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Intel's disruption is now complete

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Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#181

Post by feanaro »

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.

Since the DMV exists primarily for traffic safety, I assume Apple is removing your ability to run whatever you want on your processor for your safety too?

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#184

Post by chipotle_coyote »

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…

I mean, sure, paying for your drinks or snacks won't bankrupt you -- but it's not gonna bankrupt the company, either, and in today's tech job market a row of vending machines outside the company cafeteria can feel a little nickel-and-dime.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#185

Post by imhoguy »

supernova87a wrote: post #127

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…

I would quote Orwell here: "Who Controls the Past Controls the Future".

It is about lack of control over legacy killing the progress. The power of Intel is "proven" legacy, but building completely new architecture is expensive and prone to adoption failure (Itanium?) when Intel has no control over OS (Windows), apps or virtualization software.

Then Apple has control over all that: they can make hardware (scaled up mobile HW), change their OS to support it (iOS bits), support past apps (Rosetta), enforce support in new apps (compiler, LLVM, certification).

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#186

Post by jldugger »

ENOTTY wrote: post #169
rurban wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> What competent government

Let me know when you find one.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#187

Post by mrg3_2013 »

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 used to work there too but from software perspective, they simply did not understand how software world worked. S/W was also relegated as bunch of coding guys. It was not uncommon to see some random benchmark touted to assert superiority, while customers were using it differently. It'll end up becoming a manufacturing company that builds based on spec from Amazon/Google/Apple etc.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#188

Post by micv »

eulers_secret wrote: post #159
sounds wrote: post #88

Earlier 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 using a MacBook Pro with an Intel 10nm part in it. The 4 port 13" MBP still comes with one. I think the MacBook Air might have had a 10nm part before it went ARM, too.

There are still no 10nm parts for the desktop or the high-end/high-TDP laptops anyway afaik.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#189

Post by systemvoltage »

The entire world has their eggs in one basket - Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. Say whatever about Intel, I am hoping that they get back on their feet in next few years with 5nm manufacturing.

Since when is competition and choice a bad thing? If you're a chip design firm and you have a 8-month backlog to get your masks made at TSMC, what do you do then? TSMC can be world's best fab but we need to address the SPOF condition that is so close to the political hot zone in the APEC region.

Intel should spin off its Fab division as a separate company, hire some top executives to rejuvinate the workforce, make it the coolest Fab company in the world to work for and leap ahead. Intel TMG's Sohail was the biggest borderline criminal executive that was forced out a couple of years ago and was responsible for the 10nm delays.

It is enormously difficult for any startup to get into this space - you need billions and years of expertise to start a Fab. Or may be YC folks can? I worked in the Fab but don't have a birds-eye view of what it takes for a startup to get into this space. It would be amazing to see startups trying to manufacture semiconductors... you know live up to the Silicon Valley's name. You could have billions of dollars of economy built on services - US, EU and most advanced economies are shifting towards services; but they all rely on semiconductors. Imagine something were to happen to that... It is a juicy problem. We don't need Uber/AirBnb unicorns out of SV, we need Fairchild of the modern world from SV.

Edit: To see what kind of a beast EUV litho is, this is a good short documentary on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0gMdGrVteI

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#190

Post by macintux »

jeffbee wrote: post #170
eulers_secret wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There was a lot of discussion on a related, recent post about Apple buying many of Intel’s most desirable chips. Will be interesting to see whether the loss of a high-end customer translates into more woes for Intel.
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