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Intel's disruption is now complete

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Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#61

Post by p_l »

_0w8t wrote: post #32
jibcage wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Samsung chip division doesn't have guaranteed "buyer" or option to build SoC specifically for given product (even if usually you can bet on next generation Galaxy device as your target, you still have to design as if you were selling to open market - and that means less option to, for example, throw a lot of memory/cache resources that have been the main differentiator of Apple chips - which started from the same design as Exynos!)

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#62

Post by baybal2 »

SoSoRoCoCo wrote: post #43
Someone1234 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

> And after 30+ years of this, I also don' think there's anything new or revolutionary in silicon fabrication on the horizon.

Why so? Few more material, and device generations are on the way. Litho has went through more generation changes in the last 1 decade, than in any previous one.

Whole new device classes are on the way: optics on silicon, new memory, logic in the backend, and logic on package.

Semiconductor engineering is still a career suicide though, that haven't changed in the last few decades.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#63

Post by kube-system »

usrusr wrote: post #34
grecy wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The question is whether you can make a competitive cloud infrastructure service without x86. Imagine that would be a nonstarter for a lot of the market, at least now.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#64

Post by BlueTemplar »

frogblast wrote: post #33
jeffbee wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

> M1 apparently has much lower power consumption.

Even compared to similar manufacturing processes ?

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#65

Post by DeRock »

frogblast wrote: post #33
jeffbee wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

That, in part, comes from x86 vs arm. x86, with its variable length instructions, means your logic gets increasingly complex as you widen. Meanwhile with arm, you have constant instruction size (other than thumb, but that’s more straightforward than variable size), that lets Apple do things like an 8-bit wide decode block (vs. 4-bit for Intel) and a humongous 630 OOB (almost double Intel’s deepest cores).

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#66

Post by baybal2 »

samfisher83 wrote: post #55

In general mobile chip margins aren't great unless you are apple. That is why you don't see too many competitors in the mobile chip market. You have Qualcomm, but they have a Radio monopoly and their performance isn't that great. Intel architecture isn't even that bad. Intel used to have a manufacturing advantage which they longer do. That is where they are trailing: Material science and manufacturing. This stuff cos…

There are multiple 4g, and 5g radio vendors, just most people never heard of them so obscure they are.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#67

Post by m4rtink »

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…

While Intel is indeed losing the performance game, even with the shady management engine shenanigans intel CPUs are still much more open than the locked down proprietary nightmare that apparently are the new Apple ARM SoCs.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#68

Post by NobodyNada »

yesimahuman wrote: post #50
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.

> employees had to pay for everything (snacks/drinks/etc.).

That’s not entirely true, at least in Hillsboro (I interned there recently). Drinks were free, and so was fruit, but you had to pay for e.g. donuts or chips.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#69

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

agumonkey wrote: post #48
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

The thing about the top tech companies, particularly Intel and other chip companies where postgraduate degrees are more or less required to do anything interesting, is that people there have literally gone though over a decade of intense competition in the educational system to qualify to get their foot in the door. And then, to stay there and rise through the ranks is another decade or more of intense competition, both technical and political, against similar elites. Needless to say, this can have some pretty corrosive effects without proper supervision.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#70

Post by mortenjorck »

usrusr wrote: post #34
grecy wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

An Apple alternative to AWS would be interesting, but it would probably be heavily geared toward iOS and Mac app backends, with little flexibility outside those use cases. The Xcode integration would probably be amazing, though.
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