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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

#151

Post by ndesaulniers »

usrusr wrote: post #131
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…

Don't look for a change: their position was worse in the days of the Netburst dead-end and back then the company was just lucky that a second, independent path had been followed in the Haifa office to target a niche market (yes, laptops were niche in that age). So has there been organizational dysfunction for decades? I think not: there are things Intel has always been doing very well and post-Netburst improvements a…

> whatever forgettable AMD had been building between the Athlon glory days and those of Ryzen

Phenom II! I had six cores, 7 years ago! They were dog slow, but there were six of them (and that's all I could afford).

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

#152

Post by ekianjo »

dweekly wrote: post #114
graton wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they have lost a lot of their best employees because their pay is not that great. They aimed for paying at the 50th percentile in wages and the top companies come in and can offer double or more their current pay. 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…

Pay at Intel is about half of FAANG, can confirm. They seem weirdly proud of this and then weirdly confused and disappointed when great people leave.

Is that different at AMD?

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

#153

Post by ekianjo »

baloney1 wrote: post #126
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…

The CEO is, literally, one of these MBA types and he has recursively applied this thinking throughout the whole organization.

Most CEO are MBAs.

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

#154

Post by intelisdead »

Here are benchmarks of the top processors from each competitor:

Single Core:

AMD 5900X - 3643 points (+15% faster)

Intel 10900K - 3178 points

Multicore

AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 3995WX - 88673 points (+130% faster)

Intel Xeon Gold 6248R @ 3.00GHz - 38521 points

By the way, 5900X is not only faster than 10900K, but also consumes less power.

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

#155

Post by mark-r »

userbinator wrote: post #141
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…

At the end of the day, you would tear down, lock up, and leave. ...so you would never be able to have a computer on for more than the length of your workday? That sounds insane --- I could never get any real work done that way, because so much time would be spent on "restoring state" to the way it was at the end of the previous day. I wouldn't call that efficient at all.

Efficiency is your problem, not that of the office designer. If they can show that they've squeezed 20% more people into the same number of square feet, they're golden.

Laptops can be suspended rather than shut down, so maybe they're counting on that as the solution.

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

#156

Post by mark-r »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #31
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…

Trying to save money that way always makes me shake my head. Seriously what does 100 sqft of office space cost? $200/month? Maybe $300 when you include common space? So $3600/year. Or 3% of your engineers salary? Doesn't take a very big hit in productivity to erase any savings many times over.

The savings in office cost are measurable, the lost productivity is not.

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

#157

Post by amelius »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #76
graton wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they have lost a lot of their best employees because their pay is not that great. They aimed for paying at the 50th percentile in wages and the top companies come in and can offer double or more their current pay. 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…

Yes on both counts. I was contacted a couple years back about a machine learning contracting gig. When I asked what the hourly rate was the recruiter said $45/hour. I laughed and said that the going rate for that kind of skill set is like $120+/hour. That has not been an isolated incident.

$120 is about a third of what my accountant charges per hour.

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

#158

Post by microtherion »

mark-r wrote: post #150
m_mueller wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The examples you cite are people with operational excellence that were built up internally over many years. As an outsider I have no trust that Intel still has such talent, it seems they are fully run by bean counters now. Who says it's a Microsoft and not a Kodak? Microsoft had the immeasurable advantage of two big markets cornered for themselves: enterprise software and home computers software. Intel meanwhile is a…

Kodak gets unfairly picked on. They built their business by taking a cut from every single picture taken. There was nothing in the digital camera model that could replicate that revenue stream.

Except that the digital camera was literally invented at Kodak! What if they had pivoted to building cameras themselves?

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

#159

Post by temac »

noch wrote: post #34
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…

> Is there good coverage of how Intel became so uncompetitive? François Piednoël, performance architect at Intel for 20 years, recently gave a presentation that covers a lot of the reasons behind Intel's decline in his presentation "How to Fix Intel" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiKjzeLco6c

I think he is a little overrated, and the only reason he is that much known is because it is actually rare to see former Intel engineers opening a Youtube channel with some Intel content. His take about how to fix Spectre made completely no sense to me, so either I missed something, or he is actually lacking on some technical subjects...

Anyway still some interesting insight about what he saw happened there.

The situation can be explained in a very boring way in any case. You had the tick-tock cycle, then Intel 10nm was broken, but they thought not anything they could not fix with one more year of process debugging, maybe 2 worst case. And they had so much advance that they could even have tolerated 3. Except 10nm basically never worked. And the new microarchitectures were designed for it... They switched to thinking what to do with 14+++++++++ far too late, and even then I admit the result is suboptimal.

SemiAccurate is... let's say very very opiniated (as usual), to be polite, and I don't think Rocket Lake will be that much a disaster, but also yes Zen 3 is solid, although not that much magical and a bit overpriced for now (but I'm sure AMD will be able to adjust if really needed)

The final thing is: Intel had really an insane advance, and medium/high core count is not that much required right now in volume for consumers. I'm not sure about the situation in datacenters, could be more of a problem for Intel. But Intel has a level of market addressing that is insane and far above AMD. So it is not that much a big deal for Intel, at least if they manage to come back on tracks in the coming years.

So did Intel became that much uncompetitive? I don't really think so. Enthusiasts are just so a bit too much now that AMD really is competitive. Choosing Zen 2 was still a (often excellent) compromise. Choosing Zen 3 over Intel would be a no-brainer if cheaper (and when you can!), and depending of what you do it can often be the good choice even at the current prices, or at least for some specific models.

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

#160

Post by ndesaulniers »

nurspouse wrote: post #109
edoceo wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a symptom of the sickness.

Using cubicles a symptom of a sickness would mean that Google and FB are sicker. Intel has better workstations.

I have a Lenovo P920 at Google. Dual Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 6154 CPU @ 3.00GHz for 72 virtual cores. And if I want more cores in the cloud, that's also an option. What does yours look like?
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