https://www.tomshardware.co.uk/intel-cpu-10nm-earnings-amd,n...
There are other services like Packet that offer bare-metal hosting on small Atom and ARM processors. It'd be nice to see some alt x86 processors in this space.
I think you're more likely to see some ARM CPUs which have comparable performance to low-end and mid-range x86 before you see a new x86 competitor [1] - the overhead to making x86 perform well is just so high that I can't imagine anyone new bothering to get into the space. VIA has been in the market forever as the third seller of x86, and despite the theoretical benefits of entering into the datacenter CPU market, they've never made that leap (though I don't know enough about their history to know if they tried).
I'm hoping that ARM becoming competitive in the client CPU space ends up making the cross-compile overheads of enough drivers/kernel stuff that we can start to see some more diversity in the CPU market overall. I'm excited about RISC-V, especially now that they have shipping hardware you can play with today [2]. The Mill CPU sounds super cool in a bunch of ways, but the architecture has made so many decisions that I'm unsure will play out in practice I'm holding my excitement until I see real silicon somewhere [3]
[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/china...
[1] https://www.engadget.com/2018/08/16/arm-says-chips-will-outp...
They might have also baked in slight tweaks or customized whatever back-doors could be included if such things exist...
It's better to think of it as a Chinese subsidiary in a franchise system.
They haven't, they instead entered the niche of low-cost kiosk hardware. Intel and AMD completely abandoned it due to lower profit margins, but plenty of raw sales numbers to help Via float by.
Big companies rarely innovate without competition around.
If you're selling a subscription to a best-in-market service, there's not a lot of motive to innovate, agreed. Maybe you'd try a new product or a premium variant, but there's no reason to sink effort into advances that won't let you expand userbase or raise prices.
But for Intel? Before AMD got going, Intel's biggest competition was itself 9/18 months previously. Innovation wasn't just for new devices and new buyers, it was how they sold updated processors for machines that were already Intel Inside. They're not waiting on processors to die, they're actively pushing for them to be replaced for performance reasons.
That might create an incentive to release 'good enough' updates and dole out big improvements gradually, but in practice any of that which happened was already ending. Intel appears to be up against the wall regarding 10nm even with a competitor, and has been attempting major innovations to handle 7nm and below for years. With a revenue stream that relies on annual improvements to their product, they seem to have been learning hard into innovation and struggling, rather than waiting for a competitor.
The common complaint about subscription models is obviously good: if the company folds you have nothing, instead of an unsupported product. But it neglects the other issue, which is that companies intentionally cut off the possibility of "good enough" to guarantee revenue.
I don't think its an accident that products like Microsoft Office went to subscriptions around the time it becomes very hard to imagine a new feature actually worth buying for.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2018/04/19/in...
The Computerphile YouTube channel as some interviews with computer scientists that worked at Bell Labs during their heyday. It's incredibly interesting to hear about how they screwed around with early Linotype printers (which $100k+ in the 70s) and did things like reverse-engineer the font formats to create custom chess fonts.
They had direct-dial long-distance by 1951, using relays and tubes.
The transistor started making a difference in telephony with the release of the 1ESS switch in 1965. But transistors were a commodity by then.
Not modern internet services no, but all of the infrastructure it's built on is grounded on theirs.
http://blog.tmcnet.com/next-generation-communications/2011/0...
Compared to what they invented, Google and Facebook are insignificant in comparison.
We could go back to Altavista and no-Facebook and we'd be more or less fine.
Giving back the Bell Labs technlogy would be a much harder hit...
As you say, bigger companies have a harder time innovting.
Of course, if you are bigger, the more likely it is that there is no competition at certain times.
If you can survive without investing, a lot of companies choose not to.
Microsoft / IBM and now Intel defintely did.
I think it has more to do with the leadership of the company than the size of the company.
-ss
It depends where about on the timeline. AMD's hired of Lisa Su and Jim Keller in 2012, we all thought it was too little too late. Look back at the Roadmap Intel were giving at the time, I used to joke about Tick Tock were like the sound of AMD's death clock. In 2012 we were looking at 10nm in 2016, 7nm in 2018, and 5nm in 2020. We just had Sandy Bridge, but that was the last big IPC improvement we have had.
Fast forward to 2018 / 2019, No 10nm, and I would have been happy if they were selling me 14nm++++++ Quad Core Sandy Bridge. Broadwell and Skylake brings nothing much substantial. Intel were suppose to break the ARM Mobile Market with tour de force, and that didn't happen.
We all assumed Intel had many other tricks up its sleeves, new uArch or 10nm waiting in the wings when things are needed. Turns out they have nothing. Why did they buy McAfee?( Which has been sold off already ) And Infineon? Nearly eight years after the acquisition they are just about to ship their first Mobile Baseband made by their own Fabs, Eight Years! What an achievement! Nearly three years after their acquisition of Altera, which itself has been previously working with Intel Custom Fab before that. What do they have to show?
During that time, the Smartphone revolution scale has helped Pure Play Fab like TSMC to made enough profits and fund their R&D rivalling Intel. And in a few more weeks time we will have an TSMC / Apple 7nm node shipping in millions of units per week. In terms of HVM and leading node, making TSMC over taking Intel for the first time in history. AMD has been executing well following their Roadmap, and Lisa Su did not disappoint. Nothing on those slides were marketing speaks or tricks that Intel used. No over hyped performance improvement, but promise of incremental progress. She reminds me of Pat Gelsinger from Intel, Down to Earth, and telling the truth.
Judging from the Results though, AMD aren't making enough of dent in OEM and enterprise. Well I guess if you are not buying those CPU with your own money, why would you not buy Intel? The consumer market and Small Web Hosting market though seems to be doing better, where the owners are paying. I hope Zen 2 will make enough improvement and change those people's mind, better IPC, better memory controller.
If you loathe Intel after all the lies they have been telling and marketing speaks, you should buy AMD.
If you love Intel still after all, you should still buy AMD, teach them a painful lesson to wake them up.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/09/intel_puma_modem_wo...
Ironically, Broadwell's 128MB L4 cache did bring a substantial performance boost to a whole range of real-world applications, but it seems it's so expensive to manufacture that they've subsequently dropped the feature except for Apple's iMacs and expensive laptops.
> If you love Intel still after all, you should still buy AMD, teach them a painful lesson to wake them up.
But how do I choose which AMD CPU I need ? Back in my youth p4 and athlon were easy to compare (freq., IPS and a modifier because AMD) but now I can't even tell the differences between any i5/3/7 and when I look at AMD names it's as confusing but with a different lingo. I feel the same regarding GPU so maybe I am too old for that now.
A project of mine is a hardware recommender, it also includes a meta-benchmark. I collect published benchmarks and build a globally sorted order of processors out of it. https://www.pc-kombo.com/benchmark/games/cpu for games, https://www.pc-kombo.com/benchmark/apps/cpu for application workloads (that one still misses a bit of work, the gaming benchmark is better). Legacy processors are greyed out, so this might be a good starting point for you. There is also a benchmark for gpus.
For most people this processor choice is also very easy, it is "Get a Ryzen 5 2600 or an Intel Core i5-8400."
Feel free to ask if you want some custom recommendations, email is in profile :)
Also, the existing bar graph is unclear to me. What does 10/10 mean?
Example, fictional values: The 8700K is the fastest, because it was most often seen as the benchmark leader. It gets a 10. The 8600K has almost the same FPS, but it was always a bit slower, it gets a 9.9. The i5-8500 comes next, but its average FPS scaled to the 0-10 scale is lower, it gets a 8.7. Then the i5-8400, always seen as slower than the 8500 in benchmarks, would at most be able to get a 8.6, no matter what the average FPS says (with enough benchmarks average FPS become an almost meaningless metric, it's the position in the benchmark that counts).
That's why it is not possible to calculate price/performance with this. I could only highlight good deals, processors that have a high position despite being cheaper than the processors below. Which is of course already baked into the logic of the recommender.
They way I see it, I could look at AMD's Core count, Threads and Frequency, As they are clearly labelled, and that is it. On Intel's side you have features turned on and off for different i3/5/7/9, AVX speed difference etc I don't even want to bother looking it up.
Seriously, Intel has always been way too confusing with their processor lineup. AMD has always been straightforward: leave in the kitchen sink on nearly every CPU and performance scales with price. Not linearly of course, but it's much simpler to choose an AMD CPU.
We're not talking minor performance differences in features, we're talking features randomly added and removed for no logical reason from the same generation & tier of CPU model.
"Gamers need these features, but gamers often also setup servers. Let's remove server features from gaming CPUs so they can't reuse them when they upgrade, and so they have to buy new server CPUs!"
Basically, if you don't want the headache you just buy one of the highest end/most expensive CPUs on offer and you're probably fine. With AMD the feature set is pretty consistent, so you have considerably more choice to find a good price point.
In comparison, AMD's offerings are surprisingly easy. There's a handful of SKUs differentiated on core count and frequency. Generally they all have the same PCIe lanes, RAM access, SMT, instruction sets, and so on.
Ryzen 1 - slow, medium, fast, elite
Ryzen 2 - slow, medium, fast, elite
pick the one you need based on pricing/discounts if any. It's not that hard really.
For gen 2, that'd be:
23xx, 25xx, 27xx, ThreadRipper.
I think they picked the names/numbers to show some kind of equivalence with i3/5/7, but that's not quite it.
ThreadRipper is interesting. It requires a different socket than the other desktop processors and is targeted more at workstation class machines.
In servers there are Epyc and Epyc 2.
Threadripper is their workstation CPU.
slow (3), medium (5), fast (7), elite (Threadripper)
If you don't want to spend more than USD$800 on the CPU alone, don't look at the elite/threadripper line.
What is your budget? That is the first question you need to answer instead of trying to understand the entire line of chips, look at how much you have to spend, and then find the fastest one within the budget.
It's useless to try to think about the entire line of CPU's when you will only buy 1 chip (unless you are representing Dell and need to buy thousands of chips)
it seems that Intel couldn't jump into EUV manufacturing when they were in full domination because it was too expensive and new so they started improving multipatterning so improve resolution, which proved too hard to ship (hence the delays) meanwhile smaller players went their way until recently and now EUV is accessible so they can jump in swiftly while intel is still caught inside his intermediate strategy, lazy market behavior and unforeseen failures. They also have EUV planned but not until the next-generation. Note that even at larger pitch their process is near competitive with smaller ones today, but it sounds terrible.
I kick myself for not buying AMD at $2 (or buying a LOT more at $5).
I just looked this up, and it seems to boil down to the patent cross-licensing agreement between Intel, which developed the x86 architecture, and AMD, which developed the 64-bit instruction set. I don't think there's a unilateral "non-transferable license" per se — and they're free to enter into a new agreement if either party does get acquired.
This Reddit thread seems pretty good at explaining it in much more detail: https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/3b0ytk/discussion...
Even if you buy this, (I don't), there's no point for them to stay in business with absolutely non-competitive products. The remarkable thing is that thanks to Zen that did not happen and Intel actually feels some heat for the first time in years.
They still have a huge opportunity for CPU+FPGA, they bought Altera for the purpose.
> a 2004 study by Bain & Company found that 70 percent of mergers failed to increase shareholder value. More recently, a 2007 study by Hay Group and the Sorbonne found that more than 90 percent of mergers in Europe fail to reach financial goals.
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/BUSINESS/05/21/merger.marriage/
Especially when the merge should be deep and involve engineering teams with different cultures to join and work together on the product. So I'd consider the release of first Xeon+FPGA after 3 years past acquisition as a somewhat success.
I would have guessed additional lead time for Altera to move their designs from TSMC to Intel process, but it looks like Altera has been planning to fab on Intels 14nm since 2013[0].
The obvious way forward is universal specialized coprocessors, reprogrammable for the task(s). Better if tightly integrated with the memory, buses and CPUs.
The weak side of FPGA historically is programmability and especially the tools. But since the interest for FPGA is growing exponentionally in open-source community in recent years, things may change.
And by the way, 10 years ago you would say that exactly 'niche' words about GPU.
There are uses for FPGAs where there's enough money at stake for the hardware development but the number of units is small - stuff like high frequency trading or many defense roles. Or in the development of new hardware. But it's pretty niche.
Similarly, we’re finding more functions we can take away from the CPU and migrate to dedicated circuitry (FPGAs) that can handle those tasks more efficiently than the CPU can.
GPU's avoid the overhead of FPGAs while still retaining a lot of flexibility.
But, to clarify, I was speaking of consumer/mobile. The original iPhone was quite revolutionary for having a decent PowerVR graphics chip. High end symbian phones just had a CPU. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_6110_Navigator or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Razr2
Even though GPGPU was already big in 2008, people still thought of it as a difficult to use coprocessor for big compute jobs. Much as people consider FPGAs now.
And the first iPhone shipping with a powerful graphics chip is a counter to your argument that the future of mobile wasn't clear. The people with the ideas wanted a graphics processor.
http://conal.net/blog/posts/haskell-to-hardware-via-cccs http://conal.net/blog/posts/circuits-as-a-bicartesian-closed... https://github.com/conal/lambda-ccc/blob/master/doc/notes.md
If Intel can release a CPU with a built-in FPGA and everyone has one, software developers will take advantage of them. I can see stuff like video editing programs, compression algorithms, etc taking advantage of that.
FPGA is great if you need to talk to some hardware very fast/on many pins. E.g. something like a network router where you are shuffling packets between many high speed interfaces. Or doing a lot of measurements/interfacing a bunch of high speed sensors.
But not for general purpose software - GPUs are both faster, easier to develop for (and with good tooling) and much cheaper for doing that today.
Also, did they try to use enhanced locality introduced by processing several streams on GPU? E.g., if you keep states sorted as for tuple (state id, stream id) for all your streams, you may get more memory-controller friendly access pattern. I haven't seen mentions of that technique (which MUST be considered after Big Hero 6 [1] - they used that technique to never miss caches in whole movie rendering process). Big Hero 6 is 2014, the paper is 2017.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Hero_6_(film)
I really do not like papers like one linked by you. One system gets all of the treatment while other ones get... whatever is left.
I guess have they tried to use these techniques for GPUs, they would get performance gap that is much less than reported.
https://www.nextplatform.com/2018/08/22/arm-stands-on-should...
Not a thing for everyday desktops, but looks like compute competition is er... heating up. :)
This might be the answer. No competition and a good cash flow is a comfortable position. You defend this model with ads, policy, etc. and technical innovation can languish. I am not saying this is necessarily the case, but it is possible that Intel just got comfortable, slow and fat. Having a scrappy, smart competitor can be a good thing.
ARM and RISC-V have become a serious thread and are on the way to get standardized ecosystems...
traditionally yes, intel has absolutely dominated the laptop market however i have been seeing a lot more laptops lately with a Ryzen processor and Vega graphics
AMD making gains into a very lucrative market
I never met a person with a smart phone that uses an intel chip. They probably exist but i know none.
Apple aren't using them. Samsung aren't.. HTC nope.. Google pixel nope...
Intel basically sold off/scuttled their mobile division right before the iphone took off.
> It comes as Microsoft continues its work with Qualcomm to optimize Windows for devices powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon chips, including the forthcoming Snapdragon 850, which Samsung used for its first Arm-based Windows 10 laptop. So it appears there is some momentum behind the concept.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/arm-on-windows-10-chromebooks-...
However, I used to own a Tegra K1-based Chromebook, and that thing was sl-o-o-o-o-o-o-w, and it only got worse with successive updates. I'm not really optimistic when it comes to performance, absent highly-optimized apps. The state of Firefox and Chrome doesn't really fill me with confidence.
I'd like for ARM laptops to become more popular though, as a Debian user nearly all the software I use is already there.
But they have lots to show for that money!
Brand change implementations such as "Gold" and "Platinum", which gouge the customers more than ever before.
I actually thought Intel must have had some tricks up their sleeves in terms of performance gains that we hadn't seen yet, simply because there was no market need to roll them out and they had so many years of coasting on marginal gains.
Seeing them taking this stance looks a lot like the microcode hit is that bad, and that the emperor has no clothes.
Clearly, they don't have an answer to AMD at all. If this is true, their shareholders should be asking serious questions about why they've nothing significant to show for all that time and money spent when they were raking it in without a serious competitor.