IMO it's competition that makes better products in the end. If either party becomes a full monopolist the progress will stall (as already happened with Intel I guess)
IMO it's competition that makes better products in the end. If either party becomes a full monopolist the progress will stall (as already happened with Intel I guess)
> as already happened with Intel I guess
In which sense? Intel is neither a full monopolist (AMD, ARM) nor has progress stalled (we're still getting a regular cycle of new generation CPUs which improve on the previous).
Intel had a monopoly on bleeding edge cpu for a long time until they got stuck on 14nm for years, allowing TSMC to catch up and providing AMD the means to compete.
In a the best of timelines, intel, tsmc and samsung (and glofo maybe?) Would all have competitive fab nodes.
Intel didn't do much to improve their CPUs while AMD was out of the competition with the Bulldozer disaster.
It was a pretty bad time - ARM wasn't really encroaching on any of their markets in the way they are now & AMD was struggling. Intel basically just left the engineering to rot & the business people to try and gouge consumers with things like the Intel Upgrade Service, low power CPUs that were essentially just normal cores but less rather than optimized, inflated prices etc.
It also allowed AMD to completely blindside them with Zen - so we're in a situation where AMD now dominates consumer desktop and arguably a lot of enterprise/DC instead of it balancing towards a more competitive centre.
Eh, xeon 2690 was released 2012q1 at 8 cores, 2690v4 was 2016q1 at 14 cores. Same suggested customer price. Clock speed dropped a bit, but IPC was way up (AES-NI had a big throughput increase among other things). IIRC, desktop core counts were pretty stagnant, but a Haswell/Broadwell desktop chip at the same corecount and similar clocks was much faster than a Ivy Bridge/Sandy Bridge.
During 2012-2016 AMD was firmly in the Bulldozer disaster.
In 2017, Zen1 came out, and Intel's tick/tock mostly stopped. Zen1 was better than Bulldozer, but not better than Intel. Zen2 in 2019 was the big moment, and Intel hadn't done much. I recall an interview where the AMD person (might have been Jim Keller) said they had been targetting Zen2 to be competitive with what they thought Intel would have when it came out. Since Intel was in their pipeline bubble, Zen2 was a big win.
Intel had something very close to a monopoly for a long time. ARM wasn't taken seriously for desktop or server applications, and AMD was unable to compete with Intel's top-end CPUs until Zen (and with it Ryzen and Epyc) came around.