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Intel’s palpable desperation on display with Rocket Lake

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

#81

Post by nurspouse »

spaetzleesser wrote: post #25
nxc18 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Cubes and open office are bad enough but hotdesking is the next step.

It's not that simple. I worked with hotdesking at Intel. Those workstations, although still small, were bigger than the (assigned) ones I saw at Google and Facebook when I interviewed there, and Intel's one offered more privacy. Visiting those companies for an interview was depressing - finding out your crappy cube at Intel was still better than the ones at FAANG. Surreal.

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

#82

Post by Teever »

dragontamer wrote: post #32
ckemere wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Note: the I/O chip on AMD Zen 2 / Zen 3 is a 14nm GloFo chip. Only the CPU-cores ("Zepplin" maybe, or whatever they call them now) are 7nm TSMC. So AMD's strategy also leads to lower fabrication costs: because they can make a far cheaper 14nm chip to handle the slower portions of I/O (talking to RAM, or PCIe), while the expensive 7nm parts of TSMC are used only for the cores / L1 cache / L2 cache / L3 cache.

Is there any indication that Intel will move to this chiplet design? It seems like it's a no brainer and it's been proven to work by AMD.

What's keeping Intel from adopting this same practice? is it IP?

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

#83

Post by dragontamer »

Teever wrote: post #82
dragontamer wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note: the I/O chip on AMD Zen 2 / Zen 3 is a 14nm GloFo chip. Only the CPU-cores ("Zepplin" maybe, or whatever they call them now) are 7nm TSMC. So AMD's strategy also leads to lower fabrication costs: because they can make a far cheaper 14nm chip to handle the slower portions of I/O (talking to RAM, or PCIe), while the expensive 7nm parts of TSMC are used only for the cores / L1 cache / L2 cache / L3 cache.

Is there any indication that Intel will move to this chiplet design? It seems like it's a no brainer and it's been proven to work by AMD. What's keeping Intel from adopting this same practice? is it IP?

Intel has a competitor to chiplets, called EMIB, based off its Altera purchase. EMIB is pretty cool, but has only been deployed in a small number of situations so far (There was a Xeon + FPGA chip Intel made. There was the hybrid Intel+AMD chip, and finally the new big.LITTLE clone chip that Intel merged an Icelake + Atom core together). I don't know why Intel hasn't invested more heavily into EMIB, Foveros, and other advanced-packaging technologies... but Intel is clearly working on it.

Intel can do it, they just haven't decided to do so yet. They have the tech for sure.

Its simply a matter of priorities. Its not so much that Intel "isn't" investing into it, its arguable that Intel just hasn't invested "enough" into it.

AMD went all in: they literally bet their entire company on advanced-packaging, with AMD GPUs using an active interposer with HBM2, and now Zen-chips taking a chiplet strategy. And to be fair: AMD had to do something drastic to turn the tide.

We're just at a point where AMD is finally reaping the benefits of a decision they made years ago.

--------

If I were to take a guess: Intel was too confident that they could solve 10nm / 7nm (or more specifically: EUV and/or quad patterning), which would have negated the need for advanced packaging.

AMD on the other hand, is fabless. They based their designs off of what TSMC was already delivering to Apple. Since TSMC leapfrogged Intel in technology, AMD can now benefit from TSMC (indirectly benefiting from from Apple's investments).

Intel's failure bubbled up from the fab level: Without 10nm chips, Intel was unable to keep up with TSMC's performance, and now AMD is advancing.

----

AMD's strategy just works really well for AMD. AMD is forced to keep buying chips from GloFo (which are limited to 14nm or 12nm designs). All of AMD's decisions just lined up marvelously: they fixed a lot of issues with their company by just properly making the right decisions in a lot of little, detailed ways. A happy marriage of tech + business decisions. I dunno if they can keep doing that, it almost feels lucky to me. But they're benefiting for sure.

AMD took something that seemed like a downside (the forced purchase of 12nm or 14nm chips, even when 7nm was available), and turned it into a benefit.

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

#84

Post by Nokinside »

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…

Let's not forget that four companies entered this latest race in process node tech and two failed. Intel's 10nm and GlobalFoundries 7nm.

This is high risk business. Unseen problems that come after pathfinding when big choices have been made may kill the success.

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

#85

Post by rossdavidh »

api wrote: post #39

The US needs to do whatever it takes to get TSMC to build not only top-tier fabs but centers of excellence here. As it stands TSMC on Taiwan, which is threatened by China, has damn near a monopoly on competitive fabrication. A single hit on Taiwan could terminally stall the entire global supply chain for top-tier chips.

Well Samsung has quite a bit of top-notch fabrication, in South Korea and elsewhere. Not that what you're suggesting wouldn't still be a good idea.

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

#86

Post by eropple »

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.

Doesn't matter how good somebody's points are when they metaphorically walk up to you half-dressed and screaming.

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

#87

Post by vbezhenar »

ogre_codes wrote: post #53

This is just bad all around. Not just for intel, but for the entire industry. I always prefer companies doing well because their products are successful, not because their competitors fall down. More and more, Apple's timing on their switch to in-house ARM designs seems perfectly timed.

Apple should have switched to AMD instead. They would have almost perfect compatibility with Intel hardware and they would not need investing lots of money to develop chips.

Now they either need to halt some Mac lines or develop all kinds of CPUs, from mobile (which they probably can do, because they should be similar enough to iPhones) to server-grade (which they have no experience at all). And there's no way Mac Pros would sell enough to offset development costs. I just don't understand how they are going to manage that situation.

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

#88

Post by varispeed »

It seems like Intel wasted at least 5 years. They thought they are invincible and competition will never catch up, plus they thought if they change the model name and repackage to a new socket, people will still buy it. They however didn't consider the fact that people bought these processors, because there was nothing else and also new people are becoming teens and adults and they need computers as well. Maybe they also counted on brand loyalty? I think brand loyalty ends when you need to waste your time waiting for a task to complete. I am so happy to pre-order 5950X. I will also buy new Threadripper when it gets released.

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

#89

Post by varispeed »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #29
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…

Why Intel couldn't rent TMSC facility to produce their processors? Too proud?

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

#90

Post by mattlondon »

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…

Maybe just hubris and greed?

Seems like there were years when intel did not have much competition from AMD. Each year the "big news" from intel was their their Celeron/Pentium/iX/whatever was now up to 100MHz faster than last year's (during limited situations where temperatures allow blah blah blah). Or they add some new strange trademarked exotic-sounding technology brand name each year like "The new Intel Celeron/Pentium/iX with..." "Intel MaxT"/"Intel TruEvo/"Intel Cartara"/"Intel Artuga Plus"/"Intel Versuvia"/"Intel Centurior Max"/"Intel T-Xe" that no one really understands but is basically some sort of mundane enterprise feature no one actually cares about that does something for remote wifi management

Quick - rush to the store to get a new laptop!!! I totally need an extra 100MHz single-core maximum boost on a 4-core 2Ghz CPU (i.e. 5% max...) with Intel TruStep MagrittePro (TM) technology that does something to the colour gamut of my monitor in certain content creation scenarios.

It strikes me that Intel have been caught napping and resting on their laurels. AMD appear to have come out with a great competitive product and Intel don't seem to have anything to compete with it with because they've been milking the market for the past 5+ years with tiny incremental clock increases and nothing actually "new".

They've allowed AMD to eat their lunch.

Maybe they've got a "real" new product they've been keeping in reserve that they'll bring to market now and surprise everyone with. Maybe they'll bring out something amazing next year. Who knows. Maybe. Maybe not. Seems like they've blown their lead for now regardless.

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