logoalt Hacker News

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

559 points • by rbanffy • yesterday at 3:38 PM • 203 comments • view on HN

Comments

mickeyp • yesterday at 4:52 PM

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.

➕ show 21 replies
lawabider • yesterday at 4:17 PM

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.

➕ show 3 replies
esFran • today at 4:36 AM

Love them or hate them, from a customer's point of view AMD is the only company in a position to stand up to NVIDIA in the GPU market and force those sky-high prices down a bit. I'm eagerly waiting for their new models, now backed by a much more mature and well-thought-out ROCm.

I'm not joking. I'm running a Maxwell-era NVIDIA card, and on Linux it's one problem after another. I HATE NVIDIA's driver; it's one of the worst-made pieces of software I've ever seen.

dlcarrier • yesterday at 5:02 PM

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

➕ show 2 replies
dam_jackalopes • yesterday at 4:58 PM

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.

➕ show 1 reply
davoneus • yesterday at 4:39 PM

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.

➕ show 4 replies
thisislife2 • yesterday at 10:50 PM

In Data Centres. Not in retail where Intel is still undercutting AMD's desktop processors in price, to retain its market share ... It's a tactic that Intel has repeatedly used against AMD, but I don't think I've ever seen equivalent Intel processors cheaper than AMDs offering ever. I guess now it has government backing, it feels it can take more short-term risks like this as it is now "too Big to fail" ...

➕ show 1 reply
theandrewbailey • yesterday at 4:04 PM

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

➕ show 1 reply
KronisLV • yesterday at 8:02 PM

F in chat to my Intel investments, their stock price is doing bad right now. And now they're also cutting off B580, what unfortunate times. Nova Lake, where are you?

➕ show 1 reply
Covzire • yesterday at 4:33 PM

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.

➕ show 3 replies
wmedrano • yesterday at 11:09 PM

This is surprising news to me, for some reason I assumed AMD has been outselling AMD for at least the past 5 years.

➕ show 1 reply
p1necone • yesterday at 11:40 PM

The vibes I'm getting are that x86 is on its way out - apple switched, and mainstream laptops are releasing with fast snapdragon chips - I'm thinking both Intel and AMD risk becoming obsolete if they keep focusing on x86 chips.

Anyone with insight into the industry know how much institutional knowledge would be relevant still with an ISA switch?

➕ show 3 replies
shmerl • yesterday at 4:59 PM

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.

➕ show 1 reply
guerby • yesterday at 4:44 PM

ECC

2OEH8eoCRo0 • yesterday at 8:11 PM

AMD relies on geopolitically dicey Taiwanese fabs. Why is nobody else worried about this? Berkshire divested all TSMC investments a few years ago so at least they're worried.

➕ show 3 replies
shevy-java • yesterday at 7:23 PM

And both drove up the RAM prices.

I want my money back.

JudahNyquist • yesterday at 9:18 PM

makes sense, look at $INTC vs $AMD, I have been and always will be an AMD fanboy

jxie2004 • yesterday at 4:12 PM

[flagged]

neuroelectron • yesterday at 5:19 PM

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.

➕ show 1 reply