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Comment by jpalomaki | Hacker News Reader

Does AMD gain a lot by driving down prices heavily? Should make sense only if they expect Intel won’t match their price cuts.

If Intel follows, then they have both just lost money. Might make sense if ruining the market drives the competitor out, but that’s not likely with Intel.

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AMD CPUs should be cheaper to manufacture, because their chips are much smaller. Xeons are built using giant monolithic dies, so the defect rate per wafer matters a lot. EPYC processors from AMD are built using 9 separate chips under one package [1]: one I/O die and several chiplets with multiple cores each, so the yields should be much higher.

[1] https://images.anandtech.com/doci/13561/amd_rome-678_678x452...

Seems like there's only up side for AMD. They're not getting Intel-level prices now because they're not being used, so as long as they're not selling below cost, it's all upside to them. For Intel's part, they only have to follow suit if/when the strategy starts working for AMD, by which point AMD may have clawed back enough enough market share to have justified the strategy. At that point the race to the bottom probably ends, and prices might incrementally inch up somewhat, but the increased competition will still probably depress Intel's prices over what they would have been, while AMD still has gains.

That’s certainly my hope, AMD increasing core counts forced intel to follow suit or lose on multibench workloads to sometimes hilarious extents even when they where ahead on IPC per core.

I don’t care which one wins I just want proper competition again.

Same. I never particularly cared whether I had an AMD or Intel proc when price and quality were comparable. I'll happily choose whichever has the better value proposition. Though Info think AMD had a particularly uphill battle in the server market dominated by clouds that are mainly standardized on Intel. But with such price benefits, I can imagine various providers experimenting with blocks of AMD based compute.

In my opinion they are not driving down prices heavily. They are just pricing their chips competitively so people will buy AMD over Intel, but they are not super cheaper. The pricing of AMD chips just makes sense if you look at the lineup and compare it to Intel.

The number one chip on passmark right now is the 3900X which is beating intel units at nearly 4 times the cost.

Now passmark isn’t 100% accurate but it’s usually pretty close.

https://m.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

I’d call that aggressive myself.

Yeah, but we're talking server chips in TFA.

True but AMD hasn’t released Rome yet, given that in Benchmarks I posted the 12 core 24 thread is out performing the Xeons and given that Rome is a zen 2 based core I think it’s safe to extrapolate that AMD have a competitive or better processor portfolio compared to intel at this point.

Intel had been considered to get insane premiums on their chips for a long, long time...

It does work because price cuts give Intel an allergy. Intel has only recently hinted at reducing prices of some high-end CPUs "up to 15%” 2 years after zen came out and after it had already raised prices on the same CPUs by at least 15% since it started struggling with manufacturing shortages last year.

AMD should go as aggressive as possible with the pricing to steal market share from Intel because it has nothing to worry about in regards Intel responding with a price war - it just won't happen. Intel couldn't even bring itself to do that with it's mobile chips - twice. First with Strong-arm and then with Atom. It lost the mobile market twice because of its insatious margin greed.

Since they’ve lead the market so consistently for so long I think they’ve never been in a protracted situation where aggressive price cuts where required.

AMD to their credit have played everything blindingly well with nary a misstep in the last two years.

It must be hard to be intel and have your seeming invincibility in the x86 market challenged by a company that nearly went bust not that long ago.

If I were in charge of Intel,I'd have bought AMD when they were struggling...

That would invite a monopoly investigations in the EU and possibly the US pretty much instantly.

Ironically intel needs AMD to prove they don’t own the whole market, it’s just blown up this time because AMD nailed it on the architecture and fab side.

I was thinking about but still went posting my comment.You are right on monopoly.

Antitrust enforcement would probably take issue with that

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