[beardedscotsman]

Realise that intel, has not been releasing chips with any major improvement either. They have delayed time and time again new chips and designs on purpose because they haven’t had the competition to be go up against.

Intel performance will always be one step ahead of AMD, intel have faster tech in their pocket waiting to be released.

[dralley]

>They have delayed time and time again new chips and designs on purpose because they haven’t had the competition to be go up against.

No, they delayed time and time again because the 10nm process utterly failed to deliver the necessary yields and performance to be viable. It's not some ingenious display of sandbagging - only now in the past year or so has the 10nm process yields risen high enough to make low-power chips viable, and it is still not viable for high-power desktop chips, and probably will never be viable.

>Intel performance will always be one step ahead of AMD

A completely ridiculous assertion, and one that is already largely false at the present moment.

>intel have faster tech in their pocket waiting to be released.

Likely true, but only because of their failure to execute on 10nm. CPU designs are closely tied to the process they are designed to be manufactured on -- especially for Intel, who have never been concerned about being too tied to a single manufacturer (since it is themselves). This tight coupling can be good when the process is good, but the failure of 10nm meant that for years and years those architectural improvements you speak of are unshippable and useless.

Intel is not completely screwed by any measure, but the idea that they have the situation entirely under control and are intentionally not competing with now-superior AMD chips is entirely ridiculous.

[throwaway_pdp09]

> CPU designs are closely tied to the process they are designed to be manufactured on

I really had never imagined this could be so. Could you expand somewhat on why it is? Thanks.

[anticensor]

Hardware has layout constraints just like data have alignment constraints.

[bcrosby95]

> They have delayed time and time again new chips and designs on purpose because they haven’t had the competition to be go up against.

This just isn't true. When Ryzen first came out Intel was still ahead in many use cases, especially if $$ was no object to you. But after several years AMD is now taking the crown from intel in all areas they compete in. If they really had some magical faster tech Intel would have released it years ago, much less this year, but they haven't.

Instead they announce the same old chips then hook them up to industrial strength cooling units to make it look like they can compete with AMD. This isn't the behavior of a company that is just biding its time.

[ekianjo]

AMD seems to have supply issues though. You can have the best chips on the market, if they are out of stock you don't really compete.

[vonmoltke]

Whatever supply issues AMD has, I can still get their chips at or below MSRP from a number of vendors. The latest generation of Intel chips, on the other hand, are hard to find and selling at a significant premium where they are available.

[vlan0]

That's not unique to AMD. Intel also goes through periods of supply issues.

They've even had processors that basically only shipped on paper.

[wincy]

Yeah, like good luck trying to source a 9900KS for anywhere near MSRP, which was just a polished revised 9900K so Intel could still technically claim the “gaming crown” from AMD.

[code_biologist]

Have you tried to get your hands on any of the Intel HEDT parts? There's little to no supply and the supply that does exist is heavily marked up. 3950Xs and Threadrippers are in stock everywhere.

[KSS42]

AMD’s supply issues have improved significantly since Apple is moving from 7nm to 5nm this year. AMD is now TSMC’s top 7nm customer.

https://twitter.com/chiakokhua/status/1258393158766886913 https://twitter.com/chiakokhua/status/1258393160784330754

[gowld]

Intel ran out of 9th gen chips started fishing Quality Control reject chips out of the trash and selling them as F chips (9100F etc), which are chips that failed GPU quality controls and so got GPU disabled. credit for using honest label - F for F grade GPU.

[kogepathic]

> Intel performance will always be one step ahead of AMD, intel have faster tech in their pocket waiting to be released.

Citation very much needed.

Show me an Intel CPU with PCIe 4.0 or with the performance per watt of the latest AMD Ryzen mobile chips. You can't, because to date they don't exist.

I think if they had anything in reserve it would have been released by now, because AMD is trouncing them in reviews.

[snazz]

If they were to have a revolutionary technology that they haven't released yet, they'd release it as soon as their OEM and enterprise sales actually started to take a nosedive. Even though PC enthusiasts are outspoken about it, Intel is still doing just fine in their much higher-volume areas.

[willis936]

Have you seen the numbers and prices on Epyc Rome? All signs point towards Intel's reign in all areas being over. Short of a miraculous turnaround, Intel won't be competitive in three years. I want Intel to do well, but they've demonstrated over the past ten years that they are not interested in doing well.

[ashtonkem]

Isn’t there rumblings of AMD starting to make headway in data centers?

[erinnh]

I can speak only about our smallish datacenter (1TB Core Bandwidth concurrent) and we definitely have been moving towards more AMD in the past year or two. Currently we have roughly a 60/40 AMD/Intel split on new machines.

[solotronics]

they are only doing fine through inertia in enterprise and datacenter

[rowanG077]

Intel has faster tech in their pocket? 5 years ago I would have believed you. But they have seen the AMD zen architecture for years now and they can't meaningfully compete anymore. If they had tech ready to go they would have released it by now to crush AMD.

[temac]

I agree. 5 years ago Intel put Skylake out. This was what they had, and it was great; it was years ahead the competition. They did not have anything else secret even better and ready to go out, because that makes absolutely no sense: if you can crush the competition even more, just do it...

After that the story is well known: their microarch were tied to their node, and Intel's 10nm was a failure, and still is not up to what the competition is doing. They started to backport the next microarch to 14 too late IMO. They may release new ones on 14nm; or they may suddenly manage to strongly improve their 10nm (not likely, it is usually very gradual at this stage)

And it is again obvious that even in the last 3 years, they had nothing (on the microarch side that they could produce on their mainstream node) they were able to rush as a fallback to counteract Zen, otherwise why would they not have done it?

Now they are clearly behind on the process, and on the microarch Zen 2 is good enough and does not need to compete much against Sunny Cove, plus if Intel releases a backport of Sunny Cove for their 14nm it may be against Zen 3...

[dev_tty01]

>>intel have faster tech in their pocket waiting to be released.

Hmm. I think if Intel had a significant architecture enhancement waiting in the wings we would have seen it by now. They need it badly.

I just updated a 2013 quad core laptop with a late 2019 8 core laptop. Tasks that really use the cores are of course faster. Other than that, no substantial performance increase. 7 years and it is just incremental. Their process issues of late are horrific but there is not much happening architecturally either. Sad to see. They just seem a bit lost.

[ashtonkem]

Intel is literally on an older fabrication process right now, they’re on 10nm while AMD is on 7nm. They’re objectively behind.

[dralley]

You're giving Intel a little too much credit. They're only "on 10nm" for tiny, low-power laptop chips. The yields are reportedly still too low to use it for desktop or server CPUs.

Meanwhile in a couple of months AMD will be on 7nm+

(However, it should be said that Intel 10nm is roughly equivalent to TSMC 7nm in terms of density. AMD is still ahead but not by as much as the numbers would imply).

[ashtonkem]

Meanwhile AMD & TSMC are talking about 5nm for their Zen 4 architecture.

[plasticchris]

The nm numbers are marketing. Processes are too nuanced to boil down to a single number.

[temac]

And if one insists on comparing, Intel 10nm is kind of TSMC 7nm. However Intel only manages to make a few of their laptop parts with their 10nm, and with not great frequencies IIRC. So they are behind now.

[ashtonkem]

Process isn’t everything, but they’re not just marketing. The process has a huge impact on the heat & power characteristics of the core, and also controls how much stuff you can stuff into a die.

[sascovid19tw]

The point he's making is that 10nm, 7nm, etc don't actually denote anything that lets you do an apples-to-apples comparison anymore. At this point, they're not measures the way they were in legacy process nodes.

[gowld]

They haven't been apple to apples in over 20 years. But being stuck on one feature size for more than 2-3 years is still a major roadblock to performance improvement.

[vladTheInhaler]

I thought that it used to measure gate width or something like that. Did that stop being true?

[ChoGGi]

Yep

https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/technology_node

"Recent technology nodes such as 22 nm, 16 nm, 14 nm, and 10 nm refer purely to a specific generation of chips made in a particular technology. It does not correspond to any gate length or half pitch."

"At the 45 nm process, Intel reached a gate length of 25 nm on a traditional planar transistor. At that node the gate length scaling effectively stalled; any further scaling to the gate length would produce less desirable results. Following the 32 nm process node, while other aspects of the transistor shrunk, the gate length was actually increased."

[ashtonkem]

It never stopped being true, but a lot of what makes a processor faster these days is smarter layout, better branch prediction, and better microcode. Process size matters, but it’s probably less important than it was in the 1990s.

[HelloNurse]

Also, there's a difference between the minimum feature size that can be fabricated (mostly a lithography challenge), the minimum size of a reliable device that works well (e.g. with enough doping atoms in the channel) and the size and shape a specific transistor needs to be for its particular requirements.

[brennanpeterson]

That is literally not how process nodes work. They are objectively matched.

Nodes mean 3 things: density, elecrical performance (ion, max f, leakage, etc), and processing flexibility (how many supported feature primitives or designs).

[gowld]

AMD and Intel do not use the same node designs.

[russler23]

A generalization, but accurate enough. Disappointing to see it getting downvotes. Intel 10nm and TSMC 7nm have similar characteristics, as a brief Wikipedia search reveals.