- AMD got a new very competent CEO (Lisa Su) that managed to save the company and turn its fortunes around;
- In the last decade, Intel seemingly forgot what its core businesses were, and instead invested lots of its time and resources to try to break into new markets such as smartphone CPUs and modems (failing miserably at that);
- AMD is fabless; they got rid of their expensive fabs in the '00s by spinning them off as GlobalFoundries. When TSMC perfected its 7nm node, they just jumped manufacturers;
- Intel has lost the fabs lead it had years ago; I still remember them releasing 22nm chips while AMD was still on GloFo 45nm. Intel has been stuck on its 14nm node for years, and they haven't been able to release 10nm chips until last year;
- AMD saw a clear market interest for CPUs with a higher core count, and they managed to deliver a "good enough" CPU that appealed to buyers in a stale market. The Ryzen R7 1700 had slightly lower single-threaded performances than Intel, but it offered immensely better multicore performances than its Intel equivalent for a comically low price point, on cheap motherboards and with its stock cooler;
- Due to almost complete lack of competition from AMD for almost a decade, Intel got greedy and CPU prices skyrocketed; in 2017 an 8 core HEDT CPU from Intel was sold at a price close to $1100, which is almost as much as a whole R7 1700 setup costed. AMD had nothing to lose and no risk of market cannibalisation, so they could just price their CPUs at much lower price point than Intel;
- Ryzen is arguably a good design, and AMD's idea of making high core count CPU by interconnecting small quad-core CCXs instead of making huge dies like Intel Xeons was a bet that really paid off. Operating systems already more or less supported NUMA-like architectures, and AMD got from this a very scalable architecture. Like Threadripper has shown, they can just "glue" CPUs together; the final result is a much bigger package and a huge socket, but nobody really cares about that.
Indeed I would happily install a CPU the size of an HDD in my desktop PC if it means I can get more computing power for cheaper.
I have no idea if this is true: this is just my theory.
AMD struck it out of the park when they started using a chiplet architecture. It's really great for 1 socket and is pretty good for 2 sockets.
The thing to understand about chiplets is: each chiplet is a separate CPU that has to perform cache coherency. The cache coherency traffic increases as the square of the number of CPUs, so you just can't have that many talk to each other at one time.
Intel dominates the multi-socket server market and I think they wanted to maintain that dominance, so they just didn't want to go down the chiplet road, as it would really hurt their performance on 4+ socket systems.
The result, though, is that in 1-2 socket systems, AMD has a big price/performance advantage over Intel, a big part of which is due to the way chip yields work.
As an outsider it's hard to say much else without a lot of speculation.
You can't keep milking the old cow that can't calve.
AMD made a very good bet on Intel not sending Skylake to the butcher, and instead reacting with a lot of "*lake" updates.
Intel needed a quick patch to stop bleeding clients, but, ultimately, that decision to not to commit to a brand new architecture doomed them long term.
Same as the last time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_(engineer). Curiously Jim is at Intel now. So if Intel lets him do his thing, they'll be un-fucked in the near future as well, after which Jim will depart to unfuck something else.
Moore's law has ended around 2016 or so. As progress is slowing, CPU technology is commoditizing. Successive Intel CPU models aren't much faster than previous ones anymore. So all the manufacturers will just end up in the same place and will only compete on price.
We will end up running everything on very efficient cores, massively parallelized. The software frameworks for that will be very different from current ones.
This is a polemic version from 2014: Cost of transistors stopped decreasing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBrEx-FINEI
I think it'll take a lot more happening in programming language technologies than Rust or the current fragmented and janky set of mostly proprietary GPU languages.
No rr/Pernosco.
That energy usage is below the specified TDP is surprising. Some other recent processors - especially from Intel, but to a lesser extreme also some AMD models - happily went way above their specifications.
