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Intel's disruption is now complete

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Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#121

Post by VHRanger »

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…

That's more dependent on a firm's monopoly power than scale or wealth.

If you're in a competitive market you're forced to innovate.

If you're a monopolist you can just sit there and extract wealth. Which Intel was for a while.

By the way, your little theory has support and a name, it's the resource curse in political economics.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#122

Post by jeffbee »

ip26 wrote: post #100
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…

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.

I believe my point is that the M1 seems to spend its gate budget where it really helps performance of software in practice, while x86 vendors are spending it somewhere else.

AMD in particular wasted an entire generation of Zen by having too few BTB entries. Zen1 performance on real software (i.e. not SPEC) was tragic, similar to Barcelona on a per-clock comparison. They learned this lesson and dramatically increased BTB entries on Zen2 and again for Zen3. But the question in my mind is why would you save a few pennies per million units by shaving off half the BTB entries? Doesn't make sense. They must have been guided by the wrong benchmark software.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#123

Post by DeRock »

jmull wrote: post #110
sidewndr46 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Yes, I was going by memory, which thought “out of order buffer” was a thing. I meant ROB. Point still stands, in that scaling these blocks is very difficult with variable instruction size.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#124

Post by tjoff »

coward8675309 wrote: post #101
m4rtink wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And the PC has been a massive mistake that needs rectifying?

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#125

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #73
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…

> 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 Two decades of requisite grunt work will also encourage your best junior talent to seek out start-up opportunities.

> "Two decades of requisite grunt work will also encourage your best junior talent to seek out start-up opportunities."

For silicon and hardware in general, the job market is much, much smaller, making that decision significantly more difficult.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#126

Post by samfisher83 »

baybal2 wrote: post #66
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.

They are probably all paying QCOM they own a lot of the radio patents.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#127

Post by supernova87a »

Maybe this is a bit of a side topic, and I'm a layman, but I'm interested to know why the M1 chip is able to perform so surprisingly better? And why Intel or others can't just come up with a similar design, if it's clear from the specs/die images what's being done?

Is it years of work to figure out the placement of CPU/GPU/memory units on the die, routings, and come up with new instruction sets? I imagine this wasn't new physics, Apple was just using contract fabs, right?

What's the secret sauce that let them pull this off, and fend off others?

Edit, oh, this is somewhat answered below in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25093313

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#128

Post by abhiyerra »

HacklesRaised wrote: post #114

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.

I think another thing to consider is AWS Graviton2 and that based off ARM as well.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#129

Post by switch11 »

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…

that's a very astute observation

having worked at all three of

A Trillion Dollar corporation

A smaller company that grew quite a bit and sold for $5 billion+

A start up now

*

People optimize for what will make them rich/wealthy

In larger companies, the ENTIRE function of middle management is to extract wealth and not create it

In some ways it's a miracle Microsoft managed to get Satya Nadella as CEO. Normally the people who rise up the ranks are the politically astute

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