Is Intel in 2019 = AMD in the early 2010s?

[Jackgamer91]

I still remember back in the early 2010s when Intel introduced Sandy Bridge followed by Ivy Bridge and AMD couldn’t keep up with their Bulldozer and Piledriver products some people predicted the demise of AMD to Intel. 

 

Intel back then offered better single-core performance for lower TDP, while AMD produced energy sucking chips that were not very energy efficient and had poor single-core performance. 

 

Now after AMD released Ryzen the roles seem to have switched. Intel is still stuck on 14 nm and is compensating by adding more clock speed and core counts which makes their chips less energy efficient. 

 

Is Intel in 2019 in as poor a shape as AMD was in the early 2010s? 

[Guest]

Intel's bank account say no.

Very loudly.

[Spotty]

I went for AMD in 2010-2015, not necessarily because of technology standpoint, but more because of a business and finances standpoint. Intel is a very rich company. They can afford to take a few years of losses. AMD was not really in that position, and it's only in the last couple of years that they have been profitable.

[DesolationGod]

yea i would say AMD then was worse off, there was never a good reason short of being on a tight budget to buy an amd cpu then and im sure that hurt them. Intel on the other hand, while they are having issues with their 10nm line they will get past all that and still their top line cpus are competitive with amd and vice-versa, now if in a few years, amd keeps up the pace and intel doesnt, then it could be at least eyebrow raising... 

[Levent]

TBH, I dont think so. AMD between 2010 and 2016(or when Ryzen launched) was mainly issues with core design and IPC. Intel's problems nowadays happens because of their understanding of what is enthusiast level hardware (I mean locked multiplier, relatively low core counts and charging a premium for CPUs that are not worth the tag) so if they ever breakout of their greedy mindset they have lots of ways to be competitive. 

[AngryBeaver]

17 minutes ago, Jackgamer91 said:

I still remember back in the early 2010s when Intel introduced Sandy Bridge followed by Ivy Bridge and AMD couldn’t keep up with their Bulldozer and Piledriver products some people predicted the demise of AMD to Intel. 

 

Intel back then offered better single-core performance for lower TDP, while AMD produced energy sucking chips that were not very energy efficient and had poor single-core performance. 

 

Now after AMD released Ryzen the roles seem to have switched. Intel is still stuck on 14 nm and is compensating by adding more clock speed and core counts which makes their chips less energy efficient. 

 

Is Intel in 2019 in as poor a shape as AMD was in the early 2010s? 

Intel still pulls a head when it comes to gaming due to sheer clock speeds. They still have a huge market share in the server market and that isn't likely to flip anytime soon. By the time AMD starts to gain grown intel will be ready with their new product line. It would take intel getting smashed for 4-6 years to flip the positions of them and AMD.

 

I expect we are going to see some big leaps in technology in the CPU market in the next few years due to the competition being back in the space.

[PlayStation 2]

Hell no. Bulldozer was a fucking apartment complex fire when it dropped. Massive disappointments in most workloads compared to the juggernauts that were the Sandy Bridge CPUs, while Intel CPUs are a little behind AMD CPUs nowadays in numerous, largely multithreaded tasks. Intel also has a massive general market advantage. For every laptop with an AMD chip in it, you'll find like 2.5 with an Intel chip in it instead.

[Princess Luna]

FX 9590 juggernaut making boards catch fire while sucking 250W+ while being destroyed by an i5 2500K let alone i7 4790K's is in no way comparable to an i9 9900K being arguably still the best 8c/16t around... just terribly priced

[AngryBeaver]

8 hours ago, Genwyn said:

I wouldn't say either of those things is true. The Ryzen 3 and 5 lineup have been incredibly popular and are only growing, if you count current gen releases AMD is very much so on top except for the HEDT enthusiast market which is buying Intel. Clock speed hasn't been a factor for a few years now as games have become more and more multithreaded.

 

And their enterprise and server share is rapidly, like super rapidly dying off, EPYC and Threadripper took their toll hard. Intels competition for AMD Rome is a 400w housefire that costs like 7 grand. They lost a lot of their non contract customers with the launch of EPYC and they're still losing more.

 

So a few things here. Clock speed IS still a factor unless you are moving to higher resolutions... it has even become a bottleneck at 1440p with current gen cards. It isn't exactly that the games aren't supporting multi-threading, but more that dx11 and dx12 still don't have a good way of handling draw calls so they are all handled on 1 cpu core. This means that the amount of draw calls you can make will come down to your IPC X clock rate. Which currently comes out slightly ahead in intels favor due to 5+ ghz overclocks. 

 

Quote

AMD All Set To Capture 10% of the Total Server CPU Market by 2020, Report Indicates – Will Secure More Deals With 7nm EPYC CPUs Due To Strong Price / Performance Leadership

https://wccftech.com/amd-epyc-server-cpu-7nm-market-share-2020-report/ (take this source with a grain of salt) Even still they tend to over-exaggerate things.

 

My point is 10% of the total server market is a small percentage. You also have to look at how often companies actually replace servers with new ones. So I do think they will climb to 10% maybe even 20% in the next few years, but I am also pretty sure intel will have an answer to them shortly. Intel isn't a slouch and has only really be caught with with their pants down one other time... this time wasn't even them being unprepared... it was having production issues and setbacks on 10nm.

 

I just don't see AMD taking over the server market and that is where the majority of money is anyways for intel.

 

Now they will take a hit in the gaming market, but then again that is only going to be a small portion too that decide to upgrade in the window that they are pushing intel. I for example will be upgrading to a 3950x it looks like at this point, but if intel comes up with an answer by then  that might change... or I will probably build a new intel based machine again once intel puts out some killer new chip. So there are people like me and we are kind of an exception to your general market share model.

 

Ultimately though... they haven't stomped intel in straight gaming performance. They have crushed them on the value of their CPU's though. They are also hurting them in the productivity space. I mean 12 cores at the price of intel's 8, but also only about 5-8% slower per core (due to clocks speeds NOT IPC) is a huge accomplishment for AMD. I think it is great for consumers as it is going to really push the CPU space in a positive way.

[Tristerin]

Intel CANT crush AMD - or it becomes a Monopoly and will be dismantled.  This is all on purpose imho.  

[Donut417]

I’d say no. Intel has did an ok job at diversifying. I mean they make NAND flash, SSDs, both desktop and server CPUs on top of the fact they are moving in to dGPUs as well. While there CPU business might be hurting, the other parts will keep the company afloat. Hopefully this will put a fire under Intel’s ass and they might start innovating again. 

[BarneyP]

In the desktop market, Intel should be worried, but their situation is not as bad as AMD's was a few years back.

 

In the server market ... Intel look to be in massive, massive trouble. Epyc Rome puts them to shame to a quite ridiculous extent. In some areas of the product stack AMD are offering 3 and even 4 times instructions per second per dollar. Not only 3-4 times bang for buck. By practically every criterion, Epyc Rome soundly thrashes Intel - much more so than Intel was ever thrashing AMD in the desktop or server market, performance-wise.

 

And the server market is much more lucrative. 

[The Torrent]

amd was shit until like a year ago imo

 

 

 

 

 

shut up ur killing me making me say until a year ago isnt that enough

[The Torrent]

Intel aint doing bad, they just being lazy thinking they can afford to take a hit

 

 

they still got cash in their accs.

[3 Lions]

2 hours ago, The Torrent said:

they just being lazy thinking they can afford to take a hit

No they aren't being 'lazy', they are just taking their time in the R&D process. I'd rather have a CPU architecture that rewrites the rule books in terms of what a CPU can really do than a CPU architecture developed in 18 months with minimal performance boost over the previous generation. When Intel feels they've got competitive 10nm products I think single-core and multi-core performance will be record breaking, especially the i9 varient. Of course Intel currently gets a lot of stick in the low-mid budget market, however I think along with the extended R&D process they are also restructuring the way they price their products to become more competitive with AMD (in this market). 

Edited August 17, 2019 by LinusTechTipsFanFromDarlo

[mr moose]

1 hour ago, The Torrent said:

Intel aint doing bad, they just being lazy thinking they can afford to take a hit

 

 

 

 

I'll never understand where this concept comes from. 

 

There is literally nothing to suggest any company has been lazy ever let alone Intel with the hundreds of articles and press releases talking about everything they have been working on, for how long and their expected roadmaps. 

[DrMacintosh]

Honestly, the only thing Intel has to worry about right now is the desktop (and Servers). Their money maker, mobile, is on track with 10nm and beastly iGPUs. 

[melete]

Intel's revenue is such that they have a very, very long way to fall until they have to worry about the sort of problems AMD was having in the early 2010s. Their fabbing problems are a serious concern that will see Intel erode market share, but Intel still has a whole lot of resources to invest into future processes and right the ship, Obviously there's some point where Intel and AMD's market share across many different CPU market segments (desktop, mobile, server, etc.) gets reversed, but we are a very, very long way away from that point. Even if AMD's offerings are very strong compared to Intel's right now.

[The Torrent]

10 hours ago, mr moose said:

 

I'll never understand where this concept comes from. 

 

There is literally nothing to suggest any company has been lazy ever let alone Intel with the hundreds of articles and press releases talking about everything they have been working on, for how long and their expected roadmaps. 

Ultimately intel only cares about its shareholders and its stocks are exactly where they where a year ago. 46.50 on point.

[vanished]

If we compare FX to sandy and ivy bridge, AMD had way lower single-threaded performance, much higher TDP, and similar multi-threaded performance but at a lower price to make up for it.  It didn't really make sense for anyone, but at least they seemed aware of it.

 

Now, if we look at Intel vs AMD, Intel has similar single-threaded performance (trades blows depending on the task), way higher TDP, especially when overclocked, and much lower multi-threaded, and is charging anywhere from as much to over double.  The tables have flipped - Intel is now the one that makes no sense, but they seem to be unaware of this so far.

 

One important distinction though is that FX at the time was garbage for what most people wanted (gaming), while Intel, despite also making no sense now as I said, is at least still perfectly viable for this, if not slightly ahead.  In the consumer space (4 - 8 cores, or 12 with AMD now), FX failed to deliver on requirements, so that was really it.  It didn't matter that it was cheaper.  Now, Intel, though falling behind in offering "bonuses" and value-oriented pricing, is at least a solid performer for most people's needs.  That's an important distinction.  Both (AMD then and Intel now) didn't make sense, but at least Intel now is still a viable product, where as literally no one was even considering FX at the time, and especially in to the haswell and skylake days.  It wasn't a competition, they may as well have not existed.  Now, that's for the consumer space though.  Intel's current high end stuff (10+ cores) is much the same story as AMD was back then.  Afaik no sane person would consider it, there's just no point.  You pay massively more for the same or less performance.  It's not really competition, they've just failed.

[mr moose]

10 hours ago, The Torrent said:

Ultimately intel only cares about its shareholders and its stocks are exactly where they where a year ago. 46.50 on point.

What does that have to do with being lazy?

[Kisai]

10 hours ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

 

One important distinction though is that FX at the time was garbage for what most people wanted (gaming), while Intel, despite also making no sense now as I said, is at least still perfectly viable for this, if not slightly ahead. 

 

The problem is that AMD squanders it's lead, every time. Remember the introduction of x86-64? vs Intel's sad attempt and throwing the baby out with the bath water on Itanium? Remember Intel throwing the Netburst architecture out the window? AMD had a real good chance of becoming the preferred chip and somehow managed to screw up their lead.

 

I don't see them getting the lead again here either, and it's primarily because they don't ship chips in the volumes or reliability tier needed to stay on top of Intel. Why do people choose Intel? It's not because of price, I'll tell you that much.

 

If I build an Intel system, I'm pretty much guaranteed to get a rock-stable system as long as I pick appropriate parts. If I start cutting corners like buying (popular rubbish brand) parts or trying to overclock poorer performing parts (eg i5's) then I'm in serious trouble when a weak part decides to take the entire system with it. I've had that happen. GPU , CPU, RAM, MB, and PSU were all replaced one after the other. And that was a Xeon CPU. My mistake was picking cheap parts for the rest of it, and I wound up buying new parts twice for it as each part failed.

 

This is one of the reasons why I'm personally wary of "trying to save money" on a system by picking cheaper options. It's either pick the best option, or don't complain when it does fail. 

 

So this is a unique time where AMD has actually produced a part that I'd consider buying because it meets the performance target, but I'm still wary of the TDP and AMD's chipset build quality. I don't want to spend $2000 replacing everything and then have the CPU or MB chipset become a lemon.

 

I've owned two systems with Intel CPU's that were "lemons" at some point. One was the Pentium II the other was the Xeon X3220 (eqiv Q6600), the unique ways these systems failed, have me wary of ever buying parts again where I'm likely to get an early stepping level with unfixable bugs. Speaking of, that CPU I have now? Intel disabled the TSX instruction on in a later BIOS update.

 

And why is this the case?

 

https://danluu.com/cpu-bugs/

 

Because Intel has been cutting corners for the last five years on purpose. So instead of other companies trying to be as good as Intel, instead Intel is trying to be as bad as some ARM vendors.

 

So if AMD manages to produce better chips than Intel, entirely because Intel's Validation group decided to not test in-house as much and instead let the public find the bugs for them and patch them out with Windows Update/BIOS updates.

 

 

[mr moose]

6 minutes ago, Kisai said:

 

The problem is that AMD squanders it's lead, every time. Remember the introduction of x86-64? vs Intel's sad attempt and throwing the baby out with the bath water on Itanium? Remember Intel throwing the Netburst architecture out the window? AMD had a real good chance of becoming the preferred chip and somehow managed to screw up their lead.

 

I don't see them getting the lead again here either, and it's primarily because they don't ship chips in the volumes or reliability tier needed to stay on top of Intel. Why do people choose Intel? It's not because of price, I'll tell you that much.

 

If I build an Intel system, I'm pretty much guaranteed to get a rock-stable system as long as I pick appropriate parts. If I start cutting corners like buying (popular rubbish brand) parts or trying to overclock poorer performing parts (eg i5's) then I'm in serious trouble when a weak part decides to take the entire system with it. I've had that happen. GPU , CPU, RAM, MB, and PSU were all replaced one after the other. And that was a Xeon CPU. My mistake was picking cheap parts for the rest of it, and I wound up buying new parts twice for it as each part failed.

 

This is one of the reasons why I'm personally wary of "trying to save money" on a system by picking cheaper options. It's either pick the best option, or don't complain when it does fail. 

 

So this is a unique time where AMD has actually produced a part that I'd consider buying because it meets the performance target, but I'm still wary of the TDP and AMD's chipset build quality. I don't want to spend $2000 replacing everything and then have the CPU or MB chipset become a lemon.

 

I've owned two systems with Intel CPU's that were "lemons" at some point. One was the Pentium II the other was the Xeon X3220 (eqiv Q6600), the unique ways these systems failed, have me wary of ever buying parts again where I'm likely to get an early stepping level with unfixable bugs. Speaking of, that CPU I have now? Intel disabled the TSX instruction on in a later BIOS update.

 

And why is this the case?

 

https://danluu.com/cpu-bugs/

 

Because Intel has been cutting corners for the last five years on purpose. So instead of other companies trying to be as good as Intel, instead Intel is trying to be as bad as some ARM vendors.

 

So if AMD manages to produce better chips than Intel, entirely because Intel's Validation group decided to not test in-house as much and instead let the public find the bugs for them and patch them out with Windows Update/BIOS updates.

 

 

This is certainly the reason Intel maintains the lead in the corporate world, however I don't think the new Epyc's are that unstable that complete new server farms would be any less reliable.  they certainly won't get bought in addition to existing but complete replacements are likely.

[vanished]

32 minutes ago, mr moose said:

This is certainly the reason Intel maintains the lead in the corporate world, however I don't think the new Epyc's are that unstable that complete new server farms would be any less reliable.  they certainly won't get bought in addition to existing but complete replacements are likely.

If anything they're far more reliable at this point.  They've been out for a few years now and had time for any issues to become apparent, meanwhile Intel has suffered tons of serious security issues that matter most of all in a server environment, and you can bet that the people running them are well aware of this.

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

So this is a unique time where AMD has actually produced a part that I'd consider buying because it meets the performance target, but I'm still wary of the TDP and AMD's chipset build quality. I don't want to spend $2000 replacing everything and then have the CPU or MB chipset become a lemon.

What about the TDP? Intel has similar TDP on the Xeons also so I don't see how this matters much at all, buy a lesser SKU with a lower TDP if you think you don't have the cooling required. Remember TDP is only about cooling so nothing else matters other than that, if you can cool it then what the number happens to be isn't of great relevance. That's why Cascade Lake-AP being 400W TDP doesn't matter, it's designed for direct die water cooling and any system you can buy with them comes like that as it's BGA only.