I would by lying if I said that market perception didn't feed into my decision, it did.

I do hope Intel can fight back with their new CEO, ultimately this level of competition should only be a good thing for consumers.

I heard on the AMD earnings call yesterday that there was some tightness in the lower end of the Ryzen laptop lineup due to AMD under-anticipating the demand. Here's a quote:

So certainly, when I look at the semiconductor environment in 2020, it was very strong. So we saw a strong revenue ramp in our business, as well as across some of our peers. It's fair to say that the overall demand exceeded our planning.

And as a result, we did have some supply constraints as we ended the year. Those were primarily I would say in the PC market, the low end of the PC market, and in the gaming markets. That being said, I think we're getting great support from our manufacturing partners. The industry does need to increase the overall capacity levels.

And so we do see some tightness through the first half of the year, but there's added capacity in the second half.

So I anticipate that Intel is going to keep the pricing pressure on, to recapture market share. We already see this in the desktop processors, where AMD now sells at a premium versus Intel (admittedly, for good reason).

And you'd need to budget for a time machine, first!

AMD has done a poor job with naming for their new processors and architecture.

The architecture is called 'Zen'. The consumer SKUs have a model name of 'Ryzen'. I'll ignore the server parts for now (model name 'Epyc').

The Zen architecture progressed as follows: Zen-->Zen+-->Zen2-->Zen3

The Ryzen model numbers for desktop progressed as follows: Ryzen 1000-->Ryzen 2000-->Ryzen 3000-->Ryzen 5000.

The Ryzen model numbers for laptop SKUs progressed mostly as follows: Ryzen Mobile 2000-->Ryzen Mobile 3000-->Ryzen Mobile 4000-->Ryzen Mobile 5000.

Some of the newest Ryzen Mobile 5000-series are actually Zen2, aka rebadged Ryzen Mobile 4000-series.

So, Zen4 is still upcoming and not available to anyone except AMD's engineers who are currently developing it.

The laptop I ended up buying comes in a Ryzen 5 4500U flavor as well as a Tiger Lake i5-1135G7 flavor. I would have preferred the AMD-powered device but it was not available from my preferred retailer and sold out from the manufacturer, so I ended up going with the Intel version.

Thanks for the explanation. I didn't realize that the leading number didn't denote generation.

The interesting part of all of this is something that you've experienced directly, here. People crap all over Intel for being stuck on 14nm, and there are definitely good reasons to do so.

But the upshot is that they are sitting on a ridiculously mature, optimized manufacturing node that has ample capacity. They can pump out enough silicon to meet demand, or at least get much closer to it than anyone else right now.

Current-gen Intel & AMD processors are pretty much neck-to-neck in both performance and price.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+9+5900X&i...

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i9-10900...

Also, not to be overly pedantic but technically that 10900K is not the current generation (see the "10" at the beginning of the model designation); the 11th-gen Rocket Lake is coming out imminently.

I think this is only if you ignore multi-threading but I might be wrong, did Intel release better multi core CPUs or cut down the prices?

It's worth pointing out that their new chips aren't out yet ("Q1") and Intel has completely given up on matching AMD's 12C or 16C parts.

https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/AMD-Ryzen-9-5900X-vs-I...

This chart from Tom's Hardware shows a similar story:

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/auqNuTshdmehuqLXX32BBF-970...

AMD Zen3 has a lead on Intel 10th gen, but the cost/performance story has shifted.

Or PCIe Gen 4 support?

I wouldn't say Intel has anything worth looking into if you want 32 or 64 cores on the desktop.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DKVVtirNM8

There's more to PCIe than just graphics cards. SSDs, Thunderbolt, 10G Ethernet, USB 3.1-2 are some bandwidth demanding applications that could benefit

PCIe NVME drives only get 4 lanes through the m.2 port, and drives run close to the bandwidth limits on 3.0, I think I've seen benchmarks showing 30% improvements on 4.0 compared to 3.0

I'd also be interested in what difference there is running a PCIe 4.0 graphics card with only 8 lanes on 4.0 vs 3.0

it's measurable, but not very significant. take a look at these charts: https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3080-p... (pcie 2.0 x16 is equivalent to or slightly worse than pcie 3.0 x8)

Even if I were to buy a new CPU, I don't want to buy a new motherboard too just to have access to 4.0 slots.

For example, Cinebench R20: Ryzen 9 5980HS (35W) scores 4517, Core i9-10980HK scores 3484. Other benchmarks follow suit, but that's the first one listed.

> With Ryzen 5000, and by extension the Ryzen 9 5980HS, AMD is delivering much better single-thread performance. The 5980HS provides a ~20% gain versus the 4900HS, which is significant for an architectural improvement on the same process node. This takes the 5980HS above Intel’s 10th-gen H-series in all workloads, and allows Zen 3 to trade blows with Intel’s Tiger Lake featuring Willow Cove CPU cores

Tiger Lake is competitive in single core, but I believe they currently top out at 4-core CPUs.

> The Ryzen 9 5980HS is by far the fastest mobile processor available in the 35W power class, and easily offers 20-30% more performance than Intel’s best chip, the Core i9-10980HK, at a lower power level.

1. Intel single Q4 is double the revenue of AMD FY 2020.

2. On Consumer they have their Laptop APU launch along with decent GPU lineup against Nvidia. But this translate to 20% YoY. Compared to Intel 10%+ YoY. Remember AMD's baseline is a lot smaller. 10% growth from AMD and 10% from Intel is quite a bit different.

3. Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom looks good on paper with YoY. But reality is that PS5 and Xbox contributed more. Which means Server Sales still isn't anywhere good enough. Intel has been defending their territory exceptionally well, as shown with their latest report with large decrease of ASP.

This isn't just some supply constrain. It is also AMD needs to do better forecasting. Although arguably AMD is conservative in nature due to not so long ago they were on the verge of bankruptcy.

What is exceptionally good though was their profitability. Even excluding the one off Tax benefits. Their Net Income in 2020 increased by 5X!

Edit: Just checked in 2019 they were paying down their debt, which was partly why their net income were low. So 2020 is a true reflection of their profitability. All of a sudden their stock price doesn't look so insanely high.

Intel Client and DC are still vast majority of their revenue. Using the example I gave, just these two are $17B in Q4 and $66B in FY2020, vs AMD $9.8B in FY2020.

They need to work on their DC sales. As I have been saying since 2018.

https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1439/...

https://businessquant.com/intel-revenue-by-segment

If you earn $100, and keep it or use it to pay down debt, net income is still $100.

It doesn't matter much if you add to a negative debit or a positive bank account. If AMD was investing into some non-formal asset (brand awareness, R&D, etc), the numbers would change, but that's not the GP's scenario.

It'll be expensive for AMD to close the software gap between both Intel and Nvidia.

There was even a period of about of month last year where nvidia didn’t support the new kernel.

https://linuxreviews.org/Linux_Kernel_5.5_Will_Not_Fix_The_F...

My Intel NUC8i5BEH would regularly have GPU lockups and it took them several months to fix the issues.

On home systems, Arch Linux provides a system to automate the module generation [0], however features like CUDA break sometimes. [1]

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dynamic_Kernel_Module_S...

[1] https://archlinux.org/news/nvidia-45528-is-incompatible-with...

I recently switched to integrated AMD graphics, and the only problem I had was occasional render artifacts. Yes, a bit scary, but in practice only an occasional cosmetic problem. I think those disappeared completely some time ago. This is on a stock kernel.

The only graphics-related problems I have these days are with Wine and some old games, where it looks like there's a difference between what Wine emulates and what it expects to get directly from the 3D driver, e.g. with regards to old 16 bit color modes that I suppose the AMD driver simply doesn't bother with.

What? I have a Thinkpad T14 AMD and even though it has only been on the market for a few months, it's Linux support is excellent. Everything, including the GPU, works perfectly fine.

And of course that would mean that I'm more likely to use Intel hardware in future as reasonably sure the Intel drivers don't work with AMD CPUs - so sadly no EPYC for me!

Even Intel's outdated 9th and 10th gen chips were flying off the shelves and anything truly innovative (RTX 3000 GPUs, Ryzen 5000 CPUs) were paper launches for most consumers with the label "OUT OF STOCK" describing the overall situation.

Is there some way for me as a consumer to get into a pool and wait for RNG to give me a shot at buying the parts I need for my normal refresh cycle? My 6 year old desktop was due for it's rebuild this last year. X.X

Any problems come to mind?

All roads lead to TSMC ....

there's a need for another foundry like TSMC. Samsung is not cutting it.

I saw two articles that convinced me of this.

First, I saw that Germany asked Taiwan to ease the semiconductor shortage's impact on the auto industry.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-taiwan-autos-chips/german...

Then, I saw that Germany is sending a warship to the South China Sea.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/International-relations/Ind...

UMC is also exposed to geopolitical risk. Samsung too.

There's a lot of demand for semiconductor fabrication right now, and I don't think that's going away. Why concentrate all of the capex right on China's doorstep? I just don't see the wisdom of that approach.

This was never intentional. When TSMC was founded, their business model was nuts from a Western perspective: why would a company produce chips for someone else, the money is in the design and the brand, not the manufacturing. The market for this started when companies like Intel and TI wanted to derive some profits from unused manufacturing capacity.

The zeitgeist of American business over the past 40 or so years has been that brand is what people buy. Manufacturing is expensive, low-margin, and is best outsourced. Thus, there's been a slow, steady march towards design here, build somewhere else. Not just in the silicon space, but in everything from food processing to plastic tchotchkes.

That is a perfectly valid model, if there is a lot of competition in the manufacturing space. But now TSMC is so far ahead of the competition, and nobody expected that. Sometimes being the contrarian is where the profits are.

Yeah, that sounds like more of the Koolaid the business schools were selling.

Remember all the TV brands that were made in the US? Now they are bought and sold in China. Not the products, but the brand names.

What I'm referring to as "that approach" is the below suggestion from MangoCoffee, to whom I replied.

> there's a need for another foundry like TSMC.

this podcast with SemiWiki Founder Daniel Nenni. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4DgXtxkZNg

good discussion on how we go from IDM (real man have fab) to the foundry business model.

They need more Linux developers if they don't want their reputation to suffer.

The laptop is a Ryzen 2500u so not the newest, the one with a 3700u is worse, it barely boots because HPs amd bios has some glaring bugs.

Here's how it works:

1) If the goods weren't delivered and the customer hasn't paid then they're in the inventory on the balance sheet (assuming the goods were already produced) and nothing is in the income statement.

2) If the goods were delivered but the customer hasn't paid then this is in accounts receivable on the assets in the balance sheet and in the revenue in the income statement.

3) If the goods were delivered and the customer has paid then this is in cash on the balance sheet and in the revenue in the income statement.

4) If the goods weren't delivered but the customer has already (pre)paid then this is in cash on the balance sheet, but also in deferred revenue in liabilities, and not in the revenue in the income statement.

TL;DR: you can only recognize revenue if you deliver the product/service, until that time it's either just inventory (asset) or inventory(asset)+cash(asset)+deferred revenue(liability). AMD revenue = chips delivered to customers in the quarter.

They can however record the cash on their balance sheet.