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Intel's disruption is now complete

jamesallworth.medium.com

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Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#91

Post by sounds »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #85
DeRock wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

For the uneducated, what is an "OOB" here?

I think that's a typo - the Apple Silicon M1 has a "ROB is in the 630 instruction range" - https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...

"ROB" and "OOO" might have gotten mixed together here.

OOO = Out-of-order. Refers to the fact that the M1 can decode instructions in parallel.

ROB = Re-Order Buffer. Refers to the stage where the parallel instructions get put back "in-order" and "retired."

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#92

Post by notSupplied »

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…

I have a theory about why turf wars like this happens: the more successful and wealthy an entity, the greater opportunity there is for a manager to take wealth instead of make it. When you’re scrappy and broke, the only path to success is to make the company successful. When the company is rich and multitudinous, an individual can gain more from politics and turf wars rather than actually trying to push an already high enterprise value higher. The “maker:taker” opportunity ratio changes, and so does the type of personality the organization attracts.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#93

Post by morganf »

eecc wrote: post #72
lgessler wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, for we computer geeks are known for our lack of ego...

Absolutely, not. Seeing my 4 years old son experiment with social skills I’m learning soo much about the most inexplicable conflict situations I’ve been through in 15 years of IT

Super super interesting and I'd love discuss - drop me a note (contact info in my bio) :)

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#95

Post by [deleted] »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #85
DeRock wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

For the uneducated, what is an "OOB" here?

[deleted]

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#96

Post by qznc »

SteveGerencser wrote: post #45
Someone1234 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

I'm currently reading High Output Management which is 25 years old. So your comment addresses the time where the book was written.

Grove certainly sends quite utilitarian vibes. He also says that a collaborative culture is important. Your comment suggests that neither he nor his successors managed to make Intel's culture collaborative enough.

Higher management is probably often an iterated prisoners dilemma. Collaborating is best for the company but defecting is good for the ambitious manager.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#97

Post by systemvoltage »

notSupplied wrote: post #92
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…

I have a theory about why turf wars like this happens: the more successful and wealthy an entity, the greater opportunity there is for a manager to take wealth instead of make it. When you’re scrappy and broke, the only path to success is to make the company successful. When the company is rich and multitudinous, an individual can gain more from politics and turf wars rather than actually trying to push an already hi…

You put it so well, having worked in both large and small companies - I can attest to this theory. An exception might be SpaceX where you have a strong dictator at the top and any annoyances of tribal war get direct authoritarian spanking.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#98

Post by WJW »

gabereiser wrote: post #82
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, b…

Recipe for a toxic work culture from day one. Your team should never be your competition. Your company should never be your competition. Meritocracy works only in certain markets. Knowledge-based work isn’t one of them. I really feel for people who are in these companies. Who put in 6+ years of university/higher education and think that “if I could only fight my peers for the top spot” when “top” is relative. To some…

Any competition with sufficient rewards attracts this kind of toxicity eventually and that is why larger companies are usually the worst. Getting a promotion at a small company in the EU or in the midwest USA means you get maybe 10k/year extra. Getting to the next rung in FAANG (or Intel, apparently) can mean hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years, so it's not surprising people are a lot more willing to backstab their peers in those places.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#100

Post by ip26 »

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…

It seems like a straightforward tradeoff of IPC vs scalability.

They are able to shovel transistors at the core because there are only 4 of them. AMD on the other hand is packing 64 cores into a package, so each core has to make do with less.

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