Comment by K0SM0S
12 days ago
I don't mean to take away from Intel's underwhelming management.
But regardless, Keller's Athlon 64 or Zen are great competitors.
Likewise, CUDA is Nvidia's massive achievement. The growth strategy of that product (involving lots of free engineer hours given to clients on-site) deserves credit.
// I don't mean to take away from Intel's underwhelming management
chuckle lets give full credit where credit is due :-)
Athlon was an epochal chip. Here's the thing though---if you are a market leader, one who was as dominant as Intel was, it doesn't matter what the competition does, you have the power to keep dominating them by doing something even more epochal.
That's why it can be so frustrating working for a #2 or #3 company....you are still expected to deliver epochal results like clockwork. But even if you do, your success is completely out of your hands. Bringing out epochal products doesn't get you ahead, it just lets you stay in the game. Kind of like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland. You have to run as fast as you can just to stay still.
All you can do is try to stay in the game long enough until the #1 company makes a mistake. If #1 is dominate enough, they can make all kinds of mistakes and still stay on top, just by sheer market inertia. Intel was so dominate that it took DECADES of back-to-back mistakes to lose its dominate position.
Intel flubbed the 32-64 bit transition. On the low end, it flubbed the desktop to mobile transition. On the high end, it flubbed the CPU-GPU transition.
Intel could have kept its dominate position if it had only flubbed one of them. But from 2002 to 2022, Intel flubbed every single transition in the market.
Its a measure of just how awesome Intel used to be that it took 20 years....but there's only so many of those that you can do back-to-back and still stay #1.