System News
Mark Williams looks at the CPU market and marvels at how much it has changed over the course of 2019.
If there’s a technology award for 2019, it must go to AMD. The company was already competitively strong with the Ryzen 2000 series at the beginning of the year, but since launching its Ryzen 3000 series CPU line-up in July, AMD has barnstormed the market. According to German retailer Mindfactory, its CPU sales figures show that AMD now represents over 80% of all CPU sales! It’s rather insane.
When you look at what Intel has done in the past year on desktop, you can see why. All it’s released that’s of interest to power users is the i7-9900KS, which is just a better binned and factory overclocked i7-9900K – which itself is now over a year old. Intel has stagnated on the desktop.
Intel did just release the 10th Gen X-series refresh for its HEDT X299 platform, spearheaded by what would normally be an outstanding 18-core i9-10980XE. Unfortunately for Intel, AMD launched its Threadripper 3000 series on the same day, which consists currently of a 24-core and 32-core part. Both of which dominate the poor i9-10980XE and its smaller brethren. And that’s all before AMD launches its much anticipated 64-core Threadripper 3990X behemoth early in 2020.
Intel has got to be shaking at the knees right now.
Then there’s the “mainstream” 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X, which many have dubbed baby-Threadripper due to it being able to hold its own against Intel’s best HEDT parts for far lower prices.
AMD has been throwing as many cores into its products as possible since Ryzen launched and it’s starting to blur the lines between what defines mainstream, what’s HEDT, and even what a server CPU is.
There’s still some clear delineation between each segment, with HEDT typically supporting quad-channel memory configurations and higher counts of PCIe lanes, not to mention the higher core-counts over mainstream. Server chips will get you into eightchannel memory territory and support for multi-socket configurations. But just looking at core count alone, with sixteen cores now available on AMD’s mainstream product, in many ways that’s HEDT territory already just from the pure compute standpoint. And when 64-core Threadripper drops, that some serious server-grade compute that’ll be available for anyone to buy if they’ve deep enough pockets.
Intel isn’t going to crumble or lose much revenue as it’s still top dog in the mobile and server spaces, which are arguably more profitable, but for now and well into next year Intel is seriously on the back foot in the desktop and workstation space. However, once it manages to ramp its much criticised and troubled 10nm node or skip it all together and go straight to 7nm for a truly new generation of desktop parts, AMD will have a big fight on its hands once again.
It’s also hard to see Intel continuing its monolithic chip design while offering similar core counts to AMD. The good news is that Intel is developing its EMIB (Embedded
Multi-die Interconnect Bridge) which is much like AMD’s Infinity Fabric, meaning Intel could soon start exploring MCM (Multi Chip Module) style CPUs (like AMD’s Ryzen CPUs use). Combine that with its industry leading “Foverous” chip stacking technology, Intel will surely be able to come up with some interesting products in the future.
Until then, AMD appears to have a clear shot at dominating 2020 as well, so long as TSMC continues its march towards smaller processing nodes in 7nm+ and 5nm and AMD continues to execute on architectural improvements, soon to happen yet again with Zen 3.
2020 is shaping up to be another great year for CPU customers.
“Intel isn’t going to crumble or lose much revenue as it’s still top dog in the mobile and server spaces. ”