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Intel's disruption is now complete

jamesallworth.medium.com

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Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#31

Post by akmarinov »

dragontamer wrote: post #16
screye wrote: post #13

I am not sure what Intel can do to come back to a strong position. Afaik, all of Nvidia, Apple and Qualcomm (dunno about AMD) pay significantly higher wages than Intel. If Intel is starting off on the back foot and cannot get top talent, then their decline is all but guaranteed.

Intel is losing to TSMC most of all, in the manufacturing front. Intel needs to reach 10nm and 7nm, and they needed to do that 5 years ago.

Sadly, it’s looking like Intel won’t do 5nm until 2023 at which point TSMC is projecting 3nm. They won’t be able to catch up.

On the other hand Intel is a huge national security interest for the US, so expect the government to help them out where possible.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#32

Post by _0w8t »

jibcage wrote: post #7
dboreham wrote: post #2

What's the real reason Apple can design a higher performance device? Better fab process? ARM ISA is fundamentally faster? Graph conveniently omits AMD who now beat Intel using the same ISA but different process.

Apple has a greater incentive to optimize their chips for power performance because of their smaller devices (not just the phone, but the watch too).

Samsung has the same incentives. But their CPUs are far behind Apple.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#33

Post by frogblast »

jeffbee wrote: post #26
dboreham wrote: post #2

What's the real reason Apple can design a higher performance device? Better fab process? ARM ISA is fundamentally faster? Graph conveniently omits AMD who now beat Intel using the same ISA but different process.

I'm still waiting for my M1 to show up but from studying the details that other people have commented on, it's clear that Apple is slathering on the microarchitectural resources that both Intel and AMD are stingy with. Their core has a gigantic L1 instruction cache, rather a lot of L1 TLB entries (4x more than Intel), large(r) pages by default, and many other aspects. L1 TLB entries in particular are a well-known pro…

Apple’s core is very wide. But wide usually means very high power consumption.

M1 apparently has much lower power consumption.

So something else is going on other than “Apple is willing to spend more to make cores wider”.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#34

Post by usrusr »

grecy wrote: post #22
skohan wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would seem really out of character for Apple to make a move in the server space.

We know they have tens of thousands of linux boxes running iCloud and the App Store and whatever else... if they can use their own ARM servers and reduce electricity use by 50%[1], you've gotta think they're looking serious at that, purely for themselves. Not to mention buying their own hardware will obviously save them. [1] https://twitter.com/ajassy/status/1318930486517927937?s=20

Purely for themselves, or also for entering the cloud infrastructure market. In this day and age if you are big enough (Apple surely is) and happen to have superior server hardware it wouldn't really make sense to sell that hardware, you'd rather keep it and rent it out.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#35

Post by Someone1234 »

SoSoRoCoCo wrote: post #20

As someone who worked on Intel's phone chip: we definitely didn't win it. We fucked it up twelve ways to Sunday. Why: giant egos. There were turf wars between Austin, Santa Clara and Israel over who would design it, and the team that won out had long since lost its best principle engineers and had no clue how to spin the architecture to meet the design win. Otellini's hindsight hedge is pure spin: we knew the landing…

Do you think Intel can come back, or is Intel too dysfunctional/inefficient to recover?

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#36

Post by jimbokun »

baybal2 wrote: post #30

What is disruption? I myself feel that the scope, and meaning of the term grows with each passing year. This disruption, that disruption... what is of it? The word is progressively loosing any meaning.

The article is discussing disruption as described in this book:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2615.The_Innovator_s_Dil...

In the article, the chart from Christensen's early work about disruptive innovation, and the chart of Apple chips overtaking Intel chips in performance, do seem to have a striking resemblance.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#37

Post by whycombagator »

SoSoRoCoCo wrote: post #20

As someone who worked on Intel's phone chip: we definitely didn't win it. We fucked it up twelve ways to Sunday. Why: giant egos. There were turf wars between Austin, Santa Clara and Israel over who would design it, and the team that won out had long since lost its best principle engineers and had no clue how to spin the architecture to meet the design win. Otellini's hindsight hedge is pure spin: we knew the landing…

> There were turf wars between Austin, Santa Clara and Israel over who would design it, and the team that won out had long since lost its best principle engineers

So which team/location ended up winning?

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#38

Post by pinewurst »

SoSoRoCoCo wrote: post #28
voodootrucker wrote: post #5

Thank goodness. They haven't innovated in decades and x86 is a mess. I can't wait until RISC-V does the same to ARM. It's super frustrating to see America, which used to be innovative become the complacent corrupt incumbent.

I guess you didn't read about their Xeon Phi bi-directional ring architecture that achieved dozens of terrabytes/sec of bandwidth, their 512b vector-processor ISA, or, heck, just for giggles, the industry's first FinFet (and high-k dielectric) on p1270, p1272, and p1274. But, please, do go on.

And it was such an outstanding success! Intel's customers were able to get so much use out of it - it'll always be remembered as a high point in supercomputing.

Seriously - it was a resounding failure, even with Intel spending big bucks to convince this class of customers it was the future. There was little uptake and vast dissatisfaction with achieved results. IMHO I expect Xe to follow the same (very shallow) trajectory in HPC as in gamer graphics.

There is one remaining large machine (DUG "Bubba") using Xeon Phi and that's only an artifact of software tolerance combined with a _really_ great deal received on Intel's remaining "Knights Whatever" parts inventory.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#39

Post by pastrami_panda »

akmarinov wrote: post #31
dragontamer wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel is losing to TSMC most of all, in the manufacturing front. Intel needs to reach 10nm and 7nm, and they needed to do that 5 years ago.

Sadly, it’s looking like Intel won’t do 5nm until 2023 at which point TSMC is projecting 3nm. They won’t be able to catch up. On the other hand Intel is a huge national security interest for the US, so expect the government to help them out where possible.

> On the other hand Intel is a huge national security interest for the US

This. I'm actually surprised they have grown so uncompetitive considering the critical products their CPUs are presumably used in. But Intel has been a money making machine for many years, I don't think most people realize the amount of resources they've accumulated when they compare them to AMD et al. I just hope they don't make more lousy investments and actually focus on sorting out their core business problems.

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