[saas_co_de]

No, I think it is win-win.

1) AMD can sell chips in high end systems where it can't compete with Intel on CPUs or Nvidia on GPUs.

2) Intel can ship a high end graphics experience without dGPU which gets them a level of graphics in a form factor they couldn't otherwise achieve.

3) Ryzen is a low/mid range chip. Even if it could match Intel's performance it could never match Intel's brand, and Intel doesn't want to match AMDs price so they will stay in different market segments. Ryzen sales will not be hurt.

4) AMD gets valuable brand recognition by getting Radeon into more premium devices which could actually boost sales for cheaper Ryzen/Radeon devices down the line.

5) Shafts Nvidia which is a win for both sides.

6) Opens lines of communication for possible future merger or fab deal, which is not so much an issue from an anti-trust standpoint when you look at the total competitive landscape of ARM, Nvidia, Apple, Qualcomm, etc and the shrinking relevance of x86 in the big picture.

[sambe]

Regarding 3): most benchmarks I've seen quote 2-7% difference in IPC to Intel. I wouldn't call that low/mid-range. Am I misunderstanding something?

[coldtea]

From the parent: "Even if it could match Intel's performance it could never match Intel's brand".

[dahauns]

Not with that attitude.

(i.e. argued that way this would be more like "setting up for failure" on AMDs part.)

[saas_co_de]

Brand perceptions can definitely change but the reality right now is that for the past 5 years AMD has been shipping non-competitive parts and has had zero premium design wins and very little money spent on advertising.

For the average consumer, every high end system they have seen in recent memory is Intel, and every ad they have seen is Intel, and if they have seen AMD at all it has always been positioned as a budget product.

That is going to take a long time for AMD to turn around assuming they can sustain performance parity with Intel.

That is also why AMD is focused on servers and semi-custom where they are selling to technical people who are evaluating based on price/performance and not based on brand perception.

[myrandomcomment]

I am pretty sure the current PS4 and Xbox count as premium design wins for AMD.

[freeflight]

There's nothing "premium" about those gaming consoles, maybe the PS4Pro/XboneX could be considered "premium" for the console sector.

Imho parent was talking about the PC sector and in that regard, AMD has been sadly trailing way behind Intel/Nvidia for quite a while now. AMD has struggled to oppose Intel's i5/i7 dominance. Similarly, they still have no real competition for the high-end NVidia GPU's, like the 1080's.

If money is not a limiting factor, then you will be hard-pressed to come up with a build that does not include an Intel CPU and at least one Nvidia GPU.

[nerpderp83]

And consumers don't say, I want the same processor as the Xbox.

[dahauns]

Yeah, I know...it's just in light of this argument the timing seems strange.

AMD are on the brink of offering products that for the first time since forever at least has potential to build up their brand vs Intel, to actually have a significant differentiator that they can market. It seems really harsh to kill that before it even begins. But yeah, it could actually be a sign that AMD knows it couldn't go the whole nine yards in this game anyway.

[fgonzag]

10% IPC advantage compounded with up to 20% higher clock speeds in top of the line Desktop CPUs (when OCed at least)

[sambe]

I don't think OC is a fair baseline to qualitatively distinguish between CPU classes (at least low/mid vs high-end). OC is surely a large factor in purchasing decisions for a subset of high-end users, but not all.

[fgonzag]

I was talking max OC on R7 (4.0 - 4.1) vs max OC (5.0-5.1) on i7-7th gen though. Which is a good indicator of the max clocks each platform can get.

[saas_co_de]

Brand is more important than benchmarks for most buyers and even if AMD chips were better Intel would still be the premium brand.

[zanny]

Are people actually looking to buy a computer for an Intel CPU? I have honestly never met anyone that said "I need my computer to be Intel Inside™ ". They just say they want fast / modern / able to do X task and 99% of people have no idea what a CPU even is.

[com2kid]

> Are people actually looking to buy a computer for an Intel CPU? I have honestly never met anyone that said "I need my computer to be Intel Inside™ ".

I've had friends go out to buy a computer and insist on an i7 because "it is the best."

Same people who buy the newest Samsung Galaxy every year.

[wolfgke]

> I've had friends go out to buy a computer and insist on an i7 because "it is the best."

But i9 is the best... ;-)

[bsznjyewgd]

My dad went to Best Buy to replace his 10+ year old laptop last year. He actually said he wanted Intel instead of AMD because he heard AMD processors were very slow. I had to tell him the Intel N-whatever and Celerons were also very slow so that he'd stick with one of the i-whatevers.

[StudentStuff]

Basically anything they sell him will be faster than his current laptop. Many of the low power i series aren't actually much better than a celeron, but they're very common in new laptops.

CPUs aren't the bottleneck though, disk I/O and I/O in general are where most "slowness" issues are promulgated from.

[selectodude]

To most consumers, AMD sounds like a knockoff brand. Have you even seen an AMD commercial in the last decade?

[remir]

I would say yes. Intel are better at marketing than AMD (think decades of TV ads and the little Intel Inside stickers).

[walshemj]

And the ones in the UK calling i3 processor "high powered" I am looking at you PC World :-)

[wolfgke]

> think decades of TV ads and the little Intel Inside stickers

When I see "Intel Inside", I immediately think "Intel Inside - Idiot Outside". ;-)

[nordsieck]

You might have a good point for the home market - I couldn't say either way. I do know for the corporate market, businesses want as low a number of SKUs to support as possible, and so they will often only buy Intel (and only specific CPU models at that). This is particularly true in the datacenter / cloud world.

[kobeya]

I work in heavily optimized compute, and it does matter there. We write assembly that is supported by one architecture only (for now), and frontier Intel chips are easier to come by. So our code runs on Intel’s processor extensions a generation or two before AMD, and that represents a high switching cost.

But this is server compute stuff which this news doesn’t seem to be about.

[rdlecler1]

Agree — that seems like a very 2003 idea. The whole Intel Inside doesn’t have the cache it used to.

[ferongr]

Clocks matter too.

[DeepYogurt]

I am deeply curious about point 6. If intel bought amd I think it would lead to a massive change in how systems are built. I know there's the danger of a full x86 monopoly, but nvidia has a lot of pressure on intel at the high end and if the windows arm thing ever takes off I'm sure nvidia will have a laptop chip out in no time.

If there is a merger, I hope this will make a lot of AMD dream projects like the HPC APU take off, but I also fear that it might lead to a more stagnant intel+amd in a few years time.

[mjevans]

They could never do a merger for anti-trust and dual sourcing concerns...

Having said that, it MIGHT open up the potential for AMD running (some, all?) chips through Intel's fabs and actually enabling a nearly competitive playing field.

The best thing that the (US) government could do for the market would actually be to force Intel to split in to a fabrication company and a chip design company. That would enable the military to contract fabrication of higher-end validated CPUs on US soil from whichever sources they wanted...

[nerpderp83]

How is this not duopoly collusion to push out Nvidia? Smells just like 'competing gas stations' on opposite corners with the same exact prices.

AMD can be Aldi, Intel can be Whole Foods.

[jrs95]

What Whole Foods are you shopping at that's as cheap as Aldi??!

[robert_foss]

1) Intel does not ship GPUs on high-end CPUs.