Any idea why Intel's execution with the Atom family is so much better than with the Core family? Sure, the former may not have been moved to 10nm yet. But that doesn't really explain other deficits by Core that Atom already solved like lack of chipset-less SoC, much more flexible core scalability etc.
I think it's a bit like Ryzen vs Bulldozer. I don't wanna sound like Richie Rich, but it wasn't a revolutionary jump to 2017's current CPU tech (only in core counts, but that wasn't a technological deficit from intel's side), but it sure was revolutionary for AMD, especially compared to their FX lineup.
I know you're not necessarily talking just about the performance of the atom chips, but honestly I always thought that Atoms were just intel saying: are you people content with 2-4% better performance per new CPU launch and pay $300+ for a new quad core forever? Alright then, we'll show you what you actually get when you're not buying our expensive products: an insufferable CPU that made me physically break 2 netbooks out of pure rage.
I still think they are truly horrible, but they are of course much more improved products compared to what they used to be, than the intel desktop CPUs.
Core deficits were not solved because I think 99% of the employees themselves also believed the management the same thing for years, what the investors and the stock market also believed: everything's fine, on track, in high volume production with yields better than expected, and shipping for revenue either right now (Cannon Lake) or the next quarter (Ice Lake in every quarter for 2 years till the end of 2019). I don't think many of them were prepared with a speech like: guys, we do what we can to survive till we get our manufacturing in order, get as much upgrades into our Core (where viable) and we'll survive this with some scratches. Instead they all got a many pages long marketing material, teaching them how to say AMD is still bad, when it's not bad then ours is better, and when ours is
a bit worse in some workloads, then those workloads don't count as much as MS Word or Excel, and that AMD is an unreliable supplier anyway (oh the irony).
I think the only employees who initially got the truth were the process node engineers, who got the task of improving the 14nm as much as possible to not look as bad as they really are and to be able to go at least to 10 cores with
Comet Lake. That's the biggest bullet they shot themselves with till now... ICL is an utter embarrassment in a laptop to laptop comparison against 9th gen and Whiskey being on a very-very mature and impressive node, and the much praised ICL iGPU loses to Picasso in games. All this with ICL itself being a
very strong architecture with the typical intel advantages being even better and shortcomings greatly improved.
All this with foveros being a brilliant innovation, which alone could have meant ICL laptops being the best ever. I know TGL is supposed to fix many of these problems, but the fact alone that they must backport the desktop part to 14nm tells us what to expect: at best, it won't be the embarrassment ICL is right now.
Poor AMD, with intel being in the shape they are, AMD couldn't position their 7nm GPUs to be disruptive even if they wanted to (only the most expensive product has a really good price/performance ratio, but I wouldn't call even that disruptive), but I understand now why they don't want to do that.
OK that was long.