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Intel's disruption is now complete

jamesallworth.medium.com

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Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#111

Post by _ph_ »

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

Moving their own servers to Apple Silicon would save a lot of money, buth when buying as well as operating the machines. But once they do, resurrecting the Xserve should be a further source of income and raise the chip volume (which drives down costs). Imagine the margin on an Xserve powered by Apple Silicon vs. having to buy Xeon chips.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#112

Post by throwaway2048 »

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

Tech nerds are some of the least objective (and unknowingly too) groups of people I have ever known.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#113

Post by mathattack »

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…

It’s time horizons too. The time horizon of creating the next great thing can be 3-5 years. An office politician can spend a lot of time grabbing value rather than creating it in that time span. This is one reason to be suspicious of senior folks who job hop too much.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#114

Post by HacklesRaised »

What percentage of pc unit sales do Mac's make up? Anybody seriously see that market share growing because of M1? Mac's have a lot of baggage to overcome, not saying they can't but by both amd and Intel are not work shy lightweights and many of the advantages of the M1 do not translate to the expandable platforms the pc world expects.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#115

Post by agumonkey »

lgessler wrote: post #58
agumonkey wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Pardon me but I'd consider semiconductors experts different from computer geeks. Seems like I'm wrong.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#116

Post by mytailorisrich »

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…

Phone chips are hard not least, or especially, the telecom part. I'm thinking that some companies underestimate the effort.

Broadcom also tried and also failed. They came in cocky because they had succeeded in making Wifi chips with a 10-20 people team so thought that 500-ish people was more than enough for cellular even if Qualcomm had 4x that...

I would not be surprised if Intel fell into the same trap.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#117

Post by blackoil »

Between all the buzzwords and Intel hate, what is the technical tldr of Intel's position? I understand they are about 1.5 gen behind TSMC, they should be at 7nm which will compare with TSMC 5nm. Also ARM is currently more power efficient. Any other fundamental difference between AMD/Apple/Intel arch.

If magically Intel 7nm gives awesome yield next year, will they be able to catch up with a bigger caches and Big.small arch. Will they need lot more help from Windows / Linux to achieve performance gain in lockstep like Apple does by controlling both OS and processor?

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#118

Post by qayxc »

dragontamer wrote: post #15
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.

Intel dropped the ball on 10nm and 7nm processes constantly for the last 5 years. Skylake was the "tick", then they couldn't "Tock" to 10nm, so they made 14nm+, then 14nm++, then 14nm+++... Intel's been stuck on the same process for half a decade now.

> Intel's been stuck on the same process for half a decade now.

Even worse - the same architecture as well, which is why they have to backport their 10nm Ice Lake architecture to 14nm to even get anywhere.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#119

Post by blinkingled »

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.

Yeah this point is being continually missed - having better performance doesn't mean much if you are limited in what you can do by the OS, the ecosystem and the hardware. As it is you can't run another OS or attach external or PCIe GPUs to anything Apple Silicon. So if macOS continues the downward trajectory or if someone else comes up with a better GPU you're stuck unlike with a PC.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#120

Post by greggyb »

Kapura wrote: post #77

I found this very interesting, and it seems a similar thing is happening to Intel in the DIY/gaming space right now. For a long time, the Intel i5/i7/i9 were the processors of choice for gaming, but AMD's Ryzen line has been making remarkable inroads, with the recently released Ryzen 5000 series boasting performance that competes or tops Intel's top chips in the space, and generally with lower power draw to boot. I'm…

Even the first generation of Zen was not the low end. The low end of x86 is well below anything whose name starts with 'Core' or 'Ryzen'.

Ryzen came in the door at #2 in a market that goes well beyond #10.

The motherboard conventions aren't simpler, just longer supported.

AMD is doing impressive work with Ryzen, don't get me wrong, but they've already been #1 in x86 performance before, in the mid-aughts. Before and after that, their flagships were #2 in x86.

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