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os2warpmanHNSource author
Business & incomeExperience excerpt · English

> Yet even in this current “bad chips” era, Intel is only, at worst, about 10% behind in gaming …

> Yet even in this current “bad chips” era, Intel is only, at worst, about 10% behind in gaming performance (largely due to cache disparity) Gaming is irrelevant. For AMD, gaming (both console and PC combined) is less revenue than embedded-- things like those routers you can get off of aliexpress and Synology NASes. Enterprise, cloud, and AI are the only things that matter, and even enterprise is falling off. Back in 2020 with the second wave of AMD EPYC Rome, after I had gotten a couple of R7525s in hand and put them through their paces I started saying that you are professionally negligent if you, as a technology professional, recommend an Intel solution unless you have some very specific use cases (AVX512/Optane-optimized options). In 2022 everyone started agreeing with me. Now you are professionally negligent if you recommend Intel at all. Enterprise cares about speed, cloud cares about clients per socket, and AI cares about bandwidth. Intel is not competitive in any of those. …

Original discussionA message from Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan to all company employees252 source comments · at import
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soganessHN

I don't really understand this. Intel was (and arguably still is) too large relative to its current technical capabilities. Yet even in this current “bad chips” era, Intel is only, at worst, about 10% behind in gaming performance (largely due to cache disparity) and is on par or better in most other workloads. From the K10 era until Zen 3, AMD processors were objectively worse (sometimes comically so) and AMD still managed to survive. Intel’s mobile CPUs remain extremely competitive. Their integrated GPUs are the fastest in the x86 space. And their SoC+platform features: video decode/encode, NPUs, power management, wifi, and so on are the best in class for x86 CPUs; they are usually a solid second place or better regardless of architecture. Subjectively, the most interesting “mainstream” laptops on the market are still, and historically have been, Intel-based. I understand that in an era…

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lovichHN

I’ve found that a lot of my friends who are into pc gaming still haven’t grokked that ever since the crypto boom, much less the ai boom, that they are the old toys that no one wants to play with anymore. I had a friend who legitimately could not understand why Nvidia didn’t care about their reputation in the gaming market souring even after I showed him the numbers on how much nvidia is selling to corporations now. I don’t know if it was an inability to deal with the numbers or if it’s just culture shock at going from being a valued client to as you said “baggage”, but it was a surprising number of people in that camp

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johnnyanmacHN

Gaming is still a multi billion dollar industry, and touches into all the other aspects you mentioned as well. Losing out to AMD for Xbox/Playstation was definitely a costly loss. >Look at Nvidia. Gaming went from their cash crop to burdensome baggage in just a couple of years. Yes, marking up your consumer hardware by 4-5x to appeal to crypto miners surely does have an effect on your market. Arguably, AI saved them from a crash due to their over investment on Crypto/NFTs. It's not like gaming demand diminished this decade. Gaming isn't THE way out. But it's one avenue to consider. It does seem like companies c. 2025 prefer to fall into the AI bubble, though.

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SkyMarshalHN

> and they didn't have to spend barely anything on marketing. To be fair, their marketing was all that gaming related BS you listed, plus developing and maintaining CUDA. Winning gaming got them the winning AI architecture and mindshare around it, and CUDA got them the winning developer interface to it and locked in that mindshare.

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