Should we worry about Intel's Future? (Die Shrink Telegrams)
Added 2023-12-14 23:32:46 +0000 UTCSo after years of hype, today Intel launched Meteor Lake, a "4nm" 3D-Stacked processor that managed to arguably go backwards in both efficiency and IPC, and tie AMD's last gen product in iGPU and AI performance (at best). Supposedly this is the basis for Intel's new "era" and Arrow Lake builds on the "Meteor Lake Platform"...so should we be worried? If THIS is the start of at new era, is that era going to be Intel's version of "the Bulldozer years"?
You have ~3 hours to write-in below with your thoughts and questions! Sorry for the short notice!
https://cdn.videocardz.com/1/2023/12/INTEL-CORE-100-ULTRA-METEOR-LAKE-OFFCIAL-SLIDE-5.jpg
Comments
microcenter so frustrating, do the bundle deals and let me give you mohey :< https://i.imgur.com/zFqcxyD.png
capn_hector
2023-12-15 12:58:01 +0000 UTCIs this launch more about a tile platform where they can swap out little bits like the iGPU or core cluster each generation, and not about MTL itself vs phoenix?
Crast
2023-12-15 02:28:35 +0000 UTCAMD's zen moment involved the entire company working on Zen, canceling anything unrelated. I've heard of Intel canceling some things, but are they canceling enough to restore focus.
Nicholas Buckner
2023-12-15 01:27:51 +0000 UTCMaybe I’m reading the market wrong but I don’t think Emerald Rapids will be enough to make Intel’s datacenter group consistently profitable. It might be enough to stem further collapse at least but I don’t think Intel can rely on server sales to protect them from financial collapse if the overall client market turns against them..
Chris Rijk
2023-12-15 01:24:38 +0000 UTCPart of me worries that something is fundamentally rotten within Intel as it appears that even their internal documents are unreliable and are giving an overly positive impression of progress. The bombast and boasting from Intel’s leadership doesn’t help either.
Chris Rijk
2023-12-15 01:20:19 +0000 UTCHello Tom and Dan, One thing missing from this conversation is Emerald Rapids. which also launches "Today", Emerald Rapids looks good according to Wendell's video and has good uplift over Sapphire Rapids with much less power. How will this affect Intel's future if they keep executing? The consumer roadmap may not look that good to me, but Intel's server and workstation parts look quite interesting especially if the accelerators are good and have good support.
Joseph Kelly
2023-12-15 01:17:06 +0000 UTCHi Tom and Dan With the lackluster MTL launch, from what I see, I afraid Intel not from dying with mediocre product, but rather dying from EXPENSIVE mediocre product. With the info you have, do you see any path for Intel to escape the coffin corner of being expensive and bad?
Dark Side of the Force
2023-12-15 01:16:49 +0000 UTCIt seems like laptop OEMs really been in a tough spot with supply and delays the last few years, I've heard that many of them complained about Rembrandt and Phoenix supply being below what was contracted and Meteor Lake has been pared back substantially on top of being terrifically delayed. How are laptop OEMs feeling about the last few generations of products from AMD and Intel? Do you think this is incentivising more of them to reach for chip vendors such as Qualcom and other non-x86 products?
qhfreddy
2023-12-15 00:56:25 +0000 UTCHappy holiday Tom and Dan. If intel were to enter a "bulldozer "era, would there be a chance of AMD not be as aggressive with new generations of cpu past zen 6 and just deliver iterative uplift gen over gen like intel provided during 4th gen to 11th gen?
Dylan K.
2023-12-15 00:46:53 +0000 UTCCould the highlight of Meteor Lake actually be OpenVINO, and what does that say about Intel? The AI integrations Intel showed when using OpenVINO in GIMP are impressive, but that's all on the software side.
Cleansweep
2023-12-15 00:30:28 +0000 UTCMy concern with Intel failing wouldn't be that AMD would become a monopoly. I am concerned that AMD would fail right along with Intel. Since AMD has an ability to take any objectively good release and have it marred by a defect, oversight, poor marketing, etc.
Endless Logins
2023-12-15 00:24:03 +0000 UTCI see three outcomes: 1. Arrow Lake is way better than Zen 6 and Intel can charge a price premium. 2. Arrow Lake and Zen 6 are competitive ensuring a price war. 3. Zen 6 is way better than Arrow Lake and Amd can charge a price premium. #1 is the only option for Intel given what I suspect is Arrow Lakes higher cost compared to Zen 6. #2 is just Zen 3 vs Alderlake all over again. Yes, Intel is in trouble.
Eric Bagely
2023-12-15 00:17:58 +0000 UTCI’m sure there are some who will say that there’s no way that Intel can fail, that they’re too big. However, that size is in some ways exactly the problem. If Intel sales fall then their fabs become less economically efficient. Intel’s economies of scale would start to work against them. We could see a period of many years where Intel is repeatedly doing major layoffs, shutting down fabs and selling off less profitable parts of the business. It might be 10% per year but after 5 years they could shrink down to AMD’s size (under the assumption that AMD would be growing as well). Once Intel has fallen into that pattern it can be very hard to turn it around.
Chris Rijk
2023-12-15 00:13:22 +0000 UTCDo you think that Intel's inability to keep to their timelines and AMDs seeming lack of interest in supplying the thin and light market is helping pave the way for higher end ARM laptops?
qhfreddy
2023-12-15 00:02:11 +0000 UTCHiya, How does Intel feel about Intel, and why has Pat not stopped Intel making the same mistakes for what feels like 5 years now. (expensive, underdeliver, late)
coltmarshmallow
2023-12-15 00:00:17 +0000 UTCHow would you compare/contrast Intel's progress/competitiveness with Meteor Lake against that of Emerald Rapids?
qhfreddy
2023-12-15 00:00:09 +0000 UTCWhat does Intel need to do for us not to speculated if they'll be okay? Do we need to see at least 3 successful generations of being the best? Do we need to see execution and cadence being honed in even if it means reducing performance targets? Zen and Zen+ certainly weren't the best in a lot of aspects but set the ground work for the trouncing that was Zen 2 and 3. What does Intel's Zen moment look like?
CompressedAIBlocks
2023-12-14 23:59:29 +0000 UTCDuring the sandy bridge to skylake era, Intel made quite significant gains in each generation on battery life, gradually bringing laptops to the point where you could get through most of a day's work without needing to plug in. Why do you think they stagnated for so long between back then and Meteor Lake? Yet with Meteor Lake they seem to have caught up in one go with 2-3 generations of AMD's progress on that front.
qhfreddy
2023-12-14 23:59:04 +0000 UTCYes, we should be worried. Intel is big but can collapse too. That said I don’t think they will go away, but it’s going to be a rough road for them. Intel is losing market share in server, desktop and now laptops. What other signs do we need?
PCDog
2023-12-14 23:55:03 +0000 UTCHey Dan and Tom if you're joining us... Can you pinch me to make sure I'm getting this right, Intel has finally brought out a real chiplets based cpu and they've somehow managed to make it wildly more expensive to produce, efficiency which has the consistency of a Google naming scheme and has weird ipc issues. Also, do you think that Intel will actually be getting higher margins on these chips despite the obvious increase in cost, or is this another wound on Intels financial hospital medical card.
Alex Smith
2023-12-14 23:54:55 +0000 UTCI started becoming genuinely worried about Intel’s future recently. It’s not like I wasn’t worried at all previously but I figured that Intel should be able to last many years because of all of the OEM relationships they had built up in the past. My perceptions shifted due to Tom’s reporting that OEMs are extremely unhappy with the whole Meteor Lake situation and especially the report of a major OEM wanting to move to 50:50 on Intel and AMD. Intel can survive one major OEM doing this but not a mass exodus. If one OEM is doing this already then the others are likely considering it. If Arrow Lake is poor then that mass exodus could start to happen. I don’t get the impression that Intel is genuinely taking such a scenario seriously which makes me even more concerned.
Chris Rijk
2023-12-14 23:54:32 +0000 UTCI've listened to a bunch of people ask about Intel going bankrupt or becoming irrelevant. But every time it was said that this wouldn't be the case because of government funding and national security importance etc.. So I ask, what's the worst that can happen to intel if not bankruptcy?
yoda king
2023-12-14 23:52:02 +0000 UTCI'm sure Intel would like to think of this CPU like Rocket Lake: they're trying a completely new architecture, this time with tiles, and they're happy performance didn't completely collapse.
FloridaMan
2023-12-14 23:49:20 +0000 UTCIronically, it looks like Intel can market multi-threading performance when they have lately paraded "real world single-threaded benchmarks." How has the shift to multi-threading been going for the software industry?
FloridaMan
2023-12-14 23:45:30 +0000 UTCToday's reviews seem to be lukewarm, but not scathing. Will Hawk Point reviewers be looking at AMD in a better light, or more of the same (or worse)?
FloridaMan
2023-12-14 23:42:31 +0000 UTCDo you think we should buy Intel with our stock? Given our under-valuation and Intel’s over-valuation I’m unsure if it would make sense.
Jen-Hsun Huang
2023-12-14 23:39:48 +0000 UTCTom. How do you feel Emerald Rapids is and do you think it's competitive for servers? I know we're mostly looking at MTL and how it failed to live up to expectations but I actually think Emerald Rapids will do well enough to hold onto what Intel has...hopefully.
CompressedAIBlocks
2023-12-14 23:39:12 +0000 UTCDo you believe Intel should just bite the bullet and give us an x86 license? We can save x86 from Intel’s and AMD’s failures.
Jen-Hsun Huang
2023-12-14 23:38:49 +0000 UTCShould Intel at least try to launch a low power Meteor lake I3/I5 on desktop, just to have some motherboards out for Arrow Lake, or would that be suicide marketing because of the performance being arguably worse than Alder Lake ++? Hi again, this is an edit but this just popped in my head : do you think Framework will bother making a Meteor Lake board?
3-Valdion Dreemur
2023-12-14 23:38:09 +0000 UTCTom. How do you perceive Intel's competitiveness now with MTL out? This should walk over Phoenix...but it doesn't. Certainly beats it in some regards but in others? Not so much. Like the subject says, if this is the start of a new era, we better HOPE that Arrow Lake and successors are massive improvements across the board.
CompressedAIBlocks
2023-12-14 23:37:51 +0000 UTCTom. MTL looked alright when I saw the first review, then I saw another, then another, then another. One thing they all had in common? Vastly different, repeatable results. Doesn't exactly instill confidence in Intel's new architecture, new node or tile approach. but hey...at least the iGPU seems decent now :)
CompressedAIBlocks
2023-12-14 23:35:53 +0000 UTCHey Tom and Dan, do you think MTL justifies the extra delay with it's performance? Why or why not?
Xavbeat03
2023-12-14 23:35:10 +0000 UTC
