MP All Models Is Apple ****ing themselves over the ThreadRipper 3 yet?

[deconstruct60]

Intel will not have anything faster than AMD for foreseeable future.

10 nm woes are so serious, that they are porting back 10 nm Architecture: Willow Cove to 14 nm(which will result in two things - lack of efficiency, and low clocks, apart from bloated die sizes) with Rocket Lake.

About zero evidence to back this up. Willow Cove isn't being backported. And even if it was backported there wouldn't be a "low clock" problem. There would be "too big" die problem, but the clocking of the fab's implementations wouldn't get worse than it is now.


In single (or few core) "straight line" drag racing Intel is still winning with the 9900KS. Ai/ML inference... winning. AVX512 still winning on a core vs core basis. ( on just pure max core count yes, but toe-to-toe AMD has gaps. ). Minus the insane pricing on top end RAM capacity footprint , they have an substantive advantage with Optane DIMMs for very high RAM working set workloads.

Zen 3 will have 15-20% higher performance than Zen 2. What Intel has for next year? Another 14 nm Skylake respin. Yay!
...

Again not particularly true. Intel is not going to be limited to 14nm only in 2020.

AMD is is more than competitive. If Apple has started initial work on the next generation Mac Pro in the off-the-grid, secret "lab" then AMD has at least an even chance of making that design win bake off ( more non CPU package stuff may trip them up from being a slam dunk. ) . If Apple is going back into 'Rip van Winkle' mode on the Mac Pro for another 3-4 years, then Intel isn't "out of the game" at all if the design bake off isn't going to start for another 1-2 years.

But Intel is not completely dead in the water. Self imposed obstacles like price gouging can be removed by themselves too ( have to take a hit on juicy bonuses and stock price , but when royally screw up there is a price to pay. ). Intel does have lots of stuff to fix, but they also have lots of people and enough money to do it. Apple "dug a hole" on the Mac Pro also over the last 10 years. It isn't like they are doomed in the hole either over next 2-3 years.

 

[ericinboston]

What I meant was this: you can build a AMD Based system that will be faster than fully loaded Mac Pro, for the price of the basic model.

You can use Threadripper to get more performance, than fully loaded Mac Pro, and pay for it the price of basic model.

Sure. But it doesn't have Mac OS on it. From a DIY point of view, if I can have the best (and hand-picked) hardware but I can't use my favorite/required OS, what's the point?

 

[Krevnik]

I agree. It’s interesting, but I never thought of 64 bit only leading to higher quality code.

You'd be surprised. It's more an issue of resourcing. Do you keep investing and maintaining the 32-bit compatibility, or let it go? At some point, a growing support matrix starts to take on exponential growth of resources required to keep it going. Microsoft in particular seems okay paying those costs, but it also has not added nearly the level of libraries to Windows that Apple has to macOS/iOS. MapKit, AVFoundation, etc, etc. Win32 as an API has practically been frozen since the 90s. And their efforts to get folks on 64-bit have been lukewarm at best.

A concrete example though is Carbon. It is 32-bit only, and has been facing code rot for years now, but they technically have to support it as long as apps use it. But by phasing out 32-bit, they also get to phase out a 20-year-old API that was there mostly to help devs transition code from macOS 9.

AMD is the king of computing since now. Get used to this, guys.

Intel will not have anything faster than AMD for foreseeable Future means, that at best - we will have a tie between them.

While I like my Ryzen 3xxx system, AMD's biggest enemy at this point is themselves, IMO. The engineers there are doing good work, but are under-resourced to handle the sort of scale Intel currently operates at, IMO. The non-trivial microcode bugs (boost/power in particular) that took months to iron out aren't a great sign that they have the tools required to oust Intel from the majority of the install base. And that's ignoring the manufacturing scale difference between the two, where AMD would rely almost entirely on TMSC to be able to grow shipment numbers.

AMD is also not in a position of strength for laptops, at the moment. They need to get their laptop hardware into better shape on the Zen 2 or later architecture to realistically compete in the same way they've demonstrated for desktop and up.

While it will take time for Intel to have a response, they still have quite a bit of time. It will take quite a long time to grow and erode Intel's market share. EYPC is supposed to help AMD hit 10% market share in servers in 2020. That means Intel will still be taking home nearly 10 times the sales in the server space, despite having a "less advanced" product. That money, and the time it takes for AMD to grow in servers and laptops, in particular, gives Intel the "high ground" in a sense, despite having a less compelling product in the shorter term.

If it appears in Apple kexts, and it is semi-custom product it means two things:

1) Apple is testing stuff on this hardware, because they already have samples of it. That is what they need Kexts in the OS for.
2) APPLE ORDERED THE DESIGN OF VAN GOGH! Nobody else could, and it wont appear anywhere else, if it is product for Apple, for which, everything points to. You get it right now, what Van Gogh is, and what is happening?

I will admit that if Apple isn't looking at AMD parts at this point, they are looking at a possible repeat of the G5 fiasco. And the good news is that AMD at least doesn't require another architecture shift to support. Honestly, I think where this thing shows up depends a lot on what Van Gogh is.

AMD's APUs historically been budget parts. So going by that, the Air or 13" MBP are likely targets. Looking at the Ryzen 7 APU available in the Surface Laptop (a Zen+ part), it'd have to be a Zen 2 part to even think about using it in the 16" MBP refresh due to the performance gap (not likely due to timing).

The exciting possibility is a Zen 2 APU built on desktop Ryzen 7 aimed at the Mac Mini, IMO. But that would be something new for AMD, which does align with the "semi-custom". Something in the 3700 class with an integrated GPU would let Apple go to 8 cores with SMT on the Mini without changing the chassis, and use something 3600 class for the cheaper model.

What I meant was this: you can build a AMD Based system that will be faster than fully loaded Mac Pro, for the price of the basic model.

TBH, you can do the same with Intel parts if you aren't paying out the nose for Xeon-class hardware. That said, you do at least get ECC with Threadripper vs Intel's HEDT parts.

 

[koyoot]

About zero evidence to back this up. Willow Cove isn't being backported. And even if it was backported there wouldn't be a "low clock" problem. There would be "too big" die problem, but the clocking of the fab's implementations wouldn't get worse than it is now.


In single (or few core) "straight line" drag racing Intel is still winning with the 9900KS. Ai/ML inference... winning. AVX512 still winning on a core vs core basis. ( on just pure max core count yes, but toe-to-toe AMD has gaps. ). Minus the insane pricing on top end RAM capacity footprint , they have an substantive advantage with Optane DIMMs for very high RAM working set workloads.




Again not particularly true. Intel is not going to be limited to 14nm only in 2020.

AMD is is more than competitive. If Apple has started initial work on the next generation Mac Pro in the off-the-grid, secret "lab" then AMD has at least an even chance of making that design win bake off ( more non CPU package stuff may trip them up from being a slam dunk. ) . If Apple is going back into 'Rip van Winkle' mode on the Mac Pro for another 3-4 years, then Intel isn't "out of the game" at all if the design bake off isn't going to start for another 1-2 years.

But Intel is not completely dead in the water. Self imposed obstacles like price gouging can be removed by themselves too ( have to take a hit on juicy bonuses and stock price , but when royally screw up there is a price to pay. ). Intel does have lots of stuff to fix, but they also have lots of people and enough money to do it. Apple "dug a hole" on the Mac Pro also over the last 10 years. It isn't like they are doomed in the hole either over next 2-3 years.

Dec, when you will learn, that I do not pull stuff out of my ass?

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1201464338957004800

Here is confirmation that Willow Cove is backported to 14 nm process.

Stuff is already leaking. What does it mean for next year, huh?

Intel will not have anything to compete with AMD in 2020. There will not exist 10 nm miracle product next year, from Intel. We're stuck with their 14 nm process, to at least 2021, and we have to HOPE, that 7 nm process is not equal fiasco as 10 nm was.

P.S. If you guys are looking to buy Rocket Lake hardware, you better prepare your office correctly.

Invest in fire extinguishers. They will be needed...

 

[Kpjoslee]

Rumors and Leaks are confirmation now? ?

 

[ssgbryan]

You don't have to DIY a system to outperform the 7,1 for 1/2 the price. There are companies right now that sell Ryzen/Threadripper/Eypc systems for content creators.

Until the 2nd generation Threadrippers came out, I thought you could at least make the argument that the AVX 512 instruction set would give Intel a leg up in the high end video arena. But it doesn't, the cores can just brute force it (at a lower TDP).

 

[deconstruct60]

Although I am late to this thread and have read most of the comments, you really hit the nail on the head. Some more elaboration from my side would be:

-Apple very likely is tied to Intel for some foreseeable future. The Mac Pro needs a refresh so it's either wait it out (how many years?) or offer something now.

Not really. One, Apple is probably at least somewhat pissed off at Intel. How pissed off depends upon how much smoke they were blowing about their product line and for how long. But I've seen rumor quotes about "why did Mac Mini take so long" and the insider one word response was "Intel". ( that is probably an overly convenient 'dog ate my homework' excuse for Apple, but I suspect it is being used.).

Two, that Apple had to buy the celluar modem business from them because they couldn't execute... probably not entirely happy with that either. They bought it for a better price because Intel didn't execute, but that probably isn't going to build a higher trust factor with Apple.

Thunderbolt got weaved into USB4 so should have other suppliers for that too in a year or two. Short term can stop gap with discrete Intel chips with other CPUs ( in the desktop space for sure).

-I don't follow every AMD and Intel release, but just because AMD has the fastest ABC chip today, December 3, does not mean that Intel won't have an even faster chip 4 months from now. I know the AMD chip on this thread is fastest by a good margin, but Intel may close or beat that gap a few months from now .

As others pointed out lead times for these products are much longer than 4 months. The problem that Intel had is that they had designs that were deeply coupled to the initial, "super dense", 'whiz bang' 10nm fab process they were trying to roll out. It turned out that they tried to do much in one big jump (as oppose to the more incremental improvements they did in the classical 'tick-tock' scheme; change one 'big' variable at a time at each step. ).

When they stumbled they had to for the most part start over (not from scratch but a restart). That was basically a giant pipeline stall. They had to re-factor the flow of future while also churning out some gap fillers on 14nm ( and come up with band-aids for all of the Meltdown/Spectre/etc security bugs .. the deep fixes haven't come yet. ).

-Let's not forget that the Mac Pro isn't even AVAILABLE YET. Apple announced the refresh 6 months ago (golly!) and you can't even buy the computer let alone start using it. Apple had to announce most of the specs 6 months ago and therefore had to choose the specs long before that. Hence another reason we are seeing Intel chips in the design.

Yeah but the same thing has an impact on Intel internals. Design bets that Intel made in 2016-17 didn't
pan out which will be somewhat a problem in 2020 and a decent chunk of 2021. ( that is amplified a bit more because AMD has managed not to stumble too badly in same window. ).

-The Mac Pro is going to be used by different people for different software titles and different use cases and each user will have different expectations. But I would argue that unless you are running the CPU 24x7x365 at full throttle, the CPU is not the bottleneck. The drive is.

That is a big odd premise given the standard drive allocation is a 256GB drive with incrementally lower bandwidth than the other BTO options.

-Apple is a company who produces very, very few models of computers and infrequent updates. Apple likes/wants to control as much as possible on the hardware and software side. Therefore, they have to pick a CPU manufacturer and stick with it for quite a bit of time (decade usually) otherwise Apple's going to be spending more time/money on redesigns, testing, etc.

Apple likes to have competition between component vendors. They aren't picking folks because they'll going into some long term phase were they will not have to do any selection again in the future for a long time. Apple likes the component vendors trying to deliver the best at a price that Apple likes. Apple doesn't like over paying. And they don't like folks who don't deliver on time or at high quality.

AMD couldn't get CPU design wins for a long time because they were screwing up (volume production, latest fabrication tech , new features Apple had high priority on). AMD was in the budget vendor where wasn't the best but it was cheaper. Apple squeezes on prices but not dropping quality/performance on purpose to get there. They need products that have some differentiated 'value add'; not compete in the bargain sale of the week bin at the discount electronics store. [ top that off AMD was busy throwing obstacles in Thunderbolt's way. They didn't help them at all either (i.e., high priority feature) ]

and Apple likes a nice profit margin so I don't see any kind of CPU switching or offering different manufacturers at the same time. I also don't see Apple offering more than 1 CPU manufacturer at a time given the volumes (and needs) of Mac sales. Dell and Lenovo and others sell both Intel and AMD to offer choice and to also, in some cases, allure people to a low(er) budget machine.

Intel has probably offered attractive volume discounts but at some point just being cheaper isn't going to trump lack of execution problems.

-As others have mentioned, is Apple going to lose sales due to switching to AMD? Whether it's a valid technical reason or, more likely, customer belief that AMD is inferior. The customer buying these $6000+ Macs don't give a hoot if they think they could have saved $400 to use the AMD chip.

Intel is charing $3K more for CPUs that go over 1TB in RAM. Pretty sure folks in the $9000 range are going to notice a 30% tax on top. Folks in the $6K range even more so.

[ although have seen several new Threadripper 3 TRX40 boards and haven't seen one yet that hits that range either. ]

Apple is kind of doing the same thing with the Mac Pro ( lower volume sales at higher prices ), but I don' think Apple is going to be happy with a component supplier on that path too.

 

[1146331]

IMHO, it can be hard to compare price of each platform as it can become subjective, never the less and in a way, Intel seems to be switching w AMD for the "value" position?

By focusing exclusively at performance in a productivity app workflow it seems the TR3+Nvidia far out-strips Intel+Radeon. Possibly even accounting for software/OS "ease of use" the gap seems very large.

I honestly really like the new Mac Pro 7.1 and its ascetic, plus there is a lot of value in Mac OS. I just wonder if it is sold as a "no compromises" workstation, will it actually be "compromised" by the Intel chips (no Nvidia...!!!) it uses?

Start of Rant:

Again this seems to be a cumulation of a decade of neglect by Apple.

The whole Apple vibe has watered down the meaning of "Pro" to the point that they may not know what "Pro" means anymore, or more likely, they just don't care. This may not be effectively addressed by adding a new "pro" machine if the whole Apple culture is ignorant of that?

End of rant.

Pro means your phone was more expensive than mine

 

[koyoot]

Rumors and Leaks are confirmation now? ?

And leaks are not a confirmation?

I think you should check the meaning of the "Leak" word in the dictionary.

 

[Kpjoslee]

And leaks are not a confirmation?

I think you should check the meaning of the "Leak" word in the dictionary.

No, it isn't. There is a reason why the story is only getting picked up by the likes of WCCF and Techpowerups. It does lead to a fun discussion though. ?

 

[koyoot]

No, it isn't. There is a reason why the story is only getting picked up by the likes of WCCF and Techpowerups. It does lead to a fun discussion though. ?

And there is also a reason that you have no idea who leaked the information, and who translated it .

P.S. The same people who leaked a lot previously, and know far more about computers than you and me. Combined .

 

[Unregistered 4U]

they also get to phase out a 20-year-old API that was there mostly to help devs transition code from macOS 9.

Good points, thanks for the reminders!

Rumors and Leaks are confirmation now? ?

Of course they are. There were rumors and leaks awhile back that the Mac was moving to Cell processors, though. So it’s confirmation but ONLY if it actually comes to pass.

If, in twenty years, we look back and see that Apple never transitioned to AMD OR ARM... well, er, sigh, I’m sure that there will still be those that figure it’s still JUST around the bend!

 

[Kpjoslee]

https://www.anandtech.com/show/1518...ces-64core-arm-with-large-performance-uplifts

BTW, ARM server effort is getting more serious now. This will be far bigger threat for Intel than AMD will be.

 

[koyoot]

https://www.anandtech.com/show/1518...ces-64core-arm-with-large-performance-uplifts

BTW, ARM server effort is getting more serious now. This will be far bigger threat for Intel than AMD will be.

Riiiight.

Have you actually checked the specification of those CPUs?

This is no threat for Intel, nor AMD, apart from the very basic stuff which is not highest performance sensitive.

 

[Kpjoslee]

And there is also a reason that you have no idea who leaked the information, and who translated it .

P.S. The same people who leaked a lot previously, and know far more about computers than you and me. Combined .

Has nothing to do with legitimacy of the leaks. Some may end up being true, some may not. Always take those with a grain of salt.

 

[Zdigital2015]

Intel will not have anything faster than AMD for foreseeable future.

10 nm woes are so serious, that they are porting back 10 nm Architecture: Willow Cove to 14 nm(which will result in two things - lack of efficiency, and low clocks, apart from bloated die sizes) with Rocket Lake.

AMD is the king of computing since now. Get used to this, guys. Zen 3 will fix all of the problems Zen architecture ingherently has: latency and slow L1 cache write. Zen 3 will have over 2000 GB/s write to cache, and you know what that means?

It will solve any bottleneck that Zen 2 had, and every application that was relying on this(almost all of them) will get bump in performance.

Zen 3 will have 15-20% higher performance than Zen 2. What Intel has for next year? Another 14 nm Skylake respin. Yay!

AMD is not going to be 15-20% faster. Current 64 core EPYC CPUs apart from AVX512 are 100% faster than fastest Xeon 28 core CPUs. Guess what will happen with Zen 3?

Customers believe that AMD is inferior brand to Intel?

Well those guys are plainly stupid, if they believe so, especially right now.

It already started happening, in other spaces, than Apple's sandbox/fairyland.

Anyone worth their salt and their age knows how the seesaw back and forth of AMD and Intel goes and is watching this thread with a bit of bemusement. I know I am. Having a **** measuring contest over who rules the roost (AMD or Intel) is a complete waste of time because we all know that it can literally change overnight, no matter how much one thinks their team has the lead.

Here’s the story in a nutshell -

- Intel slacks off and coasts on fat profits for as long as they can while just teasing it out enough to keep people on the hook. This gets old.

- Then AMD blows them out of the water, and a sleepy Intel wakes up just enough to demonstrate just how they earned the name Chipzilla.

-AMD, unable to compete with a marketing shark and brand name recognition that is a 1000x stronger and corporate purchasing policies that favor hegemony over innovation watches their newfound rock star status slowly chipped away at along with their profits and stock price. OEM pricing policies and a generous co-marketing fund to companies making barebones profit margins on tired old mini-towers and laptops helps round out Intel’s smackdown.

- AMD tries to “innovate/compete” on price and product breadth and then Quarterly profits go kaboom. Analysts flip out and downgrade the stock. Restructuring and a new CEO are ushered in. Rinse, lather, repeat.

- Chipzilla goes back to sleep for another 5-7 years while AMD digs themselves out of a pit...again.

There are several things that are different now that don't make this scenario much hazier than in the past.

- Dr Lisa Su is AMD's CEO and she has a razor focus on what technologies AMD excels at and is keeping them from going off the rails pursuing every market Intel plays in. The execution has been slower than I would like in certain areas (GPU primarily), but you cannot argue with the results. Here's an excellent interview that really highlights this -

- Intel has a CEO issue, plain and simple.

- Intel's hubris in thinking they are simply going to brute force 10nm come Hell or high water.

Again, I have no problem with Apple moving to AMD, but the lack of a complete product portfolio is the biggest impediment to Apple embracing AMD.
[automerge]1575404294[/automerge]

And leaks are not a confirmation?

I think you should check the meaning of the "Leak" word in the dictionary.

Pure and simple - a shipping product is confirmation, period, end of story. We are a LONG way away from that, if ever.

 

[koyoot]

Has nothing to do with legitimacy of the leaks. Some may end up being true, some may not. Always take those with a grain of salt.

Those people have leaked a lot of stuff before. They know what they are saying . Rocket Lake is Willow Cove on 14 nm process, whether you like it or not .

Anyone worth their salt and their age knows how the seesaw back and forth of AMD and Intel goes and is watching this thread with a bit of bemusement. I know I am. Having a **** measuring contest over who rules the roost (AMD or Intel) is a complete waste of time because we all know that it can literally change overnight, no matter how much one thinks their team has the lead.

Here’s the story in a nutshell -

The history was this way, because one of companies failed at designing silicon.

This time history is different, because Intel FAILED TO YIELD A PROCESS.

The most important part of any product portfolio.

It will NOT be back and forth, again. At best what Intel can get is a tie. Based on all of the data that is leaked, that has been touted by Intel, and based on all of what we know from AMD portfolio and roadmaps.

Pure and simple - a shipping product is confirmation, period, end of story. We are a LONG way away from that, if ever.

And do you know where leaks come from?

From official data, that leakers have obtained. One way or another.

"Rocket Lake is Willow Cove on 14 nm" is a leak.

 

[thisisnotmyname]

From official data, that leakers have obtained. One way or another.

I have a leak for everyone. AMD has decided to exit the CPU/APU and graphics markets to focus exclusively on their line of RAM. They also want to reduce their emphasis on NA and APAC regions to hone their presence in Eastern Europe, they see the bigger opportunity for percentage gain there and in sub-saharan Africa so will be eliminating all sales and marketing personnel in other areas of the world. This comes from official data that leakers have obtained. I'm super cereal. This is totally confirmed and no one can deny it, it is happening soon!

 

[deconstruct60]

Dec, when you will learn, that I do not pull stuff out of my ass?

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1201464338957004800

Here is confirmation that Willow Cove is backported to 14 nm process.

Stuff is already leaking. What does it mean for next year, huh?

Not much of a confirmation when there is 14nm 512AVX stuff out there right now shipping (for some vendors just not Apple).

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/u...on-w-3223-processor-16-5m-cache-3-50-ghz.html

Cascade lake and Cooper Lake have AVX512. Although do have Intel turbo boost tech, but also run at a much higher TDP than desktop stuff. It is possibly turned off because the chip is just run in that mode all the time ( and the TDP will creep up more along with the socket size. )

Die size (and effectively transistor budget) is why Comet Lake doesn't have those.

Intel will not have anything to compete with AMD in 2020. There will not exist 10 nm miracle product next year, from Intel.

Nobody said there was going to be some 10nm miracle. There will be 10nm product. And they likely will be competitive ( AMD will be incrementally faster in some contexts and more so when computations are embarrassingly parallel enough to just throw more cheaper cores at the problem. ). Intel won't have super bragging rights ( a miracle ) but they will have product. If have a reasonable PCI-e v4 implementation that will be one more check box on getting back to parity.

We're stuck with their 14 nm process, to at least 2021, and we have to HOPE, that 7 nm process is not equal fiasco as 10 nm was.

"We're" as in the Mac Pro? Mac Pro probably is making no CPU moves in 2020 anyway so not having something until 2021 highly likely doesn't really matter.

Willow Cove is coming to 10nm first. Maybe a 14nm version shows up later but it is a 10nm primary target. None of this hand waving you are doing shows contrary. ( " RKL = TGL minus .... " means RKL would be a derivative of TGL and TGL is tagged 10nm. )

If Willow Cove has deep, real fixes for all the Meltdown/Spectre/etc stuff then maybe they'd backport. those band-aids are clogging up performance and it may be just worth the die bloat back to 14nm just to put that drama in the rearview mirror. But otherwise. instruction set extensions or specific willow cove caches size would be far more concrete proof.

P.S. If you guys are looking to buy Rocket Lake hardware, you better prepare your office correctly.

Invest in fire extinguishers. They will be needed...

the Mac Pro ( or iMac Pro ) were never going to use Rocket lake anyway.

 

[koyoot]

Dec. Are those AVX512 CPUs having iGPU?

I will answer. No. They don't. Rocket Lake is mainstream part. Not HEDT. And Rocket Lake is backport of Willow Cove to 14 nm.

I have a leak for everyone. AMD has decided to exit the CPU/APU and graphics markets to focus exclusively on their line of RAM. They also want to reduce their emphasis on NA and APAC regions to hone their presence in Eastern Europe, they see the bigger opportunity for percentage gain there and in sub-saharan Africa so will be eliminating all sales and marketing personnel in other areas of the world. This comes from official data that leakers have obtained. I'm super cereal. This is totally confirmed and no one can deny it, it is happening soon!

I have been reading similar things, from some people on this forum When I was trying to tell them that Zen 2 is good, and will be better than Intel products, and that Intel will not come with anything to compete.

Yeah, those leaks turned out completely wrong.

 

[thisisnotmyname]

I have been reading similar things, from some people on this forum When I was trying to tell them that Zen 2 is good, and will be better than Intel products, and that Intel will not come with anything to compete.

Yeah, those leaks turned out completely wrong.

Well now that we all agree AMD is leaving the CPU/APU market we can end this thread. Apple won't move to AMD on a product they no longer produce.

Glad that's settled.

 

[koyoot]

From 7:30.

Yay! Rocket Lake is 14 nm backport of Willow Cove! No new Intel process till 2022, at least!

 

[Zdigital2015]

Those people have leaked a lot of stuff before. They know what they are saying . Rocket Lake is Willow Cove on 14 nm process, whether you like it or not .


The history was this way, because one of companies failed at designing silicon.

This time history is different, because Intel FAILED TO YIELD A PROCESS.

The most important part of any product portfolio.

It will NOT be back and forth, again. At best what Intel can get is a tie. Based on all of the data that is leaked, that has been touted by Intel, and based on all of what we know from AMD portfolio and roadmaps.
And do you know where leaks come from?

From official data, that leakers have obtained. One way or another.

"Rocket Lake is Willow Cove on 14 nm" is a leak.

Sorry, Karnak, you CANNOT foretell the future, no matter how many capital letters you use. No one can...not you, not me, not Intel, not AMD, not Apple. I hope AMD stays successful, Intel needs the competition. Intel also needs a decent CEO to come in and clean house, reorg, re-focus the engineers and kick ass, but that’s not going to happen given all that I have read about how Intel operates internally.

Leaks don’t make it a done deal. You’ve been touting a single code name as gospel, because Semi-Custom...that’s not a shipping product, not even close. Just because it hasn’t shown up on an official roadmap doesn’t mean it won’t at CES, et al. I truly think Apple is experimenting with AMD to see if it is a viable option, but they are extremely conservative and until they announce a switch, presumably at WWDC 2020, there are simply too many moving parts to ever look at this as credible evidence of Apple making such a massive shift.

in other words, don’t count your chickens until they’re hatched.

 

[koyoot]

Sorry, Karnak, you CANNOT foretell the future, no matter how many capital letters you use. No one can...not you, not me, not Intel, not AMD, not Apple. I hope AMD stays successful, Intel needs the competition. Intel also needs a decent CEO to come in and clean house, reorg, re-focus the engineers and kick ass, but that’s not going to happen given all that I have read about how Intel operates internally.

Leaks don’t make it a done deal. You’ve been touting a single code name as gospel, because Semi-Custom...that’s not a shipping product, not even close. Just because it hasn’t shown up on an official roadmap doesn’t mean it won’t at CES, et al. I truly think Apple is experimenting with AMD to see if it is a viable option, but they are extremely conservative and until they announce a switch, presumably at WWDC 2020, there are simply too many moving parts to ever look at this as credible evidence of Apple making such a massive shift.

in other words, don’t count your chickens until they’re hatched.

Yeah, yeah. Heard the same thing before. For past 2 years, both on topic of AMD and Intel. Nothing came out true, that AMD will be the king of CPU computing. Not at all. Nothing came true, that Intel will not be able to compete, because of 10 nm failure. Nothing at all.

Dude. About Semi-Custom. We have AMD roadmaps way past CES 2020. We have roadmaps way past end of 2020. There is no single roadmap on which Van Gogh exists. Everybody who knows a thing or two about this stuff will tell you one thing: it is a semi-custom product. End of the story.

Guys, stop neglecting reality. I don't want Intel to fail. That would make us, customers pay way more than we do now for hardware! But the reality is simple: based on what we know: status of Intel manufacturing woes, their upcoming products, and the need to backport the Willow Cove to 14 nm process, they will not be back untill past 2021. And based on what we know about AMD products they are the king of computing for forerseeable future. Intel will have some very minor advantages. But for very short time.

 

[OkiRun]

And yet it also doesn't represent nothing. It's certainly representing some measure of performance. It's not just spitting out random numbers.



What's the relevant part here?

Thanks to you and teagls for the technical dives. I think that while they are enlightening to us techies, what percentage of Mac Pro customers are a)that technical and b)have the ability to care AND switch from Mac if they are not happy with performance? And, how much does the AMD cpu really affect their particular software title and use-case? We (here) all read tech specs all the time, but the real world is much different than just some tool thrashing the CPU and other pieces of the system.

In my eyes, Apple has neglected the true Mac professional for a long time...like 20 years. And I mean true, diehard Mac users working with CAD or movies or music or similar that every minute or hour of time really counts not only for profit but for delivery of some product/service. I think Apple really just doesn't care for that market, especially since Apple no longer has the monopoly in those use cases. Much of the number crunching software runs on multiple platforms and/or better platforms. Therefore, Apple isn't going to directly compete with some computer farm that can render a movie in 1/10th the time of the best Mac. Apple isn't going to compete with some workstation/server than can host 4 CPUs with up to 80 cores, for example. Apple's going to stuff the fastest specs they can WHILE ALSO ensuring their hefty margin. If Apple can't make the margin, something(s) get's dropped.

Yes, the AMDs are blazing fast...but is it a fit for 70%+ of Apple's Mac Pro use cases to warrant a redesign, OS and software testing, new marketing, a new license agreement with AMD (for 10 years I'm sure), allthewhile somehow negatively impacting its relationship with Intel? Will the iMac Pro switch to AMD since the MP is running AMD? What about the Macbook Pros? If these "pro" models do switch and yet Apple keeps Intel for all the non-pro lineup, wouldn't that imply/infer that Intel can't create "pro" cpus? And if the other "pro" models do not switch to AMD, then, is it really a "pro" class machine (in the eyes of the customer)?

Overall I think the answer is not a technical reason.

Some problems don't have technical solutions.