Remember that Intel got their advantage by sabotaging AMD. They illegally bribed OEMs into not using AMD chips when AMD was ahead.
It’s no wonder this company that can only use dirty tricks to get ahead turns out to be ran by israelis.
The decline of Intel..
Submitted 5 months ago by Dragxito@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.arktrek.shop/post/the-decline-of-intel
Comments
Linkerbaan@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Kata1yst@kbin.social 5 months ago
2009 era was also when Intel leveraged their position in the compiler market to cripple all non-Intel processors. Nearly every benchmarking tool used that complier and put an enormous handicap on AMD processors by locking them to either no SSE or, later, back to SSE2.
My friends all thought I was crazy for buying AMD, but accusations had started circulating about the complier heavily favoring Intel at least as early as 2005, and they were finally ordered to stop in 2010 by the FTC... Though of course they have been caught cheating in several other ways since.
Everyone has this picture in their heads of AMD being the scrappy underdog and Intel being the professional choice, but Intel hasn't really worn the crown since the release of Athlon.
Thrashy@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Historically AMD has only been able to take the performance crown from Intel when Intel has made serious blunders. In the early 2000s, it was Intel commiting to Netburst in the belief that processors could scale past 5Ghz on their fab processes, if pipelined deeply enough. Instead they got caught out by unexpected quantum effects leading to excessive heat and power leakage, at the same time that AMD produces a very good follow-on to their Athlon XP line of CPUs, in the form of the Athlon 64.
At the time, Intel did resort to dirty tricks to lock AMD out of the prebuilt and server space, for which they ultimately have antitrust action. But the net effect was that AMD wasn’t able to capitalize on their technological edge, Ave ended up having to sell off their fabs for cash, while Intel bought enough time to revise their mobile CPU design into the Core series of desktop processors, and reclaim the technological advantage. Simultaneously AMD was betting the farm on Bulldozer, believing that the time had come to prioritize multithreading over single-core performance (it wasn’t time yet).
This is where we enter the doldrums, with AMD repeatedly trying and failing to make the Bulldozer architecture work, while Intel coasted along on marginal updates to the Core 2 architecture for almost a decade. Intel was gonna have to blunder again to change the status quo – which they did, by betting against EUV for their 10nm fab process. Intel’s process leadership stalled and performance hit a wall, while AMD was finally producing a competent architecture in the form of Zen, and then moved ahead of Intel on process when they started manufacturing Zen2 at TSMC.
Right now, with Intel finally getting up to speed with EUV and working on architectural improvements to catch up with AMD (and both needing to bridge the gap to Apple Silicon now) at the same time that AMD is going from strength to strength with Zen revisions, we’re in a very interesting time for CPU development. I fear a bit for AMD, as I think the fundamentals are stronger for Intel (stronger data center AI value proposition, graphics group seemingly on the upswing now that they’re finally taking it seriously, and still in control of their destiny in terms of fab processes and manufacturing) while AMD is struggling with GPU and AI development and dependent on TSMC, perpetually under threat from mainland China, for process leadership. But there’s a lot of strong competition in the space, which hasn’t been the case since the days of the Northridge P4 and Athlon XP, and that’s exciting.
umbrella@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
this is what i was thinking. the article opens by saying it was ubiquitous in the 2000s, but thats only because of aggressive marketing and unfair monopolistic practices.
athlons were faster at lower clockspeeds for a big chunk of the 2000s and no one batted an eye.
aard@kyu.de 5 months ago
Not just that - intel did dual core CPUs as a response to AMD doing just that, by gluing two cores together. Which is pretty funny when you look at intels 2017 campaign of discrediting ryzen by calling it a glued together CPU.
AMDs Opteron was wiping the floor with intel stuff for years - but not every vendor offered systems as they got paid off by intel. I remember helping a friend with building a kernel for one of the first available Opteron setups - that thing was impressive.
And then there’s the whole 64bit thing which intel eventually had to license from AMD.
Most of the big CPU innovations (at least in x86 space) of the last decade were by AMD - and the chiplet design of ryzen is just another one.
pdxfed@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Admired AMD since the first Athlon, but never made the jump for various reasons–mostly availability. Just bought my first laptop(or any computer) with an AMD chip in it last year, a ryzen7 680m. There is no discrete graphics card and the onboard GPU has comparable performance to a discrete Nvidia 1050gpu. In a 13" laptop. The AMD chip far surpassed Intel’s onboard GPU performance, and Intel laptop was ~30% more from any company. Fuck right off.
Why doesn’t this matter to Intel? Part of why they always held mind space and a near monopoly is their OEM computer maker deals. HP, DELL, etc. it was almost impossible to find an AMD premade desktop, laptops were out of the question.
trolololol@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I believe my first amd was a desktop athlon around 2000. I needed a fast machine to crunch my undergraduate thesis and that was the most cost effective.
In recent years I can’t buy amd for a strong desktop, went with xps and there’s no options. Linux is a requirement for me, so it narrowed down my choices a lot. As you’d expect, it’s a horrible battery life compounded by being forced to pay and not choose an NVIDIA card that also has poor drivers and power management.
x86 and it’s successor amd86 instruction set is a Pandora box and a polished turd, hiding things such as micro instructions, a full blown small OS running in parallel and independent of BIOS, and other nefarious bad practices of over engineering that is at the roots of spectre and meltdown.
What I mean is I prefer AMD over Intel, but I prefer riscv over both.
9point6@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Cheap intel stock going then
I’d be very surprised if they don’t find a way to bounce back, they’ve done it before
Imprudent3449@lemm.ee 5 months ago
Maybe. In the past they have always been able to rely on their dominance in the PC market. With consumers shifting away from this, I don’t think it’s so straight forward and in other emerging markets like AI they are way behind.
At least they are finally putting actual money into R&D. This article was a really good read. Will be interesting to see how and if Intels investments pay off.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
Yup, they need to fund engineering. That’s what AMD did, and it turns out that’s a good strategy. Companies need to provide value to customers, and then marketing’s job is easy.
Linkerbaan@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Investing in israeli companies right now is a high risk low reward move.
ArtikBanana@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
Intel is an American company.
If you’re bothered by Israeli involvement you should avoid all the companies in that list, including AMD, as they are all invested in Israel and have Israeli teams.
Even large Chinese tech companies like Xiaomi, which has an R&D center in Israel, are invested in Israel.
Alphane_Moon@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
I am also betting they will bounce back; hopefully this is indeed a good opportunity to buy the stock for cheap.
sfantu@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Either they make a phone chip … or they continue to rot to obscurity.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
Why? AMD doesn’t make phone chips, yet they’re dominating Intel. Likewise for NVIDIA, who is at the top of the chip maker list.
The problem isn’t what market segments they’re in, the problem is that they’re not dominant in any of them. AMD is better at high end gaming (X3D chips especially), workstations (Threadripper), and high performance servers (Epyc), and they’re even better in some cases with power efficiency. Intel is better at the low end generally, by that’s not a big market. AMD has been chipping away at those, one market segment at a time.
Intel entering phones will end up the same way as them entering GPUs, they’ll have to target the low end of the market to get traction, and they’re going to have a lot of trouble challenging the big players. Also, x86 isn’t a good fit there, so they’ll also need to break into the ARM market a well.
No, what they need is to execute well in the spaces they’re already in.
iopq@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Actually, AMD do make phone chips. That is, they design the Exynos GPUs, which are inside some Samsung devices
Giooschi@lemmy.world 5 months ago
They used to, but they weren’t very good.
sfantu@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Lol … If they don’t manage to make a decent one … they’re done.
That being said I would love an "not so good " x86 smartphone with usb video out and desktop mode.
But clearly that ain’t going to happen… all the ARM shit must be sold .
joneskind@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Nice read. Thanks OP!
Dragxito@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Appreciate it 🙏.
bruhduh@lemmy.world 5 months ago
While I used AMD since fx bulldozer and currently using laptop with Ryzen 7 5700u and really enjoying it, downfall of intel saddens me because they keeping the GPUs prices down, i mean, would AMD and Nvidia offer 16gb GPUs in 300$ price range if intel wouldn’t bring a770 16gb for 300$ on the table first
LodeMike@lemmy.today 5 months ago
Don’t you mean relative decline?
Buffalox@lemmy.world 5 months ago
A decline is ALWAYS relative to something, otherwise it wouldn’t make sense. So what is it really that you mean?
Intel used to be the undisputed leader both on CPU design and production process. Those positions are both lost, Intel also always used to have huge profits, but has had deficits lately that used to be absolutely unheard of. So how is that not a decline?
Dragxito@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Agree
LodeMike@lemmy.today 5 months ago
Actually no. If I am standing still and people move past me, I’m not moving backwards.
Magister@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I tried to always use AMD, 386SX33, 486DX4/100, Duron 1000, Athlon XP 2200, then went a laptop life with Intel, but since COVID/WFH I went back to AMD, I have a 5600H in a miniPC
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
That has pretty much nothing to do with Intel’s decline though. Losing the enthusiast market to AMD was a small blow, the bigger blow was losing a lot of server market to AMD.
gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
Pretty incisive article, and I agree.
In retrospect, I think the marketing/sales/finance corporate leadership idiocy that’s intensified over the last couple decades is the single biggest contributor to my deep sense of frustration and ennui I’ve developed working as a software engineer. It just seems like pretty much fucking nobody in the engineering management sphere these days actually values robust, carefully and thoughtfully designed stuff anymore - or more accurately, if they do, the higher-ups will fire them for not churning out half-finished bullshit.
sneezycat@sopuli.xyz 5 months ago
That’s why I like my steam deck so much: the design is so thoughtful and adapted to its own needs, and unfortunately that’s a rare sight lately (not just in technology).
hark@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Would’ve probably turned out different if Valve was beholden to shareholders and the never-ending hunger for a higher stock price. The push to drive “shareholder value” is one of the most destructive forces if not the most destructive force we’re dealing with these days.
gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
Yeah… I’ve been thinking about popping for one for a while now. I should probably just go for it.
Out of curiosity, is the etched AR glass on the top end model actually worth it, or is that more of a gimmick?