This article assumes Apple was/is the only x86 game in town, and completely ignores AMD. A quick google says Apple own about 7% of the "PC market".
Intel's disruption is now complete
161–170 of 638 posts
Re: Intel's disruption is now complete
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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.
I mean that's one possibility, but what seems much more "Apple-ey" (aka likely) is that they would release a very much locked-down platform of tightly controlled, managed services which would perform well and would have a beautiful dashboard design, but would offer a small subset of the functionality which is available from AWS or GCP, they would make some weird choices - like only allowing Swift for configuration files - and all of this would be very proprietary in nature and distant from their consumer products.
Re: Intel's disruption is now complete
#163I 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.
I'm on the opposite side on this
I don't need snacks and drinks at work, just water and the occasional coffe, which I get at the bar anyway so I can have a little walk and clear up my mind
Workplaces that looks like a teenage dream party give me the chill
When I need to relax I stop working entirely and go out
I consider more money or more free time (or both) an incentive
I appreciate solid forniture, a comfortable seat, big windows with natural light, a nice neighborhood (last work I accepted was because they had an office in Duomo in Milan, the one I have now has an office 5 minutes away from the Colosseum in Rome), I don't care much about "free stuff"
Paying for my drinks or snacks it's not what will bankrupt me
Re: Intel's disruption is now complete
#164Earlier 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
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.
It's actually both, a competition that relies a lot on collaboration.
Re: Intel's disruption is now complete
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
Very large, branchy programs with very short basic blocks. This describes all the major workloads at Google, according to their paper at https://research.google/pubs/pub48320/
Re: Intel's disruption is now complete
#166I 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.
Is this really true, though? There are different types of job functions involved in designing and producing a new generation of a processor. Perhaps they have a tiered system wherein they will retain key talent by compensating it right?
Second, if you are a PhD in this area (a hybrid of Computer Engineering and Computer Science, and I believe that a PhD in this area is the minimum qualification for this type of work) then you do not have a large pool of employers to choose from in the first place, so any employer that's competing for folks from this group will likely end up with a decent number of talented people anyway.
Re: Intel's disruption is now complete
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's interesting is that Apple apparently plotted that graph too. They knew exactly when that crossover was going to occur, for years now.
They certainly didn't expect the massive Intel fuckups from the last years. With the normal performance growth curve they would still be ahead. * Broken 10nm and 7nm fab process. No end in sight. Even IBM could surpass them. * Even with much stricter memory guarantee orderings they managed to break caching and C3 kernel/ user seperation security (Spectre, Meltdown, ...). * Temperature management. Eg AVX512! * The gov…
Well, "expect" might be a strong word, but not only have Intel's CPU timelines been routinely slipping for years, the generational improvements have been kind of pedestrian for years (relative to Intel itself when you go back to the early 2000s). Intel has been behaving like they have no real competition for over a decade, and what they were shipping became their "normal performance growth curve" -- I don't think they took either Apple or AMD seriously.
Re: Intel's disruption is now complete
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Is SpaceX already that big to be in the class of overweight titans like Intel?
You could imagine the division responsible for mobile chip design to be of similar size to a mid-sized company like SpaceX. The optics are the same. You're right Intel is massive - the logistics department at Intel doesn't have any friction with the teams tasked with mobile chip design.
Re: Intel's disruption is now complete
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's interesting is that Apple apparently plotted that graph too. They knew exactly when that crossover was going to occur, for years now.
They certainly didn't expect the massive Intel fuckups from the last years. With the normal performance growth curve they would still be ahead. * Broken 10nm and 7nm fab process. No end in sight. Even IBM could surpass them. * Even with much stricter memory guarantee orderings they managed to break caching and C3 kernel/ user seperation security (Spectre, Meltdown, ...). * Temperature management. Eg AVX512! * The gov…
I don't understand this ridiculous conspiracy. What competent government would force one company to backdoor their products but forget about their other competitors, all of which are domestic?
Re: Intel's disruption is now complete
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
AnandTech's analysis corroborates what DeRock is saying here about the x86 variable length instructions being the limiting factor on how wide the decode stage can be. The other factor is Apple is using a "better" process node (TSMC 5nm). I put it in quotes because Intel's 10nm and upcoming nodes may be competitive, but Intel's 14nm is what Apple gets to compete against today, right now. Intel has been defeated in det…
> but Intel's 14nm is what Apple gets to compete against today, right now. Intel's 10nm node is out, I'm typing this on one right now. It's competitive in single-core performance against what we've seen from the M1. Graphics and multi-core it gets beat though... Or do you mean what Apple used to use? (edit: the following is incorrect) It's true Apple never used an Intel 10nm part. EDIT: I was wrong! Apple has used an…
I'm typing this on a Tiger Lake, too, and it is very fast and draws modest power. But, are they making any money on it? If they lose Apple as a laptop customer how much does that hurt their business.