AMD's stock is wild. It was around $2 just a few years ago and has been on a non-stop trend up to almost $60 today.
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What AMD is doing is really insane in my opinion. I'm not sure if they are pricing their processors low on purpose and/or if they have found a way to manufacture cheaper and/or Intel was screwing consumers with their pricing since they were so dominate.
No matter what, AMD is able to provide something that is measurably better and significantly cheaper than the incumbent, and if the blue ocean strategy holds, they should become the new incumbent in the near future.
Both. AMD uses chiplets for higher yields compared to Intel's huge monolithic processors (HCC, XCC), which lowers costs, and Intel jacked prices up because they had a monopoly.
So yes, they figured out how to produce cheaper solutions.
The argument was always "no one can use more than X cores" - but software seems to trail hardware in these examples, not the reverse. When Zen was first released, many of the less expensive 6 core options performed worse than Intel's similarly priced 4 core chips. But when comparing modern software using those old parts, AMD's 6 core offerings tend to hold up better.
It feels like AMD is finally ushering us into an era where being able to take advantage of large amounts of parallelism is going to become important for almost every developer.
For EPYC, AMD is using nine chips: https://images.anandtech.com/doci/13561/amd_rome-678_678x452...
That's 1x I/O chip (kind of like a router), and 8x chips, each of which has 8x cores on it. Total for 64-cores / 128-threads across 8-compute chips, talking together through a central 1x I/O and Memory chip.
The I/O chip is the biggest for reasons: 1. Its made on a cheaper process. 2. It has worse performance than the compute chips. 3. Its required to be big because driving external I/O requires more power.
So the I/O chip can be made on a cheap / inefficient 14nm process, while the CPUs can be made on a more expensive 7nm process (maximizing clock rates, power-efficiency). The big I/O ports are going to eat up a lot of power regardless of 7nm or 14nm process, so might as well save money here.
AMD spent less money on TSMC's research. Apple has been bankrolling TSMC to get the latest and greatest process tech.
AMD reached 7nm not because AMD put the R&D research into it... but because they can ride on the coattails of Apple and TSMC's investments.
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TSMC and Apple simultaneously benefit: TSMC can spread the risk of the 7nm process to more companies. Apple still gets first-dibs on the technology (but they only need ~6months worth of factory time to build all the chips they need).
Its more surprising that Intel managed to stay ahead of TSMC / Apple for so long. The economics are kind of against Intel here. The more people working together on process tech, the more efficient the results get.
