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Andy Grove has died

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Re: Andy Grove has died

#81

Post by jmspring »

setpatchaddress wrote: post #72
jmspring wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was much fan fare over all the technology Bill Gates put into his house. It was interesting to read, especially in the context of home automation these days. I worked with people who helped Jim Clark with some of his home automation in the early/mid 2000s. My point in general was I think the Silicon Valley elders of old, Grove, Moore, Packards (I know multiple individuals who benefitted from the Packard Childre…

I think this is viewing the past with rose-tinted glasses. I recall the same exact complaints being leveled at the 1980's tech generation.

I'm being selective about comparisons, but it's a matter or proportion, and things then were way more subdued.

Ellison, Jobs (mainly on the woodside mansion and not being charity oriented), Clark, etc certainly contrast with those I mentioned.

I think 80s-90s had seriously strong personalities emerge that get to the core of what you mention. Yet around that was much more down to earth philanthropy, etc.

I don't see that same balance today.

Re: Andy Grove has died

#82

Post by hodgesrm »

I'm so sorry to read that Andy Grove has passed away. He was an inspiration at many levels. In addition to his technical and social accomplishments he was a living argument for free immigration into the United States. My deepest respect and condolences to his family.

Re: Andy Grove has died

#83

Post by cweiss »

jmspring wrote: post #50
gogopuppygogo wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gates also is known for having built a home that stood out. It's not about the era its about the person.

There was much fan fare over all the technology Bill Gates put into his house. It was interesting to read, especially in the context of home automation these days. I worked with people who helped Jim Clark with some of his home automation in the early/mid 2000s. My point in general was I think the Silicon Valley elders of old, Grove, Moore, Packards (I know multiple individuals who benefitted from the Packard Childre…

>My point in general was I think the Silicon Valley elders of old, Grove, Moore, Packards (I know multiple individuals who benefitted from the Packard Children's fund w/ pre-mes. (sp?), etc. were much more community and outward focused than that which we see today.

That is a fascinating observation. I was alive and in the biz back then, but I've burned an awful lot of brain cells between then and now and don't have a particularly objectiv eview of things.

Why do you think folks then were outward focused? Was there less competition so more focus on "doing something really cool", or leftover 60's 'free love' culture, or less shitty traffic in Silicon Valley, or...?

Re: Andy Grove has died

#84

Post by guessmyname »

dang wrote: post #38
p4wnc6 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paul Graham expressed this much more strongly than I have, and he wrote about it over 10 years ago: "After software, the most important tool to a hacker is probably his office. Big companies think the function of office space is to express rank. But hackers use their offices for more than that: they use their office as a place to think in. And if you're a technology company, their thoughts are your product. So making…

Please stop.

Why don't you delete the parent comment?

Re: Andy Grove has died

#85

Post by astrodust »

ghaff wrote: post #69
astrodust wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The effect of Grove's talent was only made obvious when he retired and the company started to drift seriously sideways with their forays into VLIW and stupidly deep instruction pipelines. His ability to steer a company through what was perpetual chaos against relentless competitors is almost unparalleled. They didn't have it easy like Microsoft did where they were virtually the only game in town. They almost lost the…

>The effect of Grove's talent was only made obvious when he retired and the company started to drift seriously sideways with their forays into VLIW and stupidly deep instruction pipelines. Not to take anything away from Grove, but a lot of the focus on deep instruction pipelines can probably be traced to certain software partners being concerned about scaling across multi-core. As for VLIW/Itanium, I expect some of t…

I'm sure they had the right ideas, but they strayed way too far from the fundamentals.

Remember that in Grove's time Intel was getting clobbered in benchmarks by the DEC Alpha chip and was struggling to keep up with the PowerPC consortium. It was through their relentless pursuit of clock-speed at any cost that they prevailed.

Unfortunately they slammed into the 4GHz barrier earlier and harder than the competition and went into a spiral of confusion for nearly half a decade. Adding more and more stages to their pipelines was the primary strategy for pushing higher and higher clockspeeds.

What saved them in the end was the very pragmatic and practical Pentium III platform, the one introduced a few years before Grove retired, not the outlandish and massively power hungry Pentium 4 architecture.

Grove did seem to keep the company focused on relentless incremental improvement. This is in stark contrast to the later Intel which showed unbelievable hubris with their VLIW effort thinking that people would spontaneously adopt a whole new architecture just because. Maybe they listened to their partner HP way too much as that company is quite clearly utterly clueless.

Re: Andy Grove has died

#86

Post by ww520 »

Sorry to hear his passing away. He was an icon in the valley. Intel won't be where it is today without him. He was one of those who brought on the PC revolution.

Re: Andy Grove has died

#87

Post by cb18 »

He was also a Jew. As in the Jews that are well known for prodigious scientific, economic, musical, etc. etc. output.

Hardly a Syrian, or Iraqi, or Afghani, or some other adherent to a hostile, violent, and regressive ideology[0]. Not everything is an equivalency just because you want the world to be as such.

Worth noting in today's political climate.

[0] Not that all Syrians, Iraqis, or Afghanis are.

Edit: Ok, what is "triggering" you drive-by down voters. If you disagree with the facts, and can formulate that disagreement into coherent statements, that would probably be better for both your mental state and the world, than drive-by downvotes.

Edit, Edit: Upon further reflection of the above edit, as the more studious among you may have observed, a coherent disagreement with facts is more or less a logical impossibility.

So I guess what I'm asking is that if the above statements so trigger you as to garner your downvote, maybe a reappraisal of your worldview is in order. Or maybe more productive than downvoting would be if you could formulate in words what exactly about the above makes you uncomfortable.

Re: Andy Grove has died

#88

Post by jldugger »

samstave wrote: post #68
cant_kant wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Maybe it was just a different time." Ellison's 200 million dollar house set on 23 acres, suggests that selective memory might be playing a role.

Hah yeah my buddy David who built his yachts said to me that Ellison decided that his $220mm yacht wasn't big enough, so he wanted to sell it for a $400mm yacht... Now he has a 600mm fucking island of the STATE of Hawaii!!

One must not throw around the term 'volcano lair' loosely, and yet...

Re: Andy Grove has died

#89

Post by cperciva »

astrodust wrote: post #85
ghaff wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The effect of Grove's talent was only made obvious when he retired and the company started to drift seriously sideways with their forays into VLIW and stupidly deep instruction pipelines. Not to take anything away from Grove, but a lot of the focus on deep instruction pipelines can probably be traced to certain software partners being concerned about scaling across multi-core. As for VLIW/Itanium, I expect some of t…

I'm sure they had the right ideas, but they strayed way too far from the fundamentals. Remember that in Grove's time Intel was getting clobbered in benchmarks by the DEC Alpha chip and was struggling to keep up with the PowerPC consortium. It was through their relentless pursuit of clock-speed at any cost that they prevailed. Unfortunately they slammed into the 4GHz barrier earlier and harder than the competition and…

the very pragmatic and practical Pentium III platform

You mean the Pentium Pro platform? Pentium III is just Pentium Pro with off-package L2 cache and SSE instructions. The P6 microarchitecture kept Intel in business from 1998 (when the P5 line concluded) until the Nehalem architecture launched in 2008.

Re: Andy Grove has died

#90

Post by flashman »

cb18 wrote: post #87

He was also a Jew. As in the Jews that are well known for prodigious scientific, economic, musical, etc. etc. output. Hardly a Syrian, or Iraqi, or Afghani, or some other adherent to a hostile, violent, and regressive ideology[0]. Not everything is an equivalency just because you want the world to be as such. Worth noting in today's political climate. [0] Not that all Syrians, Iraqis, or Afghanis are. Edit: Ok, what…

This is such a strange comment, but I'm finding it hard to put my finger on exactly why. It's something to do with how you're happy to make generalisations about Jews, but careful in how you demonise Syrians, Iraqis and Afghans.
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