Krzanich "optimized" the company for profit, by cutting out things he considered to be excess. Including a lot of their irreplaceable validation & verification talent, that AMD instantly snapped up. The lack of validation resources is directly responsible for the failures of many key Intel products during his tenure and later, because major bugs that could have been spotted earlier slipped through, and then resulted in horrible delays and even cancellations. He then spent the surplus of the company on 30 major acquisitions, of which only two were in any reasonable degree successful.
There are CEOs who have destroyed more value than Krzanich, but not many.
Before the 10nm issues, they were making consistent IPC improvement every generation, and although core counts were pretty stagnant for consumers, they would add a couple cores every generation on top Xeon skus. Maybe they could have done bigger changes with more time between, but it was nice being able to expect new server CPUs every 12-18 months that were meaningfully better.
I don't think their node problems were anywhere near that simple. You also left out the part where AMD moved to chiplets while intel stubbornly remained monolithic for quite a while. And a whole list of other missteps.
Intel stopped advancing in 2014-2015 for a long time. They flopped on the fabrication side, they stuck to the 2-4 core CPUs and charged an arm and a leg for anything with more than that. This gave AMD an opening with their cheap and yet still decently fast higher core count CPUs.
Turns out it was a front for Russian intelligence. Even after the German government found out, the guy still somehow escaped to Russia. There’s a solid chance that Russia operatives have infiltrated the German government. They was even a big hack Russia’s state hackers did and a lot of information was leaked.
I bring this up because Hetzner was asking for my passport to buy a $10/m server. Simple opsec says to just pay a bit more and use DigitalOcean or some other VPS.
There are many good non-Hetzner European hosting companies, luckily.
Wirecard were a German fintech, but didn't have big market penetration across Europe. They were a real company with real operations, but a decent part of its balance sheet was fake (supposedly it was in an Asian subsidiary, there was no money there). It wasn't a front for Russian intelligence, it's COO was a Russian operative (and nowadays runs a shadow intelligence agency from Moscow, using incompetent morons to try to kidnap journalists, or scheming to hire ISIS suicide bombers to blow them up); those connections only surfaced after the whole thing imploded. But the whole company was an actual real place with real operations and real non-russian intelligence employees. It's still not certain if the CEO knew about the COO for instance.
Read the FT series on the whole thing, their investigation started the collapse.
But surely intel services are smart enough to get people in there illegally.
Hardware security used to be a joke. Now verified boot, encrypted RAM, key storage in hardware security models and hardware and OS attestation are getting somewhere.
But if you're important enough of a target to a state actor they will magically have some workaround. For your average raid on your home they might actually work depending on the specific setup.
For really high threat models you want zero trust models with E2EE as well as staying anonymous so no one knows where the hardware (and the people which might be much more vulnerable) are located. Tor exists for a reason.
Intel has been chasing higher and higher core counts which look good on spec sheets and dazzle in rarely utilized workloads, but said core counts do nothing to run the apps and games that most people actually use. I think getting dumped by Apple broke them, they're competing with Apple on paper and AMD is eating their lunch in reality.
They also stopped making 3D XPoint a year before AI would have bought all of it.
Micron wanted to sell the fab that manufactured 3D XPoint.
Sure, but its not like people were actively seeking that GPU, for long time it was the only option to get in a laptop that isn't 20 pounds and 18".
First it was virtualization instructions, then AVX stuff
Or if Intel and AMD GPUs had to compete with Nvidia GPUs ... wait, they do, and they are absolutely losing.
Granted their rocm support was abysmal several years back and they lost my trust as a result. But nvidia is hardly any better and intel doesn't seem to be a viable alternative ...
Honestly both of them have demonstrated that they have little interest in AI. Intel gave up on Optane right as (a much-improved successor) would've helped with MoE offsetting or even as a highly durable drive for KV caching.
AMD have... turned out some decent gaming graphics cards and fine server CPUs but little else.
People are out there solding SMDs on old Nvidia mining rig GPUs to use them for inference; their hardware is not depreciating at the normal rate you'd expect from GPUs. DGX spark is finally useful now that AI can write multi-machine inference tooling optimised to it. Where's AMD in all of this? Nowhere.
> And honestly, "Intel's shambolic efforts" alongside "AMD's Road to Damascus moment" is rather delicious phrasing. The author has managed to deliver quite a sophisticated insult in a single sentence.
Intel finally has really great low power/budget answers, but still loses greatly to 3d cache chips on most workloads.
Great Hope and Crosby movie.
Optane really died before LLMs went big. I was at an enterprise using a TON of them, often for SAP HANA workloads.
> AMD have... turned out some decent gaming graphics cards and fine server CPUs but little else.
I'm on a AMD desktop, using an AMD gpu, next to a gaming console using an AMD CPU and GPU, making large DC purchasing decisions where intel hasn't even shown up as a factor.
If you wanted a GPU with 32GB of memory for AI tasks, the AMD AI Pro R9700 was (up until about a month ago) reasonably priced at ~$1300. It's not a RTX 5090 in terms of bandwidth and compute, but for the price and being actually purchasable it's a reasonable pick.
Those cards are cheap because they're not really that amazing.
It never made sense. It's slower than RAM, and what do I get for it? Persistence? I don't want persistent RAM, I like the ability to reboot to solve problems, and storing stuff on a non-volatile mediums has all sorts of legal implications which it's easier to avoid.
It's more expensive and has less storage than SSDs, even though the main downside of SSDs is their high price per gigabyte and relatively low capacities.
It's going in the wrong direction for both use cases. I guess it could have a very niche use case as a super fast persistent caching layer in front of spinning rust but that's kinda it.
Density. PCM is closer in bits-per-unit-area to Flash than to DRAM.
Optane had much lower latency than other types of durable storage, and also had very good endurance compared to NAND.
At a prior employer, we made extensive use of them as ZFS SLOG drives for large database servers. They made fsync very inexpensive.
There's an argument to be made for the persistent memory being a cheaper substitute for more RAM, but imo the gap isn't big enough to justify it when considered as a % of the rest of the system you're building around it and the performance tradeoff.
Important reminder to check your biases. I was sure Optane had missed its mark by dropping out just before LLMs became a primary use case for high $ systems.
(I didn't actually have an Intel DIMM module -- I had a different vendor's. But fundamentally there needed to be a clean way to get data from software into the durable memory domain, and there wasn't. There also needed to be a clean way to talk to the module to get health information and to configure it to the extent it was configurable, and that didn't exist either. I wrote the kernel driver for the latter and submitted it upstream, and it probably could have gotten merged if Intel had assisted with the gnarly bits involving coordination with platform thermal firmware that shared the same SMBUS lines, but they didn't.)
SSDs are good, but an improved Optane would've been better.
If Intel had volume production of Optane and had been able to quickly reconfigure it to produce a device that could stream out model weights fast enough for inference or could have gotten a read-write device that could hold KV caches effectively, they could have made an absolute killing in the current market.
HBF is slowly going after the former market. I'm not sure flash has a great answer for the latter due to endurance issues.
I can't think of any company that is as good as Intel at having a technology that's ready or almost ready at or before the time that the market is ready for it and then completely failing to sell the product into the newly developed market.
SSDs use lots of tricks to hide this latency (using RAM). However, when the data is super critical, you can't just throw some data in RAM and hope that it gets written out.
Enterprise flash drives have battery backups and keep the system alive for a moment to flush out the writes, but Optane doesn't need special tricks to get this sort of durability, it just has it. The Optane can keep accepting writes, eventually the RAM of the SSD is filled, and then the write performance falls off a cliff. However, if your workload gives the storage device a breather to write out to flash, you wouldn't notice the difference.
If you have a large stream of critical data flowing in that has to be stored and can't be lost- Optane suddenly looks way better than SSDs
Think metadata in a ZFS array or database writes.
Also crazy endurance - often an order of magnitude beyond even enterprise nvmes.
...and because the things are basically un-killable thanks to endurance you can safely pick up 2nd hand used ones.
So they're a neat trick if used in precisely the right application. Hence:
>some fraction of technologists
>would've been awesome if only Intel hadn't killed it.
Maybe - it would presumably have improved further for niche cases, but doubt it would have conquered mainstream markets.
The actual problem is Intel was in such a bad position, they needed to shed weight, and Optane was not quick money.
ive seen that same amd community manager engage on reddit and actively pull in changes into lemonade server, for better ways to serve up models best on the strixhalo hardware. so they're accepting community help where it helps.
There's huge upswing in using Vulkan Compute which works across NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel (and even others), and which is apparently much easier and stable to run on AMD
that's quite a large market and their only competitor has moved on to greener pastures.
The rule includes >90% of "remote" workers who have discovered they were classified as hybrid (a classification now eliminated) and their manager didn't make it official. Now, remote approvals are SVP level.
The issue is, AMD still pays significantly less than any company with an RTO mandate, even with the stock appreciation. And the stock has gone down 25% in the past few weeks so it's even less competitive. The typical engineer was not given an equity-weighted package, even L9 only 30% of your TC is in stock.
It's a recruiting bonanza right now and everyone's getting calls offering 50% pay bumps from 5-day office semi corps like Broadcom or Qualcomm. The better people are getting offers at Google or Apple for 3-day RTO for even greater TC bumps.
The board should've sacked the entire leadership team of Intel and AMD years and years ago.
The fact that you can sit through both a mining boom and now a generational AI boom and have little to show for it and still keep your job is a Yahoo!-level fumble.
The heavy investments into HMB between SK Hynix & AMD might also not have happened. They went down this road before HMB demand popped off and it was a risky bet.
Sharon was the AI Chief of Staff brought in through an acquihire, managed all the high-visibility external/internal AI engagements, reported directly into Lisa Su, and was being groomed to be Lisa's successor. Even with all that, she couldn't make it 2 years at AMD.
I don't see any way out of this hole. We can't fire our execs and promote internally because our internal directors/VPs are mostly non-technical. We've been trying to pull leadership in with acquihires but we've been losing them too. Best win was replacing Alan Lee w/ Anush Elangovan which finally got ROCm working but there's a massive re-org coming he might not survive.
I remember buying an AMD K6-2 back in the day as it was cheaper and better. I've dropped in and out of the AMD sphere depending on who was winning at the given moment.
Now they're both losing.
why not start with trying to fix that?
Had Apple gone with Be instead, most likely all three companies would have gone bankrupt before 2000, and Pixar would be Jobs last successful company instead.
The way I look at it, AMD and others dumped $25m into a very early AI play that never was going to be successful. I don't fault them for trying.
There was no way she could even come close to successor of Lisa though. The grooming thing was a media play at best. Dr. Fei-Fei Li would be a heck of a lot more appropriate than Sharon.
Anush is excellent and turned around the software story. If he goes, the party is over.
It's not necessary for every company to 'revenue maxx' by jumping on every trend.
AMD made $3.5 billion in profit last year, money left over after all salaries were paid and all expenses were settled. It might be galling to this generation of avarists, but maybe that's enough?
'Doing a decent job' seems to have become seen as archaic these days, which explains much of how the stock market works. The line doesn't _have_ to keep going up faster and faster.
You mean going mild.
The $17bn that AMD is projecting to make mid-2026 is what NVIDIA was already making mid-2023.
Both companies were somewhat similar in revenue towards the end of 2022 (just before/around the ChatGPT launch), so it's not as if NVIDIA was already that far ahead in financial terms. But right around ChatGPT, NVIDIA went all-in on AI, for example by securing massive leading-edge capacity at TSMC, even outbidding Apple.
That's what the GP meant by "sitting out a generational AI boom".
I think Intel figured out way to be even worse…
I'm sure they pay more than Intel ;-)
A lot of said gains have been erased.
AMD has always been an also ran in this space and it shows to this day, but the true believers cannot be dissuaded of their faith so whatevs.
I honestly think Nvidia needs a worthy nemesis right now more than ever and I wish it existed but I don't think it does... Yet...
They're around, selling AMD Strix Halo (up to 128GB unified memory) on the low, equivalent to DGX Spark, level; and MI* chips for enterprise AI inference.
The problem they have and they've always had is that everyone uses CUDA. ROCm works, but everyone's toolchain is CUDA exclusive or CUDA first, so it's much harder to use AMD hardware.
Using higher level tooling (vLLM, llama.cpp) I have DGX Spark comparable performance for 1/3 the price (but without the same software out of the box experience nor the clustering network options).
I was going to say… everybody even government is coming together to make intel work but it’s in shambles
Haven’t they benefited a lot from the chips act?
AMD makes excellent CPUs and GPUs, I'm ecstatic with the products I have purchased from them, and they are now beating their biggest competitor and profiting billions every year. What more do you want? Isn't this enough for a company in 2026?
Velocity is not enough, acceleration is not enough, we now require jerk to go up.
Companies bending over and submitting to the AI/LLM/Datacenter hyperscalers at the expense of completely depleting all avenues for regular everyday people to have affordable access to basic computing (imho basically just another utility these days) is something that I hope people remember once the well dries and they try once again to sell us their RGB powered wares.
So... F Nvidia, F Micron and F all these money hungry asshole companies, including the weirdos thirsting for your sticks of ram.
†Disclaimer: I own an Intel Arc GPU
In the last few years Intel's division that makes Xeons had huge losses, because in order to retain their big customers they had to accept to sell at big discounts, otherwise the customers would have switched to AMD.
All has changed this year, due to the AI craze.
AMD has sold all the server CPUs that it could make, within its allocations at TSMC. Everybody who did not succeed to buy EPYCs has bought Intel Granite Rapids Xeons, because they are not made at TSMC, but in Intel's fabs, so they did not compete with other TSMC customers for allocations.
So Intel has also sold every server CPU that they could make, and they are now trying to retool some fab that made new Panther Lake CPUs back to the obsolete Intel 3 CMOS manufacturing process, in order to make more Xeons, to sell them as long as this huge demand persists.
Thus in the last quarter both AMD and Intel have sold less consumer CPUs than in the past, because all who could did delay their upgrade plans due to the unacceptable memory prices, but on the other hand both AMD and Intel had record revenues and profits from selling server CPUs.
and that's fine. just surprised the hell out of they still used a black friday special laptop from 10 years ago. that thing is special alright....
Intel isn't even condered a player in HPC anymore. 147 of TOP 500 is AMD (it's really custom chips, which AMD also does with it's Xilinx and Instinct divisions, and nVidia that are chewing up the Intels)
The truth is this is more of the same tech inflationary pressure driven by AI. AMD is winning for showing up. Don't get me wrong, AMD does have technically superior products for specific applications, but that never really mattered.
I want my money back.
Due to Trump policies (and geopolitical realities), they are building or helping to build fabs in the US and elsewhere. It's takes years to build a fab.
so intel took the hit now, AMD might take the hit later as they're kinda...... mostly a software company, that contracts to hardware companies.
The OEM deals run extremely deep, and thunderbolt (an Intel standard) is a brutal feature to drop I think for many laptop makers.
There are models on AMD CPU with Thunderbolt[0]. Now a true 2-in-1 with a touch screen, AMD and Thunderbolt AND with 14"... unicorn I've never met.
[0] https://psref.lenovo.com/search/# select 'Platform Specifications' and add Thunderbolt and AMD separately.
In practice, every USB4 controller manufactured so far is certifiable and indeed with the 8840U generation AMD started certifying their SoC -- the only difference between the 7840U and the 8840U is slightly higher clock on the NPU and the TB4 certification. Compare https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_T... to https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_T...
or https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/ish_8110922-8110971-16 vs https://support.hp.com/lv-en/document/ish_10397818-10397862-...
Technically impossible. Hmm.. do you mean Intel > AMD. nVidia > AMD. nVidia > Intel. AMD > Intel.
Anyone with insight into the industry know how much institutional knowledge would be relevant still with an ISA switch?
so now mobile, desktop and server all looking good with ARM? i can't see why it would go backwards at all.
Also beware of what you wish for, that is basically the end of PCs when it comes to be, the dream of OEMs, going back to fully vertical integration as all computers used to be in the last century, with exception of PC clones, thanks to IBM failing to control the ecosystem.
I'm not joking. I'm running a Maxwell-era NVIDIA card, and on Linux it's one problem after another. I HATE NVIDIA's driver; it's one of the worst-made pieces of software I've ever seen.
I've personally had zero issues with NVIDIA on Linux on both Turing (20xx) and Blackwell (50xx).
The problem with NVIDIA is that its driver is an incredibly delicate component of its GPUs. With each new generation, the company implements—via software, through micro-routines—features that it failed to deliver in the hardware itself. If the driver were open—meaning one that the community could develop and maintain—I could continue using my GPU without any issues. Intel and AMD support the Mesa graphics stack, with full functionality. Why doesn’t NVIDIA?
Your problem is with capitalism, and I'm with you, but what you should be pushing for is legislation that forces companies to publish detailed specs for obsolete hardware so open source enthusiasts can do the work. Call it an extended "right to repair" or whatever.
In the meantime, have you tried the Nouveau driver for your setup?