JEMC said:
Pemalite said:
When AMD absorbed ATI they took on a LOT of debt, then their CPU business started to falter with Phenom, Phenom 2 and Bulldozer... So AMD ended up cutting a lot of fat, spun off their fab business into Global Foundries (Which has struggled) and just focused on design... And on the design side they hired Jim Keller who was instrumental with the Zen architecture... And the rest is history.
Intel probably needs to do the same, if they aren't going to be competitive with leading edge nodes, then they need to start leveraging TSMC like AMD just to remain competitive.
But even doing that will not guarantee success, AMD's Radeon department has always struggled against nVidia with the exception if a couple of generations. |
Well, Intel already tried the Jim Keller card and it doesn't seem to have worked. There are a couple fo things that will force Intel to having to work harder to get out of the hole they got themselves into, because AMD had the advantage of designing chips for consoles, which won't help Intel (too late to the party), and we now also have ARM making big gains in the server market, with laptops and desktop PCs following in the not so distant future. Plus there's also RISC-V looming in the horizon. So yeah, Intel has a lot of work to do. |
Jim Keller left due to disagreements with Intel's higher-ups about outsourcing chip production long before his work was done. I'm pretty sure the tiled chip design of Arrow Lake was Jim's brainchild, but left unfinished with his early departure.
Pemalite said:
JEMC said:
Well, Intel already tried the Jim Keller card and it doesn't seem to have worked. There are a couple fo things that will force Intel to having to work harder to get out of the hole they got themselves into, because AMD had the advantage of designing chips for consoles, which won't help Intel (too late to the party), and we now also have ARM making big gains in the server market, with laptops and desktop PCs following in the not so distant future. Plus there's also RISC-V looming in the horizon. So yeah, Intel has a lot of work to do. |
I don't think they allowed Jim Keller full autonomy... Which is likely why he didn't have a long tenure there to truly make the changes necessary, Intel is extremely bureaucratic, bloated and is adverse to change.
Intel still has roughly twice the revenue than AMD, so they do have some room to cut fat and reposition themselves... And I hope they do, because we don't want AMD to be the only option in the x86 game. |
Qualcomm tried to acquire Intel, and AMD's X86 licenses actually hinge upon Intel existing, so AMD can't let Intel die either without losing their license; even acquiring Intel for themselves wouldn't fully solve the licensing questions for AMD.
With ARM becoming increasingly competitive, and OS also adapting to this, it could become a future where your choice of CPU brand is also a choice of architecture, so going X86 or ARM. If we ever get to this point I fear either Intel or AMD wouldn't survive in that world for long.