Intel's disruption is now complete • Hacker News Board

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#171

Post by jodrellblank » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 6:24 PM UTC

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…

> the greater opportunity there is for a manager to take wealth

Pieter Hintjens (creator of ZeroMQ) wrote a lot about this, and how organizations from big companies to small charities to software projects ought to design their internal structures of roles, titles, voting, auditing, to defend themselves against this kind of attack. Particularly if there's any kind of treasury, an opportunist will become tempted to take that role, but any kind of credit will attract people who want to take the credit without doing the work, power structures will attract people who want the power, and programmers who "just want to code" and avoid politics will find themselves at the bottom of a dysfunctional infected organisation structure with no power, no credit, and being instructed by distorted requests.

IIRC he tried to design the ZeroMQ organisation so that there wasn't any way for one person to insert themselves in a key point.

I'm not sure where on his blog I was reading that, but it's related to his writings about psycopaths[1] as the opportunists, and might be part of his book Social Architecture[2]

[1] http://hintjens.com/blog:_psychopaths

[2] http://hintjens.com/books

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#172

Post by bredren » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 6:25 PM UTC

rurban wrote: post #157

bredren wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn’t come up enough: intel’s ceo had to abruptly resign in June 2018 due to a relationship with an employee. [1] That could not have come at a worse time for a company like intel. [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-intel-ceo-idUSKBN1JH1VW

That could have been a good thing for Intel. The fish rots from the top for a couple of years already.

Not for 2020-2025 intel. For reference, Satya Nadella became Microsoft's CEO in 2013.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#173

Post by klelatti » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 6:25 PM UTC

The classic disruption story is clearly important here as is the pattern of recent failings by Intel. There have been other factors though that contribute to a more complex story:

- The availability of third party IP (Arm CPUs and originally Imagination GPUs) and manufacturing (Samsung and TSMC) that have allowed Apple to pick and mix to build its own SoCs.

- The fact that Arm has clearly been much more focused on power efficiency which might mean it has IP which Intel can't access (speculating here but we have big.LITTLE).

- Possibly the most importantly, the the benefits that Apple gets from being able own the whole stack and design SoCs that precisely match its needs.

As a result I'm a bit sceptical about whether Intel would have got Apple's mobile business long term given that market's eventual structure: the advantages of Apple's current approach are just too great.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#174

Post by jml7c5 » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 6:27 PM UTC

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.

This is a weirdly reductive take. Any new technology can be better in some aspects and worse in others. (To use your car/horse analogy: cars are much faster and have increased standards of living, but they have also had large negative effects on society and the environment.)

And it's a poor analogy because driver licensing is almost a straight consequence of how dangerous cars are, but the openness of an SoC does not directly follow from how fast it is.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#175

Post by lostgame » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 6:27 PM UTC

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…

Reminds me of the legendary turf wars between SEGA of Japan and SEGA of America - that cannibalized the company, and resulted in shameful, consumer-insulting mistakes like the SEGA 32x.

These issues saw them going from 50% of the console market in 1993/4 to folding console operations less than a decade later.

SEGA is my favourite example of 'too big to fail' and turf wars.

Console Wars is a great book about this story.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#176

Post by rmk » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 6:28 PM UTC

romanoderoma wrote: post #163

yesimahuman wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Snacks and other tchotchkes have become de rigueur in SV: I haven't had to buy my own lunch or snack for 8+ years now.

With the pandemic in force and the prospect of going into an office itself coming into question, companies will have to stop relying on the (lazy but admittedly effective) lure of free snacks and lunch. Good times.

On the whole, I agree with you: when I see people crumpled up in bean bags and picking at salad on picnic tables in companies' 'Come work with us' webpages, I get the chills. How very juvenile! But we all know that the industry feeds on a steady influx of juveniles and there's a new batch every summer!

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#177

Post by yongjik » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 6:28 PM UTC

jeffbee wrote: post #26

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.

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…

Is page size actually a noticeable problem for most people (say, MacBook users)? Linux has supported huge pages for years, and my impression is that it's still considered a niche feature for squeezing out the last percentage of performance. I don't think any popular distro enables it by default.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#178

Post by mrg3_2013 » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 6:29 PM UTC

Long time coming. They simply didn't understand how s/w world works, never hired people who understood how customers were actually using their processors. It was/is a h/w company that had manufacturing advantage - but lost all their edge because they strayed far too away from end customers. They obsessed over their own capabilities and missed out on the world view.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#179

Post by ivalm » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 6:29 PM UTC

blinkingled wrote: post #119

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.

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.

I think it is typical of Apple to have feature poor early entrants and then increase feature set with new generations. I am sure in the next few years the GPU/other pcie issues will be resolved.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#180

Post by paganel » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 6:30 PM UTC

systemvoltage wrote: post #97

notSupplied wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

> An exception might be SpaceX where you have a strong dictator at the top

I think a similar thing is happening at Amazon (the strong dictator stuff, I mean), and it's my hunch that Google has started following Intel's trajectory, they just haven't realised it just yet.