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Intel's disruption is now complete

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Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#271

Post by alisonkisk »

kofejnik wrote: post #209
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…

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…

That's an arvitrt judgment. Workers can be lazy and bad that their jobs, and leaders can enable workers to perform better.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#272

Post by texasbigdata »

alisonkisk wrote: post #257
texasbigdata wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An additional set of guesses to add on: some individuals are temperamentally better at the extraction than production, prefer it, are more able to exercise deceit, and have less regret or self shame.

That's obvious but doesn't explain why some organizations are vulnerable to it while others aren't.

Wasn’t meaning to be cheeky. Have been thinking about this for a few years and those are observations that took a while.

There’s analogies to building institutions in developing countries. See the constitution in the Ukraine (I think) or South Africa. Ginsberg commented publicly and Brayer agreed with (at a talk I attended) from a “source code” perspective those constitutions are superior to the American one. Sort of v2 efforts where you can adopt best practices. Yet most people would agree those younger nations don’t have stronger institutions and than the US.

So there has to be both an individual and organizational component.

This next comment is completely unbaked and probably terribly phrased, so please read it gently: in addition to the rest of the comments, I believe there is also (and I understand this is a terrible analogy) a “standby passive observer” mechanism mentality similar to how Hitler came to power. Conceptually, people that get hired externally should maybe be >50% of any large organization maybe. Those employees need to see repeated instances of malicious political acts go by (“hey aren’t we going to do something here”) and learn that sort of complicit passivity.

That’s probably a terrible analogy, but notice that there seems to be nothing the three or four people in this threat that worked at Intel could do to alter the company’s direction (obviously) but more importantly there’s also a tone of dread and finality in their words, and they seem to have all chosen to have left.

So, it seems, like nation building, a complicated problem to understand and solve.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#273

Post by nolok »

f6v wrote: post #200
ksec wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel's current design are 1-3 years late depending on which roadmap and sector you are counting. Caused by their 10nm delay. Intel had Tigerlake / WillowCove Design but they cant ship it. They also have Golden Cove. If you have put the design they were suppose to be using now, on a IPC basis Intel might still be in the lead.

What about other ARM chips?

Other ARM chips are aiming for smartphone/tablet and are more than enough for this. No one using samsung latest top phone is thinking "if only that phone was 15% faster ! this is a major issue".

No one makes ARM chips for laptop, because of the chicken and egg issue. Windows on ARM going mainline could change it.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#274

Post by tomjen3 »

beezle wrote: post #102
akmarinov wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, it’s looking like Intel won’t do 5nm until 2023 at which point TSMC is projecting 3nm. They won’t be able to catch up. On the other hand Intel is a huge national security interest for the US, so expect the government to help them out where possible.

First (and I'm no expert here) I don't believe that (x)nm is the be all end all of cpu performance. Architecture still matters. Second, perhaps the AMD/Apple fan boys have not noticed but Intel has many times the volume of AMD and whatever ARM volume Apple will have (Apple is typically 10% of lap/desktop sales, up this year from Covid). The world requires Intel to meet its computing needs and no magic wand will give…

If you can get it there is no reason not to buy an AMD product in a laptop, or to design one in, unless you absolutely need thunderbolt support.

And laptops sells way more than desktops do. This is a winner takes all market and there is no reason to go with the loser.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#275

Post by BooneJS »

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…

Intel turf wars extend beyond Geos. The 2nd floor and 4th floor of SC12 would tick-tock Xeons and rewrite RTL and verification code just because.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#276

Post by robocat »

dash2 wrote: post #202
VHRanger wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> If the company is size N, they only share 1/N

The graph of the distribution for value per person must be wierd, and definitely not flat. Maybe based on a power law, but I am unsure how to model the people that provide negative value, for example bad managers.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#277

Post by alisonkisk »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #249
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…

> The purpose of a corporation isn't to continue existing in perpetuity, but rather, to maximize returns for its investors. Society grants a group of people immunity from personal liability when they form an organization that has some chance of carrying out some useful work. The organization becomes a special kind of entity - a corporation . It can operate without its investors & officers fearing that their own wealt…

True but offtopic or supportive of parents point, which is that running off on tangents is not the purpose of the corporation.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#278

Post by trepetti »

ksec wrote: post #141
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…

Intel's current design are 1-3 years late depending on which roadmap and sector you are counting. Caused by their 10nm delay. Intel had Tigerlake / WillowCove Design but they cant ship it. They also have Golden Cove. If you have put the design they were suppose to be using now, on a IPC basis Intel might still be in the lead.

It has really been cascading process delays dating back to 2014 when 14 nm got pushed back when Broadwell was supposed to launch, too.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#279

Post by coward8675309 »

skohan wrote: post #162
coward8675309 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cloud is changing. At my gig we've embraced GCP's managed cloud services, and I do not want to go back to 2015. The operating cost savings (no devops people!) and the low cost makes engineering systems for cloud-agnosticism very expensive. If Apple provided a range of managed services that met clients' needs, they could find a lot of success. Would they beat AWS? Highly doubtful, but Apple already provides a lot…

> I'm hopeful with respect to Apple dogfooding its silicon in the data center because it may feed back into robust ongoing support for Unix/Posix on their publicly-facing platforms. I mean that's one possibility, but what seems much more "Apple-ey" (aka likely) is that they would release a very much locked-down platform of tightly controlled, managed services which would perform well and would have a beautiful dashbo…

That's not what I'm getting at. Regardless of the details of the cloud offerings, migrating from Linux to Apple Silicon would help the MacOS and iOS developer experience, because it'll all (MacOS, iOS, Apple's rack OS) be using their BSD-derived Unix OS under the covers.

Right now Apple's cloud engineers are to some extent helping Linux be a better OS by filing bug reports, creating PRs, etc. That activity, directed toward an Apple Silicon rack OS, would redound to those of us sitting behind MacBooks, typing into the terminal, treating it as a Unix box with nice driver support.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#280

Post by jv22222 »

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…

Perfect example of why Musk’s no silo rule helps his companies so much.
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