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Intel's disruption is now complete

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Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#201

Post by haramboy »

paganel wrote: post #180
systemvoltage wrote: post #97

Earlier 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.

> 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.

Similarly in US politics. And before we get emotional, how is it different from those examples?

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#202

Post by dash2 »

VHRanger wrote: post #121
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…

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.

I think scale might matter too. Companies are partly public goods problems. Each individual's hard work benefits the whole company. As a result they will undersupply hard work. If the company is size N, they only share 1/N of the total benefit they provide. So, the public goods problem bites harder when companies get big - even holding the level of competition in the market constant.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#203

Post by Tor3 »

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…

If you want turf wars, even if everything else is perfect: Create turfs. The worst period (and the only bad period) of my own company was during the time when teams working with overlapping stuff worked at different locations (at the time this was simply because we didn't have the room. Fortunately we could get back into the same site when we moved to a bigger location, but it took years to heal what the separate locations cost us).

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#204

Post by intricatedetail »

gabereiser wrote: post #82
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…

Recipe for a toxic work culture from day one. Your team should never be your competition. Your company should never be your competition. Meritocracy works only in certain markets. Knowledge-based work isn’t one of them. I really feel for people who are in these companies. Who put in 6+ years of university/higher education and think that “if I could only fight my peers for the top spot” when “top” is relative. To some…

Requirement to be a graduate of a "good" university is not a meritocracy. It's just preferring people who have a diploma, but that doesn't mean the person hired will have other qualities necessary to be effective.

Edit: I know some people with diploma who "gamed" the system, e.g. memorized queries for exam without having any understanding of SQL and passed.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#205

Post by phkahler »

jodrellblank wrote: post #171
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…

> 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 tak…

That sounds very interesting. Has there been any update on how successful or not his ideas are in practice?

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#206

Post by poisonborz »

Intel CEO on them losing the iPhone CPU deal:

> "We ended up not winning it or passing on it, depending on how you want to view it. And the world would have been a lot different if we'd done it"

No, it wouldn't. Maybe the iPhone would have been delayed 1-2 years. But they surely didn't have the capability to make this CPU properly, as all of their attempts in this field in the coming years demonstrated.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#207

Post by romanoderoma »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #184
romanoderoma wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Vending machines have been ubiquitous since my first tech job in the 90s.

I am from Italy so they even looked a big novelty back then.

I'm not blaming people who appreciate it, I consider my job my professional endeavour and as I pretend the best from myself, I pretend it from my employer.

Which means that they have to provide me the tools and the means to do it at my best.

I used to be a smoker, I wouldn't have considered it a bonus if my employer paid for my cigarettes.

My salary has to be good enough to pay for that.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#208

Post by osipov »

paganel wrote: post #180
systemvoltage wrote: post #97

Earlier 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.

> 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.

The more perceptive ones at Google have realized that and quit in mass over the past few years. Since Sundar and the rest of the McKinsey gang took over, it has been just death to Google by a thousand cuts.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#209

Post by kofejnik »

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…

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#210

Post by ivalm »

ben-schaaf wrote: post #14
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.

My guess until reviewers get their hands on the thing is that they've got some pretty good RnD alongside the massive process node advantage over Intel. AMD has already shown that there's a lot more performance in 7nm than we thought and the M1 looks like it'll be on-par with what you'd expect from zen 4, so I wouldn't say they've got any advantage from the architecture (as you'd expect)

Right, but zen 4 is a year away. If Apple is a year ahead then that’s a lot (even if it is because they are able to use 5nm node fab capacity first)
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