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What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

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Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#71

Post by mobilio »

me_me_me wrote: post #65
gok wrote: post #49

Whining about "MBAs" is almost always technical person speak for general discontent about company direction, often from the non-business parts. You don't see complaints about CEOs of Apple, Google, or Microsoft much, though they all have MBAs.

MBAs improve numbers, engineers create new products. The mentality of MBA crowd is to get the numbers right eat the cake and when things go sideways move on to a new job. Intel is a hardware tech business, its a complicated space that needs deep knowledge to understand it before you shape the future of it. Technical people might not be the only ones that should run business but they should be the core of it. I have s…

Same happens to Boeing.

When they have engineers - we get 737, 747 and many more. when they have MBAs - we get 737-MAX, 787.

Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#72

Post by lokedhs »

gok wrote: post #49

Whining about "MBAs" is almost always technical person speak for general discontent about company direction, often from the non-business parts. You don't see complaints about CEOs of Apple, Google, or Microsoft much, though they all have MBAs.

The issue isn't with MBA's per se. They can certainly be valuable to a company. The problem is when the MBA's control the direction of the company as opposed to advising it.

Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#73

Post by murgindrag »

glangdale wrote: post #28
supernova87a wrote: post #12

This is purely a total outsider's opinion, so I caveat that and please don't get all offended if I'm totally wrong. Sometimes it's really difficult to tell the difference between a crackpot theorist and a good equities analyst. Watching this guy's video, it's hard to tell which he comes off as more. He's just coherent and convincing enough that as an outsider I could believe his collection of observations. But the pr…

Francois is a smart guy, but there's a range of opinions on the matters he raises. We argue a good deal on Twitter ("constructive confrontation" between former Intel Principal Engineers :-) ). He put together the video pretty quickly so don't dismiss it just for lack of polish. Personally, I argue with him a lot on AVX-512. I think AVX-512 is a Good Thing (or will be shortly - the first instantiation in Skylake Serve…

I'm sold, and not sold. Having parsed terabytes of JSON, I was impressed by your work. Regexps and other operations are common-place, and if libraries like yours were in broad use, I could definitely see the appeal.

I'm sold on this as a technical pathway to performance.

Problem is, I do it in Python. I have a hard time laying out the breadcrumbs between simdjson and hyperscan, and practical, general-purpose code running more quickly on Intel CPUs. My code will run faster on AMD CPUs in practice even if, in abstract, given a few extra hours of coding, it could run faster on AVX-512. I'd rather wait a few hours for my computer than port my code to simdjson. I think that's true for 99% of the code out there.

Didn't we go down this path with Pentium IV's deep out-of-order pipeline and Itanium's VLIW before? Where Intel had great theoretical performance, but software didn't keep up?

For this to make a dent, Intel would need to hire a teach of engineers so Firefox and Chrome both took advantage of the new instructions. That's perhaps more practical than in the Itanium and PIV era, but that doesn't mean it will happen.

Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#74

Post by PaulHoule »

bosswipe wrote: post #27

None of that matters as long as Intel can't ship their 10nm and 7nm nodes. This guy doesn't seem to have an opinion on what's wrong at the fabs but that is the big life or death question for Intel right now.

I am glad to hear Intel is dabbling at TMSC (they have a plan B if not an actual business plan) but it is painful to see Intel talking as if nothing was wrong while congressmen are waking up to the reality that we might not be making chips in the us anymore.

And that's what is scary. Intel is failing left and right but the rap track from Intel sounds like an ad for Disneyland.

Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#75

Post by jasonzemos »

glangdale wrote: post #28
supernova87a wrote: post #12

This is purely a total outsider's opinion, so I caveat that and please don't get all offended if I'm totally wrong. Sometimes it's really difficult to tell the difference between a crackpot theorist and a good equities analyst. Watching this guy's video, it's hard to tell which he comes off as more. He's just coherent and convincing enough that as an outsider I could believe his collection of observations. But the pr…

Francois is a smart guy, but there's a range of opinions on the matters he raises. We argue a good deal on Twitter ("constructive confrontation" between former Intel Principal Engineers :-) ). He put together the video pretty quickly so don't dismiss it just for lack of polish. Personally, I argue with him a lot on AVX-512. I think AVX-512 is a Good Thing (or will be shortly - the first instantiation in Skylake Serve…

> AVX2 had downclocking issues when it first appeared too - but these were rapidly mitigated and forgotten.

Speaking of Daniel Lemire, he recently published a paper https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.05109 mentioning downclocking in section 4:

> On some Intel processors, AVX-512 instructions are subject to downclocking: whenever AVX-512 instructions are executed, the processor lowers its frequency. We do not observe any downclocking on our processor, nor did we find any Intel documentation referencing downclocking for this processor. To test for downclocking, we used the avx-turbo benchmarking tool: it reports the processor frequency after issuing long sequences of expensive instructions of various types,including AVX-512 multiplication and floating-point instructions.

Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#76

Post by me_me_me »

mobilio wrote: post #71
me_me_me wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MBAs improve numbers, engineers create new products. The mentality of MBA crowd is to get the numbers right eat the cake and when things go sideways move on to a new job. Intel is a hardware tech business, its a complicated space that needs deep knowledge to understand it before you shape the future of it. Technical people might not be the only ones that should run business but they should be the core of it. I have s…

Same happens to Boeing. When they have engineers - we get 737, 747 and many more. when they have MBAs - we get 737-MAX, 787.

Thats a great direct example of the thought process. We will save x% by doing workarounds and call it MAX instead of biting the bullet spending money and creating next iconic plane design.

Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#77

Post by mobilio »

me_me_me wrote: post #76
mobilio wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same happens to Boeing. When they have engineers - we get 737, 747 and many more. when they have MBAs - we get 737-MAX, 787.

Thats a great direct example of the thought process. We will save x% by doing workarounds and call it MAX instead of biting the bullet spending money and creating next iconic plane design.

787 is another great example because EVERYTHING is outsourced to other companies.

As result - when things (elements) are trying to getting work together they fail spectacular.

Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#78

Post by magicalhippo »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #39
ben-schaaf wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But poor single-threaded performance doesn't imply that the core is sitting idle. It may well be running as fast as it possibly can and using all the shared components of SMT leaving nothing for the other thread to use. In the same way the single-core performance may be really good yet everything shared by SMT is still only utilized to half its potential so the 2nd thread runs almost as fast as the first.

Yes. I think the point of the article was more that people don't understand where HT/virtual SMT gets its speedup from.

From the very start I've always heard HT being good for memory-bound applications. That's how it was explained and marketed.

Some years ago I worked on such an application, and we got a ~80% speed increase going from 4 threads to 8 threads on a 4-core with HT enabled. I wouldn't expect compute-bound applications to get anywhere near such gains.

Makes me wonder where those with a misconception got it from.

Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#79

Post by danpalmer »

lokedhs wrote: post #72
gok wrote: post #49

Whining about "MBAs" is almost always technical person speak for general discontent about company direction, often from the non-business parts. You don't see complaints about CEOs of Apple, Google, or Microsoft much, though they all have MBAs.

The issue isn't with MBA's per se. They can certainly be valuable to a company. The problem is when the MBA's control the direction of the company as opposed to advising it.

I think it's even more than that, it's when MBA believe that a company can do well by just being "good at business", rather than good at what their business actually does.

Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#80

Post by lars »

gok wrote: post #49

Whining about "MBAs" is almost always technical person speak for general discontent about company direction, often from the non-business parts. You don't see complaints about CEOs of Apple, Google, or Microsoft much, though they all have MBAs.

The problem isn't having an MBA though is it, it's (allegedly) not being competent enough in engineering. All the CEOs you mentioned have engineering degrees, while Intel's CEO does not.
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