I'd long Intel, it is over sold.
But, whatever it was, it was bad. They've been stuck basically at the same node for 5 years or more.
And, according to the article, their next CPU will still be at 14nm, which is completely nuts. There's no way you can compete with such brute force disadvantage.
It's remarkable to watch, but I wouldn't count on Intel getting their act together anytime soon.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-euv-tools-order
TSMC is making massive orders and seems to already be using that.
Intel hasn't even started - "Intel is also expected to start deploying EUVL systems sometimes in 2022 when it starts making chips using its 7 nm node."
Their architecture has always been on the mediocre side but manufacturing has been uncontested for almost 50 years. What makes them suddenly hit a wall while everyone else plowed through?
I have no insider knowledge but EUV is super expensive. It could be that the bean counters tried to delay one node too long.
Intel flew too close to the sun and their wings melted.
The vitriol everyone has for them is based on the fact they could have been pumping out cheap 4 / 6 / 8 core chips for people, but instead held the entire world of computing at basically quad-core CPU level for the better part of a decade.
And I share that vitriol. I'm happy they're suffering and are in pain. I hope the same thing happens to NVIDIA. I hope the same thing happens to AMD. I relish when a company and when people are made to suffer when they hold back our technological process in the name of fucking quarterly profits.
Why AMD?
> I relish when a company and when people are made to suffer when they hold back our technological process in the name of fucking quarterly profits.
Apple is doing the same thing. This only helps Apple, it's a proprietary design that's not even standard ARM, they have extensions. And it won't ever be available outside of Apple products.
I think OP is saying that once AMD reaches the dominant market position that they hope some upstart comes in and takes them out of their comfort zone.
They also reinvented them selves as a CPU company, went for lower prices with the Celeron, bit the bullet on Itanium and embraced AMD's x86-64, backpedaled the Pentium 4 thermal disaster and went from Pentium 3 into the Core architecture, took the server and HPC market by assault…
Never have I seen them this lost and in denial.
That's also an easy two-part answer, look at their CEO and former CEO. Kraznich or however you spell his name, never knew a time (as CEO) when Intel wasn't top dog (and I'm not talking about 6 months of AMD being on top with Athlon 64), so he's never been hungry. In fact, his "dismissal" from Intel for hashtagMeeEeEToOoO is nonsense. They had been dating for years, before the anti-frat policy was put into place, and their relationship was cleared by HR; Brian got axed because someone had to take the fall for 10nm sucking so much donkey dick.
The new guy isn't even an engineer, he's an MBA. Anything Intel does under his leadership will be solely the result of everyone but him. Contrast this with AMD, where Dr. Lisa Su is an amazing engineer and also a brilliant businesslady.
Part two is culture. Intel is full of arrogant jackasses who are in denial about how awesome they are. Turns out AMD and Apple have legitimate badasses designing their chips, but they also have managers that aren't causing unnecessary conflict between different teams. This same shit happened to Microsoft years ago too, by the way... turns out causing a lot of conflict on your teams in the name of 'dA cReAm riSing To ThE Top!' is a fucking idiotic management style, which should have been obvious to these sub-geniuses if they'd spend more time in their biology classes - humans are a collaborative species.
I worked for Intel for a few years, 2005-2007. It's hard to put into words what happened to Intel. The simplest way for me to explain it is that the employees didn't take risks. A different way to explain it is that most people at the company were too career focused then focused on the actual business.
But this is how disruption happens! Major players like Intel can always see where the industry is going, at a high level, but the rules of each generation in an industry are always murky.
IMO, the "ARM" generation of PCs is a shift to vertical integration. Intel set itself up for horizontal integration, and the openness of ARM means that the lines between "Computer manufacturer and CPU manufacturer" are going to increasingly blur.
Intel's business basically treats PC manufacturers like franchises; and Intel's a culture focuses more on career, and less on risk and business. This means that they're going to increasingly have trouble adapting to the new rules that come in the "ARM" generation.
One thing they could do is invest in ARM manufacturers, and / or startups that are in the ARM business. As these companies grow and Intel shrinks, slowly let the investments eat themselves from the inside. For example, every few years one of Intel's fabs could be traded to one of their ARM investments. Later, as executives retire, leadership from the ARM manufacturers or startups become Intel executives. (Edit: This is what Disney did with Pixar.)
Another thing they can do is very openly admit that they are being disrupted. The CEO can basically dictate that they have to get into the ARM market and sell ARM chips according to similar terms as existing ARM manufacturers. According to "The Innovator's Dilemma," this approach is hard to do. (Edit: It's hard to do because institutional momentum and personal habits and assumptions are very hard to break.)
And, another thing is that Intel could start a business unit that behaves like a startup. It would get the majority of the CEO's attention; with running the existing business falling to other executives and managers. This new business unit would follow the ARM rules; and it would grow at the expense of the rest of the business. Intel might even need to sell their own computers.
Honestly, I suggest reading the book. It explains it better than I can. (I also suggest watching how major car manufacturers switch to Electric. GM and VW seem to be doing this.)
It would't surprise me if the world moved from x86 to ARM despite Intel's better fabs. Companies being too good, too focused at their own business that they miss a fork on the road is a common tale.
But instead, they're completely stuck and unable to perform at what used to be their core strength.
Every time there are market disruptions people come up with retroactive, "just-so" stories to explain the problems. In Silicon Valley its typically blamed on the MBAs.
The idea that a 50 year old company, a pioneer of the computing industry, with over 100,000 global employees has run into trouble because employees are "too career focused" is such a story. Is there any data that bears this out? How would you measure it? Are the employees at AMD naturally risk takers?
Intel made some missteps in an industry with a long planning lead-time. They may or may not recover. But the reasons are not so simple and concise.
The book that I link to provides many examples, but it focuses on how hard drive companies struggled every time the physical size of the disk shrunk. Even when they knew "it's time to make a smaller disk," they'd do something silly and be non-competative.
In the case of Intel, when I interned in 2002, they knew mobile was coming and tried to set themselves up for it... But the rules of selling chips to phone makers are different than seeking chips for PCs. (Just like what the book explained in its examples.) In Intel's case, the margins were too slim in mobile... Which is a typical symptom of how a company gets disrupted.
> Are the employees at AMD naturally risk takers?
Don't confuse AMD (company) with ARM (architecture). ARM chips power all mobile phones and smart TVs. They're cheaper, and now are going to be better than x86 for PCs. (High performance, low power, low cost.) This is a textbook example of distribution. What you'll see are smart TV and phone manufacturers selling ARM PCs that are cheaper than x86 PCs, but perform better. Don't believe me? Just wait until someone realizes that all they need to do is swap Android TV out for Windows (ARM) in their assembly line for their smaller smart TVs, and throw a keyboard and mouse in the box instead of a remote.
(FWIW: AMD was never a threat to Intel. They couldn't manufacture in big enough volume.)
The Wall Street thinking is poison. Steve Jobs was terrified of this happening to Apple which is why he made sure product people had a lot of power.
There were plenty of RISC systems that were way out ahead of Intel that lost not because of inferiority but because they were being used for inferior business models.
DEC Alpha, Sun UltraSparc, etc.. they lost cause they weren't pumping out zillions of consumer level chips that ran windows. Then there are companies like IBM that just failed to capitalize on what they had or again kept their stuff super expensive and out of the big market for whatever reason.
I think lots of us new this day would come for x86.
A lot of this IMO is more about the ever decreasing importance of Windows. Windows used to be so much more important than it is today. Linux + the cloud taking over so much of server land and dev/science land has changed things dramatically. Then you have smartphones coming from the other direction. Intel ruled back in the day because more computers ran Windows than anything else and Windows was heavily tied to Intel. There's more stuff non-Windows OSes today than there ever have been. (Mac, Linux, iOS, Android). All those other types of computers not running Windows gave competitors the money they needed to compete with Intel.
ARM is not only threat to Intel. AMD caught up with Intel with Zen 2 and surpassed in Zen 3. Zen 4 5nm is planned for end 2021. If they can manage IPC gains same as Zen1-Zen2 or Zen2-Zen3, Intel is in serious trouble.
OK, but, where’s the beef? Intel has been stuck for a long time now. Do we know the management and corporate culture can catch up?
And anyways, is this transition entirely about performance? Apple is obviously selling it like that, but it seems like they really want the ability to fine-tune the architecture and SoC to their needs. And they’re not the only company with the desire and capital to make that happen; Microsoft, Amazon, Google, they all must desire on some level to finesse systems to meet their specific needs, and Intel isn’t in that business.