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

231–240 of 638 posts

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#231

Post by systemvoltage »

hapless wrote: post #227
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…

I am afraid, they're going to be using US gov as their wheelchair to survive a few more decades: https://newsroom.intel.com/news/intel-wins-us-government-adv...

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#232

Post by masklinn »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #69
agumonkey wrote: post #48

Earlier 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

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…

> Needless to say, this can have some pretty corrosive effects without proper supervision.

And half the time the supervision is the exact opposite. Concepts like stack ranking are a sure-fire way of making the workplace more contentious, politicised, and publicised.

Because that's the thing about

> intense competition

95% of the time it's about visibility, the technical excellence only matters if it's visible and publicised to decision-makers, which means self-aggrandisement and a mastery of office politics not only can compensate for lacking technical skills, but will usually edge out technical skill entirely.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#233

Post by humanlion87 »

switch11 wrote: post #129
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 a very astute observation having worked at all three of A Trillion Dollar corporation A smaller company that grew quite a bit and sold for $5 billion+ A start up now * People optimize for what will make them rich/wealthy In larger companies, the ENTIRE function of middle management is to extract wealth and not create it In some ways it's a miracle Microsoft managed to get Satya Nadella as CEO. Normally the peo…

I highly doubt you can get to the executive level of such a large company without playing politics. And playing it well. It's inevitable.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#234

Post by washadjeffmad »

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…

Mutual cooperation is often spurred by personal and professional competition. I know I've been with teams that I had to drag through projects because they "get paid the same" whether or not it ever gets finished, and well-complemented teams where we forgot everything else while we built on each other's achievements.

There's selfish, winner takes all competition that creates winners and losers, and then there's healthy, productive competition where everyone who engages comes out better off for challenging themselves against a peer.

And obviously, there has to be a culture that provides resources no matter the outcomes. If you starve the 'losers', you're just creating desperate bait dogs in a toxic work environment.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#235

Post by viburnum »

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…

This is why extremely steep marginal takes rates improve economic efficiency. If you can’t get rich by playing office politics you might as well enjoy making a good product.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#236

Post by foolmeonce »

Tor3 wrote: post #203
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 loc…

Strange, I would categorize the problem we had was that most groups had a super-majority of people in California who would end up reaching social consensus instead of having technical arguments.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#237

Post by klelatti »

kortex wrote: post #149
DeRock wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That, in part, comes from x86 vs arm. x86, with its variable length instructions, means your logic gets increasingly complex as you widen. Meanwhile with arm, you have constant instruction size (other than thumb, but that’s more straightforward than variable size), that lets Apple do things like an 8-bit wide decode block (vs. 4-bit for Intel) and a humongous 630 OOB (almost double Intel’s deepest cores).

I think this marks the definitive point where RISC dominates CISC. Been a long time coming but M1 spells it out in bold. Sure variable size instructions are great when cache is limited and page faults are expensive. But with clock speeds and node sizes ansymptoting, the only way to scale is horizontal. More chiplets, more cores, bigger caches, bringing DRAM closer to cache. Minimizing losses from cache flushes by mor…

Agree with everything except the RISC vs CISC bit. Modern Arm isn't really RISC and x86 gets translated into RISC like microinstructions. To the extent that ARMv8 has an advantage I think it's due to being a nearly clean design 10 years ago rather than carrying the x86 legacy.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#238

Post by masklinn »

whack wrote: post #194

This is a controversial opinion, but I don't agree with the idea that big corporations should make an entry into every single adjacent market. If the company has core expertise and advantages that can deliver a decisive win in a known-lucrative market, then it's a no brainer. But if that's not the case, why run around chasing shadows everywhere, instead of focusing on harvesting the markets where you're already winni…

> This is a controversial opinion, but I don't agree with the idea that big corporations should make an entry into every single adjacent market. If the company has core expertise and advantages that can deliver a decisive win in a known-lucrative market, then it's a no brainer. But if that's not the case, why run around chasing shadows everywhere, instead of focusing on harvesting the markets where you're already winning.

The risk is that a competitor comes out of these adjacent markets and edges you out. That's what's looking likely to happen with ARM, which is slowly moving from embedded / cellphone to laptops and servers.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#239

Post by agumonkey »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #112
agumonkey wrote: post #48

Earlier 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

Tech nerds are some of the least objective (and unknowingly too) groups of people I have ever known.

Maybe the feeling of being on top of the trendy tech and above the norm .. hubrys in a word.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#240

Post by djmips »

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 agree with you and a lot of the things people who are responding are saying but the one thing that keeps popping in my head is that Apple who is disrupting in this case isn't exactly the lightweight scrappy contender as put forth in the parables and anecdotes. If the hypothesis is true for Intel why is giant Apple not suffering from the same mercenary middle management / toxic political BS?
Post reply on HN