I think it has something to do with the fact that Intel hasn't got, for the first time in many years, the "latest and greatest" mainstream processors anymore
I'm not sure I completely agree. On the top end, Intel is clearly ahead. However, multi-threaded workloads and higher IPC is becoming more important for many things. And given the price premium that Intel is charging, AMD is definitely competitive.
For that matter, ARM solutions could also be very competitive but seems to be overpriced by comparison to x86 for any server solution I've seen so far.
See this panel about Intel’s “project crush” and the defeat of the 68000 [1]. Intel inside was yet another brilliant marketing campaign to take pricing power from the OEMs.
Intel at its core is a marketing company. If they also happen to have the best tech that is nice too but not a necessity.
I don’t agree with his point, but I can see it. For years CPU performance has largely been irrelevant, but they convinced the market to over pay on underperforming hardware.
Intel inside is great marketing and creating different brands of processors like i7 vs i3 independent of form factor pulls the focus away from absolute performance. Getting software manufacturers to customize for your chip again gets out of playing the actual head to head game.
It's really not hyperbole I can confirm after being one of the main contacts at a cloud service provider. Marketing can push engineering and allocate budgets. Everything is driven by "Plan Of Record" agreed with marketing. If you need something done you push marketing to add or change the POR.
Project Crush and Intel inside are simply brilliant. It’s extremely rare for a component manufacturer to capture mindshare from the OEM.
Given they’ve led the charge technologically in CPUs for decades this is extremely high praise. I think people are taking this as suggesting Intel does not innovate technologically which is not the case.
The video provides evidence of the tech being nice but not required. They openly admit their CPU was “a dog” and all the software people hated it. Yet their strategy of going around them to management worked perfectly.
People forget how awful segmented 16-bit was. And other CPUs like the 68000 and Alpha were faster at various points in time.
I wouldn't count intel down and out just yet, when you look at the fundamentals they are still number 1 and when you add in extra bonuses like the amazing strides they have made in increasing their diversity I think intel is going to bounce back hard.
Is is probably a safe bet to ignore any news from there until they actually deliver anything and read independent benchmarks.
It is really sad, they used to be very correct in their communication.