AMD expects to outsell Intel in Q4 for the first time in history

The rule includes >90% of "remote" workers who have discovered they were classified as hybrid (a classification now eliminated) and their manager didn't make it official. Now, remote approvals are SVP level.

The issue is, AMD still pays significantly less than any company with an RTO mandate, even with the stock appreciation. And the stock has gone down 25% in the past few weeks so it's even less competitive. The typical engineer was not given an equity-weighted package, even L9 only 30% of your TC is in stock.

It's a recruiting bonanza right now and everyone's getting calls offering 50% pay bumps from 5-day office semi corps like Broadcom or Qualcomm. The better people are getting offers at Google or Apple for 3-day RTO for even greater TC bumps.

If you wanted a GPU with 32GB of memory for AI tasks, the AMD AI Pro R9700 was (up until about a month ago) reasonably priced at ~$1300. It's not a RTX 5090 in terms of bandwidth and compute, but for the price and being actually purchasable it's a reasonable pick.

It never made sense. It's slower than RAM, and what do I get for it? Persistence? I don't want persistent RAM, I like the ability to reboot to solve problems, and storing stuff on a non-volatile mediums has all sorts of legal implications which it's easier to avoid.

It's more expensive and has less storage than SSDs, even though the main downside of SSDs is their high price per gigabyte and relatively low capacities.

It's going in the wrong direction for both use cases. I guess it could have a very niche use case as a super fast persistent caching layer in front of spinning rust but that's kinda it.

AMD makes excellent CPUs and GPUs, I'm ecstatic with the products I have purchased from them, and they are now beating their biggest competitor and profiting billions every year. What more do you want? Isn't this enough for a company in 2026?

Intel finally has really great low power/budget answers, but still loses greatly to 3d cache chips on most workloads.

This actually say more about Intel's heroic efforts in defending its turf.

I seriously doubt Intel has anything countering Instinct AI accelerators in terms of revenue slice. Which means despite Instinct AI accelerators having extra revenue, AMD's CPU sales is barely on par with Intel in Server Market.

We are talking about EPYC Zen 5 here and early Zen 6 revenue in late 2026. I have been banging on about the progress of AMD in server market for 5+ years. ( Edit: A quick search turns out to be 6 years [1] )

Given the price / performance AMD has had and Intel's perfect storm moment, 50% is all AMD manage to capture. I have been suggesting AMD being far too conservative with their capacity planning and has been leaving money on the table before even the AI craze on CPUs. Their sales team in Enterprise has not had the impact Intel managed. This is decades of relationship management Intel has had and utilised to the maximum.

At this rate I seriously doubt AMD will be able to compete when Intel is healed and back on their feet. ( But then Intel are well known to do stupid stuff so I guess it cancels out )

I hope Zen 6 will have more to show for. Right now it is not good enough on the CPU side. And on the GPU side not anywhere close to competing against Nvidia.

And this is speaking as someone who used to own ATI Rage 3D and bought AMD's stock at below $3.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23164306

I was going to say… everybody even government is coming together to make intel work but it’s in shambles

Haven’t they benefited a lot from the chips act?

that's quite a large market and their only competitor has moved on to greener pastures.

They're around, selling AMD Strix Halo (up to 128GB unified memory) on the low, equivalent to DGX Spark, level; and MI* chips for enterprise AI inference.

The problem they have and they've always had is that everyone uses CUDA. ROCm works, but everyone's toolchain is CUDA exclusive or CUDA first, so it's much harder to use AMD hardware.

Using higher level tooling (vLLM, llama.cpp) I have DGX Spark comparable performance for 1/3 the price (but without the same software out of the box experience nor the clustering network options).

Great Hope and Crosby movie.

Optane really died before LLMs went big. I was at an enterprise using a TON of them, often for SAP HANA workloads.

> AMD have... turned out some decent gaming graphics cards and fine server CPUs but little else.

I'm on a AMD desktop, using an AMD gpu, next to a gaming console using an AMD CPU and GPU, making large DC purchasing decisions where intel hasn't even shown up as a factor.

Ya'll sniff Apple farts like it's no tomorrow.

AMD has always been an also ran in this space and it shows to this day, but the true believers cannot be dissuaded of their faith so whatevs.

I honestly think Nvidia needs a worthy nemesis right now more than ever and I wish it existed but I don't think it does... Yet...

> And honestly, "Intel's shambolic efforts" alongside "AMD's Road to Damascus moment" is rather delicious phrasing. The author has managed to deliver quite a sophisticated insult in a single sentence.

I've personally had zero issues with NVIDIA on Linux on both Turing (20xx) and Blackwell (50xx).

They also stopped making 3D XPoint a year before AI would have bought all of it.

First it was virtualization instructions, then AVX stuff

Or if Intel and AMD GPUs had to compete with Nvidia GPUs ... wait, they do, and they are absolutely losing.

The OEM deals run extremely deep, and thunderbolt (an Intel standard) is a brutal feature to drop I think for many laptop makers.

Companies bending over and submitting to the AI/LLM/Datacenter hyperscalers at the expense of completely depleting all avenues for regular everyday people to have affordable access to basic computing (imho basically just another utility these days) is something that I hope people remember once the well dries and they try once again to sell us their RGB powered wares.

So... F Nvidia, F Micron and F all these money hungry asshole companies, including the weirdos thirsting for your sticks of ram.

I reckon 5 years from now it'll be obvious that x86 is on its way out, and 10 years from now it'll be replaced by ARM in all but narrow backwards compatibility demanded use cases.

I also predict that the survival of both Intel and ARM as big players in the market is contingent on them switching in the same timeframe. If they don't, they're dead (of course, if they try to switch and botch it, they're dead too - but baking that into a prediction feels a bit no-true-scotsman esque).

I'm hopeful that manufacturers will ship regular socketable ARM cpus just like they do with x86 now, but who knows whether that will be the case or if we'll move more towards everything being soldered on all in one solutions.

so now mobile, desktop and server all looking good with ARM? i can't see why it would go backwards at all.

Technically impossible. Hmm.. do you mean Intel > AMD. nVidia > AMD. nVidia > Intel. AMD > Intel.

Due to Trump policies (and geopolitical realities), they are building or helping to build fabs in the US and elsewhere. It's takes years to build a fab.

so intel took the hit now, AMD might take the hit later as they're kinda...... mostly a software company, that contracts to hardware companies.