> Yet even in this current “bad chips” era, Intel is only, at worst, about 10% behind in gaming performance (largely due to cache disparity)
Gaming is irrelevant.
For AMD, gaming (both console and PC combined) is less revenue than embedded-- things like those routers you can get off of aliexpress and Synology NASes.
Enterprise, cloud, and AI are the only things that matter, and even enterprise is falling off.
Back in 2020 with the second wave of AMD EPYC Rome, after I had gotten a couple of R7525s in hand and put them through their paces I started saying that you are professionally negligent if you, as a technology professional, recommend an Intel solution unless you have some very specific use cases (AVX512/Optane-optimized options). In 2022 everyone started agreeing with me.
Now you are professionally negligent if you recommend Intel at all.
Enterprise cares about speed, cloud cares about clients per socket, and AI cares about bandwidth. Intel is not competitive in any of those.
Even in the consumer space, for running bullshit workloads like Copilot on a laptop the difference is negligible. Intel is ahead, by about 10%-- at ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY WATTS (if the OEM even allows it) while you trade that 10% for 75W on AMD.
No human being on earth cares that the scan to identify if there's a cute dog in the photo they just saved to disk takes .255 or .277 seconds. They do care about battery life.
And gaming isn't just irrelevant due to revenue, once you look at margins you start realizing that AMD could never again spend a single cent on marketing X3D chips to gamers and instead redirect that money to target other sectors and they would probably be better off for it.
Look at Nvidia. Gaming went from their cash crop to burdensome baggage in just a couple of years. Gaming went to less than 9% of revenue from like, 80%. They don't care about people buying an RTX card and having to deal with OEMs and distributors and retailers and marketing and RMAs and driver patches at whatever piss-poor margin it is due to everyone taking their cut when enterprise clients are putting in POs directly to them for tens of thousands of Data Center cards at a time at high margins-- and they didn't have to spend barely anything on marketing.
The very last thing, after figuring out absolutely everything else, that Intel should care about is what their chips are benchmarking at in the latest video game.
I’ve found that a lot of my friends who are into pc gaming still haven’t grokked that ever since the crypto boom, much less the ai boom, that they are the old toys that no one wants to play with anymore.
I had a friend who legitimately could not understand why Nvidia didn’t care about their reputation in the gaming market souring even after I showed him the numbers on how much nvidia is selling to corporations now.
I don’t know if it was an inability to deal with the numbers or if it’s just culture shock at going from being a valued client to as you said “baggage”, but it was a surprising number of people in that camp
Well this all did happen in the blink of an eye. 2022, Gaming was one of the only things booming after a global shutdown. 2023, investors all at once jumped ship to chase AI. That can be rather shocking even for tech, since people don't tend to upgrade their GPU's every year.
As a parallel, imagine hearing that the IPhone 13 was the biggest selling device in history. Then suddenly the IPhone 14 is $4000 and mostly sold to enterprise. It doesn't make any logical sense without following the money. Even then it may not make much sense.
I mean, for a long time the situation was reversed.
Huge gaming demand and easy retail availability of nvidia's cards was providing economies of scale. If a few professors were buying the GeForce 8800 to look at this new 'CUDA' thing that was mostly a marketing thing.
Around the same time there were also one or two Playstation 3 clusters - but a year or two later Sony removed support for that. HPC being inconsequential, and a distraction from their core business, presumably.
It's only in recent years the stuff that used to be marketing decoration has become reality.
Too true, but at the same time... gamers didn't disappear. The market is still there.
Sooner or later, someone else will fill the need. That may be AMD, it could be Intel if they just focus for more than a year, or it'll be some cheap Chinese GPU from a company you've never heard of. (Likely named by mashing the keyboard while capslock is on.)
It's like how the mainframe market is bigger than it has ever been, despite being an irrelevant rounding error in the minds of the "Wintel" server providers, cloud vendors, etc...
Gaming is still a multi billion dollar industry, and touches into all the other aspects you mentioned as well. Losing out to AMD for Xbox/Playstation was definitely a costly loss.
>Look at Nvidia. Gaming went from their cash crop to burdensome baggage in just a couple of years.
Yes, marking up your consumer hardware by 4-5x to appeal to crypto miners surely does have an effect on your market. Arguably, AI saved them from a crash due to their over investment on Crypto/NFTs. It's not like gaming demand diminished this decade.
Gaming isn't THE way out. But it's one avenue to consider. It does seem like companies c. 2025 prefer to fall into the AI bubble, though.
I wonder what risks the bubble has for them. If they can sell every $30K AI accelerator they make right now, that might cause them to overextend, committing to up-front capacity or long term projects that are financed by the current spend patterns, or just neglecting other parts of their product line.
If the hype dies and they're back to selling 5090s to gamers, can they afford to pay those bills?
That's probably the saddest part. They can still pay thrd even pay off the debts from the bubble bursting just doing what they used to rely on.
But we know that won't be enough for shareholders and their stock would tank regardless. Because 2020's speciation isn't about having a reasonable long term portfolio. It's just extremely abundant pumping until you need to dump and pump the next trend. It's not enough these days to be a good, sensible business.
Historically the answer has been "no". When a company pivots to doing something that becomes 90% of their revenue, there is no way to go back to doing whatever the 10% was. Imagine NOKIA going back to manufacturing gumboots, which is how that company started out!