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back to article HP boss: Intel shortages are steering our suited customers to buy AMD

With the Windows 7 refresh cycles forecast to run and run, Intel's protracted CPU shortage is sending conservative corporate enterprise buyers into the arms of AMD – or so says HP Inc's CEO. Dion Weisler took to the stage late last week at Wall Street financial analyst Bernstein's annual conference to discuss HP and the wider …

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  1. Mikel

    AMD is cool again

    In desktop, server and laptops, AMD has never had a stronger proposition against Intel in their 50 year history. Superior node, better thermals, more cores, better Instructions Per Clock, more I/O lanes are just a few features On 7/7 they'll even be ahead on critical PCIe version with double the bandwidth per lane. Even the memory architecture is better, with less vulnerability to the cross process leakage Intel is seeing. Vendor support is through the roof with proper high end boards and features, rather than the flimsy boards of years past when vendors cheaped out on components and failed to deliver the AMD product's full potential.

    I don't think Intel is going to be wounded, but AMD should be able to grow their business quite a lot in the next two years. If AMD keep up the pace and Intel continue to stumble this might turn into a race in a few years.

    22 0 Reply
    1. mark l 2 Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: AMD is cool again

      The current AMD higher end line up is the best it has been for some time, but those specs will be overkill for a lot of what HP customers will be requiring, which will be basic boxes for running office, email and a browser.

      For those types of tasks the CPU has not been the bottleneck for a long time now, I have a 8 year old Dell box which is still capable for daily office tasks without the CPU cores ever getting maxed out.

      0 0 Reply
      1. Flocke Kroes Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: basic boxes

        Lets face it (Libre)office, email and a browser run fine on the current generation of Raspberry Pi and HP know it but they would much rather sell something with a bigger profit margin.

        3 6 Reply
      2. Mark #255
        Reply Icon

        Re: AMD is cool again

        I have a 8 year old Dell box which is still capable for daily office tasks without the CPU cores ever getting maxed out.

        It's not the CPU that's the bottleneck in my 8 year old Dell box, it's the memory and spinning rust. The HDD I could fix (1 TB SSDs are just over £100 from Crucial), but the memory is almost maxed out (6GB of a maximum 8), so it would be a sticking plaster at best; and thanks to our IT set-up it's just simpler to fix it with a new one.

        2 0 Reply

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        2. msroadkill
          Reply Icon

          Re: AMD is cool again

          My response to your post and the above series of similar ones on basic office PCs is ~"well yes, but they are a false economy to implement on scale".

          as a preamble - AMD have an excellent minimalist solution in their zen/vega APU. Extremely competent, but not over priced over kill.

          Many of these basic rigs have also had an obtrusive discrete GPU added at some point.

          The list of improvements a sub $100 APU offers is as long as your arm.

          Power/heat/noise/cooling?

          Intuitive GUIs - graphics are useful.

          smooth operation causing fewer distractions from the thought process.

          The perception is that support will be a challenge, but the reality is that the pervasiveness of zen/vega in so many tiers of the market (from mobile and embedded, all the way to exa servers), and the unified sibling processors from a single source, makes support much simpler than any intel/nvidia assemblage.

          This last point relates strongly to the article - even if clients are only being driven to tentative steps toward a plan B, it will wise them up about a lot of intel myths when they test the water.

          2 0 Reply
  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Hassle doing any change but thanks to Intel security issues its a hassle staying on Intel

    The argument much easier. Do you want the hassle of convincing IT security a flawed Intel chip wont be a security issue or do you want hassle to do a bit of quick testing to see that your intel run software runs OK on MAD (answer it does).

    10 0 Reply
  3. wownwow

    "Quality" is a matter of "lip service"!

    "When supply doesn't meet demand, biz goes looking for action elsewhere"

    Instead of "When Intel used partial addresses, biz goes looking for action elsewhere"!

    How stupid the IT industry is and "quality" is a matter of "lip service"! :-D

    0 0 Reply
  4. Big Al 23

    AMD on the move

    Even without Intel's ongoing 10Nm crisis AMD has changed the CPU landscape for the better for Biz and consumers. With AMD's latest CPUs shipping on 7-7-19 being another significant performance improvement with as much as 50% lower power consumption enterprise can't afford to ignore these benefits especially when AMD's enterprise products typically cost 60% of Intel's. That's a lot of dollars at the end of the day. With all of the technical and administrative issues at Intel, AMD is in a position to significantly increase their market share in all segments over the next decade.

    4 0 Reply
  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    For way too long Intel has been writing checks its firmware couldn't cash

    Its nice to see that the truth has finally caught up with Intel, which for way too long has had some perfornance gains on buggy and insecure firmware. When you put optimizations in the right place, as it would appear that AMD has been doing lately, you should hopefully reap the benefits.

    What is lamentable is how for so long, in these times where the media has been diluted, Intel has been able to get away flogging inferior and seriously defective kit.

    8 0 Reply
    1. Bronek Kozicki
      Reply Icon
      Headmaster

      Re: For way too long Intel has been writing checks its firmware couldn't cash

      True words, but I think you meant "microcode".

      2 0 Reply

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

  6. whitepines
    Windows

    Just be aware AMD has been busy copying "features" from Intel, like their version of the famous Management Engine. It is not certain they are actually more secure than Intel on their current products -- in fact there are apparently statements from AMD that they must retain all control of their systems at all times, not the organization or consumer using the machine. Whether that's actually safe or not probably comes down to whether you trust AMD's keys not to be stolen or AMD not to be legally forced to get data off the customer machine with a technical notice from e.g. the Oz government.

    I'll pass. Computers are supposed to be obedient tools not spies and leashes. Now get off my lawn!

    1 10 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Hmmm

      Your comments are a complete crock. AMD does NOT "retain control of their systems at all times" Nor does AMD hold any any mystical "Key" which can somehow unlock your system. Good grief. How much does Intel pay for this kind of nonsense.....

      AMD, as well as dozens, if not hundreds of independent software/firmware engineers and experts (not to mention hackers the world over) have spent literally thousands, if not 10's of thousands of man hours looking for vulnerabilities in AMD's chips and thus far have found only a couple of minor, easily patched bugs. In contrast, they continue to find massive vulnerabilities in Intel's chips, most of which require massive performance reductions to patch.

      More importantly, the fix for the few vulnerabilities found in AMD's chips have already been fixed in their latest Zen 2 7nm process being released in a matter of days. Intel on the other hand, with more than a dozen back doors and vulnerabilities on the books, require the user to literally cripple their performance in order to protect themselves from being hacked. In some cases, the ONLY way to mitigate the threat of being hacked with Intel is to literally disable hyper threading essentially crippling the performance in most end user scenarios.

      Furthermore, AMD's Zen 2 is "better" in nearly every major quantifiable performance metric than Intel's offerings. And by Intel's own roadmap, this situation will continue for years. In short, Intel is bleeding market share because it is shipping an inferior product, that costs more to purchase and operate, and is vulnerable to hacking unless you accept a 20-40% performance hit.

      As the market continues to shift toward AMD more and more software will be optimized for Zen2-3 increasing the performance gap even more....Intel isn't just wounded and bleeding, it is at the moment, flat on its back.............

      5 3 Reply
      1. whitepines
        Reply Icon

        AMD does NOT "retain control of their systems at all times" Nor does AMD hold any any mystical "Key" which can somehow unlock your system.

        Hmmm, a quick Internet search pulled up a decent overview of the problem, with the exact black box in question, the fact that AMD has the signing keys, what the black box can do behind your back, etc. How much was AMD paying you to post nonsense again?

        https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/bnxnvg/computex_swiftly_approaches_and_so_too_does_zen_2/

        1 0 Reply
    2. Captain Scarlet
      Reply Icon

      "In fact there are apparently statements from AMD that they must retain all control of their systems at all times"

      I think for this statement Citation is needed, please post where you got this from (As to me it feels like a statement that they must retain control of their production systems making the hardware).

      4 0 Reply
      1. whitepines
        Reply Icon

        It's kinda buried and I had a hard time finding the original source, but "bridgman" is an AMD employee with knowledge of the hardware designs:

        https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/hardware/processors-memory/1032782-13-way-ibm-power9-talos-ii-vs-intel-xeon-vs-amd-linux-benchmarks-on-debian?p=1033245#post1033245

        "the vast majority of our [AMD's] sales still come from the OEM PC market, which brings a non-negotiable requirement for DRM that can not be tampered with or disabled by the owner, backed by assurances from the HW vendor. Signing the microcode and keeping it closed are two things that help to get us over the (loosely defined and constantly evolving) threshold for "good enough" DRM."

        His definition of microcode is any firmware, including the "security processor" that I've been choking on above -- he doesn't mean just the CPU microcode. This is the new and improved AMD though -- if something makes them look bad, they redefine basic terminology so it looks less bad.

        Oh and DRM? Too bad the Oz citizens didn't reign in their crypto snooping law -- guess which hardware will likely eventually be leveraged to keep that nasty unauthorized open source encryption away from the masses or upload keys via side channel? Perhaps the thing that the user can't change but the vendor can be forced to, the thing that has the sole purpose of limiting what the user can do?

        Clear enough now?

        0 0 Reply
  7. Aseries

    Some hilarious comments. This article concerns the ability to fill corporate supply chains with a viable alternative to good old Intel. It has nothing to do with CPU fanbois. The Strawberry Pi suggestion really got me.

    2 0 Reply

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