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Comment by rgbrenner | Hacker News Reader

Congrats to AMD, but I'm still very pessimistic on their long term prospects. It seems like Intel's advantages come from a system that produces improvements over years. You can see this just in their R&D spending: Intel spends nearly 2x AMD's revenue just on R&D. Whereas this development from AMD was thanks to Jim Keller (who now works at Intel)... It was a one-off event.. and once they've extended it as far as it'll go.. then what? Unless they develop their ability to innovate (they've had issues keeping top talent at the firm), this will probably be another one of AMD's boom and bust cycles.

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Intel decided to invest more heavily in share buybacks than R&D as of their recent earnings call.

But that’s only half of the story. They need that R&D budget because they have the (massive and growing) expense of building and upgrading their own fabs, which have undergone a series of costly mistakes in the last decade. I wonder what % of intel’s R&D budget is actually comparable to AMD’s if you exclude the amount poured into fabs—betting those figures are much closer despite enormous differences in market cap. TSMC, who along with GloFo fab the AMD chips, is basically all-in on R&D investment and taking on debt to facilitate the construction of the most advanced fabs to date. And their prior investments in 7nm have scaled rapidly and panned out well. I think it was the fastest ramp for a node shrink that they’ve done.

Oh and Keller is definitely smart but you imply that he’s got a monopoly on talent in the semiconductor industry. There’s no way that’s the case lmao

TSMC is all-in on R&D and latest fabs, but GloFo is not. GF gave up on 7nm:

https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1333637

AMD's recent success partially has to do with renegotiating its contracts with GloFo, allowing AMD to use TSMC more:

https://wccftech.com/amd-is-negotiating-a-7th-amendment-to-t...

But in 2019 you need to compare Intel’s R&D with AMD + TSMC. What’s different this time is that Intel has lost its process node advantage.

Intel spreads their R&D revenue across many more product categories than AMD does. In addition to CPUs, they've got their new GPU, their SSDs, their entirely new form of NVRAM, wireless networking, and many other projects. And they run their own fab, which is a huge investment that AMD doesn't have to make.

AMD just makes their CPUs and GPUs. Also, Intel's CPU designs tend to be much more custom than AMDs, trading more engineering effort for a bit more performance.

you gotta give credits to the team as well. It wasn't just Jim Keller. btw this kind of architecture can give AMD a few years to catchup. if they can keep the momentum, they have a very good chance to be relevant again.

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