I don't recall any Intel manufacturing facilities in China tbh, and I don't think any of TSMCs facilities are affected either. The coronavirus is likely to affect several supply chains, but I think for most of us, things will be mostly on-track barring the usual delays. Regarding AMD's market position, quite frankly I think they got lucky. Software development has gotten better at using lots of threads, and while gaming is still limited in that regard, professional applications have gone from benefiting significantly to core counts being the deciding factor in how fast an application finishes its task. Major oversimplification of course, but honestly a lot of the stuff involved flies over my head. Software development is about as exciting to me as jurisprudence. So honestly, if it wasn't for advances in semiconductor lithography and software development, AMD would probably be in the same position, market wise, as it was during the Phenom-Phenom II days. Which weren't bad, all things considered. Honestly I still think AMD should've continued developing the K10 Architecture.
I was with you on board until this part. The laptop isn't that lucrative for anyone to be honest, what drives it isn't really margins, but volume. High-end machines are always lucrative and Apple has managed to print money with any product they stick their logo on... but there's a reason why many manufacturers have straight up left the laptop consumer market. The high-end laptop market is becoming extremely competitive, and everything that's not premium is fighting on value, which means less and less profit margins. Sadly, with the vast majority of PC needs increasingly turning to mobile, laptops and mobile processing is increasingly more important to both AMD, Intel, and hardware manufacturers. The difference between 2010 and 2020 in regards to mobile is just massive.
To be honest, I don't think AMD needs to put too many resources into this market, it's not really worth it if you ask me. The margins can be pretty
, and AMD is already limited by wafer capacity. Allocating additional wafers to mobile will mean foregoing more lucrative Epyc and Ryzen parts. They could always buy more wafers from TSMC but why? Epyc and Ryzen area selling like hotcakes already. Honestly, everyone was surprised by AMD's mobile 4000 series announcement, it's not very logical from a business perspective.
I'm hoping to get on Zen 3 platform. I bought a 4790k platform a few years ago and it's served me very very well. I'm hoping I can replicated this with Zen 3.