Despite past hubris, Intel has made big strides in reaching parity with AMD CPUs. Sierra Forest (launched this summer) offers 144 cores per chip, more than 2x what Intel was offering last year and on par with AMD server CPUs for the first time in many years.
There is also a huge political headwind when it comes to onshoring leading edge semiconductor fabrication - no company will benefit from this more than Intel.
I’d expect more pain in the medium term - they certainly missed the AI boat - but I wouldn’t be surprised if Gelsinger succeeds in turning things around, and I’m rooting for them. Competition between AMD and Intel, and between TSMC and Intel - will be nothing but favorable for core count, $/core, and the continuation of Moore’s Law.
At first glance, the core counts appear competitive, but of course, comparing Intel "E cores" to "cores" is not at all fair. The comment made me curious about performance though.
Sierra Forest does better if perf/watt (or energy consumed per run) is the metric, but still loses to the 64 core Epyc Siena in those same benchmarks.
I would guess there are some very efficiently parallel workloads where tons of "E" cores win in performance, but the current Intel CPUs do not seem to be competitive in my non-expert opinion.
"As evidenced by Apple’s M series chips, ARM has taken a huge bite out of x86’s market share. While ARM was focused on power efficiency, Intel was trying to brute force power out of older designs by throwing more watts into every successive chip. In the massive laptop and data center segments, this is a losing strategy. Not only that, but they significantly missed out on EUV by not investing a decade ago. Now the combination of TSMC, AMD, and ARM are slowly but surely eating away at Intel’s market share. All 3 companies are worth significantly more than Intel at this point."
> ARM has taken a huge bite out of x86’s market share.
Citation needed? I don't see many desktops with ARM chips. Most of the servers I see are still x86. etc.
I'm no Intel apologist, but Intel is dealing with the standard problem that investors love fabless semiconductor companies and hate actual fabs.
And everybody seems to have forgotten what happens when fab capacity is constrained and your fabless companies can't ship a single thing. A strong earthquake or tsunami that affects Taiwan and all those fabless companies shut down again. But, then, goldfish have longer memories than business executives.
Neverthless, Intel does have structural problems. Technically, the problem is that Intel is a fab first and foremost and everybody else are second-class. This means that really good design engineers and software people are going to be hamstrung in the company.
Politically, Intel is a company in which everybody stabs one another. This is normal for most big companies, but Grove actuively encouraged it. Consequently, people hoarded their knowledge as it was valuable in a political firefight and now that lots of them are retiring/retired that knowledge got lost permanently.
The desktop market is both saturated and contracting, and GP gave you the example of ARM taking over successfully: Apple silicon. M1-M4 are all ARM based. The performance is exceptional and the battery life is stellar. They're not just a budget CPU anymore. Further, the growth area of the market, mobile and IoT, are both dominated by ARM at the point Intel would compete with. When Google started to push Chromebooks, they used those same ARM processors. Increasingly, people only have their smartphone as the primary, if not the only, Internet device. People don't want desktops. They want that $300 Chromebook to browse the web and do taxes and that's about it. Now Win11 ARM64 is nearly ready to ship. Microsoft is changing strategy to stay competitive, and that means not sticking to x86.
There are millions of new devices that require processors every year, and if you're NOT making ARM processors then your fab is not making as much money as the competition. Your competition is going to have bigger budgets, and their engineers and fabricators are going to have much better high production experience.
Intel has let themselves fall behind. They've sacrificed the ability to stay competitive in order to stay loyal to their in house and very legacy designs. Intel is trying to sell the same product line that they've had for the past 15 years like the market didn't change, and everyone else has moved on. Now they have this 13th and 14th generation bug/defect, and they're going to look really unappealing.
Apple has 10% of the PC market and has been at that level for years. The ARM transition didn't move that number.
> if you're NOT making ARM processors then your fab is not making as much money as the competition.
Nope. The profit margin on ARM processors is at least an order of magnitude less than x86, probably close to two orders of magnitude. If you are making x86 profit margins, making ARM processors is business suicide. This is true for both Intel and AMD.
> The desktop market is both saturated and contracting,
Which applies equally to Apple devices, if you're watching the sales. They followed the same trend of moving units during COVID and then relaxed upgrades afterwards.
> if you're NOT making ARM processors then your fab is not making as much money as the competition
Do you know how ARM works? Or even chip production, for that matter?
For one, foundries don't choose to make ARM chips, their customers do. A foundry can and will make the same amount of money as their competition investing away from ARM, as Nvidia has shown on TSMC 4nm. Making "as much money as the competition" only works if you don't have to pay ARM license fees, and Apple is just about the only company in the world with that level of agreement with Softbank. Everyone else is avoiding ARM like the plague for it's dogshit licensing terms and 2-year OEM support contracts. The actual "deal" you get from buying ARM is the choice between their godawful off-the-shelf cores or the ISA itself. There are vanishingly few companies that want either of those things, least of all with ARM Ltd as the middleman.
For two, ARM's "golden era" is behind us now. If you've worked in electronics you're probably well familiar with the story of the ESP-32, a wildly successful microcontroller that hasn't been "officially licensed" ARM in years. The rare few ARM chips that are profitable don't respect the ISA license they're supposed to pay for, leaving only Apple and Nvidia as legitimate customers. Of them, Nvidia has been shipping RISC-V in place of ARM for over a decade and Apple would too if they had to pay for the IP. ARM is desperate to find customers that don't want to take advantage of them, but cannot find a single one.
Apple used to represent a small fraction of Intel's volume, but a large fraction of Intel's profit. Which is gone.
Cloud providers used to buy mostly Intel servers, but now have various efforts on buying or making their own CPUs. Amazon is now at the 4th gen graviton, seems nearly inevitable that other cloud providers will follow. Microsoft is well on it's way with the azure cobalt 100. Google has the Axion.
Investors have always been terrible at loving buzzwords and rewarding middlemen more than producers. Fabless companies over Fabs, WeWork over the companies which actually owned the buildings, you name it.
Intel has never been a fun company to work for or with. In past decades, no specialist I know of or kids coming out of school was actually saying I want to work at or with Intel... It says a lot when you actually look and listen.
There is also a huge political headwind when it comes to onshoring leading edge semiconductor fabrication - no company will benefit from this more than Intel.
I’d expect more pain in the medium term - they certainly missed the AI boat - but I wouldn’t be surprised if Gelsinger succeeds in turning things around, and I’m rooting for them. Competition between AMD and Intel, and between TSMC and Intel - will be nothing but favorable for core count, $/core, and the continuation of Moore’s Law.