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Comment by imiric | Hacker News Reader

> It might damage intel, but given they're circling the drain already, it's hard to make matters worse.

How was Intel "circling the drain"?

They have a very competitive offering of CPUs, APUs, and GPUs, and the upcoming Panther Lake and Nova Lake architectures are very promising. Their products compete with AMD, NVIDIA, and ARM SoCs from the likes of Apple.

Intel may have been in a rut years ago, but they've recovered incredibly well.

This is why I'm puzzled by this decision, and as a consumer, I would rather use a fully Intel system than some bastardized version that also involves NVIDIA. We've seen how well that works with Optimus.

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None of their products are competitive, they fired the CEO who was meant to save them, fired tens of thousands of their engineers, sold off massive chunks of the company, they're still bleeding money and begging for state support?

Also their network cards no longer work properly which is deeply aggravating as that used to be something I could rely on, just bought some realtek ones to work around the intel ones falling over.

I have bad news about realtek networking...

Realtek is actually alright nowadays, even on Linux.

> None of their products are competitive

We must live in different universes, then.

Intel's 140V competes with and often outperforms AMD's 890M, at around half the power consumption.[1]

Intel's B580 competes with AMD's RX 7600 and NVIDIA's RTX 4060, at a fraction of the price of the 4060.[2]

They're not doing so well with desktop and laptop CPUs, although their Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake CPUs are still decent performers within their segments. The upcoming Panther Lake architecture is promising to improve this.

If these are not the signs of competitive products, and that they're far from "circling the drain", then I don't know what is.

FWIW, I'm not familiar with the health of their business, and what it takes to produce these products. But from a consumer's standpoint, Intel hasn't been this strong since... the early 00s?

[1]: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Radeon-890M-vs-Arc-140V_12524_...

[2]: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Arc-B580-Benchmarks-and-...

No way, man. Peak consumer Intel was from Core 2 up to Skylake-ish. That was when they started coasting and handed the market to AMD. Right now they're losing market share to them on mobile, desktop, and server. If we ignore servers, most PCs have an AMD CPU inside.

The GPUs might be competitive on price, but that's about it. It's pretty much a hardware open beta.

Ah, I was thinking of Core 2, but was off by a couple of years. Although "peak" consumer Intel was undeniably in the 90s.

Like I said, Intel may not be market leader in some segments, but they certainly have very competitive products. The fact they've managed to penetrate the dGPU duopoly, while also making huge strides with their iGPUs, is remarkable on its own. They're not leaders on desktops and servers, but still have respectable offerings there.

None of this points to a company that's struggling, but to a healthy market where the consumer benefits. News of two rivals collaborating like this is not positive for consumers.

The 90s were easy mode for semiconductor manufacturers because of Moore's law, and because cranking the clocks was relatively easy. After 2000 was when the really advanced microarchitectures started coming out.

>a company that's struggling, but to a healthy market where the consumer benefits

I would argue that the market is only marginally healthier than, say, 2018. Intel is absolutely struggling. The 13th and 14th generation were marred by degradation issues and the 15th generation is just "eh", with no real reason to pick it over Zen. The tables have simply flipped compared to seven years ago; AMD at least is not forcing consumers to change motherboards every two years.

And Intel doesn't even seem to care too much that they're losing relevance. One thing they could do is enable ECC on consumer chips like AMD did for the entire Ryzen lineup, but instead they prefer to keep their shitty market segmentation. Granted, I don't think it would move too many units, but it would at least be a sign of good will to enthusiasts.

When your own most competitive products are being made by your competitor for you, while you still have the cost center of running your own production fabs incapable of producing your most competitive products, and receiving bailouts just to keep the lights on...

Some would say that's circling the drain.

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