This is truly amazing results.
I get stabbed over at Anandtech every time I made an argument for Intel as an AMD investor. The Internet is full of Intel bashing comments but reality is Intel has been making record revenue quarter after quarter.
For the not so good part.
>The company's 7nm-based CPU product timing is shifting approximately six months relative to prior expectations. The primary driver is the yield of Intel's 7nm process, which based on recent data, is now trending approximately twelve months behind the company's internal target.
The most important bit is that last part, 12 months behind Internal target. To put this into perspective.
Intel original 7nm, ( on the assumption it is still the same 7nm because Intel has already changed their 10nm spec) was suppose to be slightly better than TSMC 5nm+, but not as good as TSMC' 3nm. ( In terms of transistor density, by no means it is the only metric it should be judged on ). It was scheduled for 2019, pushed to 2020 then 2H 2021, and are now looking at 1H 2022, which means in terms of consumer getting their hands on it, it would be more like 2H 2022 assuming no further delay.
Given TSMC has never missed a beat in their execution and has iPhone SoC production. It is highly likely by the end of Calendar year 2022, TSMC would have shipped more 3nm Wafer than Intel's 7nm for the whole year.
I am waiting to see AMD's results.
I have been an AMD investor since pre-Zen launch and I think it is fair to say that EPYC sales feel like they haven't reached the levels some have hoped for quite yet. If AMD continue to widen the gap between EPYC and Xeon, I suspect we may look back on this inertia as a bit of a 'roadrunner effect' and in a year or two's time get a shocking quarter where AMD suddenly starts taking surprisingly large bites out of Intel's datacenter market share.
Also on the GPU side of things, it is rumored that Nvidia has struggled to get capacity at TSMC and is having to use Samsung's, supposedly inferior, 8nm process for its forthcoming Ampere cards, at least until their 7nm capacity comes online at TSMC. Not sure how much truth there is to this, but highlights the capacity issues that may currently be in play.
I've been looking just these last few weeks at buying a new Epyc Rome system, and one thing I was a bit surprised (though I shouldn't have been, I just haven't thought about it in a long time) about was that while Rome is incredible as a CPU the whole ecosystem around it has lagged by quite a bit. Specifically, the motherboard selection is still well behind what you can find for Xeon. That's not AMD's fault and there is a bit of a standard egg/chicken bootstrap issue, the market has to be deep enough to really start to fill out the niches. Epyc being so good is what has allowed them to start clawing their way up at all, and the MB scene is already massively better then even the start of this year. Still though it's made it harder for me at least to unthinkingly pull the trigger, every option for my intended use-case entails compromises. There is no perfect fit.
I suspect over the next 6-12 months even that will be less and less the case. And hopefully that will mean accelerating momentum for AMD and bring some more long term competitiveness to that market. But it's been interesting being on the purchase hunt and seeing the development in real time, it already feels like the whole game has changed for CPUs but of course everything supporting that lags a cycle or two.
Unclear if Intel is following that path.
The naming convention Intel has chosen for the last 10 years (Core iX Generation X) has basically been a long running joke. The average person can’t figure out if a used machine from 2015 has the same CPU as a 2020 machine.
Not that they’ve made the chips noticeably faster for web browsing in that timeline anyway.
Basically, this news is the blackberry storm launch announcement.
Maybe INTC will still make a lot of money but there's a "nanometer gap", damnit!
This year is already proving to be a watershed one for Intel, largely due to AMD's continued resurgence and taking the performance crown in mobile (Renoir) and expected in desktop (Zen3). Apple announced their move away from Intel silicon and even AWS making strides in their own ARM server chips (Graviton).
By itself and without further delays, 7nm will already be a hail mary of sorts due to the TSMC's pace and roadmap. But remember that 10nm yields have not been good so will it be able to handle producing server and desktop chips.
If there's another delay (e.g. 7nm in 2023), would Intel need to sell of their fabs?
i worked with Lotus Notes in 1997, and even that 1997 version would be miles ahead of many enterprise software in 2008. A super-hyper-important project had finally [and quietly] failed at Sun around 2008 after several years of trying to build a functionality which was just a one item in the large list of 1997 Lotus Notes capabilities :)
Wrt. the original discussion - Intel - anekdotally i don't see any moves on our huge mostly C++ platform (with our customers running machines with hundreds cores and terabytes of memory) toward AMD, unfortunately. Giving the cost structure of software vs. hardware, our customers will run only what is certified by us, "minor" theoretical savings on AMD hardware be damned. I think that only when Intel will get really slower than AMD, then the enterprise glacier will start moving. If i were AMD, i'd not even bother with enterprise on-premise datacenter, and would focus instead on those few places where the future is - AWS and the likes. By the time Intel, if it happens at all, brings the price/performance and energy/performance (the metrics which are really important to cloud and not that to enterprise datacenter) back to competitive level, the cloud may be owned by AMD.
Another thought though: is it completely unthinkable for Intel to pull an AMD themselves and spin out their fabs and rely on whoever has the best fabs out there? I mean - if they are years late with something that is already outdated there are not too many downsides to it.. Next-gen process nodes are now so delayed that they might as well use the time until then to retarget their designs for TSMC/Samsung.
Literally impossible without a very long term plan... and when it’s over they lose control of their destiny. They can beg TSMC for more chips if they want to meet their sales targets, but maybe they’ll sell to Apple or Nvidia instead.
The cynical answer is “they were focused on profit margins and didn’t invest in process”, but is it possible they bet hard on some technology that didn’t pan out? Ultraviolet lithography? Some exotic indium gallium arsenide magic that didn’t work in mass production?
I'm not sure if we have any good clues as to what's going wrong with Intel's 7nm efforts, but it seems reasonable to guess that they weren't putting as much effort as their competitors into getting ready for EUV.
And given how long Intel's had these issues at this point, it seems pretty clear that they have some broader management issues.
https://semiaccurate.com/2018/06/29/intels-firing-of-ceo-bri...
With regards to the specific technologies Intel was trying to do a lot of new things with 10nm. Initial rumors said that replacing copper with cobalt in some of the metal layers was causing problems. But later rumors were that Contact Over Active Gate (COAG) used mostly in the GPU section of a chip was the main culprit and why none of the early 10nm parts had working GPUs.
Moving to their own ARM chips lets them gain tighter control over the platform, and not be beholden to Intel or AMDs roadmap or desire to implement specific features Apple wants.
You are talking strategy, I am talking tactics.
Long term, Apple will benefit hugely by having their own silicon for exactly the reasons you suggest.
Short term, being competitive on performance is massively important. Arguably, the most important thing to make the transition successful. So much so that I doubt this transition would even be happening if they weren't confident about out-performing Intel in the near term.
Everybody _wants_ faster chips, but for most people, the chip is in idle state 99% of the time. Outside of the data center and serious gamers, chip speed has been fairly irrelevant for years.
Shifting to ARM for laptops and desktops just sounds like a big burden for them.
Marketing calls it "7nm+++super", engineers get graphs of power-vs-frequency.
E.g.: comparing transistor densities:
Intel 14nm 38 MTr/mm^2
TSMC 7nm 97 MTr/mm^2
Intel 10nm 100 MTr/mm^2
Samsung 5nm 127 MTr/mm^2
TSMC 5nm 173 MTr/mm^2
Intel 7nm "higher than TSMC 5nm" (planned for 2022)
TSMC 3nm 290 MTr/mm^2 (risk production in 2021)
It should also make it clear that Intel's 10nm node is basically the same as TSMC's 7nm.
However, from what I heard (I'm not an expert!), Intel's 10nm node is a "pain in the ass" to manufacture. The design phase is complex, the yields are low, etc...
For comparison, TSMC's 7nm is supposed to be a relatively "straightforward" process, and 5nm is actually an improvement in manufacturability. That is, it's easier to design and make a 5nm TSMC chip than a 7nm TSMC chip. That's actually a pretty big advantage, something Intel doesn't talk about much...
A notable thing about TSMC's 5nm is it is shipping in three months. Thats a massive gap and there is little proof that Intel 7nm is 'much' more than 5nm.
And thats before you consider other upsides seen in the TSMC chips such as cost, or the incredible power management tactics seen in the Ax series chips that are easily generations ahead of Intel.
Intel has stumbled a lot here and it's showing.
History says otherwise...
Because they are easy to buy. A great non Intel hardware and software laptop+aio by AMD or someone else would be a mortal wound on $INTC.
I think them moving to outsourced foundries would be a huge move in the wrong direction for fab consolidation.
AMD is also an organization that has been operating with the 3rd party foundry model for 10+ years. How long would it take for Intel to undergo an org-chart/culture transition into a similar model? I have to believe this would be a fairly disruptive time for such a large organization.
Not saying Intel can't pull it off, but it seems like their strategy will have to exist on a >5 year timeline at this point.
- 7% growth for consumer (the “Intel PCs” you mention)
- 43% growth for data centers
- 70%+ growth in nonvolatile storage (SSDs)... much of which goes into high end servers in data centers
Will there be more data centers And cloud offerings in 3 years, or less? Many More!
Will there be more or less PC sales in 3 years. For Intel it’s less or the same (Apple is 8-10% of the market that is disappearing and PC growth is flat to slightly up. So 3 years out it will be roughly the same)
Also keep in mind the margin on Xeons vs The laptop chips That go in a $599 plastic Dell.
Intel as a “PC” company is dying. Intel as a data center provider (SSDs and heavy processors) is ascendant
4900HS is 25% faster than the i9-9880HK (Intel's fastest contender) and uses much less power.
https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/1187443-asus-caught-bei...
Regular people don’t buy PCs at all and haven’t for a couple of decades.
Anyway EPYC is performs far better than Xeon in same price.
They don't have to give up their existing 14nm capacity, but next-generation processors could much more easily (apparently) be fab'd externally.
Sorry I've got no idea what this means.
Sales volume peaked somewhere in the mid 2000s. Since then the PC ownership rate hasn't really declined (it's still ~75%), but people haven't bought as many PCs because the rate of performance improvement has slowed so people haven't had as much of a need to replace their existing PCs.
I think the phone makers are trying to avoid that fate now by discontinuing software updates for older phones or making it expensive to replace failed batteries, but eventually one of them is going to defect and offer a phone with in-kernel drivers and a replaceable battery and then win half the market when customers get wise to not having to lay out hundreds of dollars every three years instead of every five or ten.
This sounded wrong to me, but in the interests of not just making a kneejerk response, I googled and found total global sales from 1997-2000 estimated at ~400 million PCs[1] and also a claim[2] that at that time about 60 percent of US households had at least one personal computer.
Also, since the 80s, affordable computers were available, and sold in the millions,[3] so I don't think it's valid to say the reason they were mostly owned by businesses and the upper middle class at that point was because they were too expensive. It was more that people in the upper middle class used computers at work and could relate to why they were the future, and that future included them/their children, so they were likely to see value in a new computer rather than something else.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share_of_personal_compu...
[2]https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2004/DianeEnnefils.shtml
[3]By 1985, the Commodore 64 was selling for <$150, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64
And conversely I don’t know anyone who didn’t own a PC in 2000. 2000 was the very height of the dotcom boom. The dotcom boom wasn’t fuelled by a tiny upper middle class - it was about everyone suddenly being online.
Am I waiting for CPU? No. Storage? No.
I am waiting for some friggin call-home/update-check/irrelevant network request.
Edit:brevity, removal of profane words.
Is that right? Any examples? I feel most of the times I'm waiting is for the network because everything is online now. Even my work is all done on a remote VM in a data center. I connect using vscode over ssh. And the app is snappy af except when it needs to do a network opeation.
iTunes(thanks to iWife) annoys me with it's updates. It checks for updates after you've started the program, pops up to get in your way and doesn't give you an "Install on exit" option.
Paint.Net does it right. Opens up, lets you get things done, checks for an update, gives you the option to install on exit. More should be done this way.
Playing games, Steam and all the many games with their own servers etc. Example of bad, It takes me roughly 2 mins to get into GhostRecon:Breakpoint.(not that good a game really but that's another day).
Example of good, Rocket League. Starts up, gets you going. (Disappointingly not a League of actual Rockets but good fun anyway. :-))
When you are emulating another architecture, speed often becomes a much bigger factor.
Particularly since Apple caters to a lot of markets where performance is more important. Developers, video & audio pros, animators, photographers, and other pro users are a big part of what makes Apple's higher end systems move. Even if your CPU is idle 90% of the time, when you run a build you want it to go fast.
There's a whole lot of people who are in the 'pro user' market who are incredibly frustrated with Apple - slow on hardware refreshes, generally way behind on chip generations, and a focus on design over reliability or performance.
The thing that stops a lot of people from migrating away is a lack of better options.
Some are tied to the Apple Ecosystem, and so there's no legit way of running OSX on non-Apple hardware.
Others don't need to use Apple, but Microsoft in the Windows 10 era is arguably worse, and they still haven't figured out that they need to fire all those people who keep pushing user-unfriendly choices like changing defaults on already installed systems, pushing app store apps down people's throats, etc.
For those who could move to Linux - there's a lack of nicely designed hardware that has all the modern bells & whistles, and that doesn't have weird software quirks. Particularly in the mobile space, but also to an extent in the desktop space, too.
Even when you look at a PC builder like System76's systems, their laptops still look like something out of a catalogue from 10 years ago, with none of the clean aesthetic and polish of Apple, or even premium Windows laptops. The desktops are better on that front.
Sure, you could, like I have, run a modern Linux distro on say a Lenovo X1 Carbon, or a HP Spectre X360 if you want something that looks pretty decent and has good performance, but even they have weird hardware quirks. Sound, for instance, is amazingly frustrating, and something I have to mess around with regularly, sometimes multiple times a day. It makes me look like an incompetent idiot when I'm talking away on a conference call to discover that for some bizzare reason, between Firefox/Chrome/Chromium and the System sound settings - what was working just fine not 30 minutes ago has decided that it no longer wants to cooperate, and has switched, yet again to a profile I don't want and don't need.
On the desktop side is no better - the few companies selling desktops, are mostly selling overpriced garbage aimed at Windows users, so you need to go through a Custom PC Builder using enthusiast equipment, which means spending half your time trying to find out if the 50W of RGB LEDs that the damn device comes with can be switched off (Answer: Probably not, unless you run Windows, or are willing to pull out a soldering iron. Which makes for a great discussion if you need warranty support on something).