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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

#271

Post by acrefoot »

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.

In the Bay Area, it’s more like $60-120/sqft/yr, and that’s triple net. Add in 50-100% because you need walkways and such between offices, bathrooms, security, mail room, IT, and other common areas. Then add more for building operating expenses, property taxes, building insurance, and common area maintenance. Yes, in commercial leases the tenant pays the property taxes, because the leases are for multiple years.

So dedicated office space can be expensive.

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

#272

Post by Gibbon1 »

acrefoot wrote: post #271
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.

In the Bay Area, it’s more like $60-120/sqft/yr, and that’s triple net. Add in 50-100% because you need walkways and such between offices, bathrooms, security, mail room, IT, and other common areas. Then add more for building operating expenses, property taxes, building insurance, and common area maintenance. Yes, in commercial leases the tenant pays the property taxes, because the leases are for multiple years. So d…

If you take the top end, shmancy digs near the VC teat you're still looking at only 10% of your engineers salary. Meanwhile in West Berkeley we signed a lease for $22 sqft/year. I share a 20X30 room with another engineer. Everyone else has a 10X10 office with a door. And we don't have rivers of VC money.

Sometimes I think the way big corps do offices is a legacy of mass production factory stuff. If you have an assembly line making toasters, yeah you need everyone in the same big building on a fixed schedule. But any business where people can work from home it likely means you could in thoery let individual groups decide where they want an office. Give a group of 12 engineers a stipend of $4000/mo to rent office space, see what happens.

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

#273

Post by rstuart4133 »

topspin wrote: post #213
klelatti wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we've all taken the ability to reliably introduce process node improvements for granted to some extent. 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. At the same time AMD has been fortunate that TSMC has been able to continue with its node shrinks - supported by demand from and cash generat…

> 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…

> The one area that Intel has managed to maintain superiority is quality.

There are lots deliverables, and thus lots of things that can have superior quality I guess. But my recent experience has been the reverse of yours. Intel's early WiFi modules on a CPU board were so bad I was forced to buy a go down the suck it and see path, but a whole pile of them from various manufacturers on EBay, build a room of 60 machines so I could test failure point of the bloody things. Intel at about 10 clients or so, I didn't find the fail point of Atheros and it was 1/4 the price. Then there was the i915 which hardly worked for a year after laptops were being sold with it, followed by a seeming unending series of bugs from the Manage Engine, follow by Apple cancelling heir Macbook refresh because of Intel bugs. Then I had the misfortune of using Intels T265. To name but one bug, it you would not re-initialise it's USB bus (say after a CPU reset). Intels response is "won't fix, suggest you splice in a relay USB power line".

You must be looking at a difference sort of quality to me. Right now, Intel is terrible. In the mean time I've had the pleasure of using a few 10's of AMD GX-420CA MPU's, and they are just working after 5 years, zero failures.

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

#274

Post by intricatedetail »

BostonEnginerd wrote: post #129
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.

This is a routine issue in the semiconductor industry. Payscales haven't keep up with software across that whole industry. The trade organizations are aware of this, but I haven't seen a lot of push to level the playing field. It's unfortunate, as there are lots of really fascinating problems to solve on the materials and integration side. The industry trade organization did make a snazzy movie to try to attract youn…

When I was younger I was looking into getting into this industry but was put off by low salaries. Broadly in electronics space I noticed pay is very low which I find puzzling.

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

#276

Post by octoberfranklin »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #247
octoberfranklin wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep dreaming. Electrons interact with each other, photons don't.

Not directly, but you can do really clever things with nonlinearity, look at this recent development: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-11/ou-1ei110320... Essentially, if you trap a few photons in little resonator cavities that rely on mostly all of the electrons making up the cavity, the next set of photons can pass through the cavity without interaction. This means the light interacts with engineered ele…

People have been doing "neat hacks" with nonlinear optics for a long time. None of it is remotely close to being usable as a photon-controlled photon gate.

All-optical switching (i.e. photonic computing) is like fusion power generation. It's been "right around the corner" for 20 years, yet we never seem to round the bend.

It is, however, great for physicists writing grant applications.

> look at this recent development: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-11/ou-1ei110320...

This was on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24997573

My response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25012670

Summary: this is converting information from the photonic domain to the thermal domain. Heat diffuses very slowly; you won't be able to put a lot of these devices near each other and run them at usable speeds without them causing each other thermal interference.

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

#277

Post by AtlasBarfed »

LockAndLol wrote: post #239

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, AM…

Intel's glaring inability to make a competitive GPU despite several attempts over the years really highlights the structural problems of the company.

It can only execute on its core business which the MBA infestation has been riding for a decade with their IP lead and now it finally has run out.

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

#278

Post by AtlasBarfed »

varispeed wrote: post #88

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…

Ceding/ignoring the smartphone/ARM market had a double impact on Intel. Obviously they missed a titanically large market.

But that huge market drove investment in fab technology outside of Intel, and allowed them to close the gap and provide competitive, now superior, fabs to AMD.

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

#279

Post by reducesuffering »

nolok wrote: post #256
Schiendelman wrote: post #242

Microsoft turned this around in 2009-2010 with one decision: Give everyone in engineering a 10-15% raise to keep up with competition. Intel’s fallen far behind on pay, so they have a brain drain problem and a morale problem. They won’t fix it until they pay people more. I think Intel’s more than 15% behind - they may need to bump by 25% or more.

Depending on which branch of the company you're talking of (fab design, chip design, ...), and based on what info you can actually get on it which is less fact and more "large amount of anecdotical evidence", Intel's is between more and a lot of than 15% behind. And while I agree with your proposed first step of the solution, and the urgency to do it given the delay between that and any impact on results, their tende…

From keeping close tabs on general software engineering pay, Intel is only half what other companies pay for the similar years of experience. This means that anyone who is competitively looking in the job market is skipping over Intel. Anyone in the company who is very competent can easily jump ship and get a 2x pay increase, and what’s left inside Intel are the rest.

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

#280

Post by nullc »

octoberfranklin wrote: post #203
mensetmanusman wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think on decades time scale, electron based turing machines are asymptoting in design, there isn’t much space for someone to be ahead until we start making optical computers.

Keep dreaming. Electrons interact with each other, photons don't.

My green laser pointer would like to have a word with you.
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