YHK - yet another hacker news clone

AMD expects to outsell Intel in Q4 for the first time in history

193 points rbanffy 2 hours ago 64 comments

theandrewbailey 2 hours ago | parent

Quite a comeback for a company that was not doing well a decade ago (pre-Zen).

sebmellen 2 hours ago | parent

Lisa is a beast!

throwaway_45 1 hour ago | parent

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.

tester756 1 hour ago | parent

Not really - 10nm node was too ambitious and failed cuz of that.

Tuna-Fish 1 hour ago | parent

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.

close04 1 hour ago | parent

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.

emuljetina 1 hour ago | parent

AMD was held back by their fabs, breaking off from global foundries did so much from them too

chrisgarand 1 hour ago | parent

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...

close04 1 hour ago | parent

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.

lawabider 1 hour ago | parent

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.

piyh 1 hour ago | parent

Full story pls?

Doohickey-d 1 hour ago | parent

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 )

theturtletalks 1 hour ago | parent

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.

Foobar8568 1 hour ago | parent

What? I don't remember that it turned out to be a front for Russian intelligence. WTH https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Marsalek

dralley 56 minutes ago | parent

It was messy. A number of agencies of the German government, including a handful of intelligence agencies, used Wirecard for banking.

2OEH8eoCRo0 1 hour ago | parent

The documentary about that was crazy. Like a real life spy thriller.

https://www.netflix.com/title/81404807

mort96 1 hour ago | parent

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.

nsoam 36 minutes ago | parent

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?

theturtletalks 8 minutes ago | parent

That case was so baffling, it left me forever doubting German companies, especially ones that ask for my passport. A lot of businesses used WireCard, even the government itself.

wmf 25 minutes ago | parent

All hosting providers comply with local law enforcement.

dingaling911 1 hour ago | parent

If you assume the machine will be compromised, is there any way around this?

nvme0n1p1 45 minutes ago | parent

Yep, physical access = game over. A tale as old as time. It doesn't matter who etched the silicon.

dingaling911 36 minutes ago | parent

Telegram supposedly gets around this by distributing keys over various regions.

But surely intel services are smart enough to get people in there illegally.

mahemm 10 minutes ago | parent

90% of Telegram chats live in cleartext on their servers; no one would need to go to those lengths to get chat data from them.

varispeed 1 hour ago | parent

All devices have such backdoors.

Covzire 1 hour ago | parent

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.

theandrewbailey 1 hour ago | parent

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.

tester756 1 hour ago | parent

>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.

zzzoom 1 hour ago | parent

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.

InsidiousWombat 1 hour ago | parent

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

davoneus 1 hour ago | parent

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.

dlcarrier 1 hour ago | parent

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.

davoneus 1 hour ago | parent

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).

a_e_k 53 minutes ago | parent

As someone at AMD, I think competing on two major fronts helps with that some.

cubefox 53 minutes ago | parent

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.

adrian_b 3 minutes ago | parent

The memory crisis has delayed both Intel's and AMD's consumer CPU launches, i.e. Nova Lake for Intel and Zen 6 for AMD, to next year, but when that will happen there are good chances to see a much stronger competition between them than during the last 6-7 years, because Nova Lake should finally bring back AVX-512, a.k.a. AVX10, to Intel's consumer CPUs, and it also has many enhancements that AMD has not implemented yet (e.g. APX and FRED), so unless Intel fails at execution the competing Intel and AMD CPUs should be much more balanced than in the last few years.

theandrewbailey 9 minutes ago | parent

I hope they use much of this windfall to invest in improved products in the future. It's unlikely to impossible that Radeon or Instinct will ever be more popular or faster than its competition, but it shouldn't languish, and the Zen series should keep running circles around Intel.

guerby 1 hour ago | parent

ECC

mickeyp 1 hour ago | parent

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.

jojogeo 1 hour ago | parent

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.

pachouli-please 59 minutes ago | parent

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.

adgjlsfhk1 18 minutes ago | parent

Intel's newest gen is a pretty clear favorite for laptops (especially with their better wifi/bluetooth/USB chipsets). Outside of laptop though, Intel has nothing compelling.

senderista 40 minutes ago | parent

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).

mortsnort 40 minutes ago | parent

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?

prcrstntr 11 minutes ago | parent

Chicken and Egg problem when everyone else is on TSMC

SirFatty 39 minutes ago | parent

"road to damascus"

Great Hope and Crosby movie.

esseph 38 minutes ago | parent

> Optane

Optane really died before LLMs went big. I was at an enterprise using a TON of them, often for SAP HANA workloads.

> AMD have... turned out some decent gaming graphics cards and fine server CPUs but little else.

I'm on a AMD desktop, using an AMD gpu, next to a gaming console using an AMD CPU and GPU, making large DC purchasing decisions where intel hasn't even shown up as a factor.

zdw 36 minutes ago | parent

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.

kcb 27 minutes ago | parent

Huh? Instinct is basically the only real alternative to Nvidia in the market. And they have the only real rack scale competition with Helios. This revenue is not because of gaming gpus and server cpus. This literally is AMDs road to damascus moment with data center GPUs.

mort96 19 minutes ago | parent

I never understood why some fraction of technologists seem convinced that Optane was this amazing thing that would've been awesome if only Intel hadn't killed it.

It never made sense. It's slower than RAM, and what do I get for it? Persistence? I don't want persistent RAM, I like the ability to reboot to solve problems, and storing stuff on a non-volatile mediums has all sorts of legal implications which it's easier to avoid.

It's more expensive and has less storage than SSDs, even though the main downside of SSDs is their high price per gigabyte and relatively low capacities.

It's going in the wrong direction for both use cases. I guess it could have a very niche use case as a super fast persistent caching layer in front of spinning rust but that's kinda it.

LoganDark 10 minutes ago | parent

Sometimes, things are just cool.

addaon 8 minutes ago | parent

> what do I get for it? Persistence?

Density. PCM is closer in bits-per-unit-area to Flash than to DRAM.

vivaldi_bt 6 minutes ago | parent

It somewhat (maybe) had sense for HDD caching but I don't think HDDs in 2026 are used in cases where separate cache is needed.

sethhochberg 4 minutes ago | parent

Having a very low latency, durable write destination is a superpower for lots of database architectures (or things that share architectural details with databases, like some filesystems).

Optane had much lower latency than other types of durable storage, and also had very good endurance compared to NAND.

At a prior employer, we made extensive use of them as ZFS SLOG drives for large database servers. They made fsync very inexpensive.

glitchc 18 minutes ago | parent

AND GPUs are competitive on a price/performance standpoint. Their software stack is where they fall behind.

alfiopuglisi 12 minutes ago | parent

Honest question, couldn't one just ask Claude to make a better driver for it? And reimplement pytorch on top of that or something?

everdrive 6 minutes ago | parent

>Honestly both of them have demonstrated that they have little interest in AI. Awesome? Maybe this means supply wont be ruined and I'll be able to buy CPUs.

vlyan 3 minutes ago | parent

>AMD have... turned out some decent gaming graphics cards

that's quite a large market and their only competitor has moved on to greener pastures.

dam_jackalopes 1 hour ago | parent

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.

shmerl 1 hour ago | parent

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.

dlcarrier 1 hour ago | parent

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

asimovDev 51 minutes ago | parent

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

adrian_b 21 minutes ago | parent

There are many years since AMD's EPYC CPUs have been greatly superior to Intel's Xeons and Intel has not succeeded to match them (Intel has a hope with the future Diamond Rapids Xeons, which are their first CPUs since 2019 that have a good chance to match AMD's).

In the last few years Intel's division that makes Xeons had huge losses, because in order to retain their big customers they had to accept to sell at big discounts, otherwise the customers would have switched to AMD.

All has changed this year, due to the AI craze.

AMD has sold all the server CPUs that it could make, within its allocations at TSMC. Everybody who did not succeed to buy EPYCs has bought Intel Granite Rapids Xeons, because they are not made at TSMC, but in Intel's fabs, so they did not compete with other TSMC customers for allocations.

So Intel has also sold every server CPU that they could make, and they are now trying to retool some fab that made new Panther Lake CPUs back to the obsolete Intel 3 CMOS manufacturing process, in order to make more Xeons, to sell them as long as this huge demand persists.

Thus in the last quarter both AMD and Intel have sold less consumer CPUs than in the past, because all who could did delay their upgrade plans due to the unacceptable memory prices, but on the other hand both AMD and Intel had record revenues and profits from selling server CPUs.

neuroelectron 54 minutes ago | parent

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.