It's really funny how the market thinks that Intel isn't in the game anymore.
They may not be as energy efficient as M1 or ARM chips but they certainly show that they are still a competition and invest a lot of money to improve their performance.
But they really haven't. We've not seen hide nor hair of the new process, only iterative improvements on the current process, and the attempt at big.LITTLE x86-style doesn't seem to have worked out terribly well.
ARM has taken out the low-power market that Atom and Pentium classes were aiming at. AMD APUs have long been a favorite of mid-power devices like gaming consoles and are now a desktop enthusiast favorite as well. The i5/i7 class is outmatched in every metric ($/FLOP, W/$, and W/FLOP) by the Ryzen series. IBM and Azure placed their big chip refresh orders with AMD as well, so the hyperscaler market is in danger. The only place Xeons are still superior is the scientific and high computing space, and Threadripper is making inroads there as well.
Intel still has great sales from existing cashflows and OEM agreements, but if you were buying a computer in 2022, why choose Intel? Why would its customers? I think they're going to have to come up with something new and soon.
> The i5/i7 class is outmatched in every metric ($/FLOP, W/$, and W/FLOP) by the Ryzen series.
This isn't really true though. Alder lake performance is better than Ryzen 5x at pretty much all price points. Alder lake's electricity usage is rough, but desktop users don't care. Now ryzen is a year behind intel, and who knows how their next offering will fare, but saying they've outmatched intel in every metric just isn't true.
Because Intel is / will no longer be a x86 / Chip company only anymore. They are pivoting to Foundry. Just like Andrew Grove pivoted Intel from DRAM to microprocessor.
I expect them to be at least $400bn to $600bn market cap by the end of 2030. Which is 2x or 3x of today's price.
Not exactly super high growth, but if you are a money manager with too much cash ( which is often the case today ) it is not a bad investment.
> and are now a desktop enthusiast favorite as well. The i5/i7 class is outmatched in every metric ($/FLOP, W/$, and W/FLOP) by the Ryzen series.
maybe a couple years ago, at this point Intel is dominating the gaming market, competing in the productivity market despite having fewer cores (i.e. more potent cores), are at least matching Zen3 efficiency (except i9, but you said i5/i7) if not beating (particularly at lower power budgets due to infinity fabric overhead). Ryzen has absolutely lost favor with the enthusiast market due to the significant price increases (in some segments, a 50% increase over last generation) and the refusal to chop prices to remain competitive with intel (justified with "but they can make more money selling Epyc", which is great for them but it doesn't make their products competitive for me as a consumer either).
And AMD has completely abandoned the value market... i3 12100F is listed for $110 at Best Buy (iGPU version is $140), and Intel is in the process of rolling out Celerons for even cheaper rigs (will be nice for HTPC with that iGPU). AMD's cheapest processor has a $300 MSRP and they won't budge on pricing at all given their focus on the server market.
go look at a tech enthusiast forum and nobody is recommending Ryzen anymore. It's overpriced, it no longer has a performance or efficiency advantage (in fact it's rather flopped the other way), and AMD would rather address the server market instead.
this has really shifted in the last 6 months since Alder Lake launched, but really there was a significant niche for recommending 10-series as a budget option given the significant price advantage over AMD. The thing that changed with Alder Lake is that Intel moved back into the performance lead (and matched efficiency) and prices remained the same - leaving them both better and cheaper than AMD. Thing have changed, people don't recommend AMD anymore unless you have a very specific need (like you're buying a 5950X).
Also APUs in particular are rather a flop on desktop. AMD didn't even bother releasing a 7nm APU to the consumer market until... September last year? Up until then it was all 12nm quad-core garbage - and that's GloFo 12nm, so more like Intel 22nm. On top of that, the APUs also had reduced IPC compared to the CPUs of their equivalent architecture (due to less cache). All of the hype around Ryzen was around the non-APU enthusiast chips with no onboard graphics, the APUs were never popular in the desktop segment.
The APUs are nice if you are building a SFF rig with no discrete GPU... but they have a lot of compromises - reduced IPC, PCIe 3.0, and up until September they didn't have any that weren't limited to PCIe 3.0x8 (5000G series moves this to 3.0x16). They have no HDMI 2.1 support, no HDMI VRR support, no AV1 support, and the worst hardware encoder (i.e. Teams videoconferencing quality/etc) on the market. If you really want a gaming-focused SFF rig with iGPU only, they are the best available, but they were never popular, and AMD never really pushed them the way they did the enthusiast chips.
(HEDT is another segment that's been abandoned... AMD still has not released Zen3 processors, it's been 16 months now, and who knows whether AMD will try the same "release it for pro but not for consumer" crap again like they did with the APUs.)
The thing is, the market can be right without knowing why it is right.
The market thinks that in some fixed, relatively near point in the future we will look back at now and say "Intel was already hosed, it just didn't know it".
It may be that the market is currently only expressing interest in the hopes of others that this particular future will come to pass, but that is the only way it will.
Right but the key difference is that post-recovery AMD is fabless, because they spun off their fab business.
AMD's stock can jump like this, because its value is based more closely on its designs.
Intel is not taking that approach. One amazing chip design isn't going to massively change their fortunes, and they are heavily sunk in x86, which is not the chip series the market is most interested in.
One meaningful path forward for Intel is to split in two, precisely so that the x86 design business can be liberated by being fabless, and the fab businesses can get on with making unsexy larger-process chips for everyone in America who needs them.
When AMD was at 2$, the story was that their chips designs are shit, slow, overheating etc. And since they had just flogged off their foundry they didn´t have access to any useful process, thus the chips were more slow and hot and power hungry. They also tons of debt, and basically no assets, and no way to compete - while Intel had the best chip designs and the best foundries.
