It wasn't so long ago that the trope was while others had better multi-core performance "...Intel still holds the lead for single core performance"
Now not only do AMD have a better product, but also Apple now offer equal or better performance than the best that Intel can offer.
I wonder what is next for Intel now their £1000+ CPUs are firmly in third place. Looking forward to some new innovation and competitive (inc pricing!) products from them.
Don't forget to add that Apple is now doing this on their version of a "budget" laptop that has no active cooling, that gets 18-20 hours of battery life, that runs emulated x86 code with almost no performance hit and is a 1st gen product.
I don't think any of these details can be understated. Even AMD's 1st gen Ryzen kind of sucked and look where that is now.
> Don't forget to add that Apple is now doing this on their version of a "budget" laptop that has no active cooling
The Anandtech tests were on an actively-cooled Mac Mini and the power draw numbers they were observing were far outside of what can be passively cooled in a laptop. You'd need to wait for Air-specific results before drawing too many conclusions on how it performs.
AnandTech isn't the only one providing benchmarks, they are rolling in from all over the place now. People are running 15 minute finale cut pro jobs and the fan isn't kick in on the macbook pro.
At this price it's more expensive than 80% of best-selling laptops, so not quite budget. If you compare in price to Dell for example, they only compete with their XPS line, which is their high-end one.
Apple only does high-end products, which is fine but doesn't make that model cheap.
I know this gets repeated often, but this is simply not true. Apple _does_ make high-end products, and they market themselves as a high-end brand, but Apple has always filled as many market segments as they can. There are plenty examples that prove this statement wrong: iPod Shuffle, iPhone SE, the $250 iPad. They never do deep discounts on their products though, so when they age or go stale they are far overpriced; and they do _not_ make value or budget models.
To look at these CPUs a different way, it’s fairly competitive with Ryzen processors that cost $600-700 alone, except that will buy the whole Mac Mini.
When I say first gen product, I mean the whole product, not just the chip used. It would be a very different situation if we were talking about an upgraded iPad with a new chip. This is a platform defining moment.
And architectural similarities between their first 14nm chip and their last 10nm chips are as m1 is similar to a12z at least, may be even their first 64bit
At some point one wonders if Intel will just cede the desktop and enthusiast markets to AMD and/or Apple and just focus on server and high-end computing? As an IBMer this feels familiar for some reason...
Intel isn't doing to well in HPC either. The top intel system is now at #6, and the vast majority of the performance in inside the matrix-2000 accelerator. The highest pure Intel system is at #9.
Even with high end servers Intel seems to be losing to AMD Epyc.
Amd 2qe on the market for decades practically as second in the performance tier. I'm not sure why Intel who should ostensibly have lower unit costs would abandon a market for a possibly temporary situation one or two deign nodes away might now be able an issue.
Not a chance, the consumer market it massive. Even among PC enthusiasts, AMD is in the minority. It's not even close: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
I'd sooner expect Intel to start making their own ARM chips to compete with Apple.
Steam marketshare is slow to change because it includes a lot of people with older PCs. Look at new sales and the picture is very different: https://imgur.com/a/yEKDpd2
Thanks for the link! Didn't know steam made that kind of analysis public.
But I'd take a closer look at those numbers: in 5 months intel has lost 2.5 points that AMD has gained. Doing some stupid, atrocious math of just taking the average point gain over those 5 months (and not accounting for the fact that my pc enthusiast friends are stating that their next machine will be AMD), that puts November of 2023 that they are 50% market share. That gives Intel very little time to pivot.
Not long ago at all, like just a few weeks ago right before zen3 was out in the wild! A double whammy for sure for Intel, tough times ahead indeed. Apologists can hand wave AMD off by citing the huge lead in sales that Intel still enjoys, but that argument falls flat with Apple, a trillion dollar company. Maybe Intel will start to compete on price like AMD used to.
I think they announced a short while back that they're "looking at trying to outsource manufacturing of some high end parts", ie they've known that they were falling behind in too many areas due to their shrinkage problems so they're taking in help from the outside to not become irrelevant.
M1 is running on "5nm", looking at specs Intel 10NM is 100Mtr/mm2 vs TSMC's Apple 5nm chips being 173Mtr/mm2 (So even if Intel nomenclature seems more conservative they still lag by a lot in manufacturing capacity)
5nm will be Zen 4 which should bring 10-20% IPC uplift if AMD's current trend continues.
TSMC's N5 5nm transistors are 85% smaller than their N7 transistors which should lower power consumption significantly though SRAM only shrinks a modest 35% (this especially affects desktop Ryzen with tons of cache compared to their laptop versions).
AMD currently makes the Zen 2/3 IO die on Global Foundries 12nm for contractual reasons. When they finally shrink that to 7 or 5nm, the power savings should be significant.
Zen 4 is expected to bring DDR5 support which will both drastically increase bandwidth and lower RAM power consumption. Likewise, it is expected to support PCIe 5 which doubles the bandwidth per lane to a little shy of 4GB/s.
All of these things together could mean a decent improvement in IPC and total performance and a very big improvement in performance per watt.
Meanwhile, I suspect we'll start seeing large "Infinity Cache" additions to their APUs that is shared between the CPU and GPU as the bus width of DDR just doesn't offer the bandwidth to keep larger GPUs from fighting the CPU for bandwidth. This should not only improve APU total performance, but fewer trips to RAM has a significant effect on power consumption (it costs more to move 2 bytes than to add them together).
Not really. AMD could make a 7nm version of the Apple core, but they instead build more cores. Much how AMD outmaneuvered intel with smaller chiplets (more flexible in design, higher volume, more tolerant of process errors, higher yield, etc). Apple has done similar with their design. It's better in obvious ways, larger caches, larger number of rename registers, more outstanding transactions, more memory channels, etc. Apple could make a core just as fast, maybe slightly less power efficient if it spent less on the neural cache, image processing, or GPU.
Another big win is that apple runs the memory at 4500 MHz, standard, without overclocking. Even the Zen 3 often runs the ram at 3200 MHz, and standard support goes up to 3800 MHz or so. You can run it higher, but then you have to decouple the memory clock from the CPU clock, which reduces performance. The DDR4x also supports 2 channels, instead of 1. So you get as many memory channels as the AMD threadripper, which is an expensive, hot, and low volume chip.
This happens to every giant eventually (and to countries or civilizations). They get climb to the top, and then they hold such dominant positions that they aren't forced to try. They get lazy or sloppy (and in Intel's case, I'm not suggesting the engineers were the sloppy ones... more likely strategic decisions from management and quarterly earnings per share-focused execs). Eventually they are dethroned, and some never return to power.
Intel will never go away, but they definitely will become laggards for the foreseeable future. In their industry it takes years or even a decade to see the fruits of your effort.
What if Dell, HP, Lenovo and Microsoft get together with AMD or someone like Samsung and start knocking out ARM, or even RISC-V SOC based machine that compete with Apple? Apple doing this could go to proving that ARM is viable on the desktop/laptop. Microsoft have not succeeded in the past with an ARM based platform, but this could change that and refocus their effort.
> Because Apple (theoretically at least) should start increasing their market share.
Should that be a serious goal for Apple though? Is there that much more money for them if they jump into the race-to-the-bottom budget market, where I assume much of the remaining share is? It seems there is some added value in being a luxury product.
If Apple weren't constantly trying to increase their market share, I imagine their shareholders would like to have a word with them :-)
I get what you're saying though. I don't think they should go after the budget PC market. There's still lots of room for growth at the mid to high end. There's also servers.
The goal for the investors isn't to increase market share though, it's to increase profit. I'm questioning the assumption that market share and profit are directly, and linearly, related. The average smartphone price worldwide is around $300 [1]. I don't have access to the full report at that link, but with the graphs shown, some significant portion must be below that price. My naive assumption is that market share in the top end is the most important, with a movement into the lower end eventually leading to the destruction of the perception of quality that they seem to work hard for, and operating costs that would cut into profits. \shrug\
>The goal for the investors isn't to increase market share though, it's to increase profit.
Right, but since the wholesale cost of their phones isn't likely to change much at this point, increasing marketshare is the most obvious path to increased profit. Also, with Apple increasingly focused on services revenue, getting more customers into its ecosystem makes perfect sense.
I agree they likely won't go after the low end. This site [0] claims Apple only owns 52% of the high end market so there's lots of room for growth at the mid and high end.
Anyways, since we were comparing Apple to Intel/AMD I assumed we were talking about PC's.
They could gain more of the premium market. Or they could just stick an” year old a14 and make a slightly lower end 799 macbook in search of more market. They don’t necessarily need to start making 299 cheapo laptops to gain market share.
Market share x86 overall (mobile + desktop + server), AMD vs Intel:
Q3/2020 20,2% vs. 79,8%
Q2/2020 19,7% vs. 80,3%
Q1/2020 17,5% vs. 82,5%
I don't know why the OEM business works that way, but it is very slow to shift, so Intel still has time. Self-built consumer PCs for gaming are already overwhelmingly AMD though.
That's the consequence of resting on your laurels and getting complacent. They relied too much on being the large incumbent, and they reap what they sow.
They reaped billions in profits. The issue is that organizations can't turn it on and off based on competition, once you are rich and lazy, the organization fills up with coasters and before they know it they no longer have a higher gear. Remains to be seen if Intel can come back, but I doubt it under their current leadership.
It wasn't so long ago that the trope was while others had better multi-core performance "...Intel still holds the lead for single core performance"
Now not only do AMD have a better product, but also Apple now offer equal or better performance than the best that Intel can offer.
I wonder what is next for Intel now their £1000+ CPUs are firmly in third place. Looking forward to some new innovation and competitive (inc pricing!) products from them.