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Andy Grove has died

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Re: Andy Grove has died

#151

Post by Grishnakh »

p4wnc6 wrote: post #144
Grishnakh wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing the point with Bloomberg. The whole idea with that place is that they don't like offices: they don't want anyone to have one because they think offices are a bad thing . They think people work better in one big giant, open, noisy room. A bunch of companies these days have bought into this philosophy, and a bunch of young hipsters think it's great. So Blooomberg hasn't eliminated offices to try…

I agree with your description of Bloomberg's beliefs and motivation for it, and I agree that many other organizations, especially start-ups, cargo cult on the back of this. Since the belief that offices are bad in terms of cost or productivity (e.g. Bloomberg's belief that people work better in noisy, open spaces) is demonstrably and quantitatively incorrect, and inflicts undeniable mental and physical health problem…

There's a problem with your analysis: you're assuming that people are all the same, and that work is all the same. Do you have any evidence to support your assertion that noisy, open spaces inflict "undeniable mental and physical health problems", or is that just your personal belief? This isn't like smoking: there is zero evidence that smoking is good for your health, and all kinds of evidence that it causes health problems, because our shared basic biology is consistent enough that this is true.

For one example of a work environment where noisy, open spaces seem to work well, just look at stock traders at NYSE on the trading floor. That whole environment works by people being close to each other and able to turn around and talk to each other at a moment's notice. I sure as hell wouldn't want to work there, but there are people who seem to like that environment.

I don't like open-plan offices either, but I'm not going to assume that what works for me works for everyone else. From what I've seen, the type of people getting involved in programming in recent years are not the same type of people who got involved in it back in the 70s and 80s, so it's quite possible these offices really do improve productivity overall. It's also possible that certain personality types gravitate toward certain industries, so certain workplaces work better in those industries than in others. The people interested in finance are probably not the same kind of people interested in, say, programming Arduinos. Maybe Bloomberg's office really does work out well for them. I don't have any data to disprove their beliefs, other than my own personal bias, but I can't claim to speak for all programmers.

Re: Andy Grove has died

#153

Post by astrodust »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #104
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…

"They didn't have it easy like Microsoft did where they were virtually the only game in town. They almost lost their position to AMD on more than one occasion, and were under constant pressure from Motorola, IBM, Sun, MIPS, DEC, and others all intent on capturing a dominant position in the highly lucrative desktop and server markets." You're way overstating that. You're whole post, but especially that one, totally ig…

Intel didn't have as many protections as Microsoft did. The attempts to clone Windows, such as the efforts of companies like Parallels and WINE, never came close to being 100% compatible.

AMD managed to navigate a patent minefield and ended up with a 32-bit compatible chip that was basically a drop-in replacement, the user would barely notice the difference unless they went looking for one. The Athlon XP became a serious competitor to Intel's then flagship Pentium series. AMD was also the first to come up with a workable 64-bit IA instruction set that Intel was later forced to adopt because of widespread popularity.

Microsoft has never faced pressures like that. Windows is not something you can simply swap out. Switching from Intel to AMD was simple, your software would hardly notice, but from Windows to another OS has always been a massive headache.

Re: Andy Grove has died

#154

Post by astrodust »

cperciva wrote: post #89
astrodust wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Technically the Pentium III is just a cleaned up and polished Pentium Pro, it's true. That basic design had a very long run, and is still going if you're going to include products like the Xeon Phi as a direct derivative.

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/xeon/xeon-...

I wouldn't call it dead yet. It's still paying dividends.

Re: Andy Grove has died

#155

Post by dang »

wtbob wrote: post #128

He was a refugee from Communist and Nazi oppression; he was neither a Communist nor a Nazi. That's a big difference from a typical Syrian refugee, who is fleeing Islamic violence but still believes in Islam (and thus its exhortations to violence). I'm only posting this to note that the situations aren't as parallel as you posit; this posting about the death of Andy Grove is not the right place to discuss the refugee…

> believes in Islam (and thus its exhortations to violence).

Religious flamewars are not welcome on Hacker News. Please don't comment like this again.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11335414 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Andy Grove has died

#157

Post by cperciva »

astrodust wrote: post #154
cperciva wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Technically the Pentium III is just a cleaned up and polished Pentium Pro, it's true. That basic design had a very long run, and is still going if you're going to include products like the Xeon Phi as a direct derivative. http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/xeon/xeon-... I wouldn't call it dead yet. It's still paying dividends.

Right, I didn't mean to imply that the P6 design was dead. Just that once Nehalem launched in 2008 Intel had another alternative. From 1998 until 2008, the P6 was basically the only workable design Intel had available.

Re: Andy Grove has died

#158

Post by wtbob »

dang wrote: post #155
wtbob wrote: post #128

He was a refugee from Communist and Nazi oppression; he was neither a Communist nor a Nazi. That's a big difference from a typical Syrian refugee, who is fleeing Islamic violence but still believes in Islam (and thus its exhortations to violence). I'm only posting this to note that the situations aren't as parallel as you posit; this posting about the death of Andy Grove is not the right place to discuss the refugee…

> believes in Islam (and thus its exhortations to violence). Religious flamewars are not welcome on Hacker News. Please don't comment like this again. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11335414 and marked it off-topic.

> Religious flamewars are not welcome on Hacker News.

I respectfully disagree that my response was in any way a 'religious flamewar,' or an invitation to one, but I won't say any more out of respect for the Mr. Grove's passing.

Re: Andy Grove has died

#159

Post by jclulow »

yuhong wrote: post #57
jclulow wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine we would have ended up with even more Smart Array RAID controllers; a truly terrifying dystopian vision.

Unlikely in desktop PCs.

Compaq also made x86 server equipment, which is one of the reasons they were assimilated by Hewlett Packard. Compaq developed the initial versions of the Smart Array RAID controllers, and were working with Intel (amongst others) on the thankfully defunct Intelligent I/O Architecture (I2O) on which the Smart Arrays appear to have been based.

Re: Andy Grove has died

#160

Post by tw04 »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #149
_yosefk wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone else (ARM etc.) has a monopoly on the ISA or they don't even publish it (NVIDIA etc.) Intel actually makes perhaps the most open commercially significant platform.

That's far from true. We've been able to license ARM and MIPS ISA's plus implementations for a long time. They and Intel defend theirs with patents. SPARC, the most open of old ones, could be used without license fees or patent risk at all. You just had to make it ISA compatible then pay a $99 fee. Gaisler has a SPARC CPU and pile of SOC HW under GPL that ASIC proven even on radhard, space applications. Enterprise ve…

POWER is FAR more open than Intel. You can actively license it just the same as ARM (not to say the licensing terms are the same, but the concept is).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenPOWER_Foundation

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