Could AMD be in significant trouble in the PC and laptop space in the nearish-medium term future with the ARM and Qualcomm invasion if they don't go to yearly release schedules, at least for CPUs? The rate of improvement should be terrifying if they don't have massive improvements and QC have said they want to be in desktops too
- Phone makers are used to annual releases with decent improvements whereas AMD are every two years
- 15-20% 1T perf/efficiency yearly isn't an unfair expectation for them, whereas that's on the lower-average end of expected for AMD every 2 years
- Intel are also yearly with reasonably good improvements in the ballpark to ARM/Qualcomm, although granted their starting point is worse than AMD
- GPU wise 1.3-1.4x iGPU is about expected every year, sometimes slightly higher for phone makers - similar to AMD but they generally are 1.5-2 year releases
Hypothetical 2029 scenario:
AMD are still 2 years/CPU gen, averaging 1.2x perf/efficiency per gen - 1.2^2 = 1.44x (their next release is a year later in 2030)
ARM/Qualcomm yearly 1.2x perf/efficiency, 1.2^5 = 2.49x
Difference = 1.728x in favour of ARM/QC
For reference, 1.6^2 = 2.56x | 1.15^5 = 2.01x | 1.4^2 = 1.96x | 1.3^2 = 1.69
Who would buy an AMD laptop/desktop if the competition improve that much relative to them? Which vendor would want to spend money making laptops with them over their ARM rivals, if they're able to make progress like they have done in phones? I don't want to be a doom and gloom person here but those aren't unrealistic numbers for rates of perf/eff improvement/expectations given what's happened since 2017 (Zen release) for phones/AMD/Intel. Obviously the future hasn't happened yet, but is that unrealistic if things continue in a similar way to now?