AMD outsells Intel in the datacenter space

Damn, first Intel missed out on Mobile, then it fumbled AI, and now it's being seriously challenged on its home turf. Pat has his work cut out for him.

Not to mention that ARM keeps closing in on their ISA moat via Apple, Ampere, Graviton and so on. Their last bastion is the fact that Microsoft keeps botching Windows for ARM every time they try to make it happen.

> seriously challenged on its home turf.

Is it? I presume that a large chunk of the AMD's $3.5B is MI3XX chips, and very little of Intel's $3.5B is AI, so doesn't that mean that Xeon likely still substantially outsells EPYC?

His work now boils down to prepping Intel for an acquisition.

Intel has come back recently with a new series of "Lunar Lake" CPUs for laptops. They are actually very good. For now, Intel has regained the crown for Windows laptops.

Maybe Pat has lit the much needed fire under them.

By whom though? I don't see how any company directly competing with Intel (or even orthogonal e.g. Nvidia and ARM) could be allowed to by Intel (they'd need approval in the US/EU and presumably a few other places) unless it's actually on the brink of bankruptcy?

The only ugly (for Intel) detail being that they are fabbed by TSMC

They didn't miss out. They owned the most desirable mobile platform in StrongARM and cast it aside. They are the footgun masters.

Snapdragon X Plus/Elite is still faster and has better battery life. Lunar Lake does have a better GPU and of course better compatibility.

They killed StrongARM because they believed the x86 Atom design could compete. Turns out that it couldn't and most of the phones with it weren't that great.

Intel should be focused on an x86+RISC-V hybrid chip design where they can control an upcoming ecosystem while also offering a migration path for businesses that will pay the bills for decades to come.

X Elite is faster, but not enough to offset the software incompatibility or dealing with the GPU absolutely sucking.

Unfortunately for Intel, X Elite was a bad CPU that has been fixed with Snapdragon 8 Elite's update. The core uses a tiny fraction of the power of X Elite (way less than the N3 node shrink would offer). The core also got a bigger frontend and a few other changes which seem to have updated IPC.

Qualcomm said they are leading in performance per area and I believe it is true. Lunar Lake's P-core is over 2x as large (2.2mm2 vs 4.5mm2) and Zen5 is nearly 2x as large too at 4.2mm2 (Even Zen5c is massively bigger at 3.1mm2).

X Elite 2 will either be launching with 8 Elite's core or an even better variant and it'll be launching quite a while before Panther Lake.

I'd argue that the Atom core itself could compete - it hit pretty much the same perf/watt targets as it's performance-competitive ARM equivalents.

But having worked with Intel on some of those SoCs, it's everything else that fell down. They were late, they were the "disfavored" teams by execs, they were the engineer's last priority, they had stupid hw bugs they refused to fix and respin, they were everything you could do to set up a project to fail.

IIRC Intel and AMD have a patent sharing agreement that dissolves if either is purchased.

Maybe I'm just spitting out random BS, but if I understood Keller correctly when he spoke about Zen that (for it) it's not really a problem to change frontend ISA as large chunk of work is on the backend anyways. If that's the case in general with modern processors, would be cool to see a hybrid that can be switched from x86_64 to RISC-V and, to add even more avangarde to it, associate a core or few of FPGA on the same die. Intel, get on it!

There were consumer devices with a processor designed to be flexible on its instruction set presented to the user.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmeta_Crusoe

https://youtu.be/xtuKqd-LWog?t=332

"not really a problem to change" in the context and scope of a multi-billion dollar project employing thousands of people full time.

aka the company where Linus worked!

Worth noting,

> Future Intel generations of chips, including Panther Lake and Nova Lake, won’t have baked-on memory. “It’s not a good way to run the business, so it really is for us a one-off with Lunar Lake,” said Gelsinger on Intel’s Q3 2024 earnings call, as spotted by VideoCardz.[0]

[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/1/24285513/intel-ceo-lunar-...

If you think about it, that's what Thumb mode on ARM is.

LNL is a great paper launch but I have yet to see a reasonably priced LNL laptop so far. Nowadays I can find 16GB Airs and X Elite laptops for 700-900 bucks, and once you get into 1400 territory just pay a bit more for M4 MBPs which are far superior machines.

And also, they compete in the same price bracket as Zen 5, which are more performant with not that much worse battery life.

LNL is too little too late.

> They were late

This was the main thing, as by that point, all native code was being compiled to Arm and not x86. Using x86 meant that some apps, libraries, etc just didn't work.

“It’s not a good way to run the business, so it really is for us a one-off with Lunar Lake,”

When you prioritize yourself (way to run the business) over delivering what customers want you're finished. Some companies can get that wrong for a long time, but Intel has a competitor giving the customers much more of what they want. I want a great chip and honestly don't know, care, or give a fuck what's best for Intel.

Intel and Google developed libhoudini to do binary translation of the native code to solve that problem. https://github.com/SGNight/Arm-NativeBridge, https://www.anandtech.com/show/5770/lava-xolo-x900-review-th..., http://blog.apedroid.com/2013/05/binary-translation-vs-nativ...

>unless it's actually on the brink of bankruptcy?

This may be in the cards.

They had a second attempt with x86 smartphone chips and bungled that too: https://www.pcworld.com/article/414673/intel-is-on-the-verge...

Medfield was faster than A9 and Qualcomm Krait in performance, but not so much in power (see Motorola Razr i vs M where the dual-core ARM version got basically the same battery life as the single-core x86 version).

Shortly after though, ARM launched A15 and the game was over. A15 was faster per clock while using less power too. Intel's future Atom generations never even came close after that.

> When you prioritize yourself

Unless “way to run the business” means “delivering what the customer wants.”

Lunarrow Lake is a big L for Intel because it's all Made by TSMC. A big reason I buy Intel is because they're Made by Intel.

We will see whatever they come out with for 17th gen onwards, but for now Intel needs to fucking pay back their CHIPS money.

Are they being fabbed by TSMC in the US, or overseas?

Customer being the OEMs.

that also kinda failed to reach their goals unfortunately.

Yeah, but can they run any modern OS well? The last N intel laptops and desktops I’ve used were incapable of stably running Windows, MacOS or Linux. (As in the windows and apple ones couldn’t run their preloaded operating systems well, and loading Linux didn’t fix it.)

> and, to add even more avangarde to it, associate a core or few of FPGA on the same die

The use cases for FPGAs in consumer devices are ... close to zero unless you're talking about implementing copy protection since reverse engineering FPGA bitstreams is pretty much impossible if you're not the NSA, MI6 or Mossad with infinite brains to throw at the problem (and more likely than not, insider knowledge from the vendors).

I thought the OEMs liked the idea of being able to demand high profit margins on RAM upgrades at checkout, which is especially easy to justify when the RAM is on-package with the CPU. That way no one can claim the OEM was the one choosing to be anti-consumer by soldering the RAM to the motherboard, and they can just blame Intel.

An M4 Macbook Pro 14 with 32 GB of RAM and 1 TB storage is $2,199... a Lunar Lake with the same specs is $1199. [0]

[0] https://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus-vivobook-s-14-14-oled-lapt...

Very strange. Enough bad things can be said about Intel CPUs, but I have never had any doubts about their stability. Except for that one recent generation that could age to death in a couple of months (I didn't have any of these).

AMD is IME more finicky with RAM, chipset / UEFI / builtin peripheral controller quality and so on. Not prohibitively so, but it's more work to get an AMD build to run great.

No trouble with any AMD or Intel Thinkpad T models, Lenovo has taken care of that.

You forgot the 10 nm / 7 nm node troubles that continued for years and held back their CPU architectures (which honestly kept improving).

Yeah Otellini disclosed Jobs asked them for a CPU for the iPhone and he turned the request down because Jobs was adamant on a certain price and he just couldn't see it.

Even if it was hard to foresee the success of the iPhone, he surely had the Core Duo in his hands when this happened even if it didn't launch yet so the company just found its footing again and they should've attempted this moonshot: if the volume is low, the losses are low. If the volume is high then economies of scale will make it a win. This is not hindsight 20/20, this is true even if no one could've foreseen just how high the volume would've been.

> Intel should be focused on an x86+RISC-V hybrid chip design where they can control an upcoming ecosystem while also offering a migration path for businesses that will pay the bills for decades to come.

First I've heard of this. Is this actually a possibility?

Sounds like Intel has a big boomer problem

Maybe the Atom core itself was performant, but I doubt they could take all the x86 crap around it to make it slim enough for a phone

Intel would definitely try to directly profit from stratified pricing rather than letting the OEM keep that extra margin (competition from AMD permitting).

Plus the original Jazelle mode.

RP2350 is using a hybrid of ARM and RISCV already. Also it's not really hard to use RISCV not as the main computing core but as a controller in the SoC. Because the area of RISCV cores are so small it's pretty common to put a dozen (16 to be specific) into a chip.

Yeah because it's an ASUS product. They make garbage.

They were SoCs, fundamentally the same as any ARM-based phone SoC - some atom SoCs even had integrated modems.

The BoM was pretty identical to other devices.

Reminds me that's also many people's speculation on how Qualcomm builds their RISCV chips -- swap an ARM decoder for a RISCV one.

That's just a thing that needs to be renegotiated - highly doubt these two are getting into a patent war given the state of x86. Unless Intel gets acquired by a litigious company to go after AMD :shrug:

From what I gather the one time I got to speak with chip engineers is that real estate is still at a premium. Not necessarily the total size of the chip, but certain things need to be packed close together to meet the timing requirements. I think that means that you'd be paying a serious penalty to have two parallel sets of decoders for different ISAs.

They killed strongarm because of nepotism. That's been the issue at Intel for decades. They are the epitome of ego over merit and x86 was king.

OEMs like it when it's them buying the cheap RAM chips and getting the juicy profits from huge mark-ups, not so much when they have to split the pie with Intel. As long as Intel cannot offer integrated RAM at price equivalent to external RAM chips, their customers (OEMs) are not interested.

> Windows laptops

A dying platform and as relevant as VAX/VMS going forward.

Nepotism? Like execs from different divisions fighting each other?

To me it seems they just want to keep their lock-in monopoly because they own x86. Very rational albeit stupid, but of course the people who took those decisions are long gone from the company, many are probably retired with their short-term focused bonuses.

Not so much with the latest ARM windows laptops

Not really Microsoft, rather the Windows developer ecosystem, backwards compatibility is the name of the game in PC land, and as such there is very little value to add additional development costs to support ARM alongside x86, for so little additional software sales.

Apple doesn't matter beyond its 10% market share, they don't target servers any more.

Ampere is a step away to be fully owned by Oracle, I bet most HN ARM cheering crowd is blessifuly unaware of it.

Graviton is only relevant for AWS customers.

Exactly. Most people still dont get it. What killed Atom on Phone wasn't x86. It was partly software and mostly hardware and cost. It simply wasn't cost competitive, especially when Intel were used to high margin business.

Gov would bail out intel or amd lol, this would negate American tech dominance and would try to prevent that

TSMC doesn't have any cutting-edge fabs in the US yet.

TSMC Washington is making 160nm silicon [0], and TSMC Arizona is still under construction.

[0] https://www.tsmcwashington.com/en/foundry/technology.html

You just made me nostalgic for amber screens, line printers, and all-nighters with fellow students.

not necessarily. in the past 5 years, the x86 monopoly in the server world has broken. arm chips like graviton are a substantial fraction (20%?) of the server CPU market.

That page doesn't really say much about what's currently being produced at TSMC Arizona vs the parts still under construction.

There's 4-nm "engineering wafer" production happening at TSMC Arizona already, and apparently the yields are decent:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tsmc-arizona-chip-plant-yield...

No idea when/what/how/etc that'll translate to actual production.

---

Doing a bit more poking around the net, it looks like "first half 2025" is when actual production is pencilled in for TSMC Arizona. Hopefully that works out.

That's not speculation.

Qualcomm made a 216-page proposal for their Znew[0] "extension".

It was basically "completely change RISC-V to do what Arm is doing". The only reason for this was that it would allow a super-fast transition from ARM to RISC-V. It was rejected HARD by all the other members.

Qualcomm is still making large investments into RISC-V. I saw an article estimating that the real reason for the Qualcomm v Arm lawsuit is that Qualcomm's old royalties were 2.5-3% while the new royalties would be 4-5.5%. We're talking about billions of dollars and that's plenty of incentive for Qualcomm to switch ISAs. Why should they pay billions for the privilege of designing their own CPUs?

[0] https://lists.riscv.org/g/tech-profiles/attachment/332/0/cod...

With a build quality planets apart.

My point is it's not "just pay a bit more".

No disagreement here; the link I provided was specifically for TSMC Washington.

I'm not saying that TSMC is never going to build anything in the US, but rather that the current Lunar / Arrow Lake chips on the market are not being fabbed in the US because that capacity is simply not online yet.

2025H1 seems much more promising for TSMC Arizona compared to the mess that is Samsung's Taylor, TX plant (also nominally under construction).

Those are not nearly comparable specs.

The opinion that x86 would always be king is nepotism/ego. It was obvious nearly 2 decades ago where compute was headed with cloud and mobile becoming the dominant areas. Neither of which x86 was well positioned for.

There was a story here a few days ago about the exact opposite: that Intel lost out to AMD on x86-64 because they were betting on Itanic to take over the 64-bit market.

edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41890779

> Intel could have beaten AMD to the x86-64 punch if the former wasn't dead-set on the x64-only Itanium line of CPUs

The failed because contract chip manufacturing was a huge issue back then. And the bet on slightly the wrong implementation as well. The fundamentally ideas weren't broken.

Yeah, I didn't ascribe any particular reason for it. I was dissapointed to hear the news, it came quietly after a long period of silence, which came after a much longer period of hype.