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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

#261

Post by webmaven »

elihu wrote: post #222
jp42 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so true. I have friends whose managers told them - "the only way to get more pay is to leave intel", "our hands are tied, we cant give more pay or promo", " to get more pay and promotion, one option is to leave intel and then come back"...all of these folks are in FAANG now.

There is another option, it's just a lot harder than leaving and rarely said out loud. Which is to organize.

> There is another option, it's just a lot harder than leaving and rarely said out loud. Which is to organize.

That harder work seems to only get done when you can't leave (or when leaving doesn't get results).

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

#262

Post by webmaven »

baskire wrote: post #142
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…

They also focused on diversity hiring vs focusing on hiring top talent.

> They also focused on diversity hiring vs focusing on hiring top talent.

Those aren't mutually exclusive.

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

#263

Post by webmaven »

usrusr wrote: post #250
mjevans wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They weren't even that slow. Seven years ago they didn't win in __single threaded__ applications, but for any multi-threaded workload they were great.

How is that not equivalent to "they were so much cheaper that you could get more of them"? Hardly what I'd call architectural success.

It isn't always obvious for future workloads whether scaling out vs. scaling up will win.

And even when it is obvious for particular workloads, the relative value and demand of various future workloads is definitely non-obvious.

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

#264

Post by SomeoneFromCA »

ekianjo wrote: post #152
dweekly wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

AMD is in SV, so naturally salaries must be higher than in Oregon.

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

#265

Post by rasz »

nolok wrote: post #255
Teever wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

For better or worse AMD has always been much more willing to quickly throw everything out to go with a completely new design paradigm. Something it was a massive bust like X2 or Bulldozer. Sometimes it's the Athlon or the Zen. The only time Intel really did that was with the end of the P4 and frankly even then they waited as long as they could before doing it. The rest of the time it's all carefully planned stepped i…

Historically most successful AMD designs came from the outside. 286 was Intel clone, Am386 Intel microcode copy. Am486 lagged by one year, offered lower performance and was still developed using Intel IP. K5 first 100% AMD design, slow and late, competed in the bottom low end, considered a failure. K6 100% external design by NexGen, let AMD move up to middle of the market. K7 designed by DEC Alpha team and manufactured in Motorola partnership, great success.

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

#266

Post by rasz »

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.

Great idea, now sell me one with 8 of those big cores and none of the rubbish ones.

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

#267

Post by webmaven »

yourapostasy wrote: post #251
wmf wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Intel I think ~90% of the PC market plus ~90% of the server market provides enough volume to easily cover their R&D. The rest of the industry may have needed to pivot to mobile to fill their fabs but that's not Intel's problem.

Is there an electric generator evolution scenario here Intel should be watching for? Back in the day before the electric grid really caught on, hydro- and coal-powered electric generators could be found in businesses large and small that had needs that went well beyond the limited voltage and amperage requirements of the meager electrified buildings at the time. It made sense for a business to have its own power plan…

> Could the "grid" of the Net, cloud and mobile devices evolve to the point where the existing PC and server markets retreats in relative scale into "heavy industrial" applications like cloud infrastructure, and shift out Intel's cash flow from under them?

It could, but the extractable rents of centralized data (eg. the Law of Conservation of Attractive Profits) will continue to push against this for a while yet.

Arguably, the hardware and connectivity we have now is already more than capable of dispensing with data centralization for most use-cases, relegating the cloud to niches like commodity backup-and-restore services, and premium on-demand compute capacity analogous to the use-cases for supercomputers (of which AI/ML is a growing subset).

We're already hitting use-cases and scenarios where centralized synchronization is becoming a hindrance that imposes additional costs, but the loss of control of a locus for extracting attractive profit margins implied by alternative software architectures generally limit investment.

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

#268

Post by mark-r »

hakfoo wrote: post #224
wmf wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's mash this up with the evil HP business model that's on the front page. Kodak could have sold digital cameras that required Kodak DRMed flash cards that you would have to pay to erase and reuse. And maybe the photos could be further DRMed so you'd have to take the flash card to a certified Kodak lab.

And how exactly would that have competed with five hundred other brands that didn't pull that trick? The market eventually rejected even the soft-lockin of nonstandard memory cards (think of the 12 slots nobody ever uses that come with every SD/CompactFlash reader) I'm not even sure it was the first wave of digital cameras that did them in-- people bought boatloads of digital Kodaks in the 2000s. I recall they were v…

My first digital camera was a Sony compact that would only take Sony Memory Sticks - one of those 12 slots you mentioned. I got tired of paying twice as much for half the memory of standard cards, so I made sure my next camera took SD.

Kodak was always a big player in the camera business, but they did it to increase the film business - they wanted people taking and printing as many pictures as possible, because that's where the real money was. It's hard today to imagine the scale of that business. And that's the problem, if Kodak had sold every single sensor that went into every single digital camera, it wouldn't have been enough to save them.

It's interesting to contrast the reaction of Kodak to that of the other big film company Fujifilm when the market for film cratered. https://petapixel.com/2018/10/19/why-kodak-died-and-fujifilm...

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

#269

Post by wmf »

yourapostasy wrote: post #251
wmf wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Intel I think ~90% of the PC market plus ~90% of the server market provides enough volume to easily cover their R&D. The rest of the industry may have needed to pivot to mobile to fill their fabs but that's not Intel's problem.

Is there an electric generator evolution scenario here Intel should be watching for? Back in the day before the electric grid really caught on, hydro- and coal-powered electric generators could be found in businesses large and small that had needs that went well beyond the limited voltage and amperage requirements of the meager electrified buildings at the time. It made sense for a business to have its own power plan…

Could the "grid" of the Net, cloud and mobile devices evolve to the point where the existing PC and server markets retreats in relative scale into "heavy industrial" applications like cloud infrastructure, and shift out Intel's cash flow from under them?

Absolutely. Many analysts are predicting that the future is mostly public cloud (heavily ARM) accessed from mobile devices (100% ARM) so they're imploring Intel to get back into mobile before it's too late.

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

#270

Post by formercoder »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #200
formercoder wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Sure I can. It’s on the income statement. Then I can show that some firms see more of a return on that R&D spending than others, and that impacts how valuable they are. It’s the same as how some firms get more return out of spending the same amount on factories as others. They are better factories.

> What? Sure I can. It’s on the income statement. It's on the income statement five years from now, not the one you have when you're making the decision today. The R&D paid for five years ago will commonly have been under different market conditions. > Then I can show that some firms see more of a return on that R&D spending than others, and that impacts how valuable they are. The question is, how do you cause your c…

Time being a factor is exactly why you capitalize R&D, which means make it an asset on your balance sheet. The second question is definitely an interesting one however I usually look at businesses more from an outside in view -so it’s not what I think about every day.
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