Posted by rbanffy 4 days ago
†Disclaimer: I own an Intel Arc GPU
In the last few years Intel's division that makes Xeons had huge losses, because in order to retain their big customers they had to accept to sell at big discounts, otherwise the customers would have switched to AMD.
All has changed this year, due to the AI craze.
AMD has sold all the server CPUs that it could make, within its allocations at TSMC. Everybody who did not succeed to buy EPYCs has bought Intel Granite Rapids Xeons, because they are not made at TSMC, but in Intel's fabs, so they did not compete with other TSMC customers for allocations.
So Intel has also sold every server CPU that they could make, and they are now trying to retool some fab that made new Panther Lake CPUs back to the obsolete Intel 3 CMOS manufacturing process, in order to make more Xeons, to sell them as long as this huge demand persists.
Thus in the last quarter both AMD and Intel have sold less consumer CPUs than in the past, because all who could did delay their upgrade plans due to the unacceptable memory prices, but on the other hand both AMD and Intel had record revenues and profits from selling server CPUs.
and that's fine. just surprised the hell out of they still used a black friday special laptop from 10 years ago. that thing is special alright....
Intel isn't even condered a player in HPC anymore. 147 of TOP 500 is AMD (it's really custom chips, which AMD also does with it's Xilinx and Instinct divisions, and nVidia that are chewing up the Intels)
Anyone with insight into the industry know how much institutional knowledge would be relevant still with an ISA switch?
I reckon 5 years from now it'll be obvious that x86 is on its way out, and 10 years from now it'll be replaced by ARM in all but narrow backwards compatibility demanded use cases.
I also predict that the survival of both Intel and ARM as big players in the market is contingent on them switching in the same timeframe. If they don't, they're dead (of course, if they try to switch and botch it, they're dead too - but baking that into a prediction feels a bit no-true-scotsman esque).
I'm hopeful that manufacturers will ship regular socketable ARM cpus just like they do with x86 now, but who knows whether that will be the case or if we'll move more towards everything being soldered on all in one solutions.
so now mobile, desktop and server all looking good with ARM? i can't see why it would go backwards at all.
Also beware of what you wish for, that is basically the end of PCs when it comes to be, the dream of OEMs, going back to fully vertical integration as all computers used to be in the last century, with exception of PC clones, thanks to IBM failing to control the ecosystem.
It didn't, other than in some niches.
Due to Trump policies (and geopolitical realities), they are building or helping to build fabs in the US and elsewhere. It's takes years to build a fab.
so intel took the hit now, AMD might take the hit later as they're kinda...... mostly a software company, that contracts to hardware companies.
Technically impossible. Hmm.. do you mean Intel > AMD. nVidia > AMD. nVidia > Intel. AMD > Intel.
I want my money back.