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[Bofferbrauer2]

fatslob-:O said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

It's all due to Krzanich tenure as the boss of Intel.

He constantly reduced all R&D budgets, thinking AMD and IBM could never catch up anymore, jacked up the prices for obscene margins (and still have the prices right up there, like the Xeon Platinum 8180M and it's $13011 pricetag - and that's before the Two-8000-series-chips-glued-together 9000 series, which don't have a pricetag yet) blew their money on pointless aquisitions, fired and drew away all good talent that they had to avoid competition at the top... and then came AMD with Ryzen and Intel had nothing to counter anymore. Being not an engineer and at the same time a total meeting room tyrant meant that nothing innovative could come through to Krzanich unless it meant immediate income or was about some perceived growth market (like smartphones, IoT, you name it), and CPU development grinded pretty much to a halt. Broadwell was already developed by his predecessor, but only came on the market under Krzanich - and being an expensive chip, it only got a limited release, banking an the cheaper Skylake.

The way Krzanich led the company meant massive earnings due to cutting costs everywhere and rising prices sky high, and thus Investors were enamored into his leadership. But by doing so, they mentally bankruted the company, and are now paying the price for dillydallying for 6 years under his leadership. Seriously, what he will have cost the company on the long run will certainly be several times more than what he made the company and the shareholders earn together in that period.

They did ramp up the core count, but on a side note, I don't think AMD is really responsible for that. Intel always touted themselves as bringing a 20% performance increase gen over gen, and the only way they could do that after Kaby lake really was by increasing the core count, as they reached the limit of what was feasible with clock alone. I think that's also the reason who they added 2 cores each year since, that made the 20% increase more feasible on the long run.

When they had to counter Ryzen as it became even more dangerous to them than anticipated, they didn't have much possibilities. They had the gaming market in their hand because Ryzen couldn't reach higher clock speeds, but servers and especially workstations were at risk with Epyc and the Threadripper reveal. They did counter by bringing some workstation and server chips to the desktop to match the core count, and jacked up the wattage to surpass AMD in clock speed again. But the 9900K and the Skylake-X chips showed that this could only bring them so far, now it's the end of the line. Unless they find a way to press some more ipc out of the aging core architecture, then AMD has carte blanche starting Zen 2/Ryzen 3xxx until at least 2023, as no successor is on sight earlier then that. All because Krzanich grinded development to a halt. I hope Lisa Su sends you a big check every Christmas Krzanich, because you couldn't have made her a better gift if you tried.

Intel's manufacturing group is a bigger problem than their CPU design teams. If they can't do either 10nm or 7nm then they'll have to degrade themselves on the level of AMD and become fabless chip designer like they did but shit is going to hit the fan once Intel starts initiating mass layoffs and selling their properties to others ... 

Krzanich definitely had an engineering background, at least more so than his previous predecessor Paul Otellini did but man is Intel a stinky pile of poo right now ... 

I see Lisa Su getting all the credit but the Zen's architecture all kick started under Rory Read's leadership so he's the biggest reason why AMD hasn't totally sunken since the much needed reforms he started are still in effect today at AMD. Rory Read managed to keep AMD afloat with semi-custom deals since his unveiling of the Zen project however, in saying that Read did make a few mistakes but I think AMD can reach even greater heights with Lisa Su under the helm. AMD are now the main defacto suppliers of semi-custom console APUs and cloud gaming hardware so there's no telling what they could go for next such as exclusively supplying Apple's CPU/GPUs for their Mac lines or having OEMs/server vendors supplying a bigger share with their products ... 

That all falls under the R&D and the cut budgets I mentioned before.

Yeah, Krzanich was an industrial engineer. You know, those people who rationalize everything down to the minimum. And that's exactly what he did, up  to 11, even.

I mentioned Lisa Su just because she's reaping the fallout of Krzanichs and Intels misgivings. She certainly isn't the reason Zen or the PS4/XBO deals got started, that's Rory Reads doings, totally correct, but she seems to lead the development further in the right direction and got the PS5/Scarlet deals, something Krzanich definitely didn't do.