During the company's third-quarter 2024 earnings call, Intel confirmed that its future laptop chips will return to the traditional use of RAM sticks, reversing Lunar Lake's radical...
Panther Lake and Nova Lake laptops will return to traditional RAM sticks
That’s because server offerings are real money, which is why Intel isn’t fucking those up.
AMD is in the same boat: they make pennies on client and gaming (including gpu), but dumptrucks of cash from selling Epycs.
IMO, the Zen 5(%) and Arrow Lake bad-for-gaming results are because uarch development from Intel and AMD are entirely focused on the customers that pay them: datacenter and enterprise.
Both of those CPU families clearly show that efficiency and a focus on extremely threaded workloads were the priorities, and what do you know, that’s enterprise workloads!
end of the x86 era
I think it’s less the era of x86 is ended and more the era of the x86 duopoly putting consumer/gaming workloads first has ended because, well, there’s just no money there relative to other things they could invest their time and design resources in.
I also expect this to happen with GPUs: AMD has already given up, and Intel is absolutely going to do that as soon as they possibly can without it being a catastrophic self-inflicted wound (since they want an iGPU to use). nVidia has also clearly stopped giving a shit about gaming - gamers get a GPU a year or two after enterprise has cards based on the same chip, and now they charge $2000* for them - and they’re often crippled in firmware/software so that they won’t compete with the enterprise cards as well as legally not being allowed to use the drivers in a situation like that.
ARM is probably the consumer future, but we’ll see who and with what: I desperately hope that nVidia and MediaTek end up competitive so we don’t end up in a Qualcomm oops-your-cpu-is-two-years-old-no-more-support-for-you hellscape, but well, nVidia has made ARM SOCs for like, decades, and at no point would I call any of the ones they’ve ever shipped high performance desktop replacements.
Yes, I know there’s a down-stack option that shows up later, but that’s also kinda the point: the ones you can afford will show up for you… eventually. Very much designed to push purchasers into the top end.
That’s because server offerings are real money, which is why Intel isn’t fucking those up.
AMD is in the same boat: they make pennies on client and gaming (including gpu), but dumptrucks of cash from selling Epycs.
IMO, the Zen 5(%) and Arrow Lake bad-for-gaming results are because uarch development from Intel and AMD are entirely focused on the customers that pay them: datacenter and enterprise.
Both of those CPU families clearly show that efficiency and a focus on extremely threaded workloads were the priorities, and what do you know, that’s enterprise workloads!
I think it’s less the era of x86 is ended and more the era of the x86 duopoly putting consumer/gaming workloads first has ended because, well, there’s just no money there relative to other things they could invest their time and design resources in.
I also expect this to happen with GPUs: AMD has already given up, and Intel is absolutely going to do that as soon as they possibly can without it being a catastrophic self-inflicted wound (since they want an iGPU to use). nVidia has also clearly stopped giving a shit about gaming - gamers get a GPU a year or two after enterprise has cards based on the same chip, and now they charge $2000* for them - and they’re often crippled in firmware/software so that they won’t compete with the enterprise cards as well as legally not being allowed to use the drivers in a situation like that.
ARM is probably the consumer future, but we’ll see who and with what: I desperately hope that nVidia and MediaTek end up competitive so we don’t end up in a Qualcomm oops-your-cpu-is-two-years-old-no-more-support-for-you hellscape, but well, nVidia has made ARM SOCs for like, decades, and at no point would I call any of the ones they’ve ever shipped high performance desktop replacements.