AMD CEO Lisa Su may disclose more details about Zen 3 architecture at CES

*Sigh* Some times i wish AMD keeps their cards close to their chest and surprise us after all they are also giving Intel a heads up by almost a year too. Then again Intel can't really compete with them intill they sort out their 10nm production and bring tigerlake out to their desktops in 2021 but it does set goals for Intel.

 

Intel will inevitably catch up and AMD knows it. I'm not saying Tiger Lake will be better than Zen3 (personally, I doubt it will be) but AMD is basically on a time limit when Intel regains the performance crown. AMD's fanbase is growing and becoming stronger, so, AMD needs to keep the hype train's momentum just like they did back in Athlon 64 days. The more hype there is, the more investors will buy into them. The more money they have to work with, the longer they can delay Intel's succession.

 

Completely agree with you on this. Intel will inevitably catchup with AMD and there is sort of a 'timer (tic-toc) clock' that Intel has setup for AMD. It can last for one , or maybe even for two more years till they switch sides and Intel takes the lead back again

 

Perhaps, but I think Intel's focus is elsewhere going forward. Bob Swan, their CEO, made it clear that they want to expand out from CPUs to other products (like GPUs, AI, etc.). They want a bigger slice of the total silicon pie instead of continued dominance of the CPU market.

 

I wasn't aware of that, but, I can't at all say I'm surprised (and that might explain why Intel hasn't really been putting any effort into x86 for the past 5 years). I'm sure Swan/Intel are aware that the kinds of processors necessary for modern day problems aren't going to be solved on x86.

However, I don't know what kind of processor Intel could produce in a timely manner to offer healthy competition against the following:
Processors ideal for robotics and IoT are dominated by ARM and RISC-V
GPUs are dominated by Nvidia and AMD (Intel's new Xes don't sound all that impressive)
Massively multi-threaded CPUs are dominated by IBM and AMD
Tensor or half-precision float processors are dominated by several companies, but primarily Nvidia and Google
Quantum computers have already been heavily researched by D-Wave, Google, and IBM
There has already been research done with carbon-based transistors using RISC-V

It's not that Intel couldn't compete in any of those markets, but, I don't get the impression they've been making as much progress as their competitors. Or at least I haven't heard that was the case.

 

This is some sort of obligation she has towards the investors, just like showing roadmaps of future products that are only supposed to appear in 3 or more years. But don´t worry, creating a CPU takes lots of time, so even if Intel knows AMD´s future plans they can´t simply change their chip design on such a short time to counter AMD.