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In seinem internen Nachrichten-Portal Circuit News hat Intel einige interessante Äußerungen über die aktuelle Konkurrenzsituaion mit AMD gemacht. Herausgeben wurde der Beitrag von Walden Kirsch, dem Managing Editor von Circuit News und damit einem Angestellten von Intel in der internen Kommunikationsabteilung.
Ungewöhnlich ist der Beitrag, weil Intel eigentlich davon ausgehen musste, dass dieser an die Öffentlichkeit gelangt. Über reddit ist dies nun geschehen. Demnach werden natürlich die eigenen Entwicklungen und Produkte besonders positiv dargestellt.
Der Beitrag trägt den Titel "AMD competitive profile: Where we go toe-to-toe, why they are resurgent, which chips of ours beat theirs" was übersetzt so viel heißt wie "AMD Wettbewerbsprofil: Wo wir hingehen, warum sie wieder aufleben, welche Chips von uns schlagen ihre?" und genau dies dürften die Punkte sein, die nicht nur für Intel intern interessant sind, sondern die sich aktuell auch jeder Endkunde überlegt, bevor er er sich für eine Intel- oder AMD-CPU entscheidet.
Trotz wirtschaftlichen Nachteilen ist AMD ein starker Konkurrent
Zum Start des Beitrags wird auf die wirtschaftliche Situation eingegangen. Durch diese müsste Intel eigentlich im Vorteil sein, denn man ist etwa zehnmal größer als der Konkurrent. Dennoch hat es dieser geschafft ab Sommer wieder auf Augenhöhe zu sein. Vielmehr noch als die Entwicklung in den vergangenen 24 Monaten sieht Intel seinen Konkurrenten auf breiter Fläche in allen Produktkategorien gut aufgestellt:
"AMD offers high performance CPUs, posing direct competition to Intel in both our core client and datacenter CPU businesses. With our announced ambitions to bring new discrete graphics to market, we are bringing new competition to both AMD's and Nvidia's graphics businesses.
AMD has recently been gaining some traction in winning public cloud offerings. And competition from AMD is shaping up to be especially tough in high performance computing. HPC performance is usually driven by the number of cores and the number of memory channels (or memory bandwidth). Intel is challenged on both fronts.
AMD's upcoming next-generation Zen-core products, codenamed Rome for servers and Matisse for desktop, will intensify our desktop and especially server competition. The latter is likely to be the most intense in about a decade. At Computex, AMD announced that Matisse, the company's 3rd Gen Ryzen 3000 series processors, would be available starting July 7."
Intel sieht sich erstmals seit Jahren in seinem Kerngeschäft stärkerer Konkurrenz gegenüber. Zugleich stellt man sich mit der Entwicklung einer neuen diskreten GPU-Architektur den Branchengrößen AMD und NVIDIA entgegen. Auf die einzelnen Märkte bezogen sieht Intel im Datacenter besonders gut aufgestellt, da die HPC-Leistung mit der Anzahl an Kernen und der Anzahl an Speicherkanälen wächst – in beiden Bereichen hat AMD derzeit einen Vorteil.
Richtige Entscheidungen auf technischer Ebene
Intel bewertet AMDs Schritt sich von gewissen Abhängigkeiten in der Fertigung zu trennen als besonders positiv. Erst der Wechsel der Fertigung zu TSMC habe die aktuelle Entwicklung von AMD möglich gemacht.
"By leveraging TSMC's 7nm manufacturing — AMD no longer manufactures its own chips — AMD can drive higher core counts and higher performance than it could previously with Global Foundries as its in-house manufacturer. These 7nm products will amplify the near-term competitive challenge from AMD. At Computex, Intel launched our own 10nm "Ice Lake" products — 10th Gen Intel Core — to strongly positive reviews.
Intel 9th Gen Core processors are likely to lead AMD's Ryzen-based products on lightly threaded productivity benchmarks as well as many gaming benchmarks. For multi-threaded workloads, such as heavy content creation workloads, AMD's Matisse is expected to lead."
Man geht also davon aus, dass die eigenen 9th Gen Core-Prozessoren meist schneller sein werden, für Workloads die von vielen Kernen profitieren, sieht man AMD derzeit im Vorteil.
Interview mit einem "AMD Competitiv Expert"
Circuit News hat auch ein Interview mit Steve Collins, einem "AMD Competitiv Expert" bei Intel, geführt. Dieser hat auf einige Fragen seine Einschätzung zur Lage abgegeben. Hier spielt dann auch noch einmal der Wechsel der Fertigung zu TSMC eine Rolle. Aber auch die Preispolitik ist ein Thema.
1. Why does it matter that AMD is going to TSMC for manufacturing?
It means that they have the flexibility to use whatever process technology they want, whatever process is best for their products. TSMC offers an advantage in terms of process node advancements. [See the Circuit News competitive profile on TSMC.] They're using their 7nm process, and with that they get a per-core frequency bump and lower power, which means they can scale to more cores per processor.
On top of that, AMD made improvements in their 2nd generation Zen core and their disaggregated chiplet-based architecture scales cores efficiently. Therefore, on workloads that are heavily threaded, including heavy content creation and most server workloads, they'll get great performance results. And on price, we expect their pricing to be significantly below ours. So they'll likely get good performance-per-dollar. That's what they're going to compete on, and that's the risk to Intel.
2. So that raises the obvious point: How do we respond when people say "Wow, AMD is charging a lot less for their products than Intel."
It's not well understood that Intel actually offers the market a larger selection of product pricing. While the press often likes to focus on Intel's top price points being higher than AMD's top price, few people recognize that Intel also offers lower entry pricing than AMD. So Intel offers more price point choices to our customers.
Additionally, I would say users don't buy a chip. They buy a system. They buy a whole solution that includes software enabling, vendor enabling, validation, technical support, manageability, out-of-box experience, supplier sustained consistency, and more. So, yes, while an OEM or ODM might buy a chip, the end user doesn't generally buy only a chip. We believe that our product pricing vis-à-vis AMD reflects the great deal of added value that specifically comes from buying Intel with our decades of unmatched investments in validation, software, and security.
Especially for enterprise customers, acquisition cost is just one part of the total cost of ownership. Customers using an alternative solution may need additional validation, optimization, debugging, and certifications — all normal cost adders when introducing a new solution in an IT environment. Additionally, some software is licensed per core and therefore more cores from the AMD solution results in higher licensing costs.
Performance challenges absolutely exist, but we will continue to position our value and our advantages. Some innovations we bring to the table that deliver customer value may not always result in higher performance benchmark scores, or the value of the innovation goes beyond standard benchmark results. We price to what our customers value.
Intel is a premium brand. At times, and on some workloads, we might dip below on performance, like the second half of this year. At other times, and on other workloads, we are 3x or more the performance. Our pricing will continue to reflect the value we deliver to our customers.
3. What accounts for AMD's competitive resurgence? Did TSMC turn AMD into our biggest competitor, or is it AMD's focus on higher-end desktop and server parts?
From 2006 to 2017, AMD had positive net income only three of the twelve years. I'm not sure we can point to a single thing that turned AMD around. But I do think it's was absolutely rooted in the strategic changes AMD initiated in 2015/2016 that narrowed and simplified their focus. AMD shifted to focus on higher margin or premium segments, specifically high-end client, datacenter, graphics for gaming. And they continued their investment in their semi-custom and console business.
Rather than going after lower-margin, low-end products, they refocused on how to win higher-margin business. AMD added much-needed clarity since they were previously distracted by markets that didn't align with their strengths. They simplified their investments and roadmap and started leveraging best-in-class foundries. Most importantly, they executed to that strategy. Having a clear focus and direction helps enable great execution.
I also believe AMD's comeback was a result of being very product-centric. A top priority for AMD was building great products — high-performance compute and graphics solutions — from definition to development to delivery.
4. How do you think we should be looking overall at the Intel-AMD competitive picture right now?
Well, first, it's clearly a challenging time. We have significant competitive challenges to navigate. That said, I think we have a great strategy and a great roadmap.
While it has been a number of years since we've faced a similar competitive environment (in the early 2000s with 1 GHz barrier, integrated memory controller, 64bit, and so on) Intel has risen to every situation and almost always emerged better and stronger.
Our focus needs to be on getting our execution in shape as soon as possible. We're in a competitive time partly because of our execution issues, whether that's related to our process technology node, or to our products that intercept those nodes. So I think that execution to our roadmap and strategy will help tremendously.
Beyond product execution, we need to lean on our software expertise and strength and amplify our software differentiation — now more than ever.
Finally, in competitive times, overall marketing, ensuring our customers understand our differentiated value proposition, along with customer obsession, are critical. Now more than ever, we need to lean into our sales and marketing teams to help carry us through these product challenges.
Zum Abschluss haben wir hier noch den kompletten Beitrag aus Circuit News in Form eines Bildes. Die oben beschriebenen Zitate wurden via OCR erstellt, was ohne eine weitere Nachbearbeiten für den kompletten Beitrag aber nicht so ohne weiteres möglich war.
