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Over at www.semiaccurate.com they are discussing - in unfavourable terms - the launch by Intel of the 'Comet Lake' series of CPUs:
Intel LogoLast week Intel launched their '10th Gen' CPUs, a self-inflicted wound that shouldn't have been released. If you think SemiAccurate is being a bit harsh here, ask yourself why Intel birthed this debacle in the first place.
[...]
But performance is why we are mocking Intel over this ‘family’. The company split out the Ice and Comet briefings so as to minimize comparisons and uncomfortable questions between the two. As we pointed out in our earlier article on Ice there were vague comparisons between the two ranges but no actual data. Intel even unethically hid the SKUs they were testing.
This time was more of the same, absolutely zero charts comparing this ‘generation’ to the last, or even to itself. All we got was a slide saying, “up to 16% better overall performance vs. previous gen”. That may sound great but, err, 6 cores vs 4 should get one a 50% higher performance or at least something closer to 50% than 0%, right? Don’t forget the faster memory on the new Comet devices which should get you a big chunk of that 16% alone. That level of sleaze is expected but we didn’t expect Intel to be outright unethical. Again. Actually we kinda did but we honestly hoped they wouldn’t do it again.
Yup that 16% max increase when going from a 6C i7-10710U to a 4C i7-8565U was bad. The fact that they compared a 25W 10710U to a 15W 8565U and buried that fact in the fine print is unacceptable. We once again call for the idiots responsible to be fired, not that Intel will do anything, it seems this sort of behavior has become acceptable at big blue. It still isn’t right.
Read the story and see if you agree.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday August 27 2019, @06:17PM (4 children)
Don't bet on it. They were in this exact same position with AMD over power efficiency back in 2005 and by 2007 they were back on-par and by 2008 they had crushed AMD again.
It's pretty impressive what can be done with a spare $3B in cash laying around: https://www.gurufocus.com/term/CashAndCashEquivalents/INTC/nbsp%25253Bnbsp%25253BCash%252BAnd%252BCash%252BEquivalents/Intel%2BCorp [gurufocus.com]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 27 2019, @07:01PM (2 children)
I still wouldn't bet against Intel, but things are different now.
Intel used illegal practices last time, it's doubtful they'd get away with them this time.
Also, back then Intel could just throw out their design and start from scratch with what their mobile division had.
I don't think they have such a "Plan B" to fall back on now.
And then there's all the non-technical issues.
Intel got so used to being a high-margin business, there's almost certainly all kinds of overhead and waste that you tend to acquire when you can afford it.
It's very hard to go back to being successful at lower margins again.
And it's far too easy and likely to involve firing people. Which comes with a huge risk of picking the wrong ones AND demotivating the rest, causing a downward spiral.
I guess we'll see what Intel manages to do.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 27 2019, @07:19PM (1 child)
Yes, I agree. From their public statements I suspect some very sick culture at intel. The engineers are overrun by marketers and accountants. It doesn't matter how many genius chip designers you pay in that case.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 28 2019, @11:31AM
The difference is, while marketing made promises engineers had to meet, they at least had engineer executives running things at the upper levels.
Since the late 1990s, the company has been run primarily by MBAs, accountants, and marketing types, all of whom have made 'bottom line decisions' at the expense of control of the market (excising all those 'low profit' microcontroller and memory parts.), fragmenting the market by stabbing their oem chipset partners in the back with the pentium and above chipsets while not giving their partners accurate documentation until the last minute, and finally stopping all sublicensing of their bus architecture and related parents in the early 2000s leading to only VIA, ALi, and maybe one other company producing intel compatible products, forcing AMD to move their processors to the Alpha bus (which eventually lead to their move to hypertransport and an integrated memory controller 2 generations before Intel did.)
Intel's decline has largely coincided with America's decline. Too many MBAs, too many cuts to the push up shareholder value, not enough hard looks at the administration or who was being cut or underfunded to ensure that future problems or reduced profitability could be shored up in another market.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 28 2019, @03:16AM
It's also worth considering that AMD overpaid for ATI when they purchased it in 2006, which was a massive problem for them for a few years in terms of not really having much money to spend on other things while that was paying off. This time around, AMD seems to be ahead and doesn't have the drag that comes from overpaying for acquisitions. On top of that, Intel has already been busted more than once for antitrust violations, they might try it again, but in the totality, I doubt they'll have much luck when they're not able to produce enough chips to fill the void.