Subj : Re: Intel: Once mighty, now falling?
To   : Accession
From : tenser
Date : Wed May 21 2025 00:51:27

On 19 May 2025 at 04:51p, Accession pondered and said...
 
 Ac>  > As Intel has been a behemoth in the computer industry for so long, it
 Ac>  > feels a bit surreal to me to see them seemingly fading away,
 Ac>  > particularly since I worked there for about 8 years..
 Ac> 
 Ac> As an update on this thread, it seems the AMD 9000* CPUs are showing
 Ac> signs of the same issues that Intel has been having.
 Ac> 
 Ac> For anyone looking to build a new rig, might want to wait a bit till
 Ac> they both figure this out. :(

What issues are those?

I've been working with AMD chips for a few years now; this is on
the server side, where we design and build our own boards, as we
are a computer vendor.  We don't use AMD's proprietary UEFI-based
firmware (that is, we use neither AGESA nor OpenSIL).  We wrote
our own, directly in the operating system (we run Unix).

My sense is that Intel's failures are a) they were really late
getting onto a 7nm process, basically missing the boat on that
one, and they haven't been able to keep up with AMD on the power
consumption/heat side.  Frankly, AMD is just producing a better
chip.

Also, they've tried to milk the x86 cow for far too long.  They
can't compete on the low-end, so they did what flailing companies
always do, they retreated to the high-end to try and protect their
profit margins.  But a lot of places elsewhere in the industry are
jumping to ARM, which was already dominant in the embedded space
and the low-end, but with the hyperscalars pushing it into the
datacenter across GCP, AWS, and (critically) Azure, it's ramping
up the software ecosystem, much of which was already running on
Linux anyway, and eating into Intel's bread-and-butter.  With Apple
and others starting to push in the consumer space with Apple Silicon
already there, and Ampere, Cavium, and others pushing from the lower
end, with usually better power efficiency, the case for Intel inside
is less and less.  Oh, and phones and tablets?  Forget about it.

If the RISC-V people ever really get their act together and form a
viable alternative to ARM _and_ x86 on the high end (RISC-V has
already made a number of inroads in the embedded space) then with
AMD rounding out the legacy/high-end side, there's going to be little
market left for Intel.

Also, Intel keeps favoring the x86 business over other, possibly more
lucrative spaces.  Canceling Tofino seemed like a huge mistake, for
example; there was literally nothing else on the market that did what
Tofino2 could do.  It was short-sighted madness.

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