Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Intel's disruption is now complete

jamesallworth.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 638 posts

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#221

Post by Tuna-Fish »

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.

They have access to a fab process that is ~2 full generations more advanced than what Intel is shipping most their products in, and 64-bit ARM has one advantage over x86 (fixed-width instructions) which allow them to make a very wide core.

Of those two advantages, the process one is a lot more significant. Their chip loses in single-threaded performance to AMD's newest, which are still one node behind Apple, but appears to be more power-efficient. I fully expect that once AMD gets on the matching node they will take the crown back, even in a laptop power envelope.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#223

Post by ben_w »

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’ve been thinking similar thoughts about politics. Normal countries can turn into superpowers, and then it looks (from my non-politically astute eyes) as if politicians fight for power over the nation at the expense of the nation itself, and in so doing turn the superpower back into a normal nation.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#224

Post by secondcoming »

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…

Do power structures in open source project really exist when one person can fork the entire thing with the click of a button?

I could be mistaken, but I think this kind of happened with ZMQ where one contributor got annoyed and went off to create nanomsg.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#225

Post by dr_zoidberg »

yongjik wrote: post #177
jeffbee wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not just Linux, but windows also has Large Pages support. Back in the day where CPU cryptocurrency mining was still a thing (and for some cryptocurrencies which are aimed towards CPU-mining still is), some mining programs would ask to enable large page support.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#226

Post by eznzt »

Animats wrote: post #134
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.

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

I was hoping to hear in the background "corporate accounts payable, Nina speaking... just a moment..."

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#227

Post by hapless »

systemvoltage wrote: post #189

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…

Fabrication is where Intel is falling down.

They have fresh new chip designs that would be perfectly adequate, but they are still hobbled by 14nm. They have now released three? four? iterations of x86 design on the same 14 nm process, because 10nm is that troubled

If you spun off the fabrication, as AMD did, you would have a much smaller, but more-competitive fabless business, and the fabricator would implode. (Which is pretty much what happened to Global Foundries, AMD's former fabrication house)

In any case, much of the value for shareholders would be eradicated. Intel has historically done very well as a vertically integrated business. They would like to remain vertically integrated.

We may see Intel resort to outside fabrication -- executives have already mentioned it in the business press -- but I very much doubt we will see them discard their internal fabrication capabilities.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#228

Post by manquer »

PakG1 wrote: post #160
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.

Is SpaceX already that big to be in the class of overweight titans like Intel?

perhaps not in absolute terms, however In the launch industry they are almost as massive if not bigger . spacex also employees 8,000+ people. That is a scale large enough for it to have similar problems of intel size companies.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#229

Post by imtringued »

S_A_P wrote: post #56
whatever1 wrote: post #40

My question is why Qualcomm while using the same arch, has not produced a chip as fast as the M1?

I suspect there was some talent at apple that figured out some details which Qualcomm have not at this time. This guy seems to improve things at every place he has been. He left abruptly from Intel this year, which hopefully is not due to health reasons. https://www.anandtech.com/show/15846/jim-keller-resigns-from...

Qualcom doesn't have a business model that involves high end processors. Who are they going to sell those SoCs to?

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#230

Post by rdiddly »

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…

Pretty funny, even the one little project I did for Intel as a contractor, apparently there was another group working on their own version of it and mine reeeeally had to beat theirs to be considered a success, and for my client to be considered a success. I think I pulled it off, but it was interesting being a pawn in someone else's chess game!
Post reply on HN