SEPTEMBER 2020 PCWorld 19AMD CPUs, that last line must particularly
sting.
“Dadi (Pearlmutter) understood that large
vectors in consumer electronics like laptop is
bad: 1) More power to deliver it right. 2)
Almost no software using it, create larger
cores. 3) Good for throughput benchmarks,”
Piednoël said. “Who needs this on laptop?”
Piednoël said the decision to pursue
AVX512 in consumer chips has made the dies
larger and has high power costs. Intel CPUs,
for those who don’t know, have long lowered
clock speeds for AVX512 workloads.
This probably isn’t new to anyone who
heard famed Linux creator Linus Torvalds
reach deep to spew anger at Intel’s AVX
approach just last month.
“I hope AVX512 dies a painful death, and
that Intel starts fixing real problems instead of
trying to create magic instructions to then
create benchmarks that they can look good
on,” the never-too-shy-to-cut-loose Torvalds
said (go.pcworld.com/ctls).
LOSS OF
FOCUS
Another mistake Intel
made was to defocus
the company from its
core business of making
fast CPUs, Piednoël
said.
Intel went on a
diversified buying spree
in the last half of the
decade that left the company unable to focus
on its CPU business. This let bitter rival AMD
catch up with it (go.pcworld.com/btrv), and
the only thing saving Intel from losing a more
massive market share is AMD’s volume
constraints in making its popular CPUs.
“Intel is very lucky AMD cannot get the
volume, to be able to compete,” said
Piednoël. “If they were getting volume, the
price difference would definitely cost Intel
market share a lot more than what they are
losing right now.”
Just recently AMD reached an all-time high
of 20 percent market share in laptops (go.
pcworld.com/20up), according to numbers
from Mercury Research. We called AMD’s
new 7nm Ryzen 4000-series laptop chips
“game-changing” in our review (go.pcworld.
com/gmch) this spring.
“Intel is lucky AMD has capacity
constraints and because of this, they can’t
grab market share fast enough,” he said. “We
kind of had the same thing when AMD had