Intel was washed up when the Athlon came out and was faster. Intel was washed up when the pentium 4 was too hot. Point being, intel has done pretty well for a company rendered obsolete a decade and a half ago.
Yep. The original Athlon and Opteron was the only decent period of time when it seemed like they had a decent edge. Really because Intel so horribly botched P4. So much so they buried the Pentium name they spent billions building up.
Intel is still around, still innovating, and still profitable. It has a lot more competition than in the past, but they are still a force to be reckoned with.
Intel has absolutely been lazy and literally just gave 5% performance increase per year for quite some time. When AMD was making shitty processors, Intel was just trying to squeeze as much money as possible from marginal upgrades.
You can run Windows on a Intel cpu that is 10 years old and notice hardly any difference in performance.
And on the other hand, they changed everything. Their cpus are actually innovative and really fast, and brought the entire multi core thing into consumer hands in a real way.
I'll forever be baffled at people treating one of the biggest semiconductor companies in the world which has historically released products which easily outlast the rest of the components in the system as some fly-by-night alternative to Intel.
This sentiment also caused my family to get a Pentium4 over the superior Athlon64 years back and I'm still salty.
Maybe classifying Intel as a sinking ship may be too much of an exaggeration.
Competitors maybe passed them in the last couple of years, but Intel is still in a really solid position to turn things around.
Apple's situation was a lot more dramatic. Intel still has a very good market share and can probably take a couple+ years to safely get back on track, in my opinion.
Well, no. Intel stalled at the design side. Even with superior processes to AMD they weren't competitive, and their CPU designs had only small changes for a decade.
// I don't mean to take away from Intel's underwhelming management
chuckle lets give full credit where credit is due :-)
Athlon was an epochal chip. Here's the thing though---if you are a market leader, one who was as dominant as Intel was, it doesn't matter what the competition does, you have the power to keep dominating them by doing something even more epochal.
That's why it can be so frustrating working for a #2 or #3 company....you are still expected to deliver epochal results like clockwork. But even if you do, your success is completely out of your hands. Bringing out epochal products doesn't get you ahead, it just lets you stay in the game. Kind of like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland. You have to run as fast as you can just to stay still.
All you can do is try to stay in the game long enough until the #1 company makes a mistake. If #1 is dominate enough, they can make all kinds of mistakes and still stay on top, just by sheer market inertia. Intel was so dominate that it took DECADES of back-to-back mistakes to lose its dominate position.
Intel flubbed the 32-64 bit transition. On the low end, it flubbed the desktop to mobile transition. On the high end, it flubbed the CPU-GPU transition.
Intel could have kept its dominate position if it had only flubbed one of them. But from 2002 to 2022, Intel flubbed everysingle transition in the market.
Its a measure of just how awesome Intel used to be that it took 20 years....but there's only so many of those that you can do back-to-back and still stay #1.
Honestly I think the proclaimed death of intel is vastly exaggerated. AMD came back from worse places and they do still have the manufacturing edge. Intel CPU for desktop still use less power, which is a big plus. How many people do you know that bought the fastest CPU available recently? Glad AMD is back on track, they were in a rough place, far worse than intels current situation.
AMD looked far worse... if Intel is “dying” with a yearly revenue of ~$70B or so AMD should’ve been bankrupt 10 times already.
Intel is managing to compete in per core performance while being essentially 2-3 nodes behind, and generating times the revenue of their competitor.
Zen is awesome and we need more competition but Intel isn’t nearly as far behind as it was during the P4 days and it’s revenue is nearing ATH and it’s business more diversified it ever been, if you exclude the datacenter and client computing groups it still is bringing in more revenue than AMD.
People really overstate Intel's woes. They got stuck on 14nm for ages, but were for all that time still the market leader. AMD has never comprehensively challenged them; only one segment at time is an AMD product better.
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.
Intel stagnated and at the same time started implementing some rather anti-consumer practices. This allowed AMD to take the performance lead off them with their latest generation of products. It’s fantastic that the market for processors is so competitive. I’ve grown to not like Intel very much recently, but I’m glad they’re here. They’ll keep the pressure on for further innovation, so AMD will either need to keep up or be overtaken again. Either of which is a good outcome for consumers.
If what you say is correct, Intel appears to be a generation and a half behind right now. Isn't that the kind of lead Intel used to have that made them untouchable?
I'm not convinced. The AMD product line fell into a ravine very soon after the acquisition -- CPU design has a half a decade of lead time, so their problems predated ATi.
I think AMD success is simply better viewed as Intel stumbling. The P4/Itanium split product lines were designs defined more by marketing and ideal market segmentation than they were by engineering, and they both also had some really bad design decisions. This caused Intel to fall from their technology leadership position for ~5 years, during which AMD produced steady, if slow, improvement, eventually overtaking Intel. After Intel got it's act back together, AMD hasn't been able to catch a break.
Plus Intel has been such a dominate player for so long they've had no reason to innovate and largely haven't in some time. Their complacency caught up to them.
Intel didn't beat AMD back in the day because they had a better processor. Intel relied on anti-competitive practices to lock AMD out of the desktop and server markets. They were successfully sued by AMD but the damage was done. Then Intel sat on it's laurels and quit innovating, slowly doling out incremental improvements through their 'tick-tock' release cycle. Intel dug their own hole and I have no sympathy for Intel while AMD buries them in it.
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