A new report out of Taiwan has revealed that the current US administration is tying the reduction on trade of trade tariffs on Taiwan to significant TSMC investment in the US. This investment includes a 49% stake in Intel.
  • CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml
    18·
    4 days ago

    Oh wow, it was that bad for intel?

    tbh I’ve been on AMD CPUs for over a decade now, they’re much cheaper and work just as well. Their monopoly has always seemed fake to me, by coasting on the name and equipping most prefab PCs.

    • GlueBear @lemmygrad.ml
      2·
      2 days ago

      It really is just that; if you’re not building a gaming PC and just want run of the mill CPU then grab AMD. They’re significantly cheaper and that’s all that really matters for non gaming purposes

    • whogivesashit@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      I mean I haven’t been following for a few years, but if you genuinely wanted to of the line processors when it came to single threaded computing, AMD just wasn’t competing with Intel for awhile. Multi threaded was another story though, and it continues to pay off more for AMD now that more games and programs are able to utilize those additional cores more effectively.

    • loathsome dongeater@lemmygrad.mlMEnglish
      4·
      3 days ago

      This has less to do with AMD and more with how other architecutes like ARM have taken over and Intel has no answer. No phone will ever use an intel chip and neither are newer macbooks now.

    • Cat_Daddy [any, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      6·
      4 days ago

      I haven’t been in the industry for a while, but in a past life I did a lot of computational science. Intel’s Fortran compiler—and by extension their chips’ abilities to run Fortran calculations—was light-years ahead of the nearest competition. We had an AMD-based supercomputer (a bit older design, but still relatively new at the time; I think it was about a year old at this point) that was slower than a new Intel-based desktop cluster I had just finished building. The cluster was about a 4th the specs of the supercomputer across the board, mind you; it was really just designed to be a terminal, but it still had to be able to run the computing software so researchers could set up the calculations before moving the files to a supercomputer for calculating, or if they wanted a quick one-off computation, for example.

      So as a joke I ran one of my big calculations on it just to stress test it and make sure I’d done the heat sinks right. I fully planned to kill the job once the machine warmed up, but it finished before I could kill it. I ran several of these “drag races” between the new computer and multiple of our supercomputers and clusters (all AMD of varying age) and none of them were nearly as fast as this new machine. The supercomputer I mentioned earlier even had then-state-of-the-art PCIe solid state drives, because I/O in computational science is frequently the largest bottleneck, but the new cluster just had a standard hard drive. And even still the Intel machine was faster. Meaning if we’d had a 1-to-1 comparison the differences would have been even more drastic. That speedup comes down to the tight coupling between their Fortran compiler and their assembly language. They could make use of, for example, a matrix transpose call as a single instruction that didn’t exist in the AMD assembly, and so took several instructions. And since computational science is almost totally linear algebra, this leads to a huge jump in computing speed.

  • sunbleachedfly@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    7·
    4 days ago

    Intel is on the decline. From the company’s fab operations to consumer products, virtually every Intel department is taking a hit. This has shown in the company’s reported annual revenue figure, which has come down from a high of $79 billion in 2021 to $53 billion in 2024, is a massive 33% reduction.

    Intel is a vital part of the US’s plans regarding domestic semiconductor manufacturing. As such, the company has already received billions in federal grants. However, this funding has not solved Intel’s troubles, as the company has delayed its Ohio fab from an initial target of 2025 to 2030/31. A primary reason for this delay seems to be Intel’s efforts to preserve capital resources amidst a lack of significant help from the US CHIPS Act and outside partners.

    WOW. 33% reduction is wild. For the longest time I bought AMD chips simply because they were cheaper, had more options, & seemed to have similar performance. So I suppose that might be part of it.

    I also think that Intel had a lot of institutional backing, as many consumer PCs were shipped with Intel - including MacBooks, which broke their partnership in 2020 to build their own chips. I’m wondering if a similar thing happened with regular PCs.