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Intel's disruption is now complete

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Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#301

Post by PragmaticPulp »

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…

Tech enthusiasm and criticism has become extremely cyclical in the past decade. It’s easy to forget that we were all cheering for Facebook and the Zuckerberg success story before it became uncool to be pro-Facebook.

Intel is stumbling, but up until very recently they were still the fastest gaming CPUs available. That didn’t stop gamers from criticizing them endlessly and cheering their demise. Intel went from cool to uncool.

Give it a few years and they might be able to leverage the underdog position into a comeback story.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#302

Post by muyuu »

romanoderoma wrote: post #163
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.

I'm on the opposite side on this I don't need snacks and drinks at work, just water and the occasional coffe, which I get at the bar anyway so I can have a little walk and clear up my mind Workplaces that looks like a teenage dream party give me the chill When I need to relax I stop working entirely and go out I consider more money or more free time (or both) an incentive I appreciate solid forniture, a comfortable s…

100% agreed

companies throwing away chocolates and parties are wasting resources that could go to salaries, re-investment or profit

having said that a company as large as Intel and with such a dominant position for many years has a lot of margin to waste money and make mistakes, which is why they often become complacent

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#303

Post by jodrellblank »

secondcoming wrote: post #224
jodrellblank wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Of course; when Guido Van Rossum left Python[1], he titled his email "Transfer of power" and commented "I am not going to appoint a successor. So what are you all going to do? Create a democracy? Anarchy? A dictatorship? A federation?". No doubt a lot of people would like to insert themselves as new "Benevolent Dictator for Life" - imagine the uproar if Guido had appointed a successor who nobody had heard of, but had recently bought Guido a luxury yacht. What would "fork the entire thing" look like - would Apple do it? Google? FreeBSD? Microsoft? RedHat? Would the Python dev core fracture into competing groups of stay vs leave? Just because you /can/ fork it, doesn't mean nobody has any power or influence.

Or when people complain about Linus Poettering and Systemd, either how it came to be in certain distributions, or how it took over certain subsystems, or people's behaviour around it - isn't that politics and power structures?

Or that recent post on HN ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25076197 ) where the Cairo project appears to have nobody left who is able to make a release and the last few years of releases were done by one person working at Samsung, and there hasn't been one since he left, and presumably there was no organizational structure for how to distribute this power to several people, or how to choose and "promote" someone to the job, or if nobody wants to do it, how years worth of effort came to end up on the rocks where nobody even cares anymore, isn't that a broken or absent organization one way or another?

[1] https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-committers/2018-Jul...

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#304

Post by ptx »

regimeld wrote: post #215
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…

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.

TSMC is a Taiwanese company. The world can ensure the supply of its semiconductors by ensuring Taiwan has access to weapons and guarantees of military assistance in case the CCP's benevolence wavers.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#305

Post by eecc »

baybal2 wrote: post #87
eecc wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Semiconductor engineering is still a career suicide though, that haven't changed in the last few decades. Wow, so I need to thank myself for accidentally bumbling towards ops and dev? Meh, for me it’s just that in EU there’s a total dearth of opportunities in the industry

People making WordPress websites are making more than PhD research scientists in Taiwan, and Korea.

Depressing

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#306

Post by roland00 »

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…

In sum humans do not always optimize towards one variable like success / fitness.

Instead they optimize to many things like money, prestige, power, security, and so on. Much like you can't describe health as a single thing, when you collapse your insight to a single variable you miss everything in your simulation of how reality works.

This applies to an individual level but especially applies towards a cooperative level with multiple individuals. When we cooperate (or just act in ambiguous situations) sometimes trying to collapse your actions to "mental shortcuts" aka Heuristics in Judgment and Decision-Making to borrow some thinking fast and slow language further reduces insight.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#307

Post by mmphosis »

imhoguy wrote: post #185
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…

I would quote Orwell here: "Who Controls the Past Controls the Future". It is about lack of control over legacy killing the progress. The power of Intel is "proven" legacy, but building completely new architecture is expensive and prone to adoption failure (Itanium?) when Intel has no control over OS (Windows), apps or virtualization software. Then Apple has control over all that: they can make hardware (scaled up mo…

Apple is now Full-Stack. It's turtles all the way down to the CPU!

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#308

Post by jaynetics »

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…

I for one am very glad that TSMC amounts to a SPOF. I've been to Taiwan twice, and I'd much prefer to use an old chip a while longer than for this lovely, open nation to be invaded by a totalitarian regime. There is only a few things preventing an invasion, mainly that the US would like to keep this "unsinkable carrier", and TSMC. As Xinjiang shows, only international pain will do to make the world react to China's actions, and TSMC might be able to cause that.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#309

Post by pjc50 »

ben_w wrote: post #223
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’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.

I think both the Roman Empire and imperial China went through several cycles of this.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#310

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

golergka wrote: post #296
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

You don't seem to understand the history of corporations at all.

They don't exist and were not created to sell potentially risky products to eager consumers. They were created to engage in capital-requiring efforts (notably expeditions, but also large scale resource extraction and industrial projects) that would not happen without the personal liability release.

They would not happen because the potential for liability related to the endeavor was clear to all (i.e. people would likely die, and vast amounts of money might be lost).

But societies (and notably royal families) wanted those things to happen, and so they create corporate charters to encourage them to do so.

We could make do without corporate charters, but then we'd also likely be making do without most of things they enabled, because essentially nobody would have had the guts to bet their own personal liability on what were clearly risky and dangerous endeavors.

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