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Intel’s palpable desperation on display with Rocket Lake

semiaccurate.com

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Re: Intel’s palpable desperation on display with Rocket Lake

#21

Post by rwmj »

eropple wrote: post #6
HelloNurse wrote: post #2

An unusually unfavourable article, even by the standards of semiaccurate.com. Can this new processor family be interpreted as something less terrible than "palpable desperation" and effectively giving up on the 10nm process? For example, prices might be aggressively low.

This is one of the more oddly axe-grindy articles I've seen in a while. Poorly edited English and writing what feels like angrily about some pieces of silicon--is this just the house style for this site? Maybe somebody can provide some context.

S|A is known for these ranty opinion articles - and dislike of Intel. On the other hand they do seem to have access to a lot of industry insiders and break important stories all the time.

Re: Intel’s palpable desperation on display with Rocket Lake

#22

Post by ckemere »

DylanBohlender wrote: post #7
nxc18 wrote: post #4

Is there good coverage of how Intel became so uncompetitive? My instinct is to say this is just the natural result of the presence of MBAs who are trained to focus _exclusively_ on this quarter's results so ignore R&D investment and also shit on employees by doing gimmicks like hotdesking to pinch pennies. I'm willing to bet my intuition is wrong, especially given my extremely deep bias against MBAs and 'this quarter…

Here are a couple good articles explaining it. https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/227720-how-intel-lost-10... https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-manufacturers/intel/28919... The TL;DR is that Intel has always been a vertically integrated shop (meaning that they usually fab and design their own chips), and that is starting to bite them because pure-play foundries are improving their tech at a faster rate. Intel has b…

Just skimming the first article, the TL;DR that I took away is that TSMC can get revenue from their old foundry nodes for much longer than Intel can. So the issue is not how fast TSMC improves, but more that Intel has to invest proportionally much more to keep up.

Re: Intel’s palpable desperation on display with Rocket Lake

#23

Post by phkahler »

henriquez wrote: post #5

My main question would be why Intel would even bother releasing Rocket Lake if, balancing between higher IPC and lower clocks, the performance would be _lower_ than the 10 series chips. So I disagree with the article that this will be an unqualified disaster. It's quite likely that they will be a little faster, at least core for core. But it also seems like these are notebook chips hacked into a desktop socket and li…

>> My main question would be why Intel would even bother releasing Rocket Lake...

Pure speculation, but maybe someone's bonus depended on delivering and this technically satisfies the requirement. It's not designs problem fab can't deliver the right node.

Re: Intel’s palpable desperation on display with Rocket Lake

#24

Post by [deleted] »

bnt wrote: post #10
eropple wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the more oddly axe-grindy articles I've seen in a while. Poorly edited English and writing what feels like angrily about some pieces of silicon--is this just the house style for this site? Maybe somebody can provide some context.

Why does “poorly edited English” matter when the content seems to be on point? Not everyone on the Internet is a “native” English speaker. Content matters, not who and how they wrote it.

[deleted]

Re: Intel’s palpable desperation on display with Rocket Lake

#25

Post by spaetzleesser »

nxc18 wrote: post #12
jjtheblunt wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hotdesking?

Several of the engineers I worked with a few years ago left Intel (for the company I work at) after they switched to hotdesking to save money on facilities. Basically the concept was instead of engineers having an assigned office or desk, the office would have a large field of unassigned desks and generic equipment. Every day you would come in, reserve a desk, take any belongings from a locker, and set up shop. At th…

That’s the ultimate sign of disrespect for workers as human beings. Cubes and open office are bad enough but hotdesking is the next step.

I would be miserable in such an environment. I need my keyboard and screens in a certain layout. Books need to be in a certain place. If that was taken away from me I don’t think I could live with that.

Re: Intel’s palpable desperation on display with Rocket Lake

#26

Post by spaetzleesser »

dporter wrote: post #15
jjtheblunt wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hotdesking?

Treating desks like hotel rooms instead of apartments. Instead of having one desk that is "yours," you get assigned to any available desk every day. It seems like a terrible way to work, but it cuts down on the overall number of desks needed since large offices will never have 100% attendance.

That may work for people who constantly move around like sales people or managers. Interestingly managers keep their offices even though they rarely use them. For people like engineers i think it’s super important to have a steady work environment.

Re: Intel’s palpable desperation on display with Rocket Lake

#27

Post by dragontamer »

exmadscientist wrote: post #18
eropple wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the more oddly axe-grindy articles I've seen in a while. Poorly edited English and writing what feels like angrily about some pieces of silicon--is this just the house style for this site? Maybe somebody can provide some context.

Yes, this is Charlie's house style and has been for ages. He's always hyperbolic and his tone always favors some companies over others. Everything's either the best or the worst (usually the worst), and so on. It's pretty much exactly like reading a tabloid. The counterbalance is that he's got one of the absolute best networks of moles in Silicon Valley and always seems to know things, often big things, before anyone…

I was curious and peaked behind the paywall years ago, when the PS4 / XBox One stuff was leaking. Charlie did good: he knew details of those systems a year in advance.

He's ranty and very aggressive with his writing. His best stuff is kept behind the paywall. It wasn't really worth the money to me (and I only subscribed once as a curiosity). But those "moles" he talks about are clearly the real deal.

Re: Intel’s palpable desperation on display with Rocket Lake

#29

Post by ChuckMcM »

henriquez wrote: post #5

My main question would be why Intel would even bother releasing Rocket Lake if, balancing between higher IPC and lower clocks, the performance would be _lower_ than the 10 series chips. So I disagree with the article that this will be an unqualified disaster. It's quite likely that they will be a little faster, at least core for core. But it also seems like these are notebook chips hacked into a desktop socket and li…

You ask: "Why Intel would even bother releasing Rocket Lake if, balancing between higher IPC and lower clocks, the performance would be _lower_ than the 10 series chips?"

My understanding from the article is that the answer to that question is that Intel is unable to produce any quantity of chips at 10nm that makes (enough) money. The author surmises that rather than go a year with AMD essentially unchallenged in the market, Intel back ported a 10nm chip to a process that they have better margins on 14nm, so that they could tout "improvements" on an architectural basis while skipping over the question of improvements on a system basis.

For me, what is most telling is the 500 series chip set which seems uncharacteristic.

From a purely speculative point of view (that is code for pulling a wild ass guess out of my butt here) I could see this as having been the design they had done for Apple's next generation Macbooks before they lost to Apples' A14x chip. The factors that lead me to that guess are that it really looks like a 'point' product (specific changes, not a general set of family changes) to me that doesn't fit into thee PC ecosystem as well as other chip introductions (like IceLake) did with respect to their overall roadmap.

Re: Intel’s palpable desperation on display with Rocket Lake

#30

Post by muro »

drewg123 wrote: post #8
henriquez wrote: post #5

My main question would be why Intel would even bother releasing Rocket Lake if, balancing between higher IPC and lower clocks, the performance would be _lower_ than the 10 series chips. So I disagree with the article that this will be an unqualified disaster. It's quite likely that they will be a little faster, at least core for core. But it also seems like these are notebook chips hacked into a desktop socket and li…

I think one reason is that they need to release a desktop CPU with PCIe Gen4. And if they can't do it in 10nm, they have to backport it to 14nm just to stay competitive. Amd has had Gen4 out in desktop CPUs for over a year now.

They don't need to release one at all. They can skip PCIe 4 completely and go to 5. Their roadmap lists Sapphire Rapids in about a year (so in about 3 years on calendars everyone else uses).
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