EDIT: Sorry, the article isn't about GPU rather it's about the CPU market where AMD is projected to overtake Intel in the far future.
When the AI Crash wipes out nVidia's demand in the server market they're not gonna have any loyal customers in the desktop market right as the tech boom comes to places formerly reliant on only smartphones. Then they're gonna be like surprised_pikachu.jpg
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.
All of my computers had been Intel for many many years and here about a year and a half ago I got my first AMD computer because I had seen other people's machines with AMD processors but I had never owned one for myself and so now I do I have one with an AMD Ryzen 5
If you look at who is manufacturing silicon, the numbers look even worse for Intel. All of these competitors are using TSMC fabs. AMD, Apple, Qualcomm, etc.
Pray they don't, but I'm almost certain they will now that the US is appointing complete morons to every portion of the US government. The US won't really be able to help until this rot gets cleaned out. China has four years before we can really help Taiwan again. (Or at least give them air superiority)
And Intel. Intel has been using TSMC fabs for a while.
They used to get a 40% discount, too, but that stopped recently when Pat Gelsinger said people should stop buying from TSMC because there's a good chance they'll be invaded.
TSMC's CEO didn't like that, and said "ok, no more 40% discount for you. Effective immediately." (TL;DR'd, obviously).
I just built a computer for a friend and she decided to get an AMD when I told her it was about the same performance but used half as much electricity.
This is a person who knows nothing about computers. Intel is losing their "household name" status in a big way judging by that.
Not surprised. I switched to AMD CPU and GPU about a year ago. Could not be happier. Ryzen sips power and I run mine in Eco mode (since I'm on an air cooler). Performance is still fantastic.
Invested in a water cooler setup back when I had a Bulldozer chip, which was near essential. Now on a Ryzen, and getting it to exceed about 35 degrees is very difficult. Been very good for long-term stability of my desktop - all the niggling hard disk issues seem to just go away when they've not subjected to such thermal cycling any more.
I feel like they are dropping the ball in the GPU space though, both on desktop and in servers.
They'renot really leveraging it. They killed the steam deck line of "small core count, GPU heavy APUs" which is why Valve hasn't updated it and competitors seem so power hungry. They all but killed server APUs, making them mega expensive and HPC only. They're finally coming out with a M-Pro like consumer APU, but it took until 2025, and pricing will probably be a joke just like their Radeon Pro GPUs...
And I don't even wanna get into the AI space. They get like 99% there and then go "nah, we don't really care about this market, let Nvidia have their monopoly and screw everyone over." It makes me want to pull my hair out.
I'd drop in an old Nvidia GPU for transcoding, anyway. There's lots of old cards that support nvenc. Don't neglect the Quadro cards, either. Lots of them are cheap on ebay and will transcode just fine without even needing their own cooling fan.
I've been using my AMD 5600G's iGPU to do hardware decode and encode in Jellyfin and it works pretty well. Only downside is that it doesn't support AV1, but it works well with H264 and H265.
Sad but true. Intel's performance was poor over the last year. Shuddering thinking about my Mac with Intel CPU, there must be burn victims from this thing. Still, less competition is never a good thing.
You have to remember that most people aren't "choosing a CPU" as much as buying a PC. If the majority of pre-build retail PCs have Intel, then the majority of purchases will be Intel.
Servers need very high uptime. Also, when something is documented to work a certain way, it had damn well better work as stated.
Intel had a long reputation of solid engineering. Even when they were losing at both performance and performance per watt, they could still fall back on being steady. The 13th/14th gen degradation problems have shot that argument to hell, and server customers are jumping ship.
Note: I’m not from the US, so in a lot of cases going to a manufacturer’s website and purchasing computers is not an option. Resellers are still the ones in charge here.
I work IT and when it time for a hardware refresh the reseller we are in contact with said they don’t stock AMD as there’s no demand. Which in a way creates a chicken and egg problem. I asked them if it would be possible to get laptops with AMD chips and the reseller said yes but we have to wait. So we bought 4 Intel machines for the meantime and placed a custom order for ones with AMD chips. The ThinkPads we are buying are significantly cheaper if they come with AMD chips, I was honestly a bit baffled there was no demand. Regardless, we are happy with the purchase and so are the users who claim the computers are relatively cooler than their Intel 8th gen predecessors. It just goes to show that for the most part, enterprise makes a huge chunk of the desktop market share nowadays (as younger generations tend to simply not use a computer and do everything on their phone) and that market just isn’t ready for the transition yet. They’ve been going strong with Intel for about 30-40 years. Weening of that tit is gonna take some time.
Still not ready to trust AMD/ATI again. I used them exclusively right up until they bought ATI and then decided fuck open source and the drivers for Linux tanked.
I hear all the issues folks have had with Intel/NVIDIA but I have yet to experience any of them. From where I'm sitting they are still working great. And their open source has not been perfect but its consistent. Instead of going from being golden to fuck you Linux folks overnight.