Hilarious how many times you use the term "record", nobody objective would do so. "Intel’s margins did drop a 1.1%, but are still a healthy 64.3% for the quarter" - you should have been specific is it's on year or on quarter, it is on year. Funny how you avoid units data and ASP data, things that might make Intel look bad. "14 nm parts made up over 50% of the Client Computing Group’s revenue." - that's units not revenue and a big chunk of that are Atom, Intel is trying to mislead since most will read it like you did instead of seeing through it.
Hate to burst your bubble, AMD snowflake, but record revenue is RECORD REVENUE. It cannot be sliced, diced, or spun. RECORD REVENUE. Deal with it accordingly. Maybe if AMD would get off their bums and actually make COMPETITIVE CHIPS to AMD, some of that would have been chipped away hate. Don't hate Intel for doing it better...people buy what is best for their money. AMD is on the losing end of that...for now.
Amd made better chips at one point and that still didn't help them... Intel still dominated with "record" sales.. Let's just face facts shall we?
Unless AMD comes up with something that's at least 2x better than what Intel has on the table.. (maybe even 3x) it's not going to translate into hurting Intel sales. Hell.. they've had comparable products to Nvidia yet Nvidia has 80% of the market share.
Slump in PC industry sales but client computing group revenue still increases. Clearly, they're squeezing as much out of Skylake's inflated price as possible before AMD's Zen lands.
IMO the PC slump is partly Intel's own making. "Build it and they will come." They haven't made an enthusiast range of CPUs genuinely worth buying since SandyBridge, and for consumers it's the top-end where the real margins are; many highstreet stores survive on premium parts (only big vendors can make useful money on budget parts by pushing volume). This is just like the hifi market, luxury cars, phones, TVs, etc. - companies bring out newer models that are indeed worth buying. In PC tech, storage devices and GPUs have evolved nicely, but Intel's CPUs have not.This isn't just my opinion, plenty of review sites have said the same thing in recent years, eg. toms' 2013 headline, "Haswell Is Faster; Desktop Enthusiasts Yawn".
Still today there are numerous forum comments from SandyBridge owners who continue to see little reason to upgrade (indeed, I've seen similar comments even from X58 owners). Intel needs to reboot the enthusiast market with something that's demonstrably worth the cost at enthusiast each price point, or based on significantly better performance, or both, eg. 840 UKP for an oc'd HW-E 8-core that's only 40% faster than a 3970X/4.8 is not remotely worth it. We need a 10/12-core desktop part, unlocked XEON, unlocked i3, *something*. SkyLake is too expensive, HW-E isn't good enough, so people aren't buying. G3258 was interesting but ultimately underwhelming with its lackof HT. This all has knock-on effects, ie. fewer sales means less exposure to PC tech in the first place, so yet more people adopt tablets and phones. My neighbour is soon to switch to all-tablets for his family, so his new daughter will grow up not knowing about PC tech.
Meanwhile, as consumers move to expecting suitable systems for handling 4K video, they're going to find main CPU power distinctly lacking, a gap that can be jumped on by GPU vendors for relevant applications.
I just don't get why Intel is perfectly capable of releasing something suitable for the enthusiast market in a manner which would certainly sell, but doesn't, and meanwhile sales keep declining.
Forums are full of people pinning their hopes on Zen forcing Intel to back into the game. I certainly hope so. Maybe even Intel fans should buy a Zen aswell purely as a way of helping encourage Intel to get a move on. We clearly need the competition.
You can't blame Intel for being hemmed in by physics/software. All the low hanging CPU fruit has been plucked years ago. We are in the age of diminishing returns.
If Intel was doing such a bad job, AMD would have caught up to them years ago. Don't count on Zen to leapfrog Intel, AMD faces the same constraints as Intel.
Back when CPU performance was making big jumps, it was largely driven by clockspeed and core count increases. But we hit the wall on clockspeed more than a decade ago and software has us at the wall for core count(except in specialized niches) as well.
PC sales have declined because they have been "good enough" for a decade or more, and making them faster is pretty much irrelevant to the masses, who have their attention elsewhere (Smartphones).
What you CAN blame Intel for is fantasizing that x86 was, "OMG, so awesome it's the only platform anyone will ever use for anything". "Computing" is not in a slump --- last time I checked massive numbers of phones are being sold, watches are about to take off, cars have a huge future, health and home are about to come online. But Intel is barely part of any of this, because the millstone called x86-comptibility held (and continue to hold) them back. By the time they got Atom to anything interesting, ARM was there with A57 and A72. By the time they got Core-m anywhere interesting, Apple had showed that an ARM ISA could achiever comparable performance at lower frequency and higher performance/W. And they still don't learn, shipping this garbage called Quark under some delusion that that is going to power our future dashcams and weather stations.
The only thing keeping Intel going right now is eating their seed corn. They can continue to squeeze some money out of servers for two or three years (I expect ARM servers to be truly competitive starting around 2017, last year's and this year's models remain the experimental learning models); but while Intel can try to compete by dropping the price of Xeon-D, the main thing that does is remove the revenue that Intel is built upon. Intel cannot survive on the margins provided by a world of Atoms at A57 prices and Xeon-D at "16xA72 on a SoC" prices.
SO we see Intel return to where it came from, a memory company?
intel's manufacturing process is their ace of spades. If they ever got in bad shape, they could open up a niche fab, that has high margins and makes the absolute lowest power parts for any company who needs them.
You under-estimate intel. If you knew just how many smart engineers they have, you wouldn't dare doubt their capabilities. Sure their marketing and sales teams make mistakes, but the core of their business has a bright future.
They have had a 4 year lead on fin fet manufacturing. Right now, they are working on technologies beyond fin fet, while competitors are trying to nail down fin fet so they can make big dies for GPU's
Excellent reply, CPU are good enough even for gaming. And for gaming what matters is GPU above all and GPUs have been making leaps forward. Apart from the gaming market the enthusiast market is too small to even care about. And even geeks like me and many that read this site are not looking for the 18 cores CPU, but for things like a laptop that is powerful enough to work on the go but with long battery life for when you are not home. Or a powerful convertible that is also silent. Core M is the response to ARM chips, Skylake Core M has largely improved over the original Broadwell. We have seen it over the last few months and at CES, most manufacturers are embracing Core M. Intel is catching up on this, but is on the right track.
I'd say good enough since the Core2... Even today while the older 6X class is finally starting to struggle you can still get some nice usage out of the 8x dualcores and Quads.
I think you missed a very important detail over the last few years. ARM. Intel was not power competitive and that was the goal for the last few generations - maintain performance while improving efficiency. The majority of consumers dictated this along with no competitive pressure from AMD.
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20 Comments
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iwod - Friday, January 15, 2016 - link
After all this years i still wonder why Intel bought McAfee.....Aspiring Techie - Friday, January 15, 2016 - link
Especially since McAfee doesn't have the same quality that all other Intel products have...Michael Bay - Sunday, January 17, 2016 - link
Maybe it was done as a means to an end scenario. Buy this and we give you access to that.jjj - Friday, January 15, 2016 - link
Hilarious how many times you use the term "record", nobody objective would do so."Intel’s margins did drop a 1.1%, but are still a healthy 64.3% for the quarter" - you should have been specific is it's on year or on quarter, it is on year.
Funny how you avoid units data and ASP data, things that might make Intel look bad.
"14 nm parts made up over 50% of the Client Computing Group’s revenue." - that's units not revenue and a big chunk of that are Atom, Intel is trying to mislead since most will read it like you did instead of seeing through it.
Nfarce - Tuesday, January 19, 2016 - link
Hate to burst your bubble, AMD snowflake, but record revenue is RECORD REVENUE. It cannot be sliced, diced, or spun. RECORD REVENUE. Deal with it accordingly. Maybe if AMD would get off their bums and actually make COMPETITIVE CHIPS to AMD, some of that would have been chipped away hate. Don't hate Intel for doing it better...people buy what is best for their money. AMD is on the losing end of that...for now.just4U - Tuesday, January 19, 2016 - link
Amd made better chips at one point and that still didn't help them... Intel still dominated with "record" sales.. Let's just face facts shall we?Unless AMD comes up with something that's at least 2x better than what Intel has on the table.. (maybe even 3x) it's not going to translate into hurting Intel sales. Hell.. they've had comparable products to Nvidia yet Nvidia has 80% of the market share.
r3loaded - Friday, January 15, 2016 - link
Slump in PC industry sales but client computing group revenue still increases. Clearly, they're squeezing as much out of Skylake's inflated price as possible before AMD's Zen lands.eanazag - Friday, January 15, 2016 - link
Intel is not worried about Zen.D. Lister - Saturday, January 16, 2016 - link
"Clearly, they're squeezing as much out of Skylake's inflated price as possible before AMD's Zen lands."ROFL, yeah clearly.
mapesdhs - Friday, January 15, 2016 - link
IMO the PC slump is partly Intel's own making. "Build it and they will come." They haven't made an enthusiast range of CPUs genuinely worth buying since SandyBridge, and for consumers it's the top-end where the real margins are; many highstreet stores survive on premium parts (only big vendors can make useful money on budget parts by pushing volume). This is just like the hifi market, luxury cars, phones, TVs, etc. - companies bring out newer models that are indeed worth buying. In PC tech, storage devices and GPUs have evolved nicely, but Intel's CPUs have not.This isn't just my opinion, plenty of review sites have said the same thing in recent years, eg. toms' 2013 headline, "Haswell Is Faster; Desktop Enthusiasts Yawn".Still today there are numerous forum comments from SandyBridge owners who continue to see little reason to upgrade (indeed, I've seen similar comments even from X58 owners). Intel needs to reboot the enthusiast market with something that's demonstrably worth the cost at enthusiast each price point, or based on significantly better performance, or both, eg. 840 UKP for an oc'd HW-E 8-core that's only 40% faster than a 3970X/4.8 is not remotely worth it. We need a 10/12-core desktop part, unlocked XEON, unlocked i3, *something*. SkyLake is too expensive, HW-E isn't good enough, so people aren't buying. G3258 was interesting but ultimately underwhelming with its lackof HT. This all has knock-on effects, ie. fewer sales means less exposure to PC tech in the first place, so yet more people adopt tablets and phones. My neighbour is soon to switch to all-tablets for his family, so his new daughter will grow up not knowing about PC tech.
Meanwhile, as consumers move to expecting suitable systems for handling 4K video, they're going to find main CPU power distinctly lacking, a gap that can be jumped on by GPU vendors for relevant applications.
I just don't get why Intel is perfectly capable of releasing something suitable for the enthusiast market in a manner which would certainly sell, but doesn't, and meanwhile sales keep declining.
Forums are full of people pinning their hopes on Zen forcing Intel to back into the game. I certainly hope so. Maybe even Intel fans should buy a Zen aswell purely as a way of helping encourage Intel to get a move on. We clearly need the competition.
guidryp - Friday, January 15, 2016 - link
You can't blame Intel for being hemmed in by physics/software. All the low hanging CPU fruit has been plucked years ago. We are in the age of diminishing returns.If Intel was doing such a bad job, AMD would have caught up to them years ago. Don't count on Zen to leapfrog Intel, AMD faces the same constraints as Intel.
Back when CPU performance was making big jumps, it was largely driven by clockspeed and core count increases. But we hit the wall on clockspeed more than a decade ago and software has us at the wall for core count(except in specialized niches) as well.
PC sales have declined because they have been "good enough" for a decade or more, and making them faster is pretty much irrelevant to the masses, who have their attention elsewhere (Smartphones).
bill.rookard - Friday, January 15, 2016 - link
I don't think Zen will help AMD leapfrog Intel, but it should erase some of the performance disparity. Here's hoping.guidryp - Friday, January 15, 2016 - link
I hope so to. For AMD's sake, not because I think it will drive Intel to suddenly release a bunch of performance gains they were sitting on.AMD's position is kind of precarious being in second place in both GPU and CPU and getting more distant second as time goes by.
AMD needs to get closer to parity if there is going to be an AMD much longer.
name99 - Friday, January 15, 2016 - link
What you CAN blame Intel for is fantasizing that x86 was, "OMG, so awesome it's the only platform anyone will ever use for anything"."Computing" is not in a slump --- last time I checked massive numbers of phones are being sold, watches are about to take off, cars have a huge future, health and home are about to come online. But Intel is barely part of any of this, because the millstone called x86-comptibility held (and continue to hold) them back. By the time they got Atom to anything interesting, ARM was there with A57 and A72. By the time they got Core-m anywhere interesting, Apple had showed that an ARM ISA could achiever comparable performance at lower frequency and higher performance/W.
And they still don't learn, shipping this garbage called Quark under some delusion that that is going to power our future dashcams and weather stations.
The only thing keeping Intel going right now is eating their seed corn. They can continue to squeeze some money out of servers for two or three years (I expect ARM servers to be truly competitive starting around 2017, last year's and this year's models remain the experimental learning models); but while Intel can try to compete by dropping the price of Xeon-D, the main thing that does is remove the revenue that Intel is built upon. Intel cannot survive on the margins provided by a world of Atoms at A57 prices and Xeon-D at "16xA72 on a SoC" prices.
SO we see Intel return to where it came from, a memory company?
Michael Bay - Sunday, January 17, 2016 - link
>ARM servers>truly competitive
Nice joke. They don`t even compete in pure storage yet, not even mentioning computation.
>watches are about to take off
>health and home are about to come online
Ah, so you`re just drunk.
jasonelmore - Sunday, January 17, 2016 - link
intel's manufacturing process is their ace of spades. If they ever got in bad shape, they could open up a niche fab, that has high margins and makes the absolute lowest power parts for any company who needs them.You under-estimate intel. If you knew just how many smart engineers they have, you wouldn't dare doubt their capabilities. Sure their marketing and sales teams make mistakes, but the core of their business has a bright future.
They have had a 4 year lead on fin fet manufacturing. Right now, they are working on technologies beyond fin fet, while competitors are trying to nail down fin fet so they can make big dies for GPU's
digiguy - Sunday, January 17, 2016 - link
Excellent reply, CPU are good enough even for gaming. And for gaming what matters is GPU above all and GPUs have been making leaps forward. Apart from the gaming market the enthusiast market is too small to even care about. And even geeks like me and many that read this site are not looking for the 18 cores CPU, but for things like a laptop that is powerful enough to work on the go but with long battery life for when you are not home. Or a powerful convertible that is also silent. Core M is the response to ARM chips, Skylake Core M has largely improved over the original Broadwell. We have seen it over the last few months and at CES, most manufacturers are embracing Core M. Intel is catching up on this, but is on the right track.just4U - Tuesday, January 19, 2016 - link
I'd say good enough since the Core2... Even today while the older 6X class is finally starting to struggle you can still get some nice usage out of the 8x dualcores and Quads.jasonelmore - Friday, January 15, 2016 - link
You know AMD's future is bad when people recommend that AMD Build a FAST CPU just so they can buy a intel one cheaper, with more features.eanazag - Friday, January 15, 2016 - link
I think you missed a very important detail over the last few years. ARM. Intel was not power competitive and that was the goal for the last few generations - maintain performance while improving efficiency. The majority of consumers dictated this along with no competitive pressure from AMD.