Raise and fall of Intel

I was never a fan of Intel for quite a simple reason – buying Intel chips was not optimal from my point of view. Other companies provided a better performance-to-price ratio. But I understand that nobody can tell any company how much money they should ask for their products and it is strictly up to them. If Intel wants to sell their processors for a lot of money it is their business. But in general, they were making good and solid products.

But everything changed from the release of Pentium 4. At that time Intel figured out that everybody was buying megahertz they decided to create a CPU with a lot of megahertz. And then Pentium 4 was born.

It was slower than Pentium 3 for almost all existing applications, it was consuming an insane amount of electricity and it was quite expensive. Moreover, it required quite an exotic RDRAM memory that was expensive and didn’t offer any advantages (later Pentium 4 started to use normal memory).

But from a marketing point of view, it has a huge success: it has an extremely high CPU frequency. First Pentium 4 has 1.3 GHz while a typical Pentium 3 at that time had 600-800 MHz. This was the first time when Intel released a product mostly to trick people into buying their CPU. People were buying megahertz and Pentium 4 definitely had more of them. A lot more. And people were buying these megahertz.

If it was fast, it would be less problematic but it was slow. I personally did a lot of testing in many applications and the results were quite bad. Moreover, I did tests on an already improved version of Pentium 4 that has 1.6 GHz. This was the first time that I realized that Intel was trying to trick customers instead of selling expensive but a solid product.

I would like to state that technically Pentium 4 can be fast when a compiler generates very optimal code but unfortunately, that requires a lot of time and nobody will do any optimization until Intel sells a lot of Pentium 4. Then some of the compilers did it but not to the extent that made Pentium 4 really fast, they were just able to mitigate the worst scenarios.

And as I mentioned before, Pentium 4 consumed a lot of energy and many methodboard vendors simply didn’t realize how much power it uses. I have seen a quite good and expensive ASUS motherboard with a melted CPU power connector and 24-pin connector. It uses 2.8 GHz Pentium 4.

The next moment was relatively soon. Intel didn’t want its users to move to 64-bit using x86 chips. It prepared a new (very expensive and very power-hungry) chip called Itanium for those who want to move to a 64-bit world. Not only it was quite expensive, but it was also quite slow when executing x86 instructions. And it requires even more optimizations from the compiler than Pentium 4.

We were lucky that Intel had a competitor who released a x86-64 bit CPU named Athlon 64 that was much better than Itanium and provided exactly what customers needed. And it was much cheaper. And it can run 32 programs without any issues. Lastly, it was relatively easy to change the compiler to generate 64-bit code.

Not only the CPU was cheaper but the motherboards were much cheaper too. And it was much faster than Pentium. Basically, it was the first time when the world started to see AMD as a real competitor for Intel and it was the first time when AMD got a higher desktop market share than Intel.

Then Intel released the Core family. These were quite good CPUs and they pushed AMD back to second place. And for quite some time AMD was releasing relatively bad products and finally, Intel got lazy and re-released pretty much the same architecture over and over with minor changes.

And for quite some time nothing happened and everybody thought that AMD would quietly die and then when nobody expected, AMD released the Ryzen processor. It was faster than the current generation of Intel processors and more energy efficient.

And not only it was faster. It was offering much more cores than even the top Intel chip. At that moment top Intel offers only 4 cores with hyperthreading, while AMD offers 8 cores with hyperthreading. And it was cheaper too.

In the beginning, nobody took Ryzen seriously and they were sure that Intel would answer shortly. And Intel did. Their new CPUs were faster but even more energy-efficient. Then AMD released the second generation of Ryzen CPUs. They reduced the performance gap and improved memory compatibility.

It was the time when I bought AMD based computer. And I bought it not only because I needed a new computer, but because I want to support AMD. I knew that there was a chance that I would spend more time to make it work than with Intel and I was ready for it.

Then I bought the 3^rd generation of Ryzen for my relative and it was almost already on par with Intel and still consumes much less energy. Intel 9900K was still faster but it alone consumed more energy than many whole AMD-based systems with a monitor.

It was a time when many people discovered another feature that AMD promised. You don’t need to change the motherboard when you change the CPU. For example, in 2018 I bought a Ryzen 2600X. And now I can buy 5800X3D for less than I bought 2600X and I can just swap it and will considerably improve the performance of my system and it will cost very little. All I need is to update the BIOS and I can use the same motherboard.

On the Intel-based systems, it was extremely rare to support more than the current generation even though a lot of engineers proved that it is possible. But it means less money for Intel so they were intentionally blocking it. Only now under pressure from AMD, they support one more generation but never more than 2.

But AMD didn’t only release desktop CPUs, it created a revolution in servers. Intel CPUs were not effective and consumed way more electricity per core and cost way more. It took some time for the server segment but eventually, it took off and AMD started to eat the market share of Intel in that segment too.

And AMD didn’t stop there. They released a Threadripper CPU that has a lot of cores. It is a bit a niche CPU but it is really good at workstations. For example, it was ideal for rendering or any other work that requires a lot of cores.

Then after 5000 series, AMD released a 3D CPU. It has way more cache than a regular CPU and as a result, AMD took the crown of top gamer CPU from Intel. Before that only top Intel could beat AMD in games at the cost of extreme power consumption. But AMD’s 5800X3D took that crown and it is still on the AMD side.

And even before all that success, AMD started to make custom CPUs for Microsoft XBOX and Sony Playstation while Intel refused to. As a result, AMD got quite a helpful money infusion that helped a lot.

Intel couldn’t switch from the old technical process for quite some time and I think released around 3 or 4 different CPUs using the same process and even used something “like 7nm” while it was 11 or something similar. Many releases were exactly the same CPU just a couple of percent faster. And almost every new CPU requires a new and most of the time expensive motherboard.

And now Intel couldn’t compete with AMD with normal cores so they started to offer E-Cores that are slower and more energy efficient cores. But it requires changes in a Windows scheduler and it is somewhat properly implemented only in Windows 11 but many people are still with Windows 10.

I also would like to add a few scandals when Intel “tested” the performance of their CPUs against AMD and it looked like they never saw any CPU previously in their life. It was a huge public humiliation.

Then was a big scandal with vulnerabilities with Intel CPUs and the fix made them even slower. And then Apple decided to develop its own CPU and stop using Intel CPU in most of their products.

And now it looks like Intel slowly going from a top chipmaker and trendsetter to a company that just trying to catch up with competitors and copy their technology to their products. Plus they still stay expensive which also does not help.

In conclusion, previously I didn’t buy Intel products because I could buy something better for the same money but now I just don’t want to buy any Intel products at all. The whole company spends money on how to sell bad products instead of spending money on engineering good products.

As Warren Buffett said: “We can afford to lose money – even a lot of money. But we cannot afford to lose reputation”. To me, Intel lost its reputation a long time ago. Maybe with time, I will change my opinion but for now, I prefer to buy AMD products even if they will cost more for the same performance.

I hope it helps someone.