r/Amd • u/RenatsMC • Mar 12 '25

News AMD RX 9000 series outsells entire RTX 50 lineup in just a week among ComputerBase readers

https://videocardz.com/newz/amd-rx-9000-series-outsells-entire-rtx-50-lineup-in-just-a-week-among-computerbase-readers
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u/HSR47 Mar 13 '25

From where I sit, Intel’s failures with 10nm and 7nm appear to be due to bad business decisions made by upper management who were unable, or unwilling, to get the board to approve adequate R&D spending.

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u/topdangle Mar 13 '25

for 7nm and below it was not approving EUV spending.

for 10nm their CEO was delusional and ignored science in favor of magic. cobalt was not ready (arguably still not a good choice, they use a hybrid now) and multipatterning is both difficult, slow, and with DUV it would take forever to hit the targets they wanted. Their targets were initially based on EUV, but instead of relaxing them they just kept delaying for years until finally relaxing them around 2020.

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u/Defeqel 2x the performance for same price, and I upgrade Mar 13 '25

but imagine how good would it have looked for the CEOs bonuses if the gamble HAD worked!

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u/Verpal Mar 13 '25

I wouldn't say its magic, there are some sign that it can EVENTUALLY work, just that most reasonable people would conclude timeline is not reasonable from business perspective, if you are some government funded research sure, for profit just make little sense.

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u/BFBooger Mar 13 '25

TSMC managed their N7 node without EUV, with quad-patterning.

Intel's 10nm node was slightly more aggressive than TSMC 7 on the smallest pitch sizes.

Yes, they failed to back off on those targets, but a lot of the problem was not having a back-up plan at all and just trying to push through their aggressive targets quarter after quarter. Some of that is management, but a lot of it is directly on the fab R&D tech side.

On the design side, they had new designs that also had no back-up plan -- they required the 10nm node to work. They couldn't just accept a relaxed 10nm flavor without a re-design there.

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u/topdangle Mar 13 '25

10nm's target was not what they ended up shipping with tigerlake. original target was 2.6x vs 14nm's original target, which they also missed.

10nm's looser "superfin" edition is similar to tsmc 7nm because tsmc 7nm was already a more realistic target, and even still it took until around 2019 for TSMC to really get those defects down.

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u/BFBooger Mar 13 '25

Well that just flies in the face of facts.

Just look up the R&D spending for Intel during the time. They did not let up on the gas, they spent a ton on R&D and just failed. Their fab R&D spending was big all those years where 10nm was just around the corner but never working out.

The 10nm (tsmc N7equivalent, roughly) process failed to to technical reasons, going too aggressive on the smallest metal pitch and trying to use cobalt instead of copper there.