this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2024
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Interesting Article IMO.
Regarding the 7% stock increase from Gelsinger taking over, I'm not sure that's very impressive, considering the trust was pretty low in the old administration.
Regarding Gelsinger lying and offending partners, It was pretty obvious from the beginning that Gelsinger was on some kind of hype train.
He has over promised and under delivered on everything. Personally I disliked him from the start, I saw him as an untrustworthy buffoon.
The article fails to mention that the founder of TSMC called Gelsinger a dangerous pariah.
He was too eager to try to convince everybody that Intel would soon be leading in every aspect. His claim about winning Apple back was cringy. After Apple had made their own chip equaling X86 laptops on performance, but using only half the power.
The new Arrow Lake is a disappointment too. Yes it uses less power, but that's probably mostly due to the improved TSMC process.
When AMD came out with the Ryzen CPU, Intel still had a performance per core advantage, and decent PPW compared to Ryzen.
Historically Intel has always been able to come back quickly from a setback like Ryzen was to them on total performance and PPW per CPU package.
But this time around they are making failure upon failure. Extremely Power hungry chips that performed only slightly better, and now chips that have better PPW but are slower despite TSMC fabrication.
It's now almost 8 years since AMD revealed Ryzen, and Intel still can't beat it. AMD managed to come back from near bankruptcy with extremely strained budgets. But Intel despite having way more money and R&D budgets to fight back with, has been almost constantly failing for 10 years.
I'm saying 10 years because Intel failed on the 10nm process, and released reiterations of SkyLake with barely any improvements at least 2 times before Ryzen came out.
If Intel had made decent progress on their desktop CPU's the last couple of years before Ryzen, Ryzen would not have been nearly as successful.
Before that Intel tried to compete against Arm with X86, claiming ISA doesn't matter. I guess $10 billion R&D to compete with Arm and failing, despite using more than Arm's entire revenue for years would argue that it does.
Their GPUs do have decent performance for the price, problem is that the die to provide that is twice as big as the competition. So it's not competitive to manufacture, it's just Intel who was selling cheap to move product.
All in all, if Intel production doesn't deliver soon, there is very little chance Intel will be able to fight their way back to nearly the position they once held.
That feels a slight bit unfair.
For non-gaming workloads, they're basically sitting on par or better because of the giant pile of e-cores, and for single-threaded performance (on p-cores) they're also on par to slightly ahead.
Sure, the x3d chips are the gaming kings and no argument here, but that's not moving volume - even AMD is all-in on the datacenter side because their gaming/consumer side sales have evaporated into nothingness.
Intel's problem isn't an inability to design CPUs that are competitive, it's an inability to create production-ready processes that are competitive with TSMC.
At some point they're going to have to decide if spending endless billions on processes that aren't competitive is the best use of their resources. Owning the ability to make your product is super important, but for certain market segments (client desktop and laptop) maybe going 'fuck it' and fabbing on the best process you can find so that your CPUs come out competitive is probably the way to go - and, honestly, is pretty much already what they've done with ARL.
I'd also maybe agree that the pricing is an issue: they're not industry-leading anymore but they've kept that pricing which almost immediately makes them less appealing than AMD if you don't need something Intel is offering you (like the accelerators in scalable Xeons or whatever). ARL immediately made me go 'How much? What the bleep?' when they announced pricing, because uh, they're way off on what they really should be asking.
You make some good points. But I do want to make some comments.
The testing I've seen, the CPU does deliver decent performance numbers for productivity. but it does that at too high TDP, using above the MAX rate of 250 Watt, and despite the better node, it still has worse PPW.
The reviews I've seen rate the CPU from flop to meh, with some saying it's released to early, because the platform is simply buggy.
So the Ultra 9 285K delivers slightly better in productivity than the Ryzen 9950X, but it does that at higher power consumption, despite the better TSMC 3nm production node. Where AMD is made on 4nm.
So it does have some wins, but I'll maintain Intel doesn't beat Ryzen overall, and Intel is only achieving this on the back of outside higher end production than AMD is using.
I'll still say Intel is a bit behind on the design side, but yes manufacturing is where Intels future will probably be decided.
In the past, Intel always had the advantage of superior production, and could always power through squeezing out a bit extra from both design and process technology.
But with Arrow Lake, they fail to surpass AMD despite e newer gen process.
I agree 100% regarding the pricing, but from Intels viewpoint, they are selling the Ultra 9 285K CPU similar in productivity performance to Ryzen 9950X at about the same price. At least here in Denmark in retail they are very close with Ryzen being $30 cheaper. Other markets may have different prices. But for gaming the price is absolutely horrific 50% more expensive than the 7800X3D!!
Intel got caught off guard by the rise of advanced packaging, where AMD's chiplet design could actually compete with a single die (while having the advantage of being more resilient against defects, and thus higher yield).
Intel fell behind on manufacturing when finFETs became the standard. TSMC leapfrogged Intel (and Samsung fell behind) based on TSMC's undisputed advantage at manufacturing finFETs.
Those are the two main areas where Intel gave up its lead, both on the design side and the manufacturing side. At least that's my read of the situation.
For servers and workstation yes, but the first 2 Ryzen generations were still 1 chip packages for desktop. And Intel lost marketshare quicker to AMD on desktop than on servers.
So while packaging was an important factor in higher end, Intel actually lost marketshare a lot slower on servers, where the packaging was the biggest benefit for AMD.
On desktop I think Intel lost because they'd stayed on 4 cores for too long. I remember personally complaining that my freaking phone had more cores than my desktop.
So I jumped to AMD as soon as I could afford the upgrade. 😀
On workstations AMD absolutely trounced Intel with Threadripper. Threadripper was amazing, a giant improvement of workstations, it's sad that they don't prioritize that segment anymore.