
AMD vs. Intel CPU Market Share: 7nm Makes Landfall as Price War Begins - ItsTotallyOn
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-vs-intel-cpu-market-share-7nm-makes-landfall-as-price-war-begins
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lettergram
Wait... what?

> Intel CFO George Davis implied during an interview with Barron's this week
> that the company is digging in its heels for the long haul, saying "What
> we’ve said though, the delay in 10 nanometer means that we’re going to be a
> little bit disadvantaged on unit cost for a period of time." Davis then
> noted the company expects to return to revenue growth and margin expansion
> in 2023 when it overcomes the late ramp to 10nm. As a result, it's rational
> to expect lower pricing on Intel's upcoming 10th-Gen Comet Lake processors,
> too.

If everything goes right for Intel, they don't expect revenue growth until
2023?

By the time Intel hits 10nm in stride, TSMC plans to be rolling out their
3nm... [1]

[1] [https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/2567/tsmc-talks-7nm-5nm-
yield...](https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/2567/tsmc-talks-7nm-5nm-yield-and-
next-gen-5g-and-hpc-packaging/)

~~~
jcranmer
Intel plans to start shipping 7nm in 2021, and 5nm would be coming online
perhaps 2023. See [https://www.anandtech.com/show/14312/intel-process-
technolog...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/14312/intel-process-technology-
roadmap-refined-nodes-specialized-technologies) as a source.

~~~
baybal2
The thing is, Intel can't progress to their 7nm node if they can't even spin
up 10nm one.

Siltronics (Intel's wafer supplier) is said to now to have a field day. Intel
haven't opened any new 14nm fabs, and those were maxed out years ago. The only
explanation why Intel not only expanded their orders to Siltronics, but even
entered new negotiations with other suppliers, is that they are spending a
whack a lot of wafer on something other than existing 14nm manufacturing.

It is either their GPU's are actually being taped out in extreme secrecy, or
the yield on 10nm is so low that they are "bruteforcing" it

~~~
zaarn
My bet is on the later, considering early 10nm CPUs had the iGPU fused off and
fairly abysmal and inconsistent overclock performance.

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ChuckMcM
This illustrates one of the truism's in semi-conductors which is that you need
to hold an advantage for 18 months before you have enough momentum to actually
move the needle. If I were AMD's marketing team I would start hammering on ECC
memory in the desktop and on laptops. Anything with 16GB or more of main
memory. Intel has held that as a Xeon differentiator for a long time and it
adds something like 20% margin to the part. That AMD can push PCIe 4.0 and ECC
at 'desktop' prices is pretty neat.

~~~
lorenzhs
Outside of our bubble, people don't care about ECC memory on their laptop or
desktop. It also adds ~12% (iirc) more memory cells, meaning higher memory
cost, which is going to be a hard sell given that it's a solution to a problem
that most customers don't even know about, nor would most care much if it was
explained to them. From a user perspective, memory is fine as it is, and if
memory corruption does occur, it's probably blamed on buggy software. That
would make any such push look like a desperate "we need a differentiator to
tell people why they should buy our CPUs and upsell them in the process" move.
Competing on price, speed, and (for laptops) power consumption would appear
much more promising.

~~~
vardump
It needs to be marketed as a reliability improvement it is. Lots of people
simply don't know about it at all, but would love better stability.

~~~
kube-system
This is mass market retail we’re talking about. Unless it’s easily
demonstrable, people are going to buy the prettier box on the shelf or the one
that’s cheaper.

I’d bet money that when company X adds ECC and calls it “super stable memory”,
company Y adds a button in the settings menu that calls fsck and calls that
“hyper stable memory” and undercuts company X by 12%.

------
unlinked_dll
I have two questions for people at intel and the peanut gallery

\- If I want a high performance CPU that's not "workstation" class: why should
I buy an i7 over a 3700x or 3800x?

\- How meaningful is the "intel inside" brand when IT/GIS departments buy
machines in bulk for their enterprise users?

~~~
NicoJuicy
I think why you want to buy a Intel now is:

\- Laptop ( battery life is better on Intel CPU's), but AMD has this covered
next Q.

\- Intel NUC ( it's very practical )

\- For Single core optimized applications ( eg. Some games) when you don't
care about the total price at all. Intel's one core performance was better and
support in games is lacking for a lot of cores. I think next Ryzen will handle
this.

\- When AMD is sold out completely and you need a CPU now :p

Other than that, i think it's all AMD (eg. ECC memory, price, performance and
buying the "underdog" ).

Except if someone just wants to pay the highest price just for show, then you
could still buy an Intel.

Intel inside is an OEM partnership, that i hope AMD will break :) .

~~~
haberman
When I was building a PC last December, I considered AMD until I saw that
[https://github.com/mozilla/rr](https://github.com/mozilla/rr) requires an
Intel processor.

> rr currently requires an Intel CPU with Nehalem (2010) or later
> microarchitecture.

I don't even use rr at the moment, but I hate the idea of building a monster
machine only to find that I'm left out of some cutting-edge technology because
I went off-brand.

~~~
skissane
They have been working on AMD support, see for example:
[https://github.com/mozilla/rr/issues/2034](https://github.com/mozilla/rr/issues/2034)

The problem is that AMD CPUs have lots of bugs in their performance counter
implementation. Intel CPUs don't have those bugs. With newer generations of
AMD CPUs, AMD has fixed some of these bugs, but others remain.

I wonder why AMD hasn't stepped up to get involved in this project. There
might be nothing that can be done with currently shipping silicon, but at
least AMD could make sure that on their future silicon it all works. Fixing
their performance counter bugs would likely benefit other projects as well.

~~~
garaetjjte
>With newer generations of AMD CPUs, AMD has fixed some of these bugs

Or rather, broke something. There are suitable counters working correctly on
late Bulldozer iterations, but not on Zen.

~~~
zaarn
Considering Zen is a groundup new architecture, it's hard to call that
"breaking" it, it wasn't correctly implemented on the new design.

~~~
skissane
Isn't this a sign that AMD's test suites are incomplete?

If they implement a feature correctly then break it in the new design, it
suggests their test suites didn't exercise it properly, otherwise (you'd
think) they would have caught the regression in the new design and fixed it
before release.

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NicoJuicy
It's nuts how Intel is using it's monopoly. I don't have any other explanation
why more OEM's changed to AMD for desktop and only recently Intel dropped
prices.

For laptops, we'll see in the next iteration as battery is the most important
aspect there and the next awaited version is coming soon.

Interesting times ^^

~~~
integricho
You mean new types of batteries?

~~~
NicoJuicy
Improved Ryzen for laptops so battery life would be better ;)

Current iteration is "not good enough" on that aspect ( = battery life).

