company the size of Intel can burn through money like there's no tomorrow, so sitting pat on past performance to continue to bring in _something_ isn't going to work all that much longer! Either Intel will make the products people want--or it won't--and there's no gray area left. It's a very binary proposition.


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## trparky (Jun 27, 2019)

And we come back to the question of why did Intel put a finance guy in the CEO seat?


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## Slizzo (Jun 27, 2019)

trparky said:


> And we come back to the question of why did Intel put a finance guy in the CEO seat?



Bob Swan hasn't been at the head of the company long enough to be involved in any of the end-point decisions that have put them in the place they're in currently.

We'll need some time with him in the seat to see what comes of his tenure.


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## bug (Jun 27, 2019)

lexluthermiester said:


> Cyrix CPU's were very solid BITD.


Really? I remember them being the weakest of the bunch. Ok with integer processing (but so was everybody else), but weakest when it came to FP.
But it would be nice if Cyrix and VIA were still around. Because now fanboys on either side, only have one brand to hate


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## RealNeil (Jun 27, 2019)

trparky said:


> What are your temps when doing MPEG4 h.264 encoding/transcoding using Handbrake?
> AVX instructions, especially the 256-bit kind, can very much heat a processor up.


I don't know because I never use Handbrake. If I do copy a movie, (a rare occurrence) I use DVD Fab to do it with.


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## Deathy (Jun 28, 2019)

"maybe providing amd IP to Intels X86 many years ago wasn't such a smart long term move after all? " - voltage

"I think it's about Intel licensing x86 to AMD" - XiGMAKiD

"I think what he's on about was when things went 64-bit, or something...
AMD cross licensed AMD64 with Intel, so they could go on making x86 compatible CPUs." - TheLostSwede



GinoLatino said:


> The first one... English isn't my first language too, but I understood what he meant.


Then I wouldn't mind being enlightened to what you think he meant. We have two different takes on this so far. One seems to think he meant that it was a mistake for AMD to license AMD64 to Intel. One seems to think it was a mistake for Intel to license x86 to AMD. Both of which would be an oversimplification to the point of meaninglessness. Not to mention both interpretations seeing two different failures (one on the AMD side one on the Intel side).


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## dorsetknob (Jun 28, 2019)

Deathy said:


> "maybe providing amd IP to Intels X86 many years ago wasn't such a smart long term move after all? "


In the post 486/586 era of Intel and AMD  
Intel needed a IP Cross licensing agreement with AMD as much as AMD also needed this Cross licensing ( and Probably more ).
AMD Brought X64 to the Deal which Intel wanted/Desperately needed.
The Other big Player Cyrix Had no IP that Intel wanted or needed and therefore could not effectivly compete with Intel (Pentium) and AMD (athlon ).


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## Deathy (Jun 28, 2019)

dorsetknob said:


> The Other big Player Cyrix Had no IP that Intel wanted or needed and therefore could not effectivly compete with Intel (Pentium) and AMD (athlon ).


If that is what the OP meant, it is still a very limited view of a very complicated issue that has - in the end - little to do with cross licensing (which both parties and the consumers have gained by) and more to do with the own engineering staff and innovations. For who exactly was the AMD64 licensing deal not the "smart long term move after all" in this case? Intel is still the 60+ billion jaggernaut vs the AMD 6+ billion wallflower. Was AMD supposed to not license AMD64? It was a great implementation but even back then with AMD winning nearly every performance and price contest and charging 1k for binned FX chips, Intel had the vast majority of the market secured. If AMD hadn't let them license it, they would have lacked some crucial instruction sets themselve and Intel might just have gone forward with their own implementation and considering their lock on the market (through PR, money and shady/illegal actions) might have succeeded even more. Intel without at least a competent AMD would also be the target of many anti-trust investigations and potential splitting of the company. Cyrix is also an interesting subject in and of itself, since they just reverse engineered Intel CPUs without actually having an x86 license (very clever but you can't compete by reverse engineering alone for long). Via was/is the only other player with such a license. Cyrix went in another direction, before AMD64 became a thing.


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## bug (Jun 28, 2019)

dorsetknob said:


> In the post 486/586 era of Intel and AMD
> Intel needed a IP Cross licensing agreement with AMD as much as AMD also needed this Cross licensing ( and Probably more ).
> AMD Brought X64 to the Deal which Intel wanted/Desperately needed.
> The Other big Player Cyrix Had no IP that Intel wanted or needed and therefore could not effectivly compete with Intel (Pentium) and AMD (athlon ).


To add to the context, AMD also didn't have much IP Intel wanted. But they bought what they needed from DEC and marketed that technology. It was probably a pretty risky move, but it paid out big time.


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## lexluthermiester (Jun 28, 2019)

bug said:


> Really? I remember them being the weakest of the bunch. Ok with integer processing (but so was everybody else), but weakest when it came to FP.


Na, Cyrix CPU's benchmarked fairly well in games and traded wins with like all the rest. Their downside was that they ran hotter than AMD, Intel and VIA. Even the Winchips ran cooler.


bug said:


> But it would be nice if Cyrix and VIA were still around. Because now fanboys on either side, only have one brand to hate


Right? It's not like the market isn't big enough for them now..


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## GoldenX (Jun 28, 2019)

The cost of getting on par with the freaking Atoms in performance must be huge.


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## quadibloc (Jul 3, 2019)

I'm glad the full memo is here, since it disappeared from the original Reddit site.
In my opinion, the real challenge to Intel comes from TSMC, rather than really from AMD itself. Their "7nm" may only be equivalent to Intel's 10nm, but they had it ready first.
It's true that Intel has as many people working on software for Intel chips as AMD has period. So Intel has a good Fortran compiler for Intel chips which is expensive - and AMD has a free Fortran compiler for AMD chips, from the open-source LLVM, which only runs on Linux. So that's an area where Intel is ahead. But that made me think of the rivalry between IBM and Control Data, and the famous "including the janitor" memo.
More is not always better, even if the small size of AMD is limiting it in some ways.



bug said:


> But it would be nice if Cyrix and VIA were still around.



Given that Microsoft Windows needs an x86 to run on, what would be nice is if the x86 architecture didn't require licensing. So that in addition to SPARC, Sun could have made x86; in addition to PowerPC, IBM could have made x86 (actually, they did for a while, licensing it from Cyrix). Any company able to make a CPU ought to be able to make a CPU that can actually be used: one that can run Windows. And if Windows and the applications for it aren't distributed as source, because it isn't free like Linux, then that means the dominance of Windows has enshrined the dominance of x86. CPU makers can't compete on their merits, if they can't make x86 chips.

Of course, while SPARC and PowerPC and MIPS and Alpha and 680x0 never took the world by storm, ARM was able to get somewhere - but by carving out a _new_ niche, in which it is dominant.

So the remedy to competition in the chip industry, barring x86 being taken from Intel, would be the government forcing Microsoft to move Windows to RISC-V and abandon the x86. That, of course, is hardly likely to happen.


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## trparky (Jul 3, 2019)

quadibloc said:


> Given that Microsoft Windows needs an x86 to run on


That's only because of the need for backward compatibility with decades-old legacy applications. Take the need to support legacy applications out of the equation and suddenly x86 is no longer a requirement, ARM can be used instead. Most modern programs still have source available so yes, they can be compiled for ARM. Will it be painful at first? Yes, but it can be done.


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## narble (Jul 4, 2019)

TheLostSwede said:


> Well, yes and no. They didn't become complacent in that sense, but rather, they believed they were so far ahead, so even though their first 10nm process was a mess, they thought they would have time to fix it, but alas... Hence why they started a second 10nm process, as we know. On top of that, they decided to focus on a million other things, like FPGAs, AI co-processors, GPUs, wireless data modems (3G/4G, but clearly 5G was another mess), IoT (another huge failure), mobile phone SoCs (failure), photonics and what not. This means that they somewhat lost focus on the CPU business, as it was only part of what Intel made. Then they got a huge order for 4G models (and an expected order for 5G modems) from Apple, due to them falling out with Qualcomm and this ate up a lot of their production capacity. In other words, it's not so much being complacent, as having too many different businesses that don't quite fit and which used up a lot of resources. If you take a good look, it's not hard to see why Intel are in their current position. Yes, some of their "new" businesses have helped them make more money, but at the same time, they've lost focus on the good old x86 CPU.



Definitely a strategic miss, but I think you'll find it was nothing more than a poor decision in favor of short-term profitability... Bean-counters overriding engineering decisions.

Take a look at the investment Intel made (and reversed) in ASML a few years ago. Those guys were the only ones delivering EUVL and it looked like Intel had shut out the other foundries by buying up all of ASML's upcoming production. Intel didn't just buy a big stake in ASML, they pre-ordered enough of the upcoming production to shut out Samsung and TSMC. Then what happened? I'm sure Intel insiders could comment on this, but it looks like Intel just decided they'd get along just fine without EUV.

Just look back a couple of years at TSMC's roadmap and the indications that Intel was bypassing extra-dense litho for low-end silicon (indicators here and here). I just keep wondering how Intel thought they were going to be able to continue the ramp-up to greater capacity per die without a clear path beyond DUV. Your 10mm plans are adorable, Intel.


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## Crustybeaver (Jul 23, 2019)

Jism said:


> Not for long. The 5700XT is about to be released and the later Navi (kraken) is coming as well.
> 
> Vega was a product that initially was designed for the compute and not gaming space. However with some tweaks you could apply it as a gaming GPU but with lots of overhead.


I've only just noticed your response. As much as everyone would like AMD to be competitive, it's not something that's going to happen anytime soon. Nvidia still controls the high end of the market.


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## Fluffmeister (Jul 23, 2019)

Crustybeaver said:


> I've only just noticed your response. As much as everyone would like AMD to be competitive, it's not something that's going to happen anytime soon. Nvidia still controls the high end of the market.



It's AMD, just you wait.... keep waiting.... no seriously just you wait. Any time now....


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## lexluthermiester (Jul 24, 2019)

Fluffmeister said:


> It's AMD, just you wait.... keep waiting.... no seriously just you wait. Any time now....


As opposed to Intel's 10nm... Yup, still waiting...


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## Fluffmeister (Jul 24, 2019)

699 like I said.


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## lexluthermiester (Jul 24, 2019)

Fluffmeister said:


> 699 like I said.


What is 699? And when did you say this?


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