Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Intel's disruption is now complete

jamesallworth.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 638 posts

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#41

Post by jeffbee »

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.

Intel has tons of cool stuff going on, but from the outside it looks like a big risk to adopt any of it. Optane is pretty cool, but who will be surprised if they EOL it tomorrow? AVX512 is obviously of certain utility, but 99% of computers lack it. I myself just got access to a CPU with this feature a week ago. They've got a sweet programmable 100gbps NIC that they only ship into the mobile base station market. Why? KNL is a complete joke that nobody wanted or wants. Features that everybody wants, like UMWAIT, only exist on obscure parts you can't get. Having a lot of cool hacks isn't making a great deal of visible success for Intel.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#42

Post by baq »

Someone1234 wrote: post #35
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?

AMD came back. Fabless, bruised, but also thin, agile and with a 10 year plan that thanks to TSMC they can execute more or less on schedule.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#43

Post by SoSoRoCoCo »

Someone1234 wrote: post #35
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?

I think they have been a commodity for a long time. Rephrased, the discussion is similar to, "Will GE make a comeback in the refrigerator market?" Intel isn't going anywhere, they have many, many big customers to satisfy who simply cannot shift to ARM due to ROIs <=0. And after 30+ years of this, I also don' think there's anything new or revolutionary in silicon fabrication on the horizon. I stopped getting excited about CPU tech when AMD crossed the 1GHz barrier in the PC space. Could be burnout though.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#45

Post by SteveGerencser »

Someone1234 wrote: post #35
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?

I had friends at the Intel fab in New Mexico in the 90s and this type of turf war was prevalent even then internally at the fab. Managers were constantly jockeying for position at the expense of manufacturing processes.

Just one anecdotal story, one of the wafer guys had an idea to improve a process. He went to his boss who shot it down instantly. Wafer guy knew he was right so went to another manager who liked the idea and implemented it. It ended up working and being a great idea. Instead of being rewarded for his idea, wafer guy was fired by his manager for failing to follow the chain of command.

It's built into the culture at Intel to be territorial to advance. It's been that way for at least 30 years. I personally don't see it changing any time soon.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#46

Post by quantummkv »

jeffbee wrote: post #12
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.

Super, super weird take considering that Intel's main competitors are all within walking distance of their Santa Clara HQ.

Nope. That's were many people are wrong. Intel's main competitors are not in the US. They are in Taiwan and Korea. Intel's domination came not only because of a superior chip design, but due to the fact that only they could manufacture the superior chip design.

Now since that is not an issue anymore, you see Intel getting beaten everywhere. And that is only because Intel's actual competitors in Taiwan and Korea are have now surpassed Intel.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#47

Post by SoSoRoCoCo »

whycombagator wrote: post #37
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?

"winning" is hard to define here, because the work became so diffuse (meaning, several sites grabbed the Bonnell/Silverthorn core and started whacking at it), but on paper (foils?) it was the Austin fellows who got the gold star. Some readers who were there may disagree.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#48

Post by agumonkey »

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…

It's somehow incredible how this infiltrates even the most advanced classes of company in terms of technical knowledge. You'd expect a bit more objectivity

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#49

Post by quantummkv »

jibcage wrote: post #3

I’m curious to see if Apple will bring anything similarly disruptive to the server market. So far servers haven’t been their strong suit, but a chip this attractive could change things.

They don't have to. As long as Apple can provide the ARM boxes for developers, others can and will create the ARM chips for the server.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#50

Post by yesimahuman »

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.

Reminds me of when I went to visit Intel a few years ago. I was shocked at the bare bones amenities and that employees had to pay for everything (snacks/drinks/etc.). That might sound insignificant but in the talent war in SV that stuff mattered a lot back then.

It was a stark contrast from nearly every other fast-growing tech company in the area.

Post reply on HN