Speaking of subsidies, here is what I can gather from the current state of grift. - 8.5B direct grants from CHIPS act. - 2.5B from military money earmarked to reshore armament and intelligence semiconductor sources. - 11B in federal loans. - 25% investment tax credit. Intel is behind on a lot of things. Arrow Lake should catch Intel up around the start of 2025 but the fruit of that labor won't start hitting the balance sheet until Q1 reporting and won't be strong until Q2 reporting.. They might match AMD's Zen 5 on performance. It is expected to be very similar but they will be usurped by AMD again with Zen 6. Of course, Intel should have Lunar Lake online by mid next year. Intel is promising, "leadership in compute, graphics and AI," so perhaps my pessimism is misplaced. To put the above numbers into context, TSMC's Fab 21 (located in Arizona) is expected to cost about $40B when the second phase is complete.
This two week old graphic shows that Intel is leading the industry in PowerPoint slides that show it is leading the industry. For clarity, Intel 7 is a 10nm process node. Intel 4 is a 7nm process. Much like TDP which no longer means "total dissipated power" but has quietly been redefined as "Our advertising team's optimistic guess at Typical Dissipated Power, process nodes no longer represent actual feature size. This is true across the industry, not just Intel.
This seems like a buy opportunity, for people who believe in the company. I wish I did. To be clear, I do not predict that Intel will fail. They may succeed. I just don't know. For people who know Intel is going to succeed, this is a clear buy signal. For the rest of this year, I see a lot more down side than upside.
Intel is too big to fail. Through all the problems, I see a bright future with the new ASML machines and their plan to manufacture < 3 Nm CPU like TSMC does. Best time to buy is now.
For what it's worth, I completely ignore rumors of Nvidia buying Intel. While Nvidia can afford it, they were blocked from buying ARM so this would be pretty open corruption on the part of the regulators. These days, corruption is daily and glaring so it is possible but I chose to believe the odds are low. I'm more interested in the 2nm equipment Intel ordered from Applied Materials. They claim they don't need all of AM's tech to achieve this node; primarily, just the robotics. If this turns out to be hubris, Intel will be a total loss. They can just buy the process technology and carry on but it will be indicative the company's process IP is worthless.
Intel is claiming 45 TOPS from Lunar Lake. If this is real, it will put them on about the same footing as AMD Zen 5. There is some speculation Intel will not make the 40 TOPS speculated performance limit that Microsoft is speculated to impose on local AI processing for copilot.
Intel has shown a slide of the Lunar Lake mobile CPU complex that shows RAM on board. I've heard 16 and 32GB versions will be available. This makes a whole lot of sense to me. If we want laptops to be cheaper with lower power use, we're going to need more integration.
Moore's Law is Dead just talked about a Dell roadmap that suggests M.2 graphics cards are coming. It makes sense, since M.2 is 4x PCIe lanes. Throw in PCIe 5 and you have a lot of bandwidth. I'm posting this under INTC because M.2 was introduced by Intel. DELL uses Intel exclusively (for now). Also, there are rumors that Intel has taken a huge step forward on their graphics platform. It's plausible. Laptops with expandable graphics would be a nice design win for Intel. AMD and Nvidia would probably follow shortly but Intel seems to be breaking this ground and will have first mover advantage for a while.
We can stop pretending Arc is a big threat to Nvidia or AMD. AMD is going to dominate CPU for the rest of 2024. They will dominate all niches. The question is, can Intel come back strong in 2025? I believe they can. At the very least, AMD dominance may be short lived. It will depend on TSMC N3p node coming online with decent yields by October, if they want processors in the retail chain by the start of 1Q25. I believe the odds of this process being ready are roughly 70%. They can produce product with N3p now but they need to improve yields and have four months to do it. The wildcard threat here is the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite. A whole lot of handheld users would trade 20% performance for 40% battery life. 10h battery life will be a standard feature, in 2025. I believe we are entering the post-performance era of compute. Any system made in the last 3 years is plenty fast enough for 95% of the population. Intel is pricing their products aggressively to compete with AMD. They will lose the high end for the second half of 2024. Arrow Lake will be very competitive single core performance but it will max out at 8P cores. We are starting to see that people don't care about E cores. I think E cores are a dead end, although probably could be extremely relevant in the server space. Intel is working on a 2 nano node. If they can stand that up and move to all performance cores, they could dominate again. The N2 node is, by a vast amount, the biggest hurdle to achieve that.
It will be interesting to see if Intel can convince the YouTube influencer world that RAM on the CPU complex is a good thing. Influencers are nerds. They want to be able to change and upgrade stuff. 10 years ago, RAM on complex would have been dead on arrival. Today, I think Intel has a shot and I think the idea is brilliant. This may be the first time in compute history we will be able to lower the pin count on a CPU socket. I can imagine an SoC with 400 pins/balls. All they need are maybe eight PCIe v5 lanes wifi, SSD, and expansion, two USB v4.0, HDMI out (I believe DisplayPort is going away due to committee politics), and a bunch of power. To the extent they can get the industry to accept this architecture, Intel can effectively eat the lunch of system integrators, DRAM vendors, etc. If you think about it, Intel's real problem is being able to compete with Qualcomm on power management (Note: I did not write power consumption).
I want to mention Intel's move away from HyperThreading (tm). I believe I understand it but discussion might shine some light on this for all of us. Hyperthreading was originally a way to more efficiently use die space to enable multi-threaded applications without adding cores. It originated in the days of single and double core counts. In some situations, hyperthreading is a mess that chokes on diverse compute loads but it is effective in other situations. Over the years, HT has evolved to be pretty good under a lot of situations. That evolution has added a lot of complexity. HT was never 2x speed bump, though. In the early days, it was closer to 1.2x average and evolved to 1.5x, or so. I have no idea how it scales on recent silicon. As I understand Intel's dropping of HT, it comes down to them saying die space is no longer a constraint (thanks to both process and chiplets). Improving HT will add further complexity. They are at the point, it makes more sense to just add an entire second core than it does to add transistors for the purpose of HT. So, they can strip out HT and add in as many full cores as they want. Multi-core doesn't scale with perfect efficiency, but it is worlds closer than HT. Apparently, this is also related to the thrust behind efficiency cores. They are small and light so they can toss in a lot of them (14900 has 8P cores and 16E cores). As I understand it, efficiency cores perform similar to performance cores for integer tasks. Efficiency cores fall short when doing complex tasks, like floating point math or SIMD. When you think about it, the average person surfing the net does not use the FPU, SIMD, or AVX (wider extensions of SIMD). They are using a tiny part of the CPU with most of the die consuming power without being used. I'm inclined to think HyperThreading doesn't matter. Efficiency cores don't matter, either. Intel needs to post great benchmark results to get people to buy their parts. How they get there is their business. Literally. It is also clear the strategy of efficiency cores is not going to be effective against heavy work loads such as bulk video transcoding, math simulators, etc. These cases simply need as many heavy cores as they can have. Efficiency cores look like a very effective strategy against RISC designs, like ARM. Since this is where most of the industry is headed, I'm inclined to buy into Intel's strategy and am considering buying back into INTC.
I don't see much talk of why i9 13900 is faster than i9 14900 in some games. The emperor is clothed with Intel's marketing budget. From what I can tell, changes to CEP, process, and some other minor optimizations will provide a significant step forward for Intel. This, even without design improvements. I don't expect them to pass AMD in the next year, at the least, but I do expect them to remain somewhat close.
There are a few, low confidence, rumors circulating that suggest Lunar Lake is developing into a better platform than previously thought. There were a lot of Meteor Lake leaks that were complete bollox so I don't put a lot of stock into these rumors but the idea of a significant uplift with Lunar Lake does make sense, given the process node and design improvements. AMD is going to make big inroads into the laptop market with Strix but Lunar Lake might claw some of that back.
Rumor has it, Intel is considering (has probably already decided) beefing up their NPU. This will decrease yield and increase cost but it may be an effective answer to AMD Strix Point. I'm not sure what to think about this. AI doesn't matter, right now. I literally don't know anyone who wants AI enough to pay for it. This comes down to not being AMD's bitch (nerds are morons when it comes to bragging rights) and a possible strategic advantage if/when AI comes into demand. I know extreme little about this rumor. It is hugely unlikely to involve an architectural change. At the most, this will be more NPU cores of the same design that should have frozen a while ago and needs to now be in the qualification phase of development. I can see AMD leading Intel substantially for the next 18 months. With a beefed up NPU for Lunar Lake, Intel could cut AMD's clear lead to 7 or 8 months. That's not enough time to gain all that much mind share so this could be an effective strategy if Panther Lake can manage to put Intel back in the lead. I'm betting on AMD in this race but this makes it a lot harder to call. Whatever the case, I expect to have zero issue running a computer with either brand CPU as both should have extremely strong offerings.
Lots of re-jiggering is happening at Intel. In fact, I dare say Intel is currently a dumpster fire but I firmly believe in their strategy to move forward. There are rumors of Intel trying to hustle Lunar Lake to market by October 2024. Scary stuff. I suspect Raptor Lake problems are attributable to a shortened development cycle in a rush to get it to market. Now Raptor Lake may need to be recalled and they are talking about repeating history with Lunar Lake. They may have better fortunes with Lunar Lake. I wouldn't doubt it. I'd just like to see them scurry less and focus on doing a good job more. Meanwhile, it is crystal clear Intel CPU complex are pushed to their absolute limit while an engineering sample of the 9950X has been pushed to wild levels of performance. I'm talking about 40% beyond current top scores in with chips configured with specified power and clock. AMD has completely turned the tables on Intel, from the Core Duo days. One company releases a product that can comfortably perform as specified while the other company is pushing their parts hard to keep up or get close. Still, I think we are in a post-performance era. Any of the top chips have phenomenal performance for 99% of the market and it's time for integration and cost reduction which is what Intel is doing. The market will probably reject embedded RAM on the CPU complex but TomB16 embraces it. lol!
Intel may be under an existential situation with failing Raptor Lake CPU complex. Specifically, the 14900 are known to have problems but lower level parts are also failing (at lower rates). 13th gen Raptor Lake also had problems but to a lesser degree. This could end in a recall situation.
It affects more SKUs than previously thought and a recall is a pipe dream: https://www.tweaktown.com/news/9958...-is-irreversible-no-recall-planned/index.html Definitely not going Intel any time soon. Idiots.
I consider the Intel stability problem to be a design flaw. They are pushing it so hard with power and clock, the ring bus is literally burning out and failing, in some situations. Once the minuscule bus traces are burned, they cannot be recovered. At least, this is the rumor from some tech sites. The reason I consider this to be a design flaw, and not just sales engineers asking too much of the substrate, is because the 14900k can beat the 9950X when both are cooled with liquid nitrogen and supplied with unlimited power. The delta is about 2.5% on Cinebench 23, in favor of the Intel part. Sure, someone might figure out how to squeeze a bit more out of the AMD part but the point is that Intel is right there or even a touch ahead in terms of blue sky fantasy performance testing. Without using LN2 coupled with comical levels of clock boost and power, the 9950X seems to dominate most benchmarks by a small margin. Intel has a steep hill to climb and I believe their next generation will be later than they are promising but Intel shows signs of having an ability to re-take the compute lead from AMD in 2025. Of course, AMD has Zen 6 in the pipeline to perhaps leapfrog Intel again. As for a recall, I wouldn't completely rule that out, despite it being highly unlikely. Every company announces they will not recall their faulty product up to the moment they announce the actual recall. Let's not mistake Intel press releases for honest communication. Personally, I think Intel will do something for their unhappy customers but I doubt it will be a recall. Perhaps something like a small discount on the next generation platform? They've significantly damaged their reputation and it's extremely difficult to imagine their response will do anything to restore the lost franchise value but I suspect they will do something lame and comically insufficient.
I'm told that the class action that just launched against Intel is one of many legal challenges coming their way. I would imagine the media will be full of misinformation and outright lies about the topic.
