cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/18817227
I predicted in 2017 stock price over $100 when that happened.
Took about 3-4 years longer than expected, but still congratulations to AMD, on their successful fight back from the brink of bankruptcy.
Not to diminish the hard work AMD has put in, but it’s at least partially related to Intel’s ongoing issues with quality assurance (or the lack thereof, rather), and thus it’s arguable that they hold a stronger position at least partially due to Intel’s weakness in the last 10 years.
Absolutely, if Intel hadn’t been sleeping on their laurels for 5 years on desktop performance, and had made 6 and 8 core CPUs themselves before Ryzen arrived. Ryzen would not have been nearly as successful. This was followed by the catastrophic Intel 10nm fab failures, allowing AMD to stay ahead even longer.
So absolutely, AMD has been helped a lot by Intel failing to react in time, and then failing in execution when they did react.
Still I think congratulation is in order, because Ryzen was such a huge improvement on the desktop and server, that they absolutely deserve their success. Threadripper was icing on the cake, and completely trashed Intel in the workstation segment.
And AMD exposed Intel’s weakness in face of real competition. Arm and Nvidia had already done that in their respective areas, but AMD did it on Intel’s core business.
For people who weren’t looking for a developer workstation back then: Threadripper suddenly brought the performance of a xeon workstation costing more than 20k for just a bit over 2k.
That suddenly wasn’t a “should I really invest that much money” situation, but a “I’d be stupid not to, productivity increase will pay for that over the next month or so”
For sure, and as someone who has been stuck running Linux on an Intel box after being spoiled by all-AMD for about 6 years, I gotta say, the fact that a lot of AMD stuff “just works” in Linux when you have to jump through hoops for the same from Intel is probably a big reason they’re picking up in datacenters, too. Datacenters don’t usually run on fucking Windows Server, they usually run Linux, and AMD just plays better with Linux at the moment. (In my personal experience, anyway)
Having a usable product while your opponents continually shoot themselves in the foot is a viable market strategy.
