[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?