Over the past several years, I keep hearing about how Intel is struggling in the market now. Since 2020 or so, it seems AMD has had a steady advantage with their processors over Intel. I remember seeing some benchmarks in 2020 showing AMD's flagship desktop processor was beating Intel's flagship desktop processor in many areas. Not to say Intel is making bad stuff, but it seems AMD has been fairly steadily popular with a lot of PC builders for several years.

I worked at Intel from 2011 to the end of 2019, and while I was there, I started to hear about Intel's chip manufacturing struggling and falling behind around 2018-2019 or so. TSMC's chip manufacturing process had surpassed Intel's, allowing AMD and other chip makers to make smaller transistors for their chips, and Intel struggled with that. Although Intel has tended to manufacture its own chips, I've heard Intel has now outsourced some of their chips to TSMC to make use of their process technology.

Also, while I was at Intel, I saw some changes in leadership at some fairly high levels. A couple of business group leaders left for other companies. The CEO also changed when I was there. Brian Krzanich was the CEO when I started, but eventually he was kicked out due to a supposed relationship with a subordinate - but I heard from others that people were unhappy with his leadership, as he was supposedly expected to help boost Intel's manufacturing, as Brian Krzanich was an engineer before becoming CEO. They had an interim CEO (Bob Swan) for a little while (who was in accounting) who eventually decided to become permanent CEO, but he didn't last long. They then brought in Pat Gelsinger, who was there for just a few years before resigning in 2024 (his plan to turn Intel around was apparently not working well enough).

At any rate, I've heard a lot of news about Intel recently that makes it sound like they're just not doing very well. For a while now, I've had a feeling they've had bad management, and sometimes it seems like Intel doesn't know where they want to go. Like many tech companies, they've had a lot of layoffs as they ramp up projects and then decide to cancel them, buy other companies & sell them, etc..

As Intel has been a behemoth in the computer industry for so long, it feels a bit surreal to me to see them seemingly fading away, particularly since I worked there for about 8 years..

Nightfox

Re: Intel: Once mighty, now falling?
By: Nightfox to All on Tue May 06 2025 21:54:39

It feels a bit surreal to me to see them seemingly
fading away...

To everything, turn...turn...turn...
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Hey Nightfox!

On Tue, May 06 2025 23:54:39 -0500, you wrote:

Over the past several years, I keep hearing about how Intel is
struggling in the market now. Since 2020 or so, it seems AMD has had
a steady advantage with their processors over Intel. I remember
seeing some benchmarks in 2020 showing AMD's flagship desktop
processor was beating Intel's flagship desktop processor in many
areas. Not to say Intel is making bad stuff, but it seems AMD has
been fairly steadily popular with a lot of PC builders for several
years.

I'm not sure it was that long ago, but it has definitely been proven that the X3D line of AMD CPUs have been better than Intel's competition. Seems the first (5800X3D) was released some time in 2022. But AMD was probably creeping up for awhile before that.

At any rate, I've heard a lot of news about Intel recently that makes
it sound like they're just not doing very well. For a while now,
I've had a feeling they've had bad management, and sometimes it seems
like Intel doesn't know where they want to go. Like many tech
companies, they've had a lot of layoffs as they ramp up projects and
then decide to cancel them, buy other companies & sell them, etc..

Sounds like they're going to bounce back. I think they're already starting to make Xeon chips (server rated) with that X3D tech, so if they end up bringing that to the normal consumer market, their fans will probably jump back on the bandwagon.

As Intel has been a behemoth in the computer industry for so long, it
feels a bit surreal to me to see them seemingly fading away,
particularly since I worked there for about 8 years..

I'd probably consider it a hiccup. Their latest chips are crap compared to AMDs, but I'm sure they'll figure it out at some point and fix it. Granted, it could still hinder their market for at least a chip generation if a lot of their fans switched to the latest AMD chips and go a few years without buying Intel again.

Regards,
Nick

... Sarcasm: because beating people up is illegal.
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Hey Nightfox!

On Tue, 06 May 2025 21:54:38 -0700, you wrote:

As Intel has been a behemoth in the computer industry for so long, it
feels a bit surreal to me to see them seemingly fading away,
particularly since I worked there for about 8 years..

As an update on this thread, it seems the AMD 9000* CPUs are showing signs of the same issues that Intel has been having.

For anyone looking to build a new rig, might want to wait a bit till they both figure this out. :(

Regards,
Nick

... Sarcasm: because beating people up is illegal.
--- GoldED+/LNX 1.1.5-b20250409
* Origin: _thePharcyde telnet://bbs.pharcyde.org (Wisconsin) (46:1/100)

Re: Intel: Once mighty, now falling?
By: Accession to Nightfox on Mon May 19 2025 04:51 pm

As an update on this thread, it seems the AMD 9000* CPUs are showing signs of the same issues that Intel has been having.

For anyone looking to build a new rig, might want to wait a bit till they both figure this out. :(

Ah, interesting.. Sucks to hear that. :(

Nightfox

On 19 May 2025 at 04:51p, Accession pondered and said...

As Intel has been a behemoth in the computer industry for so long, it feels a bit surreal to me to see them seemingly fading away, particularly since I worked there for about 8 years..

As an update on this thread, it seems the AMD 9000* CPUs are showing
signs of the same issues that Intel has been having.

For anyone looking to build a new rig, might want to wait a bit till
they both figure this out. :(

What issues are those?

I've been working with AMD chips for a few years now; this is on
the server side, where we design and build our own boards, as we
are a computer vendor. We don't use AMD's proprietary UEFI-based
firmware (that is, we use neither AGESA nor OpenSIL). We wrote
our own, directly in the operating system (we run Unix).

My sense is that Intel's failures are a) they were really late
getting onto a 7nm process, basically missing the boat on that
one, and they haven't been able to keep up with AMD on the power consumption/heat side. Frankly, AMD is just producing a better
chip.

Also, they've tried to milk the x86 cow for far too long. They
can't compete on the low-end, so they did what flailing companies
always do, they retreated to the high-end to try and protect their
profit margins. But a lot of places elsewhere in the industry are
jumping to ARM, which was already dominant in the embedded space
and the low-end, but with the hyperscalars pushing it into the
datacenter across GCP, AWS, and (critically) Azure, it's ramping
up the software ecosystem, much of which was already running on
Linux anyway, and eating into Intel's bread-and-butter. With Apple
and others starting to push in the consumer space with Apple Silicon
already there, and Ampere, Cavium, and others pushing from the lower
end, with usually better power efficiency, the case for Intel inside
is less and less. Oh, and phones and tablets? Forget about it.

If the RISC-V people ever really get their act together and form a
viable alternative to ARM _and_ x86 on the high end (RISC-V has
already made a number of inroads in the embedded space) then with
AMD rounding out the legacy/high-end side, there's going to be little
market left for Intel.

Also, Intel keeps favoring the x86 business over other, possibly more
lucrative spaces. Canceling Tofino seemed like a huge mistake, for
example; there was literally nothing else on the market that did what
Tofino2 could do. It was short-sighted madness.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
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Hey tenser!

On Wed, 21 May 2025 00:51:26 +1200, you wrote:

What issues are those?

From what I've read, CPU burnout due to voltage spikes, and core parking apparantly not working correctly. Also performance issues (ie. not as good as originally advertised) due to them using the Zen2 codebase in order to rush it out the door because they were more familiar with it.

Although, I got this all from the interwebs so it could all be wrong. ;)

I've been working with AMD chips for a few years now; this is on
the server side, where we design and build our own boards, as we
are a computer vendor. We don't use AMD's proprietary UEFI-based
firmware (that is, we use neither AGESA nor OpenSIL). We wrote
our own, directly in the operating system (we run Unix).

What do you recommend if one were to build a new homelab, replacing an Intel Xeon E3-1230 CPU? Mind you, I wouldn't be looking to spend a ton, but would at least want better than what I currently have (more than 4x2 cores/threads).

My sense is that Intel's failures are a) they were really late
getting onto a 7nm process, basically missing the boat on that
one, and they haven't been able to keep up with AMD on the power consumption/heat side. Frankly, AMD is just producing a better
chip.

Do we really need desktop processors that have 24 cores? It seems there have been issues ever since going over 8. I'm currently running a Core i9-9900k with 8 cores and 16 threads. Never felt the need to overclock, and I can throw anything at it that I would normally do, and yet it continues to run super smooth. *shrug*

Also, Intel keeps favoring the x86 business over other, possibly more lucrative spaces. Canceling Tofino seemed like a huge mistake, for
example; there was literally nothing else on the market that did what Tofino2 could do. It was short-sighted madness.

I take it this is more in the commercial market? I only deal with my personal computers, I don't work in the field or anything, so am lacking a lot of knowledge as to what goes on in the industry.

Regards,
Nick

... Sarcasm: because beating people up is illegal.
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* Origin: _thePharcyde telnet://bbs.pharcyde.org (Wisconsin) (46:1/100)

On 20 May 2025 at 06:26p, Accession pondered and said...

On Wed, 21 May 2025 00:51:26 +1200, you wrote:

What issues are those?

From what I've read, CPU burnout due to voltage spikes, and core parking apparantly not working correctly. Also performance issues (ie. not as
good as originally advertised) due to them using the Zen2 codebase in order to rush it out the door because they were more familiar with it.

Yeah,the intertubes are pretty much all wrong, there. Current
generation AMD microarchitectures are Zen 4 and Zen 5; the "code
base" in question might be AGESA, but mention of Zen 2 in there
is pretty sparse; Zen 2 is really ancient. I can tell you that,
in particular, Turin is pretty zippy.

I've been working with AMD chips for a few years now; this is on
the server side, where we design and build our own boards, as we
are a computer vendor. We don't use AMD's proprietary UEFI-based firmware (that is, we use neither AGESA nor OpenSIL). We wrote
our own, directly in the operating system (we run Unix).

What do you recommend if one were to build a new homelab, replacing an Intel Xeon E3-1230 CPU? Mind you, I wouldn't be looking to spend a ton, but would at least want better than what I currently have (more than 4x2 cores/threads).

Homelabs aren't really something I'm super up on, but that sounds
like Sandy Bridge; basically anything is going to be ok.

On the AMD side, you can probably get a Milan-based server, or even
something based on Genoa, pretty reasonably. Personally, I'd go for
that. You can probably get 16 cores/32 threads for under $2k, but
I'm speculating. (Our machines are rack-scale, and go for about a
million dollars a pop; but you get 32 compute sleds with 128 HW threads
and 1TiB of RAM each, plus about 48 TiB of disk and 100 Gbps to a
custom switch).

My sense is that Intel's failures are a) they were really late
getting onto a 7nm process, basically missing the boat on that
one, and they haven't been able to keep up with AMD on the power consumption/heat side. Frankly, AMD is just producing a better
chip.

Do we really need desktop processors that have 24 cores? It seems there have been issues ever since going over 8. I'm currently running a Core i9-9900k with 8 cores and 16 threads. Never felt the need to overclock, and I can throw anything at it that I would normally do, and yet it continues to run super smooth. *shrug*

Honestly, I have no idea. I think that Intel on the desktop is
a losing proposition in the long term. As for whether you _need_
it? I suppose it depends on what you're using it for. For high
end CAD or graphics processing, or a developer workstation where
you're doing lots of big builds, sure: more is better. Since
Denard scaling stopped a few years ago, the only way we're going
to get better performance is to increase parallelism, and since
we want to maximize bandwidth to DRAM and number of memory channels
is in some sense a function of core counts, then yeah.

But for day-to-day consumer use, is a desktop machine even that
useful? Probably not. Most end users are probably better off with
a laptop and an external monitor+keyboard/mouse.

Also, Intel keeps favoring the x86 business over other, possibly more lucrative spaces. Canceling Tofino seemed like a huge mistake, for example; there was literally nothing else on the market that did what Tofino2 could do. It was short-sighted madness.

I take it this is more in the commercial market? I only deal with my personal computers, I don't work in the field or anything, so am lacking
a lot of knowledge as to what goes on in the industry.

Yeah. Basically, they had an ASIC that was almost unique in the
industry in terms of functionality for building high-end switches
and routers, but they canceled it. We had built our switch
product around it (32-ports of 200Gbps capacity with a high-speed
PCIe link to one of our compute sleds to control the whole thing),
and finding a replacement was an interesting exercise.

I remember when DEC was failing; they were selling off successful
business units to try and preserve their high-margin server
business, selling their big VAXen and Alpha boxes running VMS.
They gave away almost everything: Alpha, the networking division,
etc. I see Intel making similar mistakes to try and preserve the
x86 business.

... I know a good tagline when I steal one!

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* Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (46:3/203)

Hey tenser!

On Fri, 23 May 2025 02:38:14 +1200, you wrote:

Yeah,the intertubes are pretty much all wrong, there. Current
generation AMD microarchitectures are Zen 4 and Zen 5; the "code
base" in question might be AGESA, but mention of Zen 2 in there
is pretty sparse; Zen 2 is really ancient. I can tell you that,
in particular, Turin is pretty zippy.

Well, that's good to know. I had just recently got a Google pop-up on my phone that mentioned AMD's latest CPUs were suffering from some of the same woes as Intel, so I mentioned it here since the Intel side of it was already brought up. Either way, not a great time to be in the market, and I'm glad I'm currently not. ;)

Homelabs aren't really something I'm super up on, but that sounds
like Sandy Bridge; basically anything is going to be ok.

Now you see where my price point was. ~$500 for the whole setup, which included 32gb RAM, and me buying 4 2TB 10k HDDs.

On the AMD side, you can probably get a Milan-based server, or even something based on Genoa, pretty reasonably. Personally, I'd go for
that. You can probably get 16 cores/32 threads for under $2k, but
I'm speculating. (Our machines are rack-scale, and go for about a
million dollars a pop; but you get 32 compute sleds with 128 HW threads
and 1TiB of RAM each, plus about 48 TiB of disk and 100 Gbps to a
custom switch).

Even 8 cores/16 threads would probably be fine. I'm definitely not looking to spend upwards of $2k on BBSing and at home tinkering. At the moment I'm running 3 VMs, with 2 cores and 4gb RAM dedicated for each. I have plenty of RAM and HDD space left over currently. I was just wondering if there was any AMD CPUs that were preferred over others for this kind of task, I guess.

But for day-to-day consumer use, is a desktop machine even that
useful? Probably not. Most end users are probably better off with
a laptop and an external monitor+keyboard/mouse.

I do some gaming, yet I don't usually bother with 4k as it all looks the same after 1080p (lol) when FPS is concerned. I had a laptop once, and it always seemed hot to the point I got one of those fan pads you put under it. I'm not really interested in the portability or anything, which is why I stick with desktops (and build them myself).

I remember when DEC was failing; they were selling off successful
business units to try and preserve their high-margin server
business, selling their big VAXen and Alpha boxes running VMS.
They gave away almost everything: Alpha, the networking division,
etc. I see Intel making similar mistakes to try and preserve the
x86 business.

I guess I'm glad I don't see or pay attention to any of that from the userland. But, whenever I'm in the market to upgrade one of my PCs, I may end up doing an AMD build next. That probably won't be for another few years, though, as what I have now is still kickin' strong.. and they aren't creating any new games that demand anything more these days that I'm actually interested in playing.

Regards,
Nick

... Sarcasm: because beating people up is illegal.
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