Hacker News Reader

Comment by andy_ppp | Hacker News Reader

This seems like a lose lose and a net negative for everyone.

1) AMD must be preventing Intel from in future building similar integrated GPUs using anything like AMDs patent portfolio in GFX.

2) Intel will be able to 100% push out any vendors from moving to Ryzen for presumably faster integrated graphics.

3) Nvidia doesn't have an x86 CPU and last time I looked - all PCs and Mac laptops were using x86.

As some have speculated maybe this is Apple telling their suppliers to jump and Intel and AMD said how high...

I'm going to be interested to see if we ever get a jump to Apple using ARM and internally designed GPUs, I have a feeling that Jonny Ive must be wetting himself over making a reasonably powerful laptop that thin.

View on HN

No, I think it is win-win.

1) AMD can sell chips in high end systems where it can't compete with Intel on CPUs or Nvidia on GPUs.

2) Intel can ship a high end graphics experience without dGPU which gets them a level of graphics in a form factor they couldn't otherwise achieve.

3) Ryzen is a low/mid range chip. Even if it could match Intel's performance it could never match Intel's brand, and Intel doesn't want to match AMDs price so they will stay in different market segments. Ryzen sales will not be hurt.

4) AMD gets valuable brand recognition by getting Radeon into more premium devices which could actually boost sales for cheaper Ryzen/Radeon devices down the line.

5) Shafts Nvidia which is a win for both sides.

6) Opens lines of communication for possible future merger or fab deal, which is not so much an issue from an anti-trust standpoint when you look at the total competitive landscape of ARM, Nvidia, Apple, Qualcomm, etc and the shrinking relevance of x86 in the big picture.

I am deeply curious about point 6. If intel bought amd I think it would lead to a massive change in how systems are built. I know there's the danger of a full x86 monopoly, but nvidia has a lot of pressure on intel at the high end and if the windows arm thing ever takes off I'm sure nvidia will have a laptop chip out in no time.

If there is a merger, I hope this will make a lot of AMD dream projects like the HPC APU take off, but I also fear that it might lead to a more stagnant intel+amd in a few years time.

They could never do a merger for anti-trust and dual sourcing concerns...

Having said that, it MIGHT open up the potential for AMD running (some, all?) chips through Intel's fabs and actually enabling a nearly competitive playing field.

The best thing that the (US) government could do for the market would actually be to force Intel to split in to a fabrication company and a chip design company. That would enable the military to contract fabrication of higher-end validated CPUs on US soil from whichever sources they wanted...

Regarding 3): most benchmarks I've seen quote 2-7% difference in IPC to Intel. I wouldn't call that low/mid-range. Am I misunderstanding something?

From the parent: "Even if it could match Intel's performance it could never match Intel's brand".

Not with that attitude.

(i.e. argued that way this would be more like "setting up for failure" on AMDs part.)

Brand perceptions can definitely change but the reality right now is that for the past 5 years AMD has been shipping non-competitive parts and has had zero premium design wins and very little money spent on advertising.

For the average consumer, every high end system they have seen in recent memory is Intel, and every ad they have seen is Intel, and if they have seen AMD at all it has always been positioned as a budget product.

That is going to take a long time for AMD to turn around assuming they can sustain performance parity with Intel.

That is also why AMD is focused on servers and semi-custom where they are selling to technical people who are evaluating based on price/performance and not based on brand perception.

I am pretty sure the current PS4 and Xbox count as premium design wins for AMD.

And consumers don't say, I want the same processor as the Xbox.

> And consumers don't say, I want the same processor as the Xbox.

XBox One's processor is from a pre-Ryzen generation, so this should not be a concern. :-)

APUs pre-Ryzen weren't too bad, used to have a VM box running an A10 before I put a 1500X in it. Price wise they're very competitive, and AMD is happy to fab semi-custom silicon for anyone, hence how they were the primary vendor for all consoles for years.

There's nothing "premium" about those gaming consoles, maybe the PS4Pro/XboneX could be considered "premium" for the console sector.

Imho parent was talking about the PC sector and in that regard, AMD has been sadly trailing way behind Intel/Nvidia for quite a while now. AMD has struggled to oppose Intel's i5/i7 dominance. Similarly, they still have no real competition for the high-end NVidia GPU's, like the 1080's.

If money is not a limiting factor, then you will be hard-pressed to come up with a build that does not include an Intel CPU and at least one Nvidia GPU.

> If money is not a limiting factor, then you will be hard-pressed to come up with a build that does not include an Intel CPU

If money is not a limiting factor, you probably look at AMD EPYC now.

Yeah, the PCIe lanes alone are killing it, never mind the increase in CPU performance. Intel doesn't have much to offer to oppose this dominance, and their at a wall with process technology (can't go much smaller than 7nm without massive power leakage) with a 3 to 4 year pipeline just to get a new chip out. Making one chip takes 9 months end to end, assuming the design is ready now, hence the long pipeline.

That looks promising but is aimed at the server market. I haven't been keeping up that well since Ryzen but imho AMD has been really struggling with the premium desktop market, especially CPU wise.

Ryzen helped some with that but afaik Intel's chips are still way ahead in terms of single-thread performance, which is something many desktop users (like gamers) are looking for.

On one hand, it's cool to have i5's/i7's last so long, on the other hand, it's never a good situation when there's no real competition. Too bad Intel didn't pull through with Larrabee, a third player in the dedicated GPU market would have made this whole situation way more interesting/dynamic.

Tho could just as well have resulted in AMD going belly up, trying to compete against Intel and Nvidia vs the current situation sounds like it would been a worse deal for AMD.

Yeah, I know...it's just in light of this argument the timing seems strange.

AMD are on the brink of offering products that for the first time since forever at least has potential to build up their brand vs Intel, to actually have a significant differentiator that they can market. It seems really harsh to kill that before it even begins. But yeah, it could actually be a sign that AMD knows it couldn't go the whole nine yards in this game anyway.

Brand is more important than benchmarks for most buyers and even if AMD chips were better Intel would still be the premium brand.

Are people actually looking to buy a computer for an Intel CPU? I have honestly never met anyone that said "I need my computer to be Intel Inside™ ". They just say they want fast / modern / able to do X task and 99% of people have no idea what a CPU even is.

To most consumers, AMD sounds like a knockoff brand. Have you even seen an AMD commercial in the last decade?

You might have a good point for the home market - I couldn't say either way. I do know for the corporate market, businesses want as low a number of SKUs to support as possible, and so they will often only buy Intel (and only specific CPU models at that). This is particularly true in the datacenter / cloud world.

> Are people actually looking to buy a computer for an Intel CPU? I have honestly never met anyone that said "I need my computer to be Intel Inside™ ".

I've had friends go out to buy a computer and insist on an i7 because "it is the best."

Same people who buy the newest Samsung Galaxy every year.

> I've had friends go out to buy a computer and insist on an i7 because "it is the best."

But i9 is the best... ;-)

I would say yes. Intel are better at marketing than AMD (think decades of TV ads and the little Intel Inside stickers).

> think decades of TV ads and the little Intel Inside stickers

When I see "Intel Inside", I immediately think "Intel Inside - Idiot Outside". ;-)

And the ones in the UK calling i3 processor "high powered" I am looking at you PC World :-)

My dad went to Best Buy to replace his 10+ year old laptop last year. He actually said he wanted Intel instead of AMD because he heard AMD processors were very slow. I had to tell him the Intel N-whatever and Celerons were also very slow so that he'd stick with one of the i-whatevers.

Basically anything they sell him will be faster than his current laptop. Many of the low power i series aren't actually much better than a celeron, but they're very common in new laptops.

CPUs aren't the bottleneck though, disk I/O and I/O in general are where most "slowness" issues are promulgated from.

I work in heavily optimized compute, and it does matter there. We write assembly that is supported by one architecture only (for now), and frontier Intel chips are easier to come by. So our code runs on Intel’s processor extensions a generation or two before AMD, and that represents a high switching cost.

But this is server compute stuff which this news doesn’t seem to be about.

Agree — that seems like a very 2003 idea. The whole Intel Inside doesn’t have the cache it used to.

Clocks matter too.

10% IPC advantage compounded with up to 20% higher clock speeds in top of the line Desktop CPUs (when OCed at least)

I don't think OC is a fair baseline to qualitatively distinguish between CPU classes (at least low/mid vs high-end). OC is surely a large factor in purchasing decisions for a subset of high-end users, but not all.

I was talking max OC on R7 (4.0 - 4.1) vs max OC (5.0-5.1) on i7-7th gen though. Which is a good indicator of the max clocks each platform can get.

How is this not duopoly collusion to push out Nvidia? Smells just like 'competing gas stations' on opposite corners with the same exact prices.

AMD can be Aldi, Intel can be Whole Foods.

What Whole Foods are you shopping at that's as cheap as Aldi??!

1) Intel does not ship GPUs on high-end CPUs.

Regarding 3. It's rumored in the chip design community that NVidia designed an x86 CPU and got as far as engineering sample silicon but the project was cancelled because they couldn't work out the licensing.

>As some have speculated maybe this is Apple telling their suppliers to jump and Intel and AMD said how high...

That sounds a bit far fetched IMO. They aren't that dominant in the PC market (esp. compared to the Big Three (Lenovo, HP, Dell)) for Intel and AMD to warrant such an "out there" cooperation just at the behest of Apple...

Lenovo/HP/Dell might sell more units, but every single Apple product has a high end i5/i7 or extreme low power part in it. The margins for Intel are likely an order of magnitude higher from Apple than Dell.

I think you overestimate the heft of Apple in x86 world.

a) Sure, Apple doesn't have a low end and as such higher overall margins, but: The Big Three all have a sizable mid-/highend/ultrabook/business range as well with just the same i5/i7/core m CPUs (only updated more often). Apple surely is a good customer, but I severely doubt that the overall margin difference for Intel between them and Apple is even in the remote vicinity of an order of magnitude. What is an o.o.m. higher though is the market share of those three (~60% vs ~6%).

b) I just don't see a bargaining chip. What's the "or else" from Apple's side? Full Ryzen? Would actually be cool, but Ryzen is still completely unproven in the mobile world, and this would be all the more reason for AMD not to enter the deal. ARM? Yeah...I wouldn't hold my breath.

You have to consider that this isn't a simple internal SKU customizing, but a significant and delicate licensing deal with THE direct competitor in x86 world. (The tech is actually the simpler part, seeing that it's not an integrated solution but a MCM.) Apple would have to have severe leverage that they would be the main driver for Intel for such a move. Or they are paying a real buttload for this tech - but then you can be sure they want exclusivity. And the statement really doesn't sound like it.

Don't almost all apple's use the mobile versions with only the Pro using HDET parts

Depends for some massively parallel applications workstations etch threadripper has the edge on price performancem even more so if they bring out ThreadRipper 2 next year and replace the two dummy cores

Isn't Apple market-share of x86 tiny?

About 4%.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com