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Intel's disruption is now complete

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Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#291

Post by BoorishBears »

5d749d7da7d5 wrote: post #218
Kapura wrote: post #77

I found this very interesting, and it seems a similar thing is happening to Intel in the DIY/gaming space right now. For a long time, the Intel i5/i7/i9 were the processors of choice for gaming, but AMD's Ryzen line has been making remarkable inroads, with the recently released Ryzen 5000 series boasting performance that competes or tops Intel's top chips in the space, and generally with lower power draw to boot. I'm…

>the Intel i5/i7/i9 were the processors of choice for gaming, but AMD's Ryzen line has been making remarkable inroads I just checked my go-to hardware recommendation site, Logical Increments[0], and not a single Intel CPU makes the list. AMD everything. [0] https://www.logicalincrements.com/

The idea it's recommending a 3600 over a 10600k for a thousand dollar build tells me there's a slant...

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#292

Post by tonyedgecombe »

NobodyNada wrote: post #68
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.

> employees had to pay for everything (snacks/drinks/etc.). That’s not entirely true, at least in Hillsboro (I interned there recently). Drinks were free, and so was fruit, but you had to pay for e.g. donuts or chips.

Which is not a bad policy. I'm not sure I would want to work somewhere that offered free junk food.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#293

Post by tuatoru »

texasbigdata wrote: post #272
alisonkisk wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As well as the formal, visible institutions like constitutions or legal frameworks there are a lot of invisible ones like cultural norms.

In a lot of countries the most powerful institution is "family first" (sometimes extending that to ethnic or religious in-group second).

The (currently) successful countries got that way with a different norm, "same rules for everyone".

I'm viewing the emphasis on family first in recent Disney/Pixar movies with increasing concern. Sure it sells better in China, but at what long-term cost?

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#294

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

aaaxyz wrote: post #286
regimeld wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agree. The world's supply of semiconductors is dependent, in some ways, on the benevolence of the CCP. TSMC is like Arakkis. We need to diversify the supply chain.

Isn't TSMC building a fab in AZ? Anyway I'd say the "spice" in semiconductor production is rare earth elements, since the CCP controls most of their extraction (and has artificially lowered exports in the past)

> Anyway I'd say the "spice" in semiconductor production is rare earth elements, since the CCP controls most of their extraction

That's really only because of other countries outsourcing to China and not supporting domestic mining. There is no shortage of rare earths in other countries.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#295

Post by supernova87a »

hyperpallium2 wrote: post #212
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…

Apart from cache, anandtech notes https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de... What really defines Apple’s Firestorm CPU core from other designs in the industry is just the sheer width of the microarchitecture. "Width" enables greater parallel execution of instructions.

Does this also refer to physical die width? As in, it also makes the manufacturing more expensive as yields go down due to any small defect?

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#296

Post by golergka »

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…

> Societies do this because it is widely believed that it would be impossible for various things to happen without it.

It is not society's business to allow or disallow different kinds of contracts between private parties. If I know that corporation's investors don't have personal liability and still decide to go into business with them, it's my personal decision to accept this risk and not society's. If I so please, I could go into even riskier deals, up to just gifting them my money. It could be a stupid decision, but it's my decision to make, not something that "society" can allow me to do – actually, not society, but it's worst enemy, the government.

Of course, some governments act out of assumptions that you stated, but it's nothing more than just justification for tiranny.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#297

Post by warkdarrior »

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

Indeed the iPhone can be seen as opening a completely new market, instead of disrupting an existing technology. Laptops still exist, desktops still exist, servers still exist. iPhone expanded the technologies available, did not replace any existing one.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#298

Post by PragmaticPulp »

wisty wrote: post #284
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…

Didn't Steve Jobs usually greenlight 2 or 3 teams to design then just pick the most promising one to go to production? Sometimes it makes sense to have a bit of competition, but having multiple prototypes (often with slightly different design parameters - e.g. a reliable design, an advanced design, and a moonshot) is a better competition than having managers attacking each other with passive-aggressive Powerpoint sho…

I worked at a company founded by an ex-Apple CEO. He tried this technique because Steve Jobs did it. The problem was that it doesn’t work at all unless you truly have 2 or 3 entire teams of fully competent people to pull it off. It can work at Apple because they’re absolutely massive and they only focus on a very small number of products.

In our case, making two teams work independently on the same problem just created a situation where each team had half as many resources.

Given Intel’s history of paying median rather than top wages and losing their best employees to competitors, they didn’t even have one full department capable of pulling this off, let alone 2 or 3.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#299

Post by the8472 »

mrtksn wrote: post #266
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, don…

> I don't know where the notion of "Intel is about to die and TMSC will make us suffer due to monopoly" comes from

Semiconductor R&D costs have been going up, companies consolidating or went into niches. There are jokes about having to buy from The Semiconductor Company® in the future.

Intel is sitting on a lot of money, so they're not going to die soon. But they haven't been showing signs of improving the situation since 14nm was delayed in 2013. This saga didn't start with 10nm. Remember that the cadence used to be tick-tock every 18 months. We still can't get 10nm desktop chips. So there are some questions how they'll fare in the future.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#300

Post by this_user »

SteveGerencser wrote: post #45
Someone1234 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think Intel can come back, or is Intel too dysfunctional/inefficient to recover?

I had friends at the Intel fab in New Mexico in the 90s and this type of turf war was prevalent even then internally at the fab. Managers were constantly jockeying for position at the expense of manufacturing processes. Just one anecdotal story, one of the wafer guys had an idea to improve a process. He went to his boss who shot it down instantly. Wafer guy knew he was right so went to another manager who liked the i…

The difference is that back then Intel still had a quasi-monopoly. Even AMDs occasional successes from the late 90s on were usually temporary, and never an existential threat to Intel, so they could afford a certain level of internal dysfunction.

But we are now living in a world where mobile is more important than desktop, and mobile chip designs have enough power to be a threat to the desktop market, and perhaps even the server market in the not-too-distant future. This is something that should worry Intel.

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