According to the market research firm Mercury Research, the desktop CPU market has witnessed a remarkable transformation, with AMD seizing a substantial 28.7% market share in Q3 of 2024—a giant leap since the launch of the original Zen architecture in 2017. This 5.7 percentage point surge from the p...
Intel has been stagnating since the 4th gen Core uarch in 2014 with little competition. They knew they were top dog and they sat on their hands until their hands went numb. There’s a reason “14nm++++++++++” was a running joke. This is a decade of monopolistic market behavior finally coming home to roost.
That’s a wee revisionist: Zen/Zen+/Zen2 were not especially performant and Intel still ran circles around them with Coffee Lake chips, though in fairness that was probably because Zen forced them to stuff more cores on them.
Zen3 and newer, though, yeah, Intel has been firmly in 2nd place or 1st place with asterisks.
But the last 18 months has them fucking up in such a way that if you told me that they were doing it on purpose, I wouldn’t really doubt it.
It’s not so much failing to execute well-conceived plans as it was shipping meltingly hot, sub-par performing chips that turned out to self-immolate, combined with also giving up on being their own fab, and THEN torching the relationship with TSMC before you launched your first products they’re fabbing.
You could write the story as a malicious evil CEO wanting to destroy the company and it’d read much the same as what’s actually happening (not that I think Patty G is doing that, mind you) right now.
early zen werent performant in lower core count loads, but were extremely competitive in multi core workloads, especially when performamce per dollar was added into the equation. even if one revisits heavy multi core workload benchmarks, they faired fairly well in it. its just at a consumer level, they werent up to snuff yet because in gaming, they were still stuck with developers optimizing for an 8 thread console, and for laptops amds presence was near non existant.
Its chronic underinvestment in engineering to “maximize shareholder value” for a decade before AMD launched Zen. Then Intel got 5 years behind on engineering, and have only managed to get 2 of those 3 caught up. The newest tile based architecture only just matches the performance of AMD’s 3 year old AM4 architecture.
Single core workloads Intel still had the lead. But multi core (or just multi tasking) Zen 1 was a beast. By zen 2 there was hardly a reason to get Intel even for gaming, and especially at normal setups (nobody is using a top of the line GPU at 1080p). Even when you’re “just” playing a game you still have stuff running in the background, and those extra cores helped a lot.
Plus newer games are much more multi threaded than when zen first came out so those chips aged better as well.
Zen 2 was only a little slower for gaming, but it cooked the 8 core Intel 9900K in multicore performance. You could stick a 16 core 3950x into a normal mobo. The chiplet was a revolution
Basically yeah. Up until Zen 2 intel didn’t do much innovating and only around the zen 2 era did those 4th/6th gen chips start to really struggle in modern workloads.
TBH the only thing that caused me grief with that old beast of an i7 (other that the fact it would have bottlenecked my new GPU) was playing Stellaris.
18 months? Lol.
Intel has been stagnating since the 4th gen Core uarch in 2014 with little competition. They knew they were top dog and they sat on their hands until their hands went numb. There’s a reason “14nm++++++++++” was a running joke. This is a decade of monopolistic market behavior finally coming home to roost.
That’s a wee revisionist: Zen/Zen+/Zen2 were not especially performant and Intel still ran circles around them with Coffee Lake chips, though in fairness that was probably because Zen forced them to stuff more cores on them.
Zen3 and newer, though, yeah, Intel has been firmly in 2nd place or 1st place with asterisks.
But the last 18 months has them fucking up in such a way that if you told me that they were doing it on purpose, I wouldn’t really doubt it.
It’s not so much failing to execute well-conceived plans as it was shipping meltingly hot, sub-par performing chips that turned out to self-immolate, combined with also giving up on being their own fab, and THEN torching the relationship with TSMC before you launched your first products they’re fabbing.
You could write the story as a malicious evil CEO wanting to destroy the company and it’d read much the same as what’s actually happening (not that I think Patty G is doing that, mind you) right now.
early zen werent performant in lower core count loads, but were extremely competitive in multi core workloads, especially when performamce per dollar was added into the equation. even if one revisits heavy multi core workload benchmarks, they faired fairly well in it. its just at a consumer level, they werent up to snuff yet because in gaming, they were still stuck with developers optimizing for an 8 thread console, and for laptops amds presence was near non existant.
Its chronic underinvestment in engineering to “maximize shareholder value” for a decade before AMD launched Zen. Then Intel got 5 years behind on engineering, and have only managed to get 2 of those 3 caught up. The newest tile based architecture only just matches the performance of AMD’s 3 year old AM4 architecture.
Single core workloads Intel still had the lead. But multi core (or just multi tasking) Zen 1 was a beast. By zen 2 there was hardly a reason to get Intel even for gaming, and especially at normal setups (nobody is using a top of the line GPU at 1080p). Even when you’re “just” playing a game you still have stuff running in the background, and those extra cores helped a lot.
Plus newer games are much more multi threaded than when zen first came out so those chips aged better as well.
Zen 2 was only a little slower for gaming, but it cooked the 8 core Intel 9900K in multicore performance. You could stick a 16 core 3950x into a normal mobo. The chiplet was a revolution
Huuuuuh
So you’re telling me that milking my 4770k until this year when I built a new rig with AMD was in fact a genius move?
Basically yeah. Up until Zen 2 intel didn’t do much innovating and only around the zen 2 era did those 4th/6th gen chips start to really struggle in modern workloads.
TBH the only thing that caused me grief with that old beast of an i7 (other that the fact it would have bottlenecked my new GPU) was playing Stellaris.
Perfect market timing.