AMD outsells Intel in the datacenter space

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.

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

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

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.

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-...

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.

“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.

> 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.

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.)

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.