[DSingularity]

Intel is in the cusp of getting taking out. Architectures and process technologies are both multiple generations behind. AMD has 10x its server share. If the trend sustains for one more generation the majority of the market will go to AMD.

[throwawaylinux]

Not that Intel is in a good spot, but Intel for about the past 4 years has been in the position that AMD (and TSMC) had been in for much of the past 30 years (with some brief switches).

Actually it's not even that in the case of Intel vs AMD because Intel continues to have large revenues and profits (gross margins slipped from usual low-60s to low-50s in the past few years). Whereas AMD was really struggling as a company for long periods.

Could Intel be in terminal decline as a CPU design and/or silicon manufacturing leader? It's possible. Is it a done deal or are they "finished" any time soon? No way. It will be many years while this plays out.

[totalZero]

Intel is nowhere close to the doldrums of yesteryear's AMD. It continues to command the lion's share of the x86 market, and hasn't needed to sell off assets in order to remain afloat. In fact, Intel's business has never been better. The AMD-favoring narrative that the firms have flip-flopped is not backed up by market share research, nor corroborated by quarterly filings.

[throwawaylinux]

That's what I was getting at. On technical execution they actually are doing pretty bad particularly in manufacturing but also in CPU design. But even technically it has been a few years in comparison to current leaders that previously lagged by similar amounts for many years. Of course financially they are doing far better.

It's just amazing to me that people who really follow the AMD / Intel battle quite closely can actually believe that Intel is finished because AMD emerged from their decade-long post-Opteron slump a few years ago with Zen.

[DSingularity]

I said they are on the cusp. Please tell me, what happens if we end up with 10nm+++? You really think we would end up with anything other than with >50% of datacenter purchases going to amd?

[toast0]

Currently, AMD is fab capacity limited and couldn't get enough cpus made to be 50% of datacenter purchases.

Add to that some reality about purchaser reluctance to switch, in part because of at least perceived quality of platform support, and Intel still has a lot of breathing room.

We're starting to see some positive signs from Intel fabs, so they could likely recover, as they have before. For AMD to become dominant, they will need to continue to do excellent work for a few more years while Intel continues to wallow as they have since maybe Skylake.

[throwawaylinux]

You said they're being on the cusp of being "taken out".

> You really think we would end up with anything other than with >50% of datacenter purchases going to amd?

Even if this did happen, how do you believe AMD survived for decades with probably under 1% of data center purchases? And small share of PC and other server revenue? How as AMD able to weather through all that and eventually come out the other side with a good product that would not be possible for Intel?

[mhh__]

I'll have a glass of whatever you're having.

Intel's first proper competitor to Zen is coming out soon, and from what I've seen so far it looks like a monster. Couple this with them launching GPU's into the most demand-heavy market we might ever see, they don't have to do much to have a good few years.

Also, every measure I've ever seen has AMD still at least a doubling away from parity with Intel, so I find your figure very hard to believe.

[uluyol]

AMD and Intel are fighting different battles right now.

AMD is competing with Intel today. They're offerings are better so they're winning market share and growing.

On the other hand, Intel really needs to be compared to the Intel of a few years back. They had ~100% of the server, laptop, and workstation markets. Whatever they released, people would buy it, and they could charge whatever they wanted. That level of dominance isn't going to come back. There is too much competition from AMD and ARM.

I'm not saying that Intel won't do well. But while they have to deliver competitive CPUs, they also have to succeed with this GPU push (which btw is not their first attempt) and probably also succeed with fabbing other people's chips (which has also flopped in the past). So they need to not flop this time, and they have to continue to execute well since these areas all have competition.

As a consumer, this is all excellent. It's seriously amazing what healthy competition brings.

[DSingularity]

Really? Show me what you’ve seen. EPYC continues to win and Xeon continues to lose. Same for TSMC on the manufacturing side.

[unnah]

The description of the Golden Cove microarchitecture at https://www.anandtech.com/show/16881/a-deep-dive-into-intels... certainly looks promising.

[porker]

> Couple this with them launching GPU's into the most demand-heavy market we might ever see, they don't have to do much to have a good few years.

From what I have read their GPUs will be fabbed by TSMC so they will be constrained by capacity as much as anyone else.

[x3sphere]

Going by this... https://www.cpubenchmark.net/market_share.html

Intel still has 90%+ of the server market. It only just started moving over to AMD. They did gain a lot of ground over Intel in the desktop market though.

[martinpw]

That chart shows the installed base at the end of each quarter, not sales in each quarter - see note below the chart. So current Intel sales are likely significantly less than 90% of the server market.

[dogma1138]

AMD can’t make enough chips to take 50% of the current sales market yet alone 90%… you do understand that both Intel and AMD publish reports each quarter so we know how much revenue they generate in each segment right?

[martinpw]

How about reading more carefully before being so patronizing. I just said Intel likely has less than 90% market share now. I never said AMD has 90%. Sheesh.

[dogma1138]

AMD’s Q2 revenue for enterprise, semi-custom and embedded is $1.6B, Intel’s datacenter revenue for Q2 was $6.5B. Intel still outsells AMD by at least 3 to 1 in datacenter and perhaps even a bit more in terms of volume since AMD has almost no entry level systems unlike Intel.

[martinpw]

Which does not contradict anything I said. AMD having 20-30% market share in data centers sounds plausible.

[DSingularity]

Yeah, 5 years ago it was a 99% market share.

[Hikikomori]

10x? Where did you find those numbers.

[DSingularity]

I actually meant 10x growth in its share of server CPU sells over past 5 years. They went from 1% of the market to roughly 10%.

[nixgeek]

Tell me more about 10x its server share? Do you have an industry citation showing AMD shipping 10x the sockets?