[thinkythought]

Does anyone believe there's another core duo type massive leap out there to even be had this time around though? AMD is going to slowly pull a bit ahead of intel, especially in bang for buck, but i don't see how they can catch back up.

As it is, last time intel jumped ahead it was by repackaging and souping up an a mobile arch that in and of itself was based on the old pentium 3 arch. They can't really mine the parts bin that way this time around either.

[jcranmer]

The next big leap in computing is accelerators. Except getting accelerators right is as much a software investment as it is a hardware investment. That's what Nvidia got right, and why Nvidia is being so successful despite the fact that their hardware has massive limitations.

Of course, Intel also appears to be forgetting that they have the ultimate advantage in getting to accelerators--they can dump the accelerator in the same socket, Nvidia can't--since they keep trying to compete by using expansion cards despite that being the worst limiting factor for offload.

[phire]

Fun fact, The Pentium III had an identical pipeline to the Pentium II with added SSE instructions and the Pentium II was just the Pentium Pro pipeline with added MMX instructions. Intel started work on the Pentium Pro back in 1991.

Intel's current architecture is just small incremental improvements to a 27 year old design. The biggest features they have added are Nehalem's hyperthreadding (which they borrowed from Pentium 4) and Sandybridge's uop cache (loop cache).

All their other performance improvements have come from small micro-optimisations and just chucking transistors at the design. Better branch prediction, better load/store buffers, more load/store buffers, more execution units, bigger reorder buffers, wider instruction decoders, more renaming registers, wider instruction retirement, more unique/specialised instructions and of course, clock speed improvements. But it's still fundamentally the same design which intel could have done back in 1991 if they had the silicon budget.

And this was absolutely the right design decision, everyone else is copying the same design. Apple copied it with their Cyclone/Typhoon/Twister arm CPUs. ARM copied it with their Cortex A57, A72, A73 cpus. AMD copied it with their Zen architecture (after trying out new ideas with Bulldozer and failing). IBM and Sun/Oracle have server class CPUs with more or less the same ideas, but 4 to 8 way "hyperthreadding".

AMD's Zen might pull ahead slightly, but that's only because their design is newer and hopefully free of cobwebs than Intel's design.

But there are still plenty of new CPU design ideas out there, It's quite possible we will see another 50% jump in single threaded performance.

[bhouston]

If Intel goes multi-chip in the same package like Ryzen, then yeah, they can get more cores in, similar to Ryzen Threadripper.

So there is a leap coming for Intel as well if they go that route, and after the massive success of Ryzen, they are likely going there. Just easier to scale core counts if you can use smaller dies and just use a lot of them with an interconnect fabric.

[xenadu02]

Intel had two advantages:

1. Relentless process improvement, putting them 1-2 generations ahead of everyone else.

2. Using their monopoly to prevent OEMs from shipping AMD processors.

#1 isn't true anymore.

#2 is almost irrelevant since mobile has taken over and makes the PC revolution look like child's play by comparison.

Intel doesn't have a good graphics story. They sell hot power-hungry chips. They no longer have a process advantage. Their monopoly in x86 is increasingly (but not yet completely) irrelevant.

I'm sure they can ride the x86 profitability horse for at least 5-10 years. What then? Remember: RIM was profitable for several years after the iPhone was released. That didn't save them. Microsoft continued to rake in cash with Windows/Office as iOS/Android/AWS/GC established a new world order that threatened to make them irrelevant.

[bhouston]

Intel needs to pull a Microsoft.

Basically the new Microsoft CEO has reinvigorated Microsoft by challenging the old preconceptions and doing what is right in the current environment. I wonder if Intel could find a CEO like that.

I still can not believe that my favorite code editor on Linux is an open source code text-oriented editor from Microsoft (VS Code.)

[bradleyjg]

3. Yields. Historically Intel had the fastest ramp up to the highest yields.

I don’t know if that still holds true.

[selectodude]

Intel's yields at 14nm++++++++++ are exceptional now. We'll see how TSMC's 7nm holds up though. They're still using DUV lithography with boatloads of multipatterning. Intel's 10nm is running into issues due to that, I'm curious what TSMC is doing correctly. They might just be saying they have good enough yields at 7nm and be totally full of shit. One thing about Intel's scale is they have to acutally get it right before they can say they're successful at it.

[smueller1234]

Without coming up with a pretty new overall design, Intel will struggle with that: the IO capabilities of Zen are much better than those of today's Xeons. And the more chips, the more sockets, the more chip IO. On top of that, as the throughput requirements for NICs, accelerators, storage (ssds and nvram-type devices) keeps increasing very quickly, that'll put further pressure on such a design.

Don't get me wrong, it seems likely that Intel is considering such options, but they won't be all too amazing for many workloads.

[bhouston]

They do need to come up with a new design.

Intel hired Jim Keller that developed AMD's HyperTransport and the Zen's interconnection fabric and was intrumental in the Zen project a few months ago.

[georgeburdell]

Looking at CPUs alone is probably too narrow of a focus. AMD bet the farm on a CPU architecture, and thankfully they appear to be winning, but they don't have competitors for most Intel products: FPGAs, Optane, some of the new AI chips, etc., and consequently Intel could still win in terms of ecosystem in the eyes of the big Cloud providers.