That says more about Intel's shambolic efforts than it does about AMD's road to damascus moment.
Honestly both of them have demonstrated that they have little interest in AI. Intel gave up on Optane right as (a much-improved successor) would've helped with MoE offsetting or even as a highly durable drive for KV caching.
AMD have... turned out some decent gaming graphics cards and fine server CPUs but little else.
People are out there solding SMDs on old Nvidia mining rig GPUs to use them for inference; their hardware is not depreciating at the normal rate you'd expect from GPUs. DGX spark is finally useful now that AI can write multi-machine inference tooling optimised to it. Where's AMD in all of this? Nowhere.
AMD has their Strix/Gorgon Halo as a competitor to DGX Spark, which is at least in the ballpark in terms of bandwidth, and being x86 has some compatibility benefits.
If you wanted a GPU with 32GB of memory for AI tasks, the AMD AI Pro R9700 was (up until about a month ago) reasonably priced at ~$1300. It's not a RTX 5090 in terms of bandwidth and compute, but for the price and being actually purchasable it's a reasonable pick.
Persistent memory will be back, it's just too compelling to give up on, and thanks to the research industry it spawned we have a pretty good idea of how to build systems that effectively exploit it. I can't wait until every DB can use pmem to achieve the holy grail of low-latency transactional durability (which is impossible today even with NVMe).
Doesn't Intel have near cutting edge fabs tho? Even if their own AI chips aren't great, aren't they getting contracts to make Nvidia and Apple chips?
Not to forget AMDs dominance in performance per dollar in CPUs of any variety up until very recently on basically all fronts. Consumer, handheld/low power, server, you name it.
Intel finally has really great low power/budget answers, but still loses greatly to 3d cache chips on most workloads.
"road to damascus"
Great Hope and Crosby movie.
[delayed]
Ahh TIL! I used ChatGPT to find out what your "..road to damascus moment." expression meant, it was quite complimentary to you;
> And honestly, "Intel's shambolic efforts" alongside "AMD's Road to Damascus moment" is rather delicious phrasing. The author has managed to deliver quite a sophisticated insult in a single sentence.
I have avoided Intel products since the time some law enforcement forensic team used DCILeech to read the RAM of my server hosted at Hetzner and extracted a LUKS key from it. That was a lifelong lesson. There is no guarantee AMD won't come up with similar shenanigans like Intel's DCI soon and of course we don't know what PSP does behind the scenes, but at least for now, they are generally better for anti-forensics-tuned Linux kernels.
If you assume the machine will be compromised, is there any way around this?
Yep, physical access = game over. A tale as old as time. It doesn't matter who etched the silicon.
Telegram supposedly gets around this by distributing keys over various regions.
But surely intel services are smart enough to get people in there illegally.
Full story pls?
It's not the OP's story, but it's also not the first story of things hosted at Hetzner being intercepted. Best to not host "such" things there, since they seem quite compliant in that regard: https://notes.valdikss.org.ru/jabber.ru-mitm/ (comments at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37955264 )
Look into the WireCard scandal. WireCard was the Stripe of EU worth billions. They were even audited by one of the big 4 firms and they confirmed it was a real company.
Turns out it was a front for Russian intelligence. Even after the German government found out, the guy still somehow escaped to Russia. There’s a solid chance that Russia operatives have infiltrated the German government. They was even a big hack Russia’s state hackers did and a lot of information was leaked.
I bring this up because Hetzner was asking for my passport to buy a $10/m server. Simple opsec says to just pay a bit more and use DigitalOcean or some other VPS.
I have no idea what this has to do with the topic at hand. What does KYC from Hetzner have to do with Wirecard? Do you mean to say that you suspect that Russia is behind Hetzner?
Yeah I tried to move to Hetzner, but bounced off when they wanted my passport info. I've since moved to OVH, where I get significantly more resources for the same money compared to DO, they're a European company hosting in Europe (getting away from US tech was the primary reason I was looking for DO alternatives), and they never asked for my passport!
There are many good non-Hetzner European hosting companies, luckily.
The documentary about that was crazy. Like a real life spy thriller.
What? I don't remember that it turned out to be a front for Russian intelligence. WTH https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Marsalek
It was messy. A number of agencies of the German government, including a handful of intelligence agencies, used Wirecard for banking.
All devices have such backdoors.
AMD specifically calls out high sales of Instinct products as leading the sales growth. I wonder how their Epyc and Ryzen lines compare to Intels Xeon and Core lines. AMD's Instinct sales are practically nothing compared to competing Nvidia products, but no one† buys Intel Arc accelerators, so that may be the main reason AMD is beating intel.
†Disclaimer: I own an Intel Arc GPU
do people / businesses even buy Xeons anymore? Any used server from the last 5 years I see is always EPYC and all VM services I see are EPYCs unless something ancient that is still on a Xeon E5 from like 2015
Having strong competition between the CPU vendors is always a good thing. AMD has made mistakes, but it's hard to argue they don't deserve to outsell Intel for a change.
Hopefully they don't completely swap roles completely, with Intel being incapable of competing and AMD stagnating without competition. I'd rather they both be competitive.
Absolutely. It's also why I like seeing the Arm and Risc processor pressure; forces them to keep upping their game and not get fat and lazy (like Intel did).
As someone at AMD, I think competing on two major fronts helps with that some.
There is arguably no particularly strong competition. There would be strong competition if Intel and AMD had to compete with x86 CPUs from Apple and Qualcomm.
Or if Intel and AMD GPUs had to compete with Nvidia GPUs ... wait, they do, and they are absolutely losing.
Good. I was bitten by Intel's voltage issues in their 13th gen CPUs. Then again in the 14th gen replacement. They appear bloated, complacent and I hope AMD eats their lunch.
Quite a comeback for a company that was not doing well a decade ago (pre-Zen).
Lisa is a beast!
Also Intel decided to not improve for a long time. They were just happy collecting rent and protecting margin. Only the paranoid survive. Intel used to be a memory company and they pivoted cause Andy grove could see what was coming.
Not really - 10nm node was too ambitious and failed cuz of that.
It wasn't just that. Intel could have survived a failed node, or a few of them. Certainly wouldn't be their first.
Krzanich "optimized" the company for profit, by cutting out things he considered to be excess. Including a lot of their irreplaceable validation & verification talent, that AMD instantly snapped up. The lack of validation resources is directly responsible for the failures of many key Intel products during his tenure and later, because major bugs that could have been spotted earlier slipped through, and then resulted in horrible delays and even cancellations. He then spent the surplus of the company on 30 major acquisitions, of which only two were in any reasonable degree successful.
There are CEOs who have destroyed more value than Krzanich, but not many.
AMD benefited greatly from Intel's self inflicted wound: laying on their laurels thinking the leverage they had with OEMs and inertia will carry them through the hard patch like it did in their P4 times.
Intel stopped advancing in 2014-2015 for a long time. They flopped on the fabrication side, they stuck to the 2-4 core CPUs and charged an arm and a leg for anything with more than that. This gave AMD an opening with their cheap and yet still decently fast higher core count CPUs.
Also, they spent a long time suppressing AMD by bribing, and strong-arming their partners during the first cycle of AMD beating Intel (Athlon series): https://www.eetimes.com/intel-accepts-order-to-stop-unfair-t... Later on: https://www.rbbecon.com/news/article/commission-imposes-e106...
That’s the leverage I was mentioning. That’s what worked for them in Pentium days and thought will just work again. It helped a lot that AMD had a compelling product to sell.
AMD was held back by their fabs, breaking off from global foundries did so much from them too
AMD is reaping the reward of pragmatism, their best gaming CPU skus often have 8 full cores with a large cache for desktops plugged into a wall outlet.
Intel has been chasing higher and higher core counts which look good on spec sheets and dazzle in rarely utilized workloads, but said core counts do nothing to run the apps and games that most people actually use. I think getting dumped by Apple broke them, they're competing with Apple on paper and AMD is eating their lunch in reality.
Intel never took GPUs seriously either. I'm positive they're kicking themselves that the AI revolution runs on products they are not competitive with.
They also stopped making 3D XPoint a year before AI would have bought all of it.
It's amusing because i915-derived integrated graphics had the largest GPU share for a long time, but they still tried to make an x86-based GPU instead.
>They also stopped making 3D XPoint a year before AI would have bought all of it.
Micron wanted to sell the fab that manufactured 3D XPoint.
They also have baffling policy of just introducing a feature and then snuffing people not paying enough from using it. "Oh for that you need more expensive model" "Oh yeah ? fuck you I'm buying AMD"
First it was virtualization instructions, then AVX stuff
Gaming decline is not a good thing, but part of it is overpriced PC components due to AI craze. No one is in a rush to make new PCs for such prices.
Blah blah blah, AMD so great.
The truth is this is more of the same tech inflationary pressure driven by AI. AMD is winning for showing up. Don't get me wrong, AMD does have technically superior products for specific applications, but that never really mattered.
ECC