this is a tough video to make because the popular cool thing to do right now
is to praise AMD and dunk on Intel and
for good reason i mean it does appear to be that thanks to AMD we have
experienced more excitement in the last three years than the prior decade but i
need to make it anyway not because i'm trying to influence your next purchasing
decision you guys should always buy the product not the cool brand but rather
because i'm worried about Intel not until the company they're doing fine
they're making billions of dollars but rather the people at Intel and i need
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it can be really easy to forget that branding aside a company isn't some kind
of hive mind entirely aligned to one purpose and that it's easy for a handful
of people who are too disconnected from the customer or too focused on bean
counting to steer the ship in the wrong direction in spite of the hard work and
best intentions of the vast majority and the thing is while Intel does a lot of
stuff wrong as someone who has actually met many individuals over there over the
years i can say confidently that Intel employees
well they might not have cute nicknames like googlers or yahoos but
that company is chock full of really awesome people who care a lot
like imagine the most hardcore overclocking enthusiast you know
now imagine that he's got like an awesome beard and he's jacked and he's
like carrying a surfboard i basically met that guy at an opt-in event one of
my other favorites is a gentleman who is always inviting me to see the secret
room at trade shows all you guys have ever seen of it is some laptop b-roll
but even though there's literally no roi
for the company or really for me since i can't report on it he's always sneaking
me away from the laptops to get a look at what his team has been working on
behind the scenes for no reason other than that he knows that i'm going to
share his appreciation for it even ex-im tellers seem to take a
disproportionate amount of pride in their work i've had it happen on
multiple times that i do a retrospective on an old piece of enthusiast gear from
Intel only to have an ex-engineer reach out and be like you know what hey i
poured my soul into that thing and i'm just really glad that you liked it
knowing these people i can say with confidence that many if not most of
Intel's mistakes happen for reasons that are closer to
human flaws than they are to pure evil
and we all make mistakes let's take their most recent
self-inflicted wound it's very clear from the revenue growth and steady
profits over at team blue that the business folks are in charge and doing a
very good job of delivering maximum shareholder value or whatever it is that
they do but it's also clear that this strategy wasn't one that rewarded
delivering exciting products to enthusiasts and gamers Intel spent the
better part of a decade with no competition in the CPU market and used
that opportunity to do what monopolies do best get very
very comfortable delivering incremental generational improvements targeting the
widening upgrade cycles of their corporate and small and medium business
customers even something as simple as using proper thermal interface material
on their cpus didn't happen until AMD
forced their hand it's also clear that they were focused on growing markets
rather than mature ones with r d so
laser focused on mobile and data center products that talking points about
performance per watt always seem to make their way into the product sheets and
reviewer guides for like overclockable k series desktop cpus where young Linus
was looking at them going sorry what performance per watt who cares how fast
does it go how much does it overclock why is there a GPU taking up valuable
silicon on my CPU where is my mainstream six core well the sleeping giant
awakened two years ago and don't kid yourself they have awakened and they
will come roaring back i've seen this movie a couple of times now but some of
the rumors coming out have me worried that until they're ready to make a
legitimate play for the performance crown again Intel might do some
desperate things that will damage the things about them that i still love even
if i'm not a big fan of their price to performance right now so
Intel employees intellers blue badges in
no particular order here are some things that i really don't want to see go away good
engineering in my experience with our AMD based NVMe
storage server i learned that AMD has a whole server slash data center platform
out there that as far as i can tell no one ever thought to go hey what happens
if i light up all these PCIe lanes with data and then actually load up the CPU
at the same time turns out that the data gets retrieved so fast from that big
flash array that by the time the CPU comes back around to get it
it's gone rarrow wendell made an offhand comment to me
that really stood out while we were troubleshooting the issue i said to him
you know man i never saw any of these kinds of stupid issues when we rolled
our Intel all NVMe storage server and he goes yeah Intel's got fewer PCIe lanes
and they're a generation behind but they put some really good engineering into
them i've always kind of taken for granted that a PCIe lane is a PCIe lane
and it made me hesitate to fully transition the backbone of my company to
pneumonic server until these wrinkles are sorted out either by AMD or by the
Linux community through kernel patches and as someone who has forgotten more
about both software and hardware than i will ever know about either of them put
together when those words carry a lot of weight with me go sub to him by the way
level one tags great guy then there's the talent pool and team size Intel is a
much much bigger company than AMD and
that can be a double-edged sword their massive r d resources are how they can
be simultaneously competing head-to-head with AMD also a multi-billion dollar
company on cpus samsung on data center
storage broadcom on network connectivity solutions and soon to be NVIDIA on gpus
and deep learning all multi-billion dollar companies but guys it's the
attention to detail that makes customers happy back to my AMD server again i was
blown away that there is no official Windows 10 support on epic or an onboard
raid controller on the epic platform there is basically no material cost to
adding either these things so as far as i can tell it just came down to r d
priorities and not having enough to do everything i mean Intel might try and
nickel and dime you on a license to unlock motherboard capabilities like a
special raid mode but i wouldn't even consider the
possibility that it wouldn't be there the next big one is partnerships Intel
is always out there nurturing new and emerging technologies whether it's vr or
wearables or global connectivity solutions
even if those initiatives don't use any Intel silicon yet and the time and
effort that they put into working with other industry leaders is a big part of
why they end up at the heart of so many products i mean do you guys think it's
an accident that Intel design wins outnumber AMD ones and laptops
by so much even at a time when AMD
genuinely has a competitive laptop product like their new 4th gen mobile
ryzen finish goods manufacturers rely on silicon makers like Intel AMD and NVIDIA
for a lot of guidance and engineering support something that takes time and
resources if you want to do it right industry consortiums are another prime
example of this name one and Intel is probably a member
and recently they even gave Thunderbolt 3 to the usb implementation forum to
make its features available cross-platform as usb4 something
everything in my list had in common is
trust and over the last little while the
cracks in that trust have been starting to show meltdown spectre and since we're on the
subject a Thunderbolt 3 security flaw that microsoft has evidently been wary
of for years but while those problems have catchy names and they do make for
good headlines they're honestly unlikely
to cause real everyday problems and damage to Intel's
long-term reputation with the average joe my real concern there comes from
rumors about the upcoming 10th gen consumer chips early reports seem to
indicate that Intel's geriatric 14 nanometer process with however many
pluses we're adding to the end of it by now is going to be used to build 10 core
chips that will run at 80 plus degrees underwater
out of the box without any overclocking there is a reason that in the absence of
competition Intel wasn't doing that obviously so
that gives me some worry that a compromise has been made somewhere like
i said i've seen this movie last time Intel fell behind their pentium d
processors ran hot and loud and while to
my knowledge the cpus didn't have a higher than acceptable failure rate the
motherboards oh man that was hard that was hard to look
at we would pull those boards out even just two or three years down the road
from the system and the backs the backs of the boards where the vrms were
soldered on on the front they would be dark and sometimes like warped like bowed
from the heat even if they were somehow still running i'm not saying that's
going to happen uh validation techniques and CPU power delivery technology have
certainly come a long way since the early 2000s
i'm just saying that pushing the envelope in this way is a dangerous path
with the potential for unforeseen consequences because here's the thing
when an enthusiast like like you asks me for a recommendation these days you're
going to hear a lot of AMD AMD AMD
can i say they're rocking it right now but when someone who might come back to
me for help asks for a recommendation
they are more likely to hear Intel i want to know for sure that everything
from the CPU to memory compatibility to
the usb controller on the motherboard to wi-fi
is all just gonna basically work i'm not saying the upcoming 10th gen consumer
chips are bad or that they're going to fail prematurely not by a long shot i've
still got that trust i'm just saying please tread carefully guys because the
better long-term play may be to just take it on the chin for a couple years
learn from it especially you executives more r d to enthusiast stuff please
there's not a lot of us but we're really noisy and then come back with your
performance leadership and your reliability intact
because it's not even my word on the subject that matters really it's the
tier one system integrators that are pumping out millions of machines a year
and i'm sure those guys are watching all of this much more closely than i am
just like you guys are watching closely to see how he's going to segue to that
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specials at the links below if you guys enjoyed this video uh maybe
you'll enjoy a more critical letter to Intel from back at computex
2018 i'm not sure if anyone over there really you know took it to heart but
hey i'm gonna i'm gonna keep doing these every time i feel like they're necessary