Intel "Nova Lake" Could Arrive Without AVX10, APX, and AMX Support
14 points by Joban
14 points by Joban
Has Intel forgotten that they need to compete with the rest of the world, and not just with their "business" products like Xeon?
I get it that when AVX-512 took a much larger percentage of gates and generated so much extra heat that the CPU had to be throttled, it made sense to have products with AVX-512 and products without. These days, AMD has a full 512 bit wide implementation that can run at full speed, and Intel can't even give us a double pumped 256 implementation for compatibility?
This by itself isn't entirely unexpected from Intel. They're famously good at continuing down a bad path much, much longer than makes sense. But on a 52 core, high end CPU, this makes no sense.
"I want the expensive, premium Intel CPU that's going to make my air conditioning work extra hard when I push it, but no, it's perfectly fine if there's no AVX-512" doesn't seem like what I'd expect from consumers.
“Why would I invest in Intel products/chips at any price point when I don’t think they’ll be around in five or ten years?” is my question.
Like, consumer electronics like laptops or OEM PCs, sure, but I wouldn’t consider them for a custom built PC because I’d be stuck with their motherboard for a while.
There really hasn’t been a good reason to buy Intel for 30 years with a handful of exceptions. The Pentium M (32-bit) and then the Core 2 (64-bit) were lower power than anything AMD had, so made sense in laptops. AMD caught up a long time ago. And in a load of other places, AMD has had products in better places in the price:performance calculations. Even back in the ‘90s, a K6-2 plus motherboard cost less than the motherboard for an Intel system. The Opteron solidified their lead in the server space and they never gave it up (except on the security side. You can pretty much rely on AMD to screw up anything related to security, whereas Intel get it right at least 30% of the time).
This... seems to ignore the period between 2009 and 2017 or so when not only was AMD's Heavy Machinery line pretty bad, but Intel's Core arch was literally unrivaled in perf and power usage? AMD's strategy has always been to offer 90% of the perf at 70% of the cost, but it's not worth much to win the price/performance metrics when your absolute performance is shitty. This was true in the server space as well as desktop/laptop, it was only with Zen 2 or so that VPS providers bothered buying AMD servers.
Nearly a decade of "we're the best and everyone will buy our stuff no matter the price 'cause they have no good alternatives" has been kinda a big influence on how Intel ended up in its current pickle.
There is one reason that I use Intel in my desktop rather than AMD: Idle power usage. The majority of the time I'm on my desktop I'm reading and writing (and perhaps I will end up programming for fun again at some point), which means that the CPU spends a lot of time idling. Current AMD CPUs idle 20-30 watts higher than current Intels; if this gap ever went away I'd move to AMD immediately.
Though to be perfectly honest, there's probably a lot of my day-to-day computing (aside from occasional gaming - and, were I to get back into coding for fun - compile jobs) that would be adequately served by a Raspberry Pi or something.
Okay, but for a while their consumer CPUs were simply better than AMD’s. Or at least, AMD couldn’t compete except at the low end.
That’s what I remember at least, when I was growing up watching tech YouTubers (I’m 22) everyone used Intel CPUs until Ryzen came out.