41–50 of 289 posts
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The worst part of hot-desking in my experience is you always seem to end up next to some guy from marketing who is on their phone all day, and as a result you get absolutely no thinking time.
Same problem comes up with open offices. Some ass from another department constantly talking on the phone 9 to 5. I developed a Pavlovian twitch every time his phone rang.
Oh hey, AVX-512 is finally coming to consumer desktop CPUs... like 6 years after Intel originally was planning?
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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…
> 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. Are you saying that vertically integrated companies are inherently disadvantaged because pure-play companies have a bigger list of orders and can spend more on evolving technology? The…
In the long run Intel screwed themselves over by not leasing out fab time to other companies. They put themselves in a niche in an industry that is naturally dominated by the largest player. And it's extra embarrassing that they did so because they knew very well how important it was to be the biggest--they were for a few decades!
Maybe Intel could have held on longer if they had a successful mobile chip to stuff into billions of smartphones, but their mobile efforts were short lived and seemed to be treated with disdain by the management. The first product kind of sucked and instead of sticking with it and improving they just threw in the towel, both on mobile processor and the baseband chip. An embarrassing misstep for a company as big as Intel.
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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…
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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.
Oh hey, AVX-512 is finally coming to consumer desktop CPUs... like 6 years after Intel originally was planning?
One wonders whether the beating Intel is is taking will lead it forego license-based downclocking with Rocket Lake.
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Giving Jim Keller the boot is probably on Intel's list of regrets.
Chip architecture isn't current Intel's problem, process architecture is. There's some overlap between the 2, but 100% of Intel's current struggles can be chalked up to dysfunction on their process side. Given the lead time of chip arch (2-3 years?), the chip side of the house is arriving at manufacturing start day, and the process and specs they'd been optimizing for just aren't available. Until Intel's process catc…
The process side of this industry is in a really scary spot right now. TSMC is killing it. Nvidia is using Samsung to fab the RTX 3xxx chips, and there's some rumblings that low yields are a reason why those are in such short supply (not to mention, whenever Samsung releases a new phone only some regions get the Exynos chips, because historically they couldn't produce enough of them; Samsung used to have a pretty cool relationship with Qualcomm whereby Snapdragons were fabbed with Samsung, but more recently, they've moved to TSMC).
On the high performance side, everyone is moving to TSMC. If Samsung and Intel's fabs continue to exhibit issues at these smaller process node sizes, the monoculture is only going to get worse. We need Intel to get their act together, not just because it pushes better design innovation from AMD and Nvidia (not that they need it right now), but because their fabs are a critical, independent part of the software supply chain. They're the last western company with any form of high yield fabrication on high performance chips. At this point, we shouldn't just be worried about Intel's bottom line; we need to start being legitimately worried about national security (both in tactile cyber-warfare terms, and also more nebulous economic terms with regard to western manufacturing).
Oh hey, AVX-512 is finally coming to consumer desktop CPUs... like 6 years after Intel originally was planning?
One wonders whether the beating Intel is is taking will lead it forego license-based downclocking with Rocket Lake.
Despite that, it is still probably too late anyways. My industry has moved on to GPUs and FPGAs for real-time compute, but I remember when everyone was waiting for 512 after utilizing AVX-256 for some time. Although the thought of a 64-core threadripper with avx-512 at 5GHz on all cores is appealing.
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…
I don't personally believe that Apple would be going to in-house silicon instead of Intel for its flagship laptops if there were a viable way to avoid doing so. Intel is so hurt right now that I surmise it'd be willing to negotiate a fat discount for a flag-carrying customer, and the loss of Windows functionality is kind of disappointing at the upper end of the market (where some tools are clearly better supported by windows or at least x86).
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…
Doesn't help they switched from large cubes with five-foot high cubicle walls which did a good job on minimizing noise and visual distractions to having cubicle walls with a height of about 3-4 feet high and much smaller. Plus they installed sit-stand desks and you have people stand and make phone calls that can be heard 30 feet away. Doesn't help for concentrating on problems.