Intel's disruption is now complete • Hacker News Board

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#261

Post by simonh » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 7:17 PM UTC

djmips wrote: post #240

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…

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?

Apple is very differently organised from most big corporations, it has whats known as a functional organisational structure. Marketing, operations, software engineering, hardware engineering, etc.

Most corporations are organised around product groups, but what happens when the mobile products group comes up with a new device and wants to sell it to corporate clients? The enterprise products division might not like that. Imagine if Apple had a Mac division selling laptops, they might not have been happy about the Phone division coming out with the iPad and keyboard cases.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#262

Post by jldugger » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 7:17 PM UTC

hyperpallium2 wrote: post #153

That chart is not of competing technologies, but of market demand and one technology. The classic disruptive chart shows two technologies improving in parallel, but the performance customers demand doesn't increase as fast, so eventually the disruptive technology is "good enough" for those customers (even though the incumbent technology is better still: it "overshoots") and has other desired qualities (like battery e…

> let us note that Christensen himself assessed the iphone as non-disruptive.

Which I suppose it is, but I think it's important to ask: if Apple didn't introduce a disruptive technology, why were they able to do what Nokia didn't?

Its hard to deny how the iPhone represented a power shift away from carriers. It's easy to forget but a decade ago you had to pay carriers for the privilege of changing your ringtone. They had their fingers in every pie, in exchange for access to the market the carriers more or less controlled. Hell, you often couldn't even bring your phone if you switched carriers.

Nokia was too busy pleasing their customers: the big cellular providers who ordered most of their phones. And the status quo heavily favored them -- the top selling phone of all time is still a Nokia phone from 2004. They didn't really have any idea how to market direct to consumer and their brand had no particular meaning -- they made as many SKUs as carriers wanted. Since they were in a clearly dominant position, they had no need to arm twist the weakest player to break into the market, and a lot to lose if they played hardball.

Clay's right that it's not a traditional "cheap tech finds a new purpose undermining more expensive status quo" but it definitely rhymes -- all the incentives are the same and adequately explains why Nokia fell apart.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#263

Post by tjoff » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 7:18 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #140

tjoff wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the PC has been a massive mistake that needs rectifying?

From the point of view of IBM, most likely yes, otherwise there wouldn't have been PS/2 and MCA architecture. Hence why laptops and 2-1 hybrids are basically back to the days of vertical integration of 16 bit computers, whose the PC was the only exception.

So let's all make sure, for apples sake, that is fixed then.

Not really, PC laptops and hybrids are pretty standardized. A slim case doesn't really make it vertical integration.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#264

Post by Doctor_Fegg » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 7:18 PM UTC

jack_riminton wrote: post #248

djmips wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Explained somewhat by the nature of the innovators dilemma and the products they're making: - x86 chips for PC were Intel's cash cow so doing anything to disrupt that revenue stream would be fought against - Apple's cash cow is the phone itself so they don't particularly have any dogmatic loyalty to one type of chip as long as the phone sells Now if there were a technology to come up agains the iPhone (glasses anyone…

They did, famously, deliberately kill their own iPod market by introducing the iPhone.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#265

Post by texasbigdata » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 7:19 PM UTC

rdiddly wrote: post #230

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!

That’s why Netflix had that epic comment along the ways of “Enron had engraved Integrity into the marble of the main lobby its corporate headquarters. True values of a corporation get reflected in who gets rewarded, who gets promoted, and who gets let go.”

People who are political as a prerequisite need to believe there is both a reward and a low fear of retaliation/termination for their actions.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#266

Post by mrtksn » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 7:20 PM UTC

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…

People root for anything-but-intel because competition is a good thing and intel had none for very long time.

I don't know where the notion of "Intel is about to die and TMSC will make us suffer due to monopoly" comes from but before having people cheer for Intel again they probably need some time to have their execs cure some disease in some poor part of the world, do a few AMAs on reddit, open-source something, donate to some cool projects in tandem with actually improving their products before regaining the goodwill of the people. Can take some clues from Bill gates and Microsoft.

The consumers are pissed. AMD's comeback is attracting a lot of fanfare because of people being sick of the not having an option beside "should I get i3, i5 or i7" for very long time.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#267

Post by pinewurst » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 7:20 PM UTC

SoSoRoCoCo wrote: post #213

pinewurst wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But whatever real innovation underlay Xeon Phi/KNx was performed two decades ago. Current Intel is only capable of SKUsmanship - minutely partitioning function for projected max margins. Edit: Also too, remember that KNx was really an attempt to salvage Intel's failed Larrabee GPU effort.

> Also too, remember that KNx was really an attempt to salvage Intel's failed Larrabee GPU effort. I do, and I don't think you know that the first "Knights" project was simply a rename of Larrabee. Same exact product. It was called Knights ... Landing I think? Then it became Xeon Phi.

Knights Ferry was the 1st. Unclear about the actual diffs between it and Larrabee silicon. I do know the 1st boards still had a video out port but it was disconnected.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#268

Post by wombatmobile » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 7:20 PM UTC

Grove embraced Christensen's paradigm for innovation and backed this learning with investment and the risk of cannibalisation inherent with Celeron.

It's easy to be wise after the fact, but we can now say that Grove or Otellini didn't take a big enough risk. Instead of risking cannibalisation of their core markets, they might have won a bigger prize over the longer term by straying further.

Desperate Gamers Camp Out in the Pandemic for $700 GPUs Months after the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080's launch, the lines at brick-and-mortar stores across the country can still wrap around the block.

https://www.wired.com/story/nvidia-amd-demand-pandemic-lines...

C'est la vie.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#269

Post by alisonkisk » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 7:21 PM UTC

viburnum wrote: post #235

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…

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.

What is "extremely steep marginal takes rates" ?

Are you saying that low profit enterprises create more value? The thesis is attractive but also makes me wonder about Apple, high profit and also highly creative.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#270

Post by CountSessine » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 7:22 PM UTC

raverbashing wrote: post #52

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…

Interesting that you mention page size, IMHO 4k was small even 10 years ago. Though of course the next bump is 4M which I think might be too big for most apps Apparently ARM supports 4KB, 64KB and 1MB (I just googled that) Also maybe all the x86 crud might be finally taking its toll (and not just the ISA but all the cruft that got on top of it for 40yrs+ like legacy buses and functionalities, ACPI, or even the overen…

There’s nothing wrong with ACPI - in fact it’s what’s going to enable ARM in the server space. Without something like ACPI, you need customized kernels and other crap to control system devices. ACPI is actually quite nice. And it replaced something (APM) that really was legacy cruft (dropping into real mode for power management?!! Ugh!)

EFI doesn’t seem that bad either. Maybe something like uboot would suit you better? But the reason we have those nice graphical bios utilities now is because of EFI.