Re: These don't seem to compete with exiting AMD!
"Unless I'm missing something, these new chips, don't even seem to compete against the current Zen 2 Threadrippers that came out in 2020!"
Good morning, Mr Van Winkle! I trust you've had a pleasant slumber. When we last saw you in 2011, Intel were the x86 leader and it looked like AMD were headed for bankruptcy. I mean, Bulldozer, yikes. What were they thinking?!
About that. A few years later, things... changed. Rather dramatically, in fact. Intel haven't made a competitive processor since 2016 when AMD introduced Naples. They couldn't get their 10nm process to work, so they cancelled or delayed everything for years but that didn't help either. They seem to have finally got that sorted, but in the meantime AMD and everyone else at the forefront have moved on to 7nm, which Intel have spent the last 4 years trying, without success, to get working also. Now 5nm (and even 3nm) is almost ready elsewhere and they're still planning yet another future generation of 10nm parts. Yeah, it's that bad.
As you've surmised, Intel's newest processors are no longer competitive with AMD's *previous* generation. It's like that across pretty much all product families, though I suppose you can make a case that AMD's G-series AM4 parts (integrated graphics) are nothing special. Intel are losing on both power and performance at any price point, and by every metric: core count, IPC, cache sizes, TDP, and pretty much any delivered performance metric you can name. And that's for AMD's parts that Intel have a comparable offering; AMD have entire segments and families for which Intel have literally nothing at all to offer. The trade rags have even taking to comparing Intel's latest parts with AMD's previous generations, and often AMD parts that are in a lower marketing segment too, just so they have something to write about when "reviewing" the shiny new blue silicon. Lots of them rely on Intel for free review samples, ad buys, and early access to embargoed information, so they kind of have to. But the whole situation is rather embarrassing for Intel, so much so that they have been shedding talent, too (though probably their miserable stack-racking centric corporate culture isn't helping any).
Bob Swan was sent packing, but far too late to help; once you're more than a full generation behind there's really no way to recover. An object lesson for B-schools, I guess, though it's not like you couldn't already fill a shelf with case studies on putting accountants in charge of businesses. As you might expect for this stage of their drain-circling, they've turned to a lifer, the prodigal son who made the rounds and came home, Mr Gelsinger. His approach has been the only one open to him: lie. You'll find a recent article on El Reg about their latest marketing gimmick, using numbers without units in place of everyone else's process node sizing, just like Cyrix did many years ago when they couldn't compete with Intel on clock rates. Obviously they're not even talking about performance, at all. He hopes we're all that stupid.
In the meantime, Intel are doing what they've always done to stay in business: paying off OEMs to build around their inferior products. The market's not blind, though; just like Bulldozer, most of Intel's processors now have negative net value, so it's a real challenge to sell them. But of course, newspapers have to be filled, so hacks still rave about the "new hotness", even when it can't compete with products that have been on the market for several years already. If you care about PCIe 4 and lots of memory support in a workstation form factor, you already have either a Threadripper or the superior but non-overclockable Threadripper Pro next to your desk, and have for a long time. We're all embarrassed for the hacks who have to write about these "amazing new" processors, but everyone needs a living.
And now you're caught up!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
