Is Intel done for?

[Man]

I've closely followed CPUs for the past two decades (I'm 34, by the way) and, honestly, I believe Intel has never been in a worse position.

• Their consumer CPU business is in shambles, and even in the datacenter market, their market share is steadily declining.
• They're currently in the midst of a CPU rebrand, desperately retiring the iconic i3/5/7/9 in an attempt to change consumer perception.
• Their CPU architecture reached its peak with Kaby Lake (i7-7700K) or perhaps the short-lived i9-9900K, which was completely annihilated by Zen2 (Ryzen 7 3700X).
• Their feeble attempt at "big.LITTLE" has failed miserably, lacking any redeeming qualities.
• Their foundry is falling far behind the likes of TSMC and even Samsung, becoming a cash sinkhole.
• Their newly established GPU division has struggled to gain any traction, securing less than 1% market share.
• Their foray into the discrete GPU industry has proven to be a major misstep, now that crypto mining is dead for the foreseeable future.

Despite all these challenges, Intel seems unwilling to change their ways. They persist in changing the socket every two generations, locking clock multipliers, restricting user voltage tweaks, limiting overclocking to high-end chipsets, and just screwing over users by doing things like disabling AVX-512.

 

The only thing they're willing to change is the brand, like that's going to help!

 

Given Intel's deep-rooted bureaucracy and anti-consumer practices, I simply don't see how the company can survive AMD's relentless assault.

Now, some might argue: "What about Netburst, a.k.a. Pentium 4 and Pentium D?"

 

Well, at least back then, their foundry business was a force to be reckoned with. They were rolling out 65nm CPUs in early 2006, at least a year ahead of both TSMC and Global Foundry. So, at least their foundry business was at the top. But now... well, I'm sure you're already know!

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

3 minutes ago, Man said:

I've closely followed CPUs for the past two decades (I'm 34, by the way) and, honestly, I believe Intel has never been in a worse position.

• Their consumer CPU business is in shambles, and even in the datacenter market, their market share is steadily declining.
• They're currently in the midst of a CPU rebrand, desperately retiring the iconic i3/5/7/9 in an attempt to change consumer perception.
• Their CPU architecture reached its peak with Kaby Lake (i7-7700K) or perhaps the short-lived i9-9900K, which was completely annihilated by Zen2 (Ryzen 7 3700X).
• Their feeble attempt at "big.LITTLE" has failed miserably, lacking any redeeming qualities.
• Their foundry is falling far behind the likes of TSMC and even Samsung, becoming a cash sinkhole.
• Their newly established GPU division has struggled to gain any traction, securing less than 1% market share.
• Their foray into the discrete GPU industry has proven to be a major misstep, now that crypto mining is dead for the foreseeable future.

Despite all these challenges, Intel seems unwilling to change their ways. They persist in changing the socket every two generations, locking clock multipliers, restricting user voltage tweaks, limiting overclocking to high-end chipsets, and just screwing over users by doing things like disabling AVX-512.

 

The only thing they're willing to change is the brand, like that's going to help!

 

Given Intel's deep-rooted bureaucracy and anti-consumer practices, I simply don't see how the company can survive AMD's relentless assault.

Now, some might argue: "What about Netburst, a.k.a. Pentium 4 and Pentium D?"

 

Well, at least back then, their foundry business was a force to be reckoned with. They were rolling out 65nm CPUs in early 2006, at least a year ahead of both TSMC and Global Foundry. So, at least their foundry business was at the top. But now... well, I'm sure you're already know!

Short answer, no. 

[Mark Kaine]

hmm, no?

 

just because you can write it down doesn't make any of this true lol

[minervx]

Intel's desktop CPU's remain competitive in performance to price against AMD, and that's the main thing consumers in this space care about.  Intel still has most of the mobile Windows market.

 

Intel was capable of succeeding without a GPU line, so how does the fact that it's GPU line isn't successful, if it doesn't need that portion of the market?

[RONOTHAN##]

I think the only thing in the list of points that you made that's actually true is that their data center market is currently behind. 

1. Performance wise they're on par or even slightly ahead of AMD with 13th gen in most situations. Power efficiency wise sure, they're behind a fair bit, but since most people don't shop based on that the performance and price differences is what actually matters. 
2. And? They've been needing to refresh their branding since 10th gen when the names started getting weird. Dropping the "i" is a bit on the odd side, but it's not like this actually matters to the silicon that leaves the factory. 
3. This is outright false. Golden Cove was such a massive improvement over Kaby Lake/Coffee Lake that saying otherwise is just downright false. The E cores are about as performant as Zen 2 right now, let alone the P cores. 
4. What's so bad about big.LITTLE? The only real issue with it is that because it's so new software isn't optimized for it and the scheduler isn't yet perfect. In practice with workloads that have had the optimization done for it the E cores are about 30% as fast as the P core, which given that they take up 25% the space of a P core means that performance wise it actually makes more sense to pack the chip full of E cores than P cores. It's a design that's already been proven solid by Arm and more specifically Apple, saying it has "nothing redeemable" is either uninformed or ignoring a lot of other info. 
5. Their fabs are catching back up, their Intel 7 node is pretty similar to TSMC 7nm and they should be running Intel 20A (roughly equivalent to TSMC 2nm) in about a year, officially catching back up to TSMC and Samsung by that point. 
6. Did you expect their GPU division to come out of nowhere and completely stomp on AMD and Nvidia? Considering how new of a player they are, their 4% market share in the GPU division is downright impressive considering AMD is at 12%, and they'll likely trend upwards as Battlemage and other architectures release and their drivers get more mature.
7. They weren't really relying on GPU mining to sell GPUs, the A750 is just actually a good value if you don't mind the less polished driver experience. 

These observations are either completely misinformed or completely missing the point a lot of the time. Intel is far from going under, and while yes they do have some downright stupid behavior like locking internal voltages on non-K chips and breaking AVX-512 support for no reason (though admittedly you can count on one hand the number of workloads that actually benefit from AVX-512), it's not stuff that actually affects how competitive they are because most people don't care about those features anyway. This is far from the days of FX for them, they're still getting faster and are far from going under. 

[lafrente]

That's kind of like saying "Is Earth done for?" after a few earthquakes.

[Levent]

if you truly believe those things, feel free to short intel stocks lol

[tkitch]

Sure, intel's done for.  Yup.

I'ma just wait for AMD to Quadruple, then Quadruple that, and then quadruple THAT to put Intel into a super-weak position in the market.

 

Good luck with that.  

 

If you think the i7 7700k was peak?  Why does the i3 12100 trash it in ever possible metric?  The 9900k can't beat the 12100 in a number of tests, either.  

 

You've got some weird delusions, bruh.  IDGI.  

[dilpickle]

If you closely follow the CPU business you'll know that none of this matters.

[ToboRobot]

Worst comes to worst, Intel's fate could be like IBM, but they won't just disappear.

[seanondemand]

Sees that they made over 8 billion in profit last year - yep done for for sure

 

wake me up when they get taken private by a hedge fund, that’s when you’ll know. 

[Xiee]

Even with all their downturns, Intel is not "done for". They still hold a huge chunk of the market and it will only take a miracle for AMD to overtake them completely unless Intel really manages to screw something up really bad.

[art12354]

Buy INTC while it's low folks!

[Echothedolpin]

Intel’s integrated graphics compose 62% of the entire graphics chip market. Folks tend to forget that as they aren’t discrete.

[Beerzerker]

Same spewel we heard over a decade ago about AMD being "Done" due to how things were going when FX came out.

Before that it was AMD resorting to a gimmik that let customers play the silicon lotto and win extra cores for the price of a cheaper chip model.
Before that they were done when AM2 came out and AM2+ didn't do much to change things afterwards.
They were done when 775 came out and Intel's CPU speeds and efficency took off, leaving anything AMD was making at that time in the dust by comparison.

And I'm sure we'll hear it all yet again one day.

[Stahlmann]

10 hours ago, Beerzerker said:

And I'm sure we'll hear it all yet again one day.

Probably when the next generation is out and the 8950X 2% is faster than the 14900K in Valorant.

[Sarra]

I use the option that is the best for my needs. I used AMD during Socket A and 939 times, and when AMD had issues after that, I switched to Core2Duo and Core2Quad. I had an i5 4440 and a Xeon, but Ryzen was so tempting, I went with Ryzen 9 3900XT,upgraded to a 5950X.

 

Unless Intel really impressed with the 14 series... Which it won't. The brand change is going to be enough for me to entirely avoid it, it sounds and feels like a serious attempt to obfuscate the actual performance enough to the point where they can get away with egregious price gouging.

 

I mean, we'll see, I guess. I almost went with a Xeon upgrade for my server, but I ended up choosing to reuse my old 3900XT instead.

[Man]

On 7/17/2023 at 11:03 AM, RONOTHAN## said:

• Performance wise they're on par or even slightly ahead of AMD with 13th gen in most situations. Power efficiency wise sure, they're behind a fair bit, but since most people don't shop based on that the performance and price differences is what actually matters. 

Sure, by throwing power efficiency out the window by pushing the voltage/frequency curve way too far... not much unlike late-model Pentium Ds! 

 

Notice Ryzen 7 7700X's power consumption (198W) and compare it with i5-13600K (255W). To put things into perspective, the i5-13600K's power consumption is mere 7W less than the i9-7900X, a so called "HEDT" CPU.

 

That's kind of... bad!

 

 

On 7/17/2023 at 11:03 AM, RONOTHAN## said:

• And? They've been needing to refresh their branding since 10th gen when the names started getting weird. Dropping the "i" is a bit on the odd side, but it's not like this actually matters to the silicon that leaves the factory. 

 

It's a sign of things to come. Intel finally realizes that it'll take years to catch-up with Ryzen. 

 

Either that or 14th Gen. is going to be revolutionary on the level of Conroe (Core 2), or at least Sandy Bridge, which I highly doubt!

 

On 7/17/2023 at 11:03 AM, RONOTHAN## said:

• This is outright false. Golden Cove was such a massive improvement over Kaby Lake/Coffee Lake that saying otherwise is just downright false. The E cores are about as performant as Zen 2 right now, let alone the P cores. 

 

Check the comparison between i7-7700K and i3-13100F below. 

 

On 7/17/2023 at 11:03 AM, RONOTHAN## said:

• What's so bad about big.LITTLE? The only real issue with it is that because it's so new software isn't optimized for it and the scheduler isn't yet perfect. In practice with workloads that have had the optimization done for it the E cores are about 30% as fast as the P core, which given that they take up 25% the space of a P core means that performance wise it actually makes more sense to pack the chip full of E cores than P cores. It's a design that's already been proven solid by Arm and more specifically Apple, saying it has "nothing redeemable" is either uninformed or ignoring a lot of other info. 

 

I can see some point of big.LITTLE in mobile space but desktop?

 

I'd much rather take grown-up P-Cores than baby E-Cores which are more or less worthless. Personally, Intel mostly bothered with big.LITTLE to skew multi-core synthetic benchmark resuls in their favor!

 

Plus, they nuked AVX-512 because of big.LITTLE so...

 

On 7/17/2023 at 11:03 AM, RONOTHAN## said:

• Their fabs are catching back up, their Intel 7 node is pretty similar to TSMC 7nm and they should be running Intel 20A (roughly equivalent to TSMC 2nm) in about a year, officially catching back up to TSMC and Samsung by that point. 

 

Just because Intel calls it "7nm" doesn't mean it can keep-up with TSMC's 7nm N7. 

 

Besides, N7 is old news. For perspective, N5 was a full node jump over N7 and the upcoming N3 will be a full node jump over N5. 

 

Even Samsung is now well ahead of Intel with their 3nm GAAFET, which is 'supposedly' on par with N4 or at last N5 which are still on FinFET. I can only imagine how things will improve once TSMC finally move to GAAFET. 

 

On 7/17/2023 at 11:03 AM, RONOTHAN## said:

• Did you expect their GPU division to come out of nowhere and completely stomp on AMD and Nvidia? Considering how new of a player they are, their 4% market share in the GPU division is downright impressive considering AMD is at 12%, and they'll likely trend upwards as Battlemage and other architectures release and their drivers get more mature.

 

They'd a shot with Larabee but nope, they just dumped it in order to focus their foundries output on the booming Core 2 sales. 

 

On 7/17/2023 at 11:03 AM, RONOTHAN## said:

• They weren't really relying on GPU mining to sell GPUs, the A750 is just actually a good value if you don't mind the less polished driver experience. 

 

It's an okay choice, I suppose, if you're only going to play modern AAAs. But aside from that it's pretty much useless. 

 

However, I "do" want a 3rd player in the dGPU market. 

 

23 hours ago, Beerzerker said:

Before that it was AMD resorting to a gimmik that let customers play the silicon lotto and win extra cores for the price of a cheaper chip model.
Before that they were done when AM2 came out and AM2+ didn't do much to change things afterwards.
They were done when 775 came out and Intel's CPU speeds and efficency took off, leaving anything AMD was making at that time in the dust by comparison.

 

Everyone does that, mate. 

 

i5 CPUs are essentially cut-down i7s!

 

On 7/17/2023 at 7:20 PM, tkitch said:

If you think the i7 7700k was peak?  Why does the i3 12100 trash it in ever possible metric?  The 9900k can't beat the 12100 in a number of tests, either.  

 

While there's indeed an IPC uplift as a 4.1 GHz i3-12100F matches a 5.0GHz i7-7700K, this difference is most likely coming primarily from larger L2 and L3 cache pools (256KB/8MB vs. 1,250KB/12MB), as well as DDR5 memory. 

 

The i3-12100F simply has far more bandwidth to play with. 
 

 

[tkitch]

4 minutes ago, Man said:

While there's indeed an IPC uplift as a 4.1 GHz i3-12100F matches a 5.0GHz i7-7700K, this difference is most likely coming primarily from larger L2 and L3 cache pools (256KB/8MB vs. 1,250KB/12MB), as well as DDR5 memory. 

 

The i3-12100F simply has far more bandwidth to play with. 
 

 

So, do you expect components to just not improve?

 

of course newer memory is better, hell the 7700k on a number of chipsets was limited to 2400mhz ram.

 

but a cpu's performance isn't limited to just the silicon.  As you mentioned, the IPC got better.  (And also at nearly a 20% frequency drop off, so that says even more for it.)

 

so yeah, the 12100 is better.  For more than just "cache and RAM"

 

If someone wanted to disable some cores on a 12600k to get a 4c/8t chip, I'd be curious to see how a (nearly) 5GHz chip compares to a 7700k 5ghz.

[-rascal-]

On 7/16/2023 at 9:25 PM, Man said:

I've closely followed CPUs for the past two decades (I'm 34, by the way) and, honestly, I believe Intel has never been in a worse position.

• Their consumer CPU business is in shambles, and even in the datacenter market, their market share is steadily declining.
• They're currently in the midst of a CPU rebrand, desperately retiring the iconic i3/5/7/9 in an attempt to change consumer perception.
• Their CPU architecture reached its peak with Kaby Lake (i7-7700K) or perhaps the short-lived i9-9900K, which was completely annihilated by Zen2 (Ryzen 7 3700X).
• Their feeble attempt at "big.LITTLE" has failed miserably, lacking any redeeming qualities.
• Their foundry is falling far behind the likes of TSMC and even Samsung, becoming a cash sinkhole.
• Their newly established GPU division has struggled to gain any traction, securing less than 1% market share.
• Their foray into the discrete GPU industry has proven to be a major misstep, now that crypto mining is dead for the foreseeable future.

Despite all these challenges, Intel seems unwilling to change their ways. They persist in changing the socket every two generations, locking clock multipliers, restricting user voltage tweaks, limiting overclocking to high-end chipsets, and just screwing over users by doing things like disabling AVX-512.

 

The only thing they're willing to change is the brand, like that's going to help!

 

Given Intel's deep-rooted bureaucracy and anti-consumer practices, I simply don't see how the company can survive AMD's relentless assault.

Now, some might argue: "What about Netburst, a.k.a. Pentium 4 and Pentium D?"

 

Well, at least back then, their foundry business was a force to be reckoned with. They were rolling out 65nm CPUs in early 2006, at least a year ahead of both TSMC and Global Foundry. So, at least their foundry business was at the top. But now... well, I'm sure you're already know!

 

Intel kind of step out of the HEDT market....but it seems that they are attempting to make a return.

 

Yes, the re-branding / re-naming can (will) be confusing... like the rest of the industry, I DON'T exactly know WHY Intel is doing this.

 

I wouldn't say the big.LITTLE design has failed; it excels over AMD in certain use cases.

 

Yes, Intel needs to address the power consumption of their CPUs, as someone pointed out.

BUT you can ALSO say that for AMD. THEY need to sort out their power consumption of the RX 7000 series vs nVidia's RTX 4000 series.

 

This is Intel's FIRST GENERATION of GPUs. They are able to hit RTX 3060 / RTX 4060 levels of performance for a FIRST GEN product.

For comparison, look the the Moore Threads MTT S80 China-made GPU; another FIRST GEN GPU.

Even a GTX 750 Ti obliterates it. It's also a driver / software heap of hot garbage.

 

[cmndr]

Quote

• Their feeble attempt at "big.LITTLE" has failed miserably, lacking any redeeming qualities.

Looks pretty solid to me overall. Intel is competing well with AMD despite a 1 process node disadvantage.
Alderlake was just all out better than Zen 3 on launch, though I think Zen 4 /4C are a stronger designs than Raptorlake but ehh. 
Financially and technologically Intel is behind AMD on a number of measures but they're still pretty close in on a lot of measures. 
Overall Intel is in a MUCH MUCH MUCH stronger position than AMD was in 2015 (I joked about AMD going bankrupt and joked about their idea for a 32C Zeppelin going down in flames). 

 

Quote

I believe Intel has never been in a worse position.

At least from a product perspective, RaptorLake is MUCH more appealing relative to AMD's parts than Smithfield ever was vs Denmark. To be fair to your claim though... Yonah > Denmark.

[RONOTHAN##]

3 minutes ago, tkitch said:

If someone wanted to disable some cores on a 12600k to get a 4c/8t chip, I'd be curious to see how a (nearly) 5GHz chip compares to a 7700k 5ghz.

You can also just overclock the 12100 to 5GHz, where the performance scales a ton (40% faster in some instances, more likely because of the increased cache speed)

 

 

16 minutes ago, Man said:

I'd much rather take grown-up P-Cores than baby E-Cores which are more or less worthless. Personally, Intel mostly bothered with big.LITTLE to skew multi-core synthetic benchmark resuls in their favor!

Yeah, that's the entire reason for big.LITTLE on desktop, because if you need the P cores for anything you likely don't need more than 6-8, and if you are doing multi-core workloads that scale to many threads the 4 E cores are 20-30% faster than a single P core while taking up the same die space. The downside is the lack of software support, which while annoying is getting better. 

 

19 minutes ago, Man said:

Sure, by throwing power efficiency out the window by pushing the voltage/frequency curve way too far... not much unlike late-model Pentium Ds! 

They're priced to take that into account, idle power consumption on Intel is actually a little bit better, and unless you live in the EU with ridiculous power pricing you aren't super likely to actually notice a difference on your power bill either way. 

[danalog]

CPU market dominance comes and goes in waves. AMD hit their stride with the K6, K7, and K8 architectures but sharply fell off with the introduction of the Core 2 Duo, almost vanishing from the market for a solid ~8 years. Ryzen was their big resurgence. Sometimes you make a better chip than your competitor, sometimes your competitor releases the Pentium D and you beat it with a real dual-core.

[Donut417]

On 7/17/2023 at 12:25 AM, Man said:

I believe Intel has never been in a worse position.

Are they hurting? Yes. Are they done? Nope. Intel will figure things out. AMD was a Dumpster Fire for like over a decade and they got themselves out of it. Also with the state of the world I doubt Uncle Sam will let Intel go out of business. 

[starsmine]

On 7/17/2023 at 12:25 AM, Man said:

I've closely followed CPUs for the past two decades (I'm 34, by the way) and, honestly, I believe Intel has never been in a worse position.

• Their consumer CPU business is in shambles, and even in the datacenter market, their market share is steadily declining.

Sure, shambles is exaggerating, but sure, zen is gaining market share.

On 7/17/2023 at 12:25 AM, Man said:

• They're currently in the midst of a CPU rebrand, desperately retiring the iconic i3/5/7/9 in an attempt to change consumer perception.

What? This whole framing is not accurate to the goals, or inciting reasons.

On 7/17/2023 at 12:25 AM, Man said:

• Their CPU architecture reached its peak with Kaby Lake (i7-7700K) or perhaps the short-lived i9-9900K, which was completely annihilated by Zen2 (Ryzen 7 3700X).

Huh? Like I dont even know what framing you are going for here. 

On 7/17/2023 at 12:25 AM, Man said:

• Their feeble attempt at "big.LITTLE" has failed miserably, lacking any redeeming qualities.

That is just a lie, Alder lake and Rapter Lake have been very successful for both desktop and laptop use cases

On 7/17/2023 at 12:25 AM, Man said:

• Their foundry is falling far behind the likes of TSMC and even Samsung, becoming a cash sinkhole.

That's not true. Its just patently false, they stumbled with intel 7(also known as 10nm, which is more similar to TSMC and Samsungs 7 then their 10), but are already back in action with intel 4 with engineering samples already coming off the line. 

On 7/17/2023 at 12:25 AM, Man said:

• Their newly established GPU division has struggled to gain any traction, securing less than 1% market share.

not sure where you got 1% from, Yes, they have lost quite a bit of money on first gen ARC, but there are a lot of lessons learned. Sure BIG battlemage is likely cancled, but I would not call them dead because of that.... And where did you get 1% from?

On 7/17/2023 at 12:25 AM, Man said:

• Their foray into the discrete GPU industry has proven to be a major misstep, now that crypto mining is dead for the foreseeable future.

it is very difficult to say one way or the other. But Crypto was a blip, it does not mater outside of the 2 years it mattered. 

On 7/17/2023 at 12:25 AM, Man said:

Despite all these challenges, Intel seems unwilling to change their ways. They persist in changing the socket every two generations, locking clock multipliers, restricting user voltage tweaks, limiting overclocking to high-end chipsets, and just screwing over users by doing things like disabling AVX-512.

 

The only thing they're willing to change is the brand, like that's going to help!

 

Given Intel's deep-rooted bureaucracy and anti-consumer practices, I simply don't see how the company can survive AMD's relentless assault.

Now, some might argue: "What about Netburst, a.k.a. Pentium 4 and Pentium D?"

 

Well, at least back then, their foundry business was a force to be reckoned with. They were rolling out 65nm CPUs in early 2006, at least a year ahead of both TSMC and Global Foundry. So, at least their foundry business was at the top. But now... well, I'm sure you're already know!

I really thought this was going to be a thread about how next year will be a misstep for intel with zen5 coming out and no strong response from intel as they just refresh Raptor lake instead of launching a desktop meteor lake, and framing that whole misstep as doomer "intel is done for". But I was wrong, its dumber then that. 

God imagine thinking that going from 90% market share to 80% over 5 years means doomer brain.