Why is it do or die just because they can't make faster CPUs? AMD can't make them either. It's the end of an entire era technologically. We all knew this day would come.It's a hard problem that requires a whole new paradigm probably. Hopefully both AMD and Intel will have enough money to keep doing research by trying and failing with various radical approaches or we may never see faster CPUs again. Why would they need to worry about ARM? That is low power mobile devices, a sector they got out of a while ago.
Because ARM is coming (has come) to the server (eg Ampere, Graviton). x86 was a moat around a server product with high margins. Now they have lost the process lead and there is the possibility of using ARM on the server that business is very vulnerable.
Apple is moving to ARM, and ARM is very much beginning to make inroads in the data center space. ARM is a big threat to x86 (so to both Intel and AMD).
Linpack is the "legacy" benchmark on pure FLOPs throughput. But HPCG is the more realistic benchmark that better tests the interconnects.
HPCG is a sparse-matrix, which more accurately represents many HPC problems. Linpack is a bit of a legacy, but still represents dense-compute pretty well.
Its still a GFLOPs / TFLops style measurement, but HPCG has a LOT more data movement.
