[sdesol]

They really are doing something disruptive. I can't quite remember if this is correct (it has been a while since I last studied business), but in business there is a "blue ocean strategy". The basic premise is, if you can provide a product for half the price, with the twice the value, you will destroy the incumbent.

What AMD is doing is really insane in my opinion. I'm not sure if they are pricing their processors low on purpose and/or if they have found a way to manufacture cheaper and/or Intel was screwing consumers with their pricing since they were so dominate.

No matter what, AMD is able to provide something that is measurably better and significantly cheaper than the incumbent, and if the blue ocean strategy holds, they should become the new incumbent in the near future.

[blattimwind]

> What AMD is doing is really insane in my opinion. I'm not sure if they are pricing their processors low on purpose and/or if they have found a way to manufacture cheaper and/or Intel was screwing consumers with their pricing since they were so dominate.

Both. AMD uses chiplets for higher yields compared to Intel's huge monolithic processors (HCC, XCC), which lowers costs, and Intel jacked prices up because they had a monopoly.

[exikyut]

Oooooh, and they can mix and match chiplets that pass progressively more stringent QC stages to build the various SKU classes.

I like it!

[bcrosby95]

Not only disruptive to their industry, but game changing for those of us writing software. I remember reading all the hoopla over the loss of Dennard scaling 15 years ago (e.g. http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm). Intel poked along at 2 and 4 core consumer systems for so long.

The argument was always "no one can use more than X cores" - but software seems to trail hardware in these examples, not the reverse. When Zen was first released, many of the less expensive 6 core options performed worse than Intel's similarly priced 4 core chips. But when comparing modern software using those old parts, AMD's 6 core offerings tend to hold up better.

It feels like AMD is finally ushering us into an era where being able to take advantage of large amounts of parallelism is going to become important for almost every developer.

[thesz]

Smaller chips have better yield. As AMD's current chips are composed from several smaller ones (I believe two or three), each composite has better yield than one bigger of same real estate size.

So yes, they figured out how to produce cheaper solutions.

[dragontamer]

> As AMD's current chips are composed from several smaller ones (I believe two or three)

For EPYC, AMD is using nine chips: https://images.anandtech.com/doci/13561/amd_rome-678_678x452...

That's 1x I/O chip (kind of like a router), and 8x chips, each of which has 8x cores on it. Total for 64-cores / 128-threads across 8-compute chips, talking together through a central 1x I/O and Memory chip.

The I/O chip is the biggest for reasons: 1. Its made on a cheaper process. 2. It has worse performance than the compute chips. 3. Its required to be big because driving external I/O requires more power.

So the I/O chip can be made on a cheap / inefficient 14nm process, while the CPUs can be made on a more expensive 7nm process (maximizing clock rates, power-efficiency). The big I/O ports are going to eat up a lot of power regardless of 7nm or 14nm process, so might as well save money here.

[cma]

It also sets them up to go forward into EUV where shot noise is unavoidable. And they had a contract with global foundries to still buy some large amount from them at a worse process node, the chipper design let’s them use that for the IO die.

[wyxuan]

Two problems is production capacity and data center, since AMD is competing against Apple for production by tsmc. on the point about data centers, Amd narrowly got on the train here. Semiconductors are a very cyclical industry and since the end of the business cycle is coming in Amd is in for a rough time. There's room for growth, but arguably the stock is priced in

[dragontamer]

The opposite.

AMD spent less money on TSMC's research. Apple has been bankrolling TSMC to get the latest and greatest process tech.

AMD reached 7nm not because AMD put the R&D research into it... but because they can ride on the coattails of Apple and TSMC's investments.

--------

TSMC and Apple simultaneously benefit: TSMC can spread the risk of the 7nm process to more companies. Apple still gets first-dibs on the technology (but they only need ~6months worth of factory time to build all the chips they need).

Its more surprising that Intel managed to stay ahead of TSMC / Apple for so long. The economics are kind of against Intel here. The more people working together on process tech, the more efficient the results get.