Intel Fights Back

[SteelCrysis]

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/31...top-mobile

During last week’s Q4 2020 conference call, Lisa Su spoke directly to the constraint problem:

We saw a strong revenue ramp in our business as well as across some of our peers. It’s fair to say that the overall demand exceeded our planning. And as a result, we did have some supply constraints as we ended the year. Those were primarily, I would say, in the PC market, the low end of the PC market and in the gaming markets.

While there’s a little ambiguity in her phrasing, I read Su’s statement as applying to the general PC market, the low-end of the PC market specifically, and to gaming on both console and PC. RDNA, RDNA2, and both consoles would all be part of “gaming markets.” The one market she doesn’t mention is servers, and server is where AMD picked up 0.5 percent additional share.

Intel likely regained share in desktop and mobile partly because AMD opted to emphasize Epyc shipments in a supply-constrained environment. It would be surprising if Microsoft and Sony didn’t have agreements with AMD requiring the CPU designer to make every effort possible to deliver their own SoCs, and AMD is aggressively trying to build its server market share.

This year, we’ll see Ice Lake SP go up against AMD’s next-generation Milan servers. Milan is expected to deliver the 1.19x IPC uplift AMD picked up from Zen 3, while Ice Lake-SP will offer a similar-sized IPC upgrade to Xeon processors. Intel will finally get the benefit of a die shrink for this comparison, while AMD’s Milan, like Rome, is built on a 7nm process.

In mobile, it’ll be Ryzen 5000 and 4000 against Tiger Lake now, with Alder Lake and its hybrid CPU configuration dropping late this year. AMD’s Ryzen 5000 series will hold down the desktop, even though these parts technically launched in 2019. Rocket Lake, Intel’s ICL backport to 14nm, drops in late March. This will be an interesting year for CPU comparisons: Intel will introduce 10nm servers for the first time, debut a new microarchitecture on the desktop for the first time in over five years, and launch its first hybrid CPUs for mainstream power envelopes and workloads.