To say things are looking rough for Intel would be an understatement of the century.
I don’t really like Intel’s CPUs and their overall computing ecosystem but I REALLY don’t want Intel to die.
A monopoly with AMD would still be terrible for everyone even if AMD’s been doing solid work. No one wins except for those at the top in monopolistic systems.
AMD was “dead” for a decade when Intel dominated starting with Core2 duo until AMD released Zen. It didn’t kill AMD to have bad products and tiny marketshare.
It was very close. If they hadn’t pulled off Zen and good IGP graphics to go with it, AMD would be toast.
I bought AMD at $8 a share, soon after the Zen release I think, and it was still not clear if they were coming back from the brink. Intel was just unstoppable back then.
I remember how anti-everything Intel were at the time and made my next desktop a AMD 8350 on the old Bulldozer architecture paired with a Radeon HD 7870. “AMD is like a bus, big, red, and terrible drivers.” Great system it was.
The old AMD practically died then, betting the company on hiring Intel’s best CPU architect to make Zen and focusing on CPU/GPU combinations and eventually taking over the console chip market. Lots of risky strategy combined with a bunch of smart plays kept them alive. Then they just built on that position.
Intel facing a similar reckoning is not doing too well, I think they’re over cutting in ways, but they’re also facing headwinds from ARM that AMD never had to deal with.
I mean, Intel still has a lot of smart people working for them, fortunately.
The trajectory is worrying though. The current Intel CEO seems like they would never go for a “Hail Mary” like Zen.
That’s basically what Patt was doing with Arc, but it seems that is over.
The current environment would suggest a push on low cost GPUs to draw the gamers who blanch at NVIDIA’s current cost, combined with a push to neural net co-processors which they have in RnD at the moment.
Intel have some lower end fab time in a potentially tarrif protectionist US market. This is the kind of environment where you could seriously make an impact at the lower end of the market to keep the lights on for the RnD to finish.
I’ll bet they over cut, starve RnD, kill off the Arc GPUs, focus on the low end without an end goal and start spiralling into irrelevance.
AMD now has a fun opportunity to poach talent from Intel and potentially chase some of those RnD options.
Small companies can exist forever. Texas Instruments still pumps out tens of billions of components. It doesn’t have to be a monopoly.
TI is not a small company, heh. And they’re a manufacturer.
Consumer CPUs and GPUs were AMD’s business, and they would be little more than a skeleton (or acquired by someone) without that.