[Alupis]

I guess it was innovation until competition got tough, then it was squash-mode, no matter how illegal or unsavory. During that era, can we honestly say Intel was still innovating in the CPU line? Have they innovated in CPU's recently? It seems not so much...

Look at the Core series - moderately incremental improvements for nearly two decades now? Many of which have significant, unfixable design flaws. AMD got their act together, and with significantly fewer resources ended up totally leap-frogging Intel in nearly all CPU metrics. How did this not happen at Intel after all these years?

AMD had some objectively better CPU's during the Athlon era - until they ran out of money mostly due to Intel's anti-competitive behavior.

The "what-if" scenario is interesting to ponder...

[ethbr1]

> AMD got their act together, and with significantly fewer resources ended up totally leap-frogging Intel in nearly all CPU metrics. How did this not happen at Intel after all these years?

AMD outsourced foundry issues to TSMC.

[Alupis]

And so could Intel if they wanted. Instead, they seem more interested in designing yet another socket and asking everyone to upgrade all of their hardware for a moderate performance bump...

[gruez]

>Instead, they seem more interested in designing yet another socket and asking everyone to upgrade all of their hardware for a moderate performance bump...

Who's upgrading their cpus after 1-2 generations?

[Alupis]

AMD folks, because you can use the same socket for many generations of CPU's, providing a drop-in 10-minute upgrade...

[tssge]

Yeah I totally agree if we consider Intel's innovation in the CPU space or lack thereof in the 21st century.

I have seen more innovation happen in the CPU space in the last 5 years than the 20 years prior to that. This has been thanks to AMD, Apple, ARM, TSMC etc; Intel has seemingly attempted to only slow down the innovation to keep cozy at the top spot.

Personal example: I rented an AMD machine last month and I seriously thought there was a bug with fastfetch when it showed the CPU having 5,7GHz clocks with 32 threads. I didn't believe such was possible. I had to double check because it felt so far fetched seeing such monstrous increase in clocks and cores, when upgrading from a few years old Intel machine to a new AMD one. That's innovation.

However to Intel's credit they have made major innovations in other areas, like peripherals, interconnects and so on. I am extremely grateful for Thunderbolt/USB4 existing today compared to the myriad of vendor specific docking connectors of the past.

>How did this not happen at Intel after all these years?

They replaced engineers with accountants after gaining dominant position on the market. Short term it gave more profits but long term most innovation was lost in the process.