> I'm worried about AMD since AFAIK, the enthusiast PC builder/Gamer for who these chips are addressed is a niche market and most volumes are in OEMs laptops (Dell, HP, Lenovo) that companies buy in bulk for their workforce and that's where AMD has zero presence while intel has a deathgrip on those OEMs.
Intel's deathgrip rests on four factors:
- Intel's "deal sweeteners" (preferential pricing et al), which they can't afford to do forever.
- Intel's ability to provide the whole stack (chipsets->boards).
- Corporate IT's sclerotic processes (not always a bad thing BTW though personally I find it stifiling).
- Server chip architecture.
It will all come down to money. If AMD parts have good performance/cost/power consumption points, you'll get AMD laptops (is thunderbolt 3 silicon available for AMD? I don't know).
If they beat Intel on server performance why wouldn't everybody switch? AMD doesn't appear to have the full AVX instruction set but I'm not sure how many people really use that.
Corporate IT's process is mostly about money, holistically (does it give us volume pricing? Does it reduce support cost?) as corporate IT is always a cost center. So they'll switch if it's worth it.
So you're right that Intel will continue to be dominant for a (relatively) long time, but for the reasons above that's more about market hysteresis than fundamental superiority, which Intel still has in certain places but which has eroded mostly across the board for a long time. And the kicker of hysteretic phenomena is when you reach the critical point you can't really get back.
That is so far from truth. Cooperate IT is all about not getting fired and doing no wrong. It has very little to do with performance, power, or cost. Your CTO could make an excuse of not buying AMD because it is not stable. That was the reason in the old days AMD not getting any traction.
There is a huge brand stickiness in Corporate purchase, and people are willing to pay premium for it. And that is why everyone want these client.
> Cooperate IT is all about not getting fired and doing no wrong. It has very little to do with performance, power, or cost.
From what I have seen this rule is mostly about software which is vastly more complex than hardware for typical IT departments. So that 'not getting fired' is mostly about software. E.g our company still buy very expensive licenses from IBM, Oracle, SAP and so on. However as far was hardware goes it is super crappy HP laptops despite devs complaining about disk crashing, freezing and myriad other problems everyone still keep getting those.
It’s “available” but hasn’t been adopted yet by most motherboard manufacturers. Maybe we’ll see laptops with TB3 when the 4000-series mobile chips come out.
Intel's deathgrip rests on four factors: - Intel's "deal sweeteners" (preferential pricing et al), which they can't afford to do forever. - Intel's ability to provide the whole stack (chipsets->boards). - Corporate IT's sclerotic processes (not always a bad thing BTW though personally I find it stifiling). - Server chip architecture.
It will all come down to money. If AMD parts have good performance/cost/power consumption points, you'll get AMD laptops (is thunderbolt 3 silicon available for AMD? I don't know).
If they beat Intel on server performance why wouldn't everybody switch? AMD doesn't appear to have the full AVX instruction set but I'm not sure how many people really use that.
Corporate IT's process is mostly about money, holistically (does it give us volume pricing? Does it reduce support cost?) as corporate IT is always a cost center. So they'll switch if it's worth it.
So you're right that Intel will continue to be dominant for a (relatively) long time, but for the reasons above that's more about market hysteresis than fundamental superiority, which Intel still has in certain places but which has eroded mostly across the board for a long time. And the kicker of hysteretic phenomena is when you reach the critical point you can't really get back.