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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

#231

Post by goatinaboat »

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.

...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.

Sun solved that 20+ years ago with their Sun Ray technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray

These days you could do it with persistent VDI.

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

#232

Post by goatinaboat »

mark-r wrote: post #156
Gibbon1 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

It is, but not within the timeframe that someone will get their bonus/promotion for the cost savings and move on. Same scam as outsourcing.

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

#233

Post by rwmj »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #63
rwmj wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the point of hot-desking, there's a single big room and you pick a free desk.

Got to wonder - why are you there at all? How is this one particle better from working at home? Clearly you're not there because of the environment (proximity to folks on your team etc)

I'm not there, I work from home.

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

#234

Post by topspin »

klelatti wrote: post #228
topspin wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Intel has clearly been caught out by its inability to get 10nm - which I understand was overambitious - to work and pretty much everything else follows on from there. It's more than process node. Zen 3 now has superior IPC as well; the now unqualified performance lead of AMD devices happens at lower frequency. The process node problem is just the most visible and embarrassing problem Intel has. It is not the only p…

Not disagreeing that Intel has deep problems but doesn't greater transistor density support more sophisticated architectures and hence superior IPC? Also the failure to get 10nm working has presumably been problematic for the architecture team who have to design for two processes at the same time rather than focus on just 10nm?

> doesn't greater transistor density support more sophisticated architectures and hence superior IPC?

Intel claims Rocket Lake will deliver 10% IPC improvement over Cannon Lake on the same 14nm node. Clearly 14nm hasn't been tapped out despite the five years and 3-4 (depending on who you ask) previous microarchitectures they've used it for. Yes, smaller devices enable better designs. Ironically if Rocket Lake actually delivers 10% then it's corroboration that Intel has been slacking on microarchitecture as well.

> for the architecture team who have to design for two processes at the same time rather than focus on just 10nm?

Intel has been designing devices for at least two nodes as SOP for 13 years now; they called it "tick-tock" which is the cycle of developing a new microarchitecture on one node and then porting to a smaller node.

The difference this time is that they're going backwards... In any case the argument that there is some great difficulty with moving cores between nodes is tough to support given the history.

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

#235

Post by FridgeSeal »

sadness2 wrote: post #187
FridgeSeal wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how much that’ll hold, a lot of the gaming and pc subreddits and the communities there have been strongly favouring AMD chips in builds and advice. With Zen 3 chips I expect that to continue.

There's always a loud contingent of AMD fanboys, but then there's the silent majority who don't care and just buy on raw gaming performance per $, which is reflected in market share. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/market_share.html

Well if they’re buying “raw performance per $” then they’ll be buying AMD chips anyway.

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

#237

Post by Tepix »

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.

For me the overly agressive tone was detrimental while reading the article. I kept thinking: "Is this really necessary?" It reminds me of the rethoric that we've seen in politics in the last four years.

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

#238

Post by kasabali »

wmf wrote: post #166
causality0 wrote: post #127

I'd be interested in an x86-64 processor that took the 1+3+4 approach of the Snapdragon 875. One big core with a super high clock rate and massive IPC, three smaller ones, and four that are smaller still. A desktop CPU with a single-core performance equal to half a normal 8-core chip would be an absolutely incredible tool for IPC-constrained applications like game console emulation.

A desktop CPU with a single-core performance equal to half a normal 8-core chip This isn't possible. The cores are already as fast as they can be, so moving from 10 big to 1 big would only reduce performance.

Well said.

A lot of people I see on hardware forums seem to have the deception that we'd suddenly have 10 GHz cores had big.LITTLE x86 processors appear.

Reality is we'd have few of exact same cores we have today and a dozen more atom level cores put there solely for the purpose of marketing spec race.

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

#239

Post by LockAndLol »

What actually happened to memristors? I read about them nearly a decade ago and we still don't have any on the market if I'm not mistaken. How come Intel didn't invest heavily in those?

And why is it only AMD that has a GPU baked into a CPU? Vega graphics are simply amazing and beat Intel's integrated graphics hands down. It's so nice to have only a single chip without buying an extra graphics card.

Unfortunately, AMD isn't very present. I see Intel sponsoring every eSports event out there and handing out i9s as prizes. I'm not tunes into the gamers but I still have the impression they believe Intel reigns supreme...

With RISC-V about to enter the market and AMD beating Intel on benchmarks, Intel better pull a rabbit out of their behind to stay competitive. But that's just a layman's view on the subject.

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

#240

Post by kasabali »

013a wrote: post #47
ethbr0 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Right, and that's my biggest fear. 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…

> whenever Samsung releases a new phone only some regions get the Exynos chips, because historically they couldn't produce enough of them

That's not true.

The reason for that has always been Quallcomm's patent shakedown.

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