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Intel Mum On When Entry-Level CPU, IoT Supply Will Improve (crn.com)
Intel is staying quiet on when the company expects its shortage of entry-level CPUs to end as it prioritizes production of Core and Xeon processors to meet growing demand in the PC and server markets. From a report: The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company provided more details on its plan to improve processor supply in its third-quarter earnings call on Thursday, when the company reported a continuing resurgence in its PC business and strong continued growth in its data-centric businesses. When an analyst asked Intel interim CEO Bob Swan when he expected the supply constraints to be over, Swan did not provide a timeline in his response. But he answered other parts of the analyst's questions about the company's efforts to improve supply. "We were caught off guard a little bit this year by the explosive growth well ahead of what our expectations were back at the beginning of the year, and that growth came from all different segments of the business," he said. "It put us in the unfortunate situation of constraining some of the demand signals that we were seeing from the market and our customer base."
It's not a particularly huge issue for them as their 14 nm process is very mature and highly performant. Even on Intel's own marketing slides, they indicated that their 10 nm would not initially have as good of performance characteristics as their 14 nm process.
The real problem for Intel is that they anticipated moving several product lines off of 14 nm by this point, but since that hasn't happened they're unable to supply all markets adequately. AMD can't take all that much advantage of the situation as they're selling Ryzen products about as quickly as they can make them as well. The biggest issue for Intel will probably be in the server market as that's where AMD's 7 nm products will launch first and likely have a massive core advantage over Intel parts given AMD's multi-chip module approach when compared to Intel's monolithic die.
Maybe for a monopoly, but AMD can already service that market and if Intel raises prices more because their pricing guy only took econ 101, they'll see AMD snap up that market share for a lot longer than the shortage persists. That's econ 202, don't go for a short term gain that will cause you long term pain.
It sounds like TSMC is leaving everyone else in their dust which is great for AMD. Downside is that these factories cost so much that the barrier to entry to new players is extremely high to the point even intel are scared of building new fabs by the sounds of it. AFAIK / not an expert.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
As for servers, those are also slow to transition from intel to AMD, but that is a very different affaire...
Opteron sold pretty well for a long time, friendo.
Yes, Opteron sold pretty well for a long time. It was in the early 00's. I was there.
It took AMD from the release of the K8 with AMD64 in April 2003 until april 2006 to achieve a quite high market share in servers (22%). So, a full 3 years from introduction to peak.
Yes, intel did some less-than-legal moves to prevent AMD from prospering that they (hopefully) can not do now due to higher scrutiny... But at that time, replacement cycles were faster both on user computers and servers, and in servers, consolidation of the high end market (PA-RISC, Alpha, MIPS, Power and Sparc were still relevant then) was at play, allowing the oportunities to forklift upgrades to AMD, and the P4 was CRAP.
But this is 2018...
Epyc debuted in May 2017. If the past predicts the future, we still need to wait a while before AMD becomes important in servers...
Nowadays, replacement cycles are longer, hypervisors do not support their full features on AMD processors (yet), and the high end market is pretty much X86 now, except for some holdouts like Power and Sparec which are much smaller than what they were in the 00's (i.e., no forklift upgrades).
So, some goods for AMD (EPYC being an EXCELENT product, intel not being able to play nasty tricks, intel security woes, and intel production problems), and some bads for AMD (longer replacement cycles, no rip and replace upgrades, Intel product is not crap, ecosystem not yet fully ready for AMD, server people a very conservative bunch).
And do not get me wrong, I want AMD and VIA (nowadays Zhaoxin) to grow, and move the X86/AMD64 market from a near-monopoly to a 3-way oligopoly, but this will take time and effort. It will not happen overnight.
And extrapolating what hapens in the DIY-desktop market to the whole market, or living of past glories, will only set people up for disapointment....
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
They used to do that, but years ago Dell called their bluff and Intel didn't do squat, then HP joined them in building systems with AMD chips. Go look at Dell and HP's product pages today and you'll see a large number of AMD based offerings.
And besides, nowadays Intel needs to keep those two vendors - who together represent 45% of all shipped PCs - happy with Intel or that's a major gift to AMD right when Intel is having yield problems. Grandma buys a laptop for home use, John buys a laptop for college, Steve buys a PC for work. None of them really give a crap if its an i3/i5/i7 or a Ryzen on the motherboard, as long as the price is right and the machine works as fast as they expect it to. And a significant segment of the "enthusiast" market is getting positively giddy with the price/performance of the AMD parts over Intel. Ryzen and Threadripper were great surprises when the real world numbers and prices were seen, Ryzen 2 is looking even better. Now is not the time for Intel to badly play poker with its customers.