this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2024
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Amazing what happens when your primary competitor spends 18 months stepping on every rake they can find.
And, then, having run out of rakes, they then deeply invest in a rake factory so they can keep right on stepping on them.
This'll probably be a lot more interesting a year from now, given that the product lines for the next ~9 months or so are out and uh, well.....
18 months? Lol.
Intel has been stagnating since the 4th gen Core uarch in 2014 with little competition. They knew they were top dog and they sat on their hands until their hands went numb. There's a reason "14nm++++++++++" was a running joke. This is a decade of monopolistic market behavior finally coming home to roost.
That's a wee revisionist: Zen/Zen+/Zen2 were not especially performant and Intel still ran circles around them with Coffee Lake chips, though in fairness that was probably because Zen forced them to stuff more cores on them.
Zen3 and newer, though, yeah, Intel has been firmly in 2nd place or 1st place with asterisks.
But the last 18 months has them fucking up in such a way that if you told me that they were doing it on purpose, I wouldn't really doubt it.
It's not so much failing to execute well-conceived plans as it was shipping meltingly hot, sub-par performing chips that turned out to self-immolate, combined with also giving up on being their own fab, and THEN torching the relationship with TSMC before you launched your first products they're fabbing.
You could write the story as a malicious evil CEO wanting to destroy the company and it'd read much the same as what's actually happening (not that I think Patty G is doing that, mind you) right now.
early zen werent performant in lower core count loads, but were extremely competitive in multi core workloads, especially when performamce per dollar was added into the equation. even if one revisits heavy multi core workload benchmarks, they faired fairly well in it. its just at a consumer level, they werent up to snuff yet because in gaming, they were still stuck with developers optimizing for an 8 thread console, and for laptops amds presence was near non existant.
Not only that, but it was vastly more power efficient, and didn't have the glaring security vulnerabilities that Intel had. All while being on a worse Global Foundries manufacturing process.
Unless you were a PC gamer who also didn't care about $/perf, Zen1 was the better architecture.