They had been operating on the same premise for a long time. Use dirty tactics along side with superior tech to heavily punish the competition. Then coast along for as long as possible, maximizing profits and doing little else. Rinse and repeat.
However this hinges on them getting the superior tech at the right moment, just as the competition is surging again after years of Intel coasting. This backfired in the past when Prescott had a new 90nm process that had way more leakage than expected. This raised the amount of energy the chip required to operate, which in turn raised the heat. This limited the clockspeed, which made them slow and energy hungry. Desktops were slow and noisy and laptops were impossible due to the power requirements. And the Netburst architecture they had needed high clockspeeds which also wasn’t possible. It failed hard and allowed AMD to surge with their Athlon64 chips absolutely destroying anything Intel had at that time. Intel needed to go back to their P6 design (pre-netburst), which had been kept alive in the company for their Pentium M series.
It backfired again recently when Intel failed to make the expected jumps in process node. The chip design was perfectly fine, but pretty ordinary as compared to AMDs lineup. Especially on the high end AMD had more performance on the table. As the new process node failed and AMD had TSMC make their high end chips, AMD took the lead once again.
This failure was compounded by a large scale production error where oxidation of one of the internal cpu layers wasn’t caught by QA. This made a small (but significant) percentage of chips fail after a few years. Intel figured out a workaround where changing some of the power regulation allowed for the oxidation to not occur or get worse. But chips that already failed or were about to, still failed. This led to consumers being annoyed and weary of buying Intel again and enterprise customers forcing Intel to replace a lot of chips at no costs.
Another big part is the whole GPU thing, where Intel has had integrated GPUs for a long time, but no dedicated product. The performance, compatibility and features were poor, basically enough to connect a monitor for office work but not much more. They even released a couple of products with AMD integrated GPUs, combined with Intel cpus because their on-board graphics were so poor. They tried to fix this multiple times, but failed each time. Recently with their Arcmage and later Battlemage products they are finally in a position to sell products. But the performance is still poor and compatibility is hampering them quite a bit. Even when selling them at a loss, it’s hard to be competitive. And then when the AI boom hit, they were left out in the cold. Nvidia won that race, selling so many chips for AI. AMD did significantly worse, but still good as compared to Intel. Intel has been selling some AI products, but it’s nothing compared to the others.
Then there’s the whole ARM thing. People have been saying for years one could build pretty good chips with them. In the past companies like Qualcomm and Mediatek said as much, but weren’t taken seriously. Then Samsung made their own and also said as much. Again they weren’t taken seriously, they are good chips for phones and perhaps tablets, but for serious computing you need more power. Sure the performance per watt is good, but no way that scales right. But someone at Apple was listening after getting frustrated with Intel. They had moved from IBM to Intel in the past without much trouble. So they invested, designed some chips and blew people away with their results. Enough for Microsoft for example to also try again with Arm chips, having failed miserably with the software in the past. This might hurt Intel a lot in the future, as they were often the preferred supplier when it came to running Windows.
So yeah a lot of things going on, there’s also some shady financial stuff involved and more tech stuff. It’s an interesting, complicated and unfolding story. Like so many things today, we have no idea how the future will be in regards to Intel.
Their recent release has them pretty competitive with AMD and Apple to an extent again. It’s not an absolute disaster that was pre 16th gen (if that’s what they’re called) .
Did Intel somehow manage to close the yawning performance-per-watt gap with Apple Silicon, or is this just this year’s latest potato?
Man, what is even happening at Intel? Apple and AMD have made them look absolutely pathetic, not to mention their own processors grenading for fun.
They had been operating on the same premise for a long time. Use dirty tactics along side with superior tech to heavily punish the competition. Then coast along for as long as possible, maximizing profits and doing little else. Rinse and repeat.
However this hinges on them getting the superior tech at the right moment, just as the competition is surging again after years of Intel coasting. This backfired in the past when Prescott had a new 90nm process that had way more leakage than expected. This raised the amount of energy the chip required to operate, which in turn raised the heat. This limited the clockspeed, which made them slow and energy hungry. Desktops were slow and noisy and laptops were impossible due to the power requirements. And the Netburst architecture they had needed high clockspeeds which also wasn’t possible. It failed hard and allowed AMD to surge with their Athlon64 chips absolutely destroying anything Intel had at that time. Intel needed to go back to their P6 design (pre-netburst), which had been kept alive in the company for their Pentium M series.
It backfired again recently when Intel failed to make the expected jumps in process node. The chip design was perfectly fine, but pretty ordinary as compared to AMDs lineup. Especially on the high end AMD had more performance on the table. As the new process node failed and AMD had TSMC make their high end chips, AMD took the lead once again. This failure was compounded by a large scale production error where oxidation of one of the internal cpu layers wasn’t caught by QA. This made a small (but significant) percentage of chips fail after a few years. Intel figured out a workaround where changing some of the power regulation allowed for the oxidation to not occur or get worse. But chips that already failed or were about to, still failed. This led to consumers being annoyed and weary of buying Intel again and enterprise customers forcing Intel to replace a lot of chips at no costs.
Another big part is the whole GPU thing, where Intel has had integrated GPUs for a long time, but no dedicated product. The performance, compatibility and features were poor, basically enough to connect a monitor for office work but not much more. They even released a couple of products with AMD integrated GPUs, combined with Intel cpus because their on-board graphics were so poor. They tried to fix this multiple times, but failed each time. Recently with their Arcmage and later Battlemage products they are finally in a position to sell products. But the performance is still poor and compatibility is hampering them quite a bit. Even when selling them at a loss, it’s hard to be competitive. And then when the AI boom hit, they were left out in the cold. Nvidia won that race, selling so many chips for AI. AMD did significantly worse, but still good as compared to Intel. Intel has been selling some AI products, but it’s nothing compared to the others.
Then there’s the whole ARM thing. People have been saying for years one could build pretty good chips with them. In the past companies like Qualcomm and Mediatek said as much, but weren’t taken seriously. Then Samsung made their own and also said as much. Again they weren’t taken seriously, they are good chips for phones and perhaps tablets, but for serious computing you need more power. Sure the performance per watt is good, but no way that scales right. But someone at Apple was listening after getting frustrated with Intel. They had moved from IBM to Intel in the past without much trouble. So they invested, designed some chips and blew people away with their results. Enough for Microsoft for example to also try again with Arm chips, having failed miserably with the software in the past. This might hurt Intel a lot in the future, as they were often the preferred supplier when it came to running Windows.
So yeah a lot of things going on, there’s also some shady financial stuff involved and more tech stuff. It’s an interesting, complicated and unfolding story. Like so many things today, we have no idea how the future will be in regards to Intel.
Their recent release has them pretty competitive with AMD and Apple to an extent again. It’s not an absolute disaster that was pre 16th gen (if that’s what they’re called) .