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Intel's disruption is now complete

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Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#101

Post by coward8675309 »

m4rtink wrote: post #67
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…

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.

That's why I commute to the office via horse — so I don't need to deal with those fascists at the DMV. Sure the costs of boarding and hay and horseshoes pile up, but at least I'm not being hassled by The Man.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#102

Post by beezle »

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.

First (and I'm no expert here) I don't believe that (x)nm is the be all end all of cpu performance. Architecture still matters.

Second, perhaps the AMD/Apple fan boys have not noticed but Intel has many times the volume of AMD and whatever ARM volume Apple will have (Apple is typically 10% of lap/desktop sales, up this year from Covid). The world requires Intel to meet its computing needs and no magic wand will give the other guys that capacity anytime soon.

It is way to early to count Intel out.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#103

Post by Ericson2314 »

baq wrote: post #42
Someone1234 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AMD came back from being second fiddle in the right market. Intel would have to come back from being first fiddle in the wrong market.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#104

Post by lumberingjack »

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…

From my reading articles at the time and me waiting for Android phones to become available before the iPhone was even announced I thought all that apple had to do was scale an SOC to their massive production level other peoplehadd already figured out the computing.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#105

Post by skohan »

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

> Not to mention buying their own hardware will obviously save them.

Maybe, maybe not. Apple doesn't currently produce servers, so it would probably take a lot of time and money for them to build out that capability to the point where it's break-even or better compared to just buying commodity hardware.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#106

Post by dsr_ »

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?

Competition is good for markets. There's still not enough competition in the general CPU market, but it's getting closer: Intel, AMD, Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung, Broadcom.

Intel has money and equipment and existing market share: there's no reason for them not to be profitable for the long term, as long as they stop acting like they don't have any competition (as they did until 2018) or that their only competition is AMD (as they currently are pretending).

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#107

Post by emdowling »

m4rtink wrote: post #67
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…

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.

So? Consider 3 aspects:

1. Power efficiency (read: battery life) 2. Performance 3. Openness

99% of consumers only care about 2 of those. The more that time goes on, the more it becomes clear that prioritizing openness, in particular for hardware, is a direct trade-off against building a great consumer product.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#108

Post by guscost »

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…

Not just attracts - rewards and cultivates, too. People already working somewhere don’t have immutable personalities. If an employer is a bad influence on its employees, problems will manifest not only with new hires.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#109

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

#110

Post by jmull »

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?

From the Anandtech article[1] on the M1, I think this is referring to the reorder buffer, or ROB. Reorder buffers allow instructions to execute out-of-order, so maybe that's where the "OO" comes from.

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...

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