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Intel's disruption is now complete

jamesallworth.medium.com

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Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#131

Post by reaperducer »

skohan wrote: post #90
reaperducer wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xserve Apple’s Xserves were awesome. Not cheap. Only marginally competitive. But a joy to work with because of all the nice little details like a FireWire port on the front so you could boot it off of an iPod.

Yeah I remember Xserve! But if anything it seems like it was evidence that Apple wasn't really able to "get" the server market, where hardware is a commodity and price and compatibility are basically the only concern. Not to say that couldn't change, especially if their own processors had a big advantage in price/performance, but there hasn't been a whole lot of evidence that they have what it takes to succeed in thi…

While most of your points are true, I will quibble with this:

there hasn't been a whole lot of evidence that they have what it takes to succeed in this space.

Does it matter? In 2006 and 2007 there were legions of pundits, columnists, and "experts" who said the same thing about Apple making a telephone.

I wonder if there's a market for a server optimized for iOS builds. Cram as many Mx chips and possible into a rackable case with abundant cooling. Certainly it would be useful to Apple internally. But I wonder if there are enough iOS developers with the budget to make this workable.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#132

Post by rconti »

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…

I was thinking precisely this as I read parent's comment. These are managers/teams fighting in zero-sum game (or something they THINK is a zero-sum game) for a bigger share of stock bonuses of the existing extremely valuable company. Take that win and that bigger chunk of a massively valuable company, and in a way you don't really care what happens with the phone chip market; by the time it really pays off big, in 6 or 8 years, you might be somewhere else anyway.

Whereas, in a smaller company with a smaller pie to divide amongst folks, the growth of the pie is the most important thing.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#133

Post by spamizbad »

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

One value that cuts through most of elite society is the thought that competition produces better outcomes. So “competing” instead of collaborating with another office is good, actually, because competition will breed excellence (or something).

When you’re small all that competitive energy is directed at your competitors. When you’re king of the hill that competitive energy turns inward.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#134

Post by Animats »

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.

Ah, Intel. Acre-sized floors of tiny cubicles. Everything is grey. Really.[1]

I visited Intel HQ once, and it really did look like that. Is it still like that?

[1] https://youtu.be/gXReifFHXbY?t=44

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#135

Post by evancox100 »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #116
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.

TI was also in the mobile AP space for a while then dropped out

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#136

Post by drummer »

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.

I think you will find that The Man is especially going to be hassling you with your horse.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#137

Post by coward8675309 »

skohan wrote: post #75
mortenjorck wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's hard to imagine Apple really getting the cloud market, or their product offering would look like. Cloud by necessity has to be pretty agnostic and flexible to meet the diverse needs of customers. Apple hasn't really demonstrated an ability to succeed with this type of product, and leans heavily toward very tailored, limited, "apple knows best" types of products.

The cloud is changing. At my gig we've embraced GCP's managed cloud services, and I do not want to go back to 2015. The operating cost savings (no devops people!) and the low cost makes engineering systems for cloud-agnosticism very expensive. If Apple provided a range of managed services that met clients' needs, they could find a lot of success. Would they beat AWS? Highly doubtful, but Apple already provides a lot of cloud data services to Apple developers and consumers as part of iCloud.

I'm hopeful with respect to Apple dogfooding its silicon in the data center because it may feed back into robust ongoing support for Unix/Posix on their publicly-facing platforms.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#138

Post by ip26 »

jeffbee wrote: post #122
ip26 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I doubt it was about saving their pennies. Zen1 EPYC was a huge package with an expensive assembly & copious silicon area. But it was spread across 32 cores. A larger BTB probably had to come at the expense of something else.

What 'real software' are you thinking of? Anything in particular? Just curious, not looking to argue.

(sorry I changed my comment around the same time you replied)

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#139

Post by chaboud »

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

I completely agree with this. I’ve been in software since ‘98, but many of the valuable tools I apply to interpersonal interaction were learned on the path of raising my 5 year old.

Natural consequences, timely feedback, parallel modeling, Socratic questioning, mirroring...

If you want to know how to handle the politics of a large organization, try interacting with children. The parallels are amazing.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#140

Post by pjmlp »

tjoff wrote: post #124
coward8675309 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

From the point of view of IBM, most likely yes, otherwise there wouldn't have been PS/2 and MCA architecture.

Hence why laptops and 2-1 hybrids are basically back to the days of vertical integration of 16 bit computers, whose the PC was the only exception.

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