Maybe. Traditionally it's hard for companies to compete with much cheaper but slightly less performant rivals. That's the whole idea behind "Disruptive Innovation." When x86 came out it was the cheap knockoff that everybody could afford and it eventually ended up eating it's way into workstations and servers as its scale let it pour more engineering resources in. ARM may be achieving that sort of scale advantage over x86 but its fragmented nature makes the story more complex.
If everything goes right for ARM, next year's CPU line should be single-core competitive against Intel's laptop line; the year after, ARM could be ahead.
Meanwhile, AMD's CPUs are winning on price/performance and pure performance for multi-core in the server market, and it looks like they're going to be competitive with Intel on basically every desktop area.
Intel has a marketing advantage. That's pretty much it.
I can appreciate the fun to be had with so many core cpu, but did you actually measure the performance? According to Passmark, both single and multithread performance of EPYC is very poor [1][2]. Passmark database is years in building and very informative, but I think for EPYC that is an erroneous result. Could you run Passmark benchmark on your rig to get another data point public?
Will give that a try tonight. Have to warn you that right now 1 of my DIMM was bad, so the system is running with only 15 DIMMS (which is an unsupported config) so the results might be suboptimal until I receive a new DIMM from the seller.
That's great, looking forward to the results. But, there's no rush. If you'd like to measure today anyway, please just make sure the result doesn't get reported to Passmark database so as not to spoil the small dataset with a biased result. Good luck with the replacement, hope it will stay solid from now on.
intel is still single thread performance king and will be for the foreseeable future. It's the most important performance metric when considering a desktop processor for most workloads.
While arm is catching up, there is no gaurentee that it will actually be competitive one day, not to mention beat it. Intel is still a beast and spends more in R&D than what amd took in last year. It would be foolhardy to write intel off.
You seem to have missed the part of the article* where the Cortex-A76 matches a core i5-7300 in performance, with much lower TDP. That is planned to come... oh wait, it's already available.
My info may be out of date, but I think Intel also has a production advantage. AMD doesn't have the capacity to, for example, own 45% of the market and leave Intel with 55%, as I understand it.
Desktop/laptop is a shrinking market, and HEDT/Workstations have always been extremely tiny -- it's nowhere close to where Intel makes most of their money. Consumer Ryzen 7 uptake numbers or ARM laptops are basically meaningless as far as predictions about "The death of Intel" go. It's nothing. Datacenters are what matter.
This is a good move for ARM perhaps, since their licensees have (repeatedly, at least _for now_) failed to move into the server market where x86 reigns supreme, so if they can take a shrinking market off Intel's hands and make some inroads there, hey, whatever works. People actually don't care about processors, because for consumers, price is king. So if they can deliver cheaper Chromebooks or whatever, people are happy. And ARM already dominates the lower end market. But large players don't work that way.
EPYC has better pricing per-core (I say this as a very happy 1950X owner) but you're kidding yourself if large scale vendors who buy thousands of SKUs per year/quarter do anything but buy in bulk, on multi-year contracts, with extensive sales negotiations. They are far ahead as far as vendor validation/stability goes (my 1950X motherboard still has BIOS/IOMMU glitches that I'm waiting on updates for, this stuff just takes time). For the biggest customers, Intel customizes their SKUs directly to their requirements. That's a significant amount of integration with their partners that AMD is not going to match overnight. And even if they take away some of Intel's total-monopoly status in the DC, say 25%, which is a metric shitload, they've still got a hell of a lot of technology (in their foundries) to back themselves up, as well as a massive warchest. I wouldn't be surprised if Xeon margins were above 50%. You really think they can't drop some of that off and immediately tilt that ratio back around, while having tens of billions on hand for R&D anyway?
You live in a castle of sand if you think they're actually going anywhere anytime in like, the next 5-7 years. And I have many bridges to sell you, if you think "marketing" is their only advantage in this fight -- as opposed to their foundries, deep integration, near-total monopoly status in the only market that matters, their massive warchest, and huge R&D setup.
I honestly wonder if Intel actually wants people think that ARM Chromebooks are a threat to them or whatever. It means they can keep deluding themselves while Xeon sales and margins continue to skyrocket for cloud providers while everyone else chases pennies (except AMD, who are actually trying, and are absolutely not guaranteed to dominate by that alone)...
(I do hope they start feeling the pressure, of course. I'd love cheaper Xeons, personally. :)
You can't really look at power and performance in isolation, given that you can trade one for the other by modifying their clock speeds. It would be better to say that from the milliwatt range to 20W socket draw or so ARM is more performance and current x86 designs are more performant above 20W.
Does "Intel Inside" sound familiar? That's because it worked amazingly well, and people chose Intel over AMD back in the day just because they "felt" better about it. Some even chose it because they didn't want to get AMD shamed ("Aw poor person; they could only a afford an AMD.").
Not saying Intel CPU lineup wasn't better than AMD's product, (especially at the height of the marketing program when laptops used to have "Intel Inside" stickers), but a lot of people didn't even bother comparing. They just chose Intel-based computers.
And that's the story of how so many people I know ended up buying a PC with a crappy Celeron* (I know, I know, the new ones are better).
Sure, CPUs are harder than iPods to market to consumers. Most haven't a clue what ARM Cortex-A7 is. But, that could be the issue. They need to step up their brand identity. They also should probably tell people that ARM doesn't actually make hardware for consumers. They just design the architecture and license that design to silicon manufactures.
Most people knew they were buying an Intel. Most people don't know they bought an ARM. They could do better.
*: I assume some bought them because the salesman at Best Buy said "dude, Intel's are what you want. AMDs are slow."
I'm not sure that type of marketing will happen again though. Since then, computers have gone further down the path of being an appliance. What's inside matters less than what it can do. If Apple releases a MacBook with 1-5 days of battery life, no one will care what's inside.
I used an ARM Chromebook with Linux installed for about 2 years. YMMV, but VLC seemed to not work anywhere near as well as it does on the x86 (in terms of playback and codec availability).
Doubtful. Performance generally corresponds to active area and, hence, power.
So, for ARM to become as performant as x86 means they wind up burning the same area and power.
That having been said, breaking a monoculture would be welcome, especially given how cavalier Intel is about security.
(You will note I didn't say "In light of" with respect to Intel and security. IBM, DEC, etc. have been preaching about the fact that x86 has lousy security for 30+ years. It's just that nobody cared until x86 became a mainframe ... err ... cloud.)
Because an enterprising engineer managed to hand code an assembly language implementation of cellular baseband on ARM thus entrenching ARM as the low cost implementation on a cell phone. After that, ARM expanded outward to run the GUI.
In addition, the batteries of the time demanded a specific power envelope. Not many chips had this envelope ... pretty much only ARM , MIPS, and a handful of also rans that you've never heard of.
Once ARM got going, network effects took over. There is no reason you couldn't implement a cell phone on a MIPS core, for example, at this point except for network effects.
Another thing is that at the time only other ISA designer that really cared about this market was Hitachi with it's SuperH (and then founded Renesas with the sole intent of becoming meaningful ARM competitor, which obviously didn't happen).
You could get usable low power microcontrollers and almost-SoCs with ARM cores in late 90's. While there were SoCs with other 32b RISC cores they typically were intended for mains powered high performance applications ranging from DVD players to network equipment. See how large part of Freescale's PowerPC SoC lineup are without much exaggerattion "Cisco 2500 on a chip" (obviosly with ppc core instead of m68k and with wonderfully complex DMA-engine/protocol decoder/whatever-thing)
Wasn't ARM also the de-facto standard for PDAs? Which was a deliberate market profiling after Apple came into the fray and wanted a CPU for their Newton (and helped spin off the ARM we know today from Acorn).
Low power Intel is not as good as low power ARM. "High power" ARM competitive with desktop doesn't quite exist yet, although the iPhones are very close (and better than a desktop of a few years ago)
I would imagine it comes down to margins. In a competitive market, customers aggressively try to drive down prices. Most silicon companies are too smart to play that game. You fight to establish dominance up front. If you don't win the market, you're unlikely to every become profitable, so you cut your losses and exit.
> So, for ARM to become as performant as x86 means they wind up burning the same area and power.
Yup. The thing is that ARM can indeed match Intel on scaling up as you noted. Intel is struggling with x86 in scaling down, though. Easy to see which one is in a better position overall.
Intel's x86 architecture reset and housecleaning is due to land in 4 or 5 years and it should be really interesting then.