The decline of Intel..

Pretty incisive article, and I agree.

In retrospect, I think the marketing/sales/finance corporate leadership idiocy that’s intensified over the last couple decades is the single biggest contributor to my deep sense of frustration and ennui I’ve developed working as a software engineer. It just seems like pretty much fucking nobody in the engineering management sphere these days actually values robust, carefully and thoughtfully designed stuff anymore - or more accurately, if they do, the higher-ups will fire them for not churning out half-finished bullshit.

That's why I like my steam deck so much: the design is so thoughtful and adapted to its own needs, and unfortunately that's a rare sight lately (not just in technology).
- Would've probably turned out different if Valve was beholden to shareholders and the never-ending hunger for a higher stock price. The push to drive "shareholder value" is one of the most destructive forces if not the most destructive force we're dealing with these days.
- Yeah… I’ve been thinking about popping for one for a while now. I should probably just go for it.
  Out of curiosity, is the etched AR glass on the top end model actually worth it, or is that more of a gimmick?

Admired AMD since the first Athlon, but never made the jump for various reasons--mostly availability. Just bought my first laptop(or any computer) with an AMD chip in it last year, a ryzen7 680m. There is no discrete graphics card and the onboard GPU has comparable performance to a discrete Nvidia 1050gpu. In a 13" laptop. The AMD chip far surpassed Intel's onboard GPU performance, and Intel laptop was ~30% more from any company. Fuck right off.

Why doesn't this matter to Intel? Part of why they always held mind space and a near monopoly is their OEM computer maker deals. HP, DELL, etc. it was almost impossible to find an AMD premade desktop, laptops were out of the question.

I believe my first amd was a desktop athlon around 2000. I needed a fast machine to crunch my undergraduate thesis and that was the most cost effective.
In recent years I can't buy amd for a strong desktop, went with xps and there's no options. Linux is a requirement for me, so it narrowed down my choices a lot. As you'd expect, it's a horrible battery life compounded by being forced to pay and not choose an NVIDIA card that also has poor drivers and power management.
x86 and it's successor amd86 instruction set is a Pandora box and a polished turd, hiding things such as micro instructions, a full blown small OS running in parallel and independent of BIOS, and other nefarious bad practices of over engineering that is at the roots of spectre and meltdown.
What I mean is I prefer AMD over Intel, but I prefer riscv over both.

Cheap intel stock going then

I'd be very surprised if they don't find a way to bounce back, they've done it before

Maybe. In the past they have always been able to rely on their dominance in the PC market. With consumers shifting away from this, I don't think it's so straight forward and in other emerging markets like AI they are way behind.
At least they are finally putting actual money into R&D. This article was a really good read. Will be interesting to see how and if Intels investments pay off.
- Yup, they need to fund engineering. That's what AMD did, and it turns out that's a good strategy. Companies need to provide value to customers, and then marketing's job is easy.
I am also betting they will bounce back; hopefully this is indeed a good opportunity to buy the stock for cheap.

Either they make a phone chip ... or they continue to rot to obscurity.

Why? AMD doesn't make phone chips, yet they're dominating Intel. Likewise for NVIDIA, who is at the top of the chip maker list.
The problem isn't what market segments they're in, the problem is that they're not dominant in any of them. AMD is better at high end gaming (X3D chips especially), workstations (Threadripper), and high performance servers (Epyc), and they're even better in some cases with power efficiency. Intel is better at the low end generally, by that's not a big market, and it's shrinking (e.g. people moving to ARM). AMD has been chipping away at those, one market segment at a time.
Intel entering phones will end up the same way as them entering GPUs, they'll have to target the low end of the market to get traction, and they're going to have a lot of trouble challenging the big players. Also, x86 isn't a good fit there, so they'll also need to break into the ARM market a well.
No, what they need is to execute well in the spaces they're already in.
- When AMD introduced the first Epyc, they marketed it with the slogan: "Nobody ever got fired for buying Intel. Until now."
  And they lived up to the boast. The Zen architecture was just that good and they've been improving on it ever since. Meanwhile the technology everyone assumed Intel had stored up their sleeve turned out to be underwhelming. It's almost as bad as IA-64 vs. AMD64 and at least Intel managed to recover from that one fairly quickly.
  They really need to come to with another Core if they want to stay relevant.
- Actually, AMD do make phone chips. That is, they design the Exynos GPUs, which are inside some Samsung devices
- Lol .... AMD dominates ? They have half the revenue .
They used to, but they weren't very good.
- Lol ... If they don't manage to make a decent one ... they're done.
  That being said I would love an "not so good " x86 smartphone with usb video out and desktop mode.
  But clearly that ain't going to happen... all the ARM shit must be sold .

Nice read. Thanks OP!

Appreciate it 🙏.

Intel GPUs are still ahead in some ways. They need to work on getting Intel GPUs in datacenters

I also like that they are working on creating a more open AI hardware platform

In what ways? Transcoding?
- HDMI 2.1 support on Linux 😂😭
Maybe in some niche performance matrices. However they still are more expensive for the same performance. AMD is cheaper and same in terms of power.

While I used AMD since fx bulldozer and currently using laptop with Ryzen 7 5700u and really enjoying it, downfall of intel saddens me because they keeping the GPUs prices down, i mean, would AMD and Nvidia offer 16gb GPUs in 300$ price range if intel wouldn't bring a770 16gb for 300$ on the table first, p.s AMD always deserved first place and still deserves it now, while intel is good as catching up player which keeping the prices down

I tried to always use AMD, 386SX33, 486DX4/100, Duron 1000, Athlon XP 2200, then went a laptop life with Intel, but since COVID/WFH I went back to AMD, I have a 5600H in a miniPC

That has pretty much nothing to do with Intel's decline though. Losing the enthusiast market to AMD was a small blow, the bigger blow was losing a lot of server market to AMD. And now AMD is starting to dominate in pretty much every CPU market there is, outside of the very low power devices where ARM is dominant and expanding.