Replies to post #147954 on Intel Corp (INTC)

[Unkwn]

Bought some AMD shares on the dip just now. Let's see how this turns out.

I wanted to see some independent benchmarks before considering AMD. I think they have a very competent team together which may be able to even outperform Intel's high end chips with the next iteration. No own fabs dragging them down anymore. By the way, Ryzen in my opinion shows just how capable Samsung's 14nm process actually is. I don't see a lead from Intel here anymore.

[morrowinder]

Chipguy: Ryzen is a huge improvement...

And I agree with you they have no where to go but up. But Mas is right about inertia in the workstation/server area. And I think it gets worse the lower down the stack they go. They won't be able to clock as high as Intel's 4 core parts and their supposed desktop TDP advantage will not be as apparent(I would predict its worse than Intel by a fair amount) in lower voltage parts. Intel has really led with laptop parts for the last 7 years. And I believe their advantage is greatest there because of all the 2 in 1 engineering Intel has done. And in volume desktops in retail, AMD has no advantage. They have shown they have lower IPC for the most part and they look like they will be where they are now, leftover crumbs. Sure they aren't as far behind as their last shitty generation but they don't promise any particular new advantages either. They will continue to sell low priced alternative skus to keep Intel honest with the various OEMs. One of the killer parts out their is the 7th gen dual core Pentium part with HT and Core i3s that START with 3.5GHZ and peak at 4.2 ghz base clock! Not a lot of room for AMD to wiggle in.

[This Causes an Error]

The best part is finally we have some fire under Intel's ass to release
more competitive SKUs of existing products and stop pushing out intros
of new products.

I agree with this sentiment, but I do think the delays Intel faces are due to execution issues more so than lack of competition.

BK really is not a great CEO, you can tell the management decisions he makes are reactive not proactive.

For example, they are only now moving DCG products to new process nodes, only when it has become clear that the foundries are moving quickly and the various competitors are going to try to take advantage of new nodes as quickly as possible.

A better CEO would have made this shift the very day that ARM began talking about server ambitions.

Also, notice Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake -- BK did not have the foresight to direct CCG to do new architectures on 14nm back in 2012/2013 when they must have known that both 14nm and 10nm development were off track. So now we get pretty much stop-gap products on 14nm that recycle the same basic architectures but leverage transistor/physical design improvements to get more frequency/better power consumption.

This is better than nothing, that's for sure, but a better CEO would have accepted the reality of poor yields on 14nm/10nm and adjusted accordingly.

I will say though, now that the Intel Architecture Group is now out of BK's hands and in Murthy's hands, I expect execution to improve.