this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2024
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It was 8 years ago. AMD was on the verge of bankruptcy and Intel had been propping them up for years so they wouldn't have to deal with the government going after them for having a total monopoly. If Zen had been a failure AMD wouldn't have survived. I figured Intel had advanced stuff in the pipeline that they were just sitting on waiting for AMD to force their hand (because they were dicks like that). I was wrong.
Hey man, they just renamed their newest chips to have a completely different confusing naming scheme! What more innovation do you want?
I think we all thought that tbh. Intel let their hubris get them and this is the result.
They don't have innovation anymore, I don't know what they're doing and I don't think they do either.
I wish AMD would catch up in the GPU side of things so it wasn't such a monopoly with NVIDIA but I guess we'll see, I mean they did knock Intel down eventually so who knows maybe it's possible.
That would have gone truly horrible if AMD did go bankrupt, that would have been a really dark timeline for all of us.
Honestly, I hope AMD-s shift to focus on lower end cards is successful. It should be considering the xx60 series (and performance equivalent) cards make up like 50% of the entire consumer GPU hardware? At least I think it was around 50 the last time I tried to sum up all the percentages of the Steam hardware survey. There's definitely a huge market they can tap if they can bang-per-buck outprice Nvidia (and I guess also Intel). Maybe even bring down the ridiculous pricing of modern GPU-s.
Even if their cards offer better value than Nvidia at the low end, AMD still have an uphill battle to get people to switch. The brand recognition they have is insane, and for some reason people value dlss and frame gen very highly (wether it works well for their card and game or not).
Steam hardware survey is questionable. There's a lot of computer cafes in east Asia where people login to their Steam accounts and happen to hit the survey. Those machines are often running very low end cards like the Nvidia 1050. This is common enough that the results are heavily skewed.
You can check yourself. I'm pretty sure the "cafe cards" amount to around 3-8% of the lowest end cards depending on whether we consider 1650 and 1060 as cafe cards. Obviously also excluding integrated cards because those I didn't consider in the first place. On the other hand the current gen and last gen low end cards (xx50 and xx60) make up 25-28% of the market.
Also I don't understand why you'd want to exclude cafe's from the potential market? It's not like internet cafes don't upgrade their hardware. When they do upgrade they're definitely going with the low end cards.
The issue is that they're being counted extra times because of multiple people logging into the same machine.
How much RAM do you imagine internet cafe machines use? 8gb? 16gb? 32gb?
They've been smart in continuing to invest in datacenter cards and investing in open compute tooling to support them. Nvidia is at the top of the world and has a long way to fall, so if they start restricting supply of datacenter GPUs or simply charging too much that leaves plenty of market for Intel and AMD both to feast on and build up healthy product stacks to eventually surpass Nvidia.
On the flipside Nvidia is smart to be diversifying right now. Their forays into GPU servers with custom ARM CPUs might become fruitful in the long term, plus their networking investments really allow them to build a unique and compelling datacenter package
It's a story that's been repeating for decades now. Company creates a new market with new useful tech, run by engineers passionate about the tech, experiences exceptional growth, becomes large corporation, much larger than any competition. Uses relative wealth to keep competition from catching up. Eventually saturates market to the point where market growth doesn't finance the growing R&D expenses (which were tuned assuming previous rate of growth would just continue). At some point, profit increases start coming from business/marketing side of things more than engineering side, resulting in MBAs and marketers getting more promotions and eventually control of the company. Then tech stagnates because they don't think investing in R&D is as worthwhile. Also aren't able to prioritize what R&D is still happening effectively because they don't really understand the tech as well as engineers. But they tread water and even increase profits because they dominate the market.
Until competition that is engineering focused (often also made up of former engineers from the dominant company) catches up or creates a new market that makes theirs start going obsolete. Suddenly trouble, then they either pivot to quietly supporting businesses that continue using their products, or gets in trouble with the law because of increasingly anticompetitive practices.
Xerox could have owned the PC market but thought they could continue being a household name sticking with copiers. IBM outsourced everything and people eventually realized they didn't need IBM. ~~Foxconn~~Fairchild had two groups of engineers leave and create Intel and AMD when they were dissatisfied with how management was running the company. And now Intel coasted while AMD floundered and was completely unprepared for TSMC and AMD to make large technical leaps and surpass them.
You're thinking of Fairchild, not Foxconn.
William Shockley led the team that invented the transistor while at Bell Labs, and then went on to move back to his home state of California to found his own company developing silicon transistors, ultimately resulting in the geographical area becoming known as Silicon Valley. Although a brilliant scientist and engineer, he was an abrasive manager, so 8 of his key researchers left the company to form Fairchild Semiconductor, a division of a camera and imaging company with close ties to military contracting.
The researchers at Fairchild developed the silicon integrated circuit (Texas Instruments developed the first integrated circuit with germanium, but it turns out that semiconductor material wasn't good for scaling and hit a dead end early on), and grew the company into a powerhouse. Infighting between engineers and management (especially east coast based management dictating what the west coast lab was doing) and Fairchild's policy of not sharing equity with employees, led Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce (who had been 2 of the 8 who left Shockley for Fairchild) to go and found Intel, poaching a talented young engineer named Andy Grove.
Intel originally focused on memory, but Grove recognized that the future value would be in processors, so they bet the company on that transition to logic chips, just in time for the computer memory market to get commoditized and for Japanese competition to crush the profit margins in that sector. By the 90's, Intel became known as the dominant company in CPUs. Intel survived more than one generation on top because they knew when to pivot.
Ah right, thanks for the correction!
We're raking in money, why spend on R&D?