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Intel's disruption is now complete

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Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#311

Post by dragontamer »

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…

> 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.

The same architecture on a smaller process will use less power and use less silicon (usually making it cheaper: but yields make that equation complicated). A 100mm^2 design using 50W will only be 50mm^2 using only 25W on a smaller node.

Since 300mm wafers are always 70,000 mm^2 in area, you now produce twice as many designs in 50mm^2 instead of 100mm^2.

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Now what made Intel get stuck on 14nm+++ is that Intel got really good at increasing 14nm++++'s clock rate. Dennard scaling is dead: a larger process may offer better GHz these days.

But if you can solve the yield issues, the march towards tinier and tinier transistors is a winner. Less power used, less chip-area used, and therefore cheaper and more-efficient chips.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#312

Post by lotsofpulp »

tuatoru wrote: post #293
texasbigdata wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

>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".

Which successful countries are these? As far as I can tell, the richer, more resourceful, established tribes don't follow the same rules as everyone. They might not be as blatantly corrupt as others, or the corruption may be more higher level with more plausible deniability, but "family first" is human nature.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#313

Post by xenocyon »

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 misunderstand the reach of limited liability. It caps liability not merely w.r.t. consumers/vendors/employees etc, but to anyone whatsoever, even a person who has no relationship with a corporation and did not enter into a contract with it.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#314

Post by golergka »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #310
golergka wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 liabili…

I know history of corporations pretty well, from hundred years war and british and dutch maritime corporation's, thank you. But history is not ethics: what is and what ought to be are two very different things, not to be confused. Explaining how and why something hapenned historically has only tangential relation to how it should happen and how should we view it from an ethical standpoint, and I was talking about the latter, not the former.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#315

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

alisonkisk wrote: post #277
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…

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

By 2020, the "purpose of a corporation", both in the general sense of "what are corporations for?" and the specific sense (e.g. "what is Intel for?") has become fairly unclear.

Maybe it actually is in the interests of that Intel runs off on tangents. How would we establish that? Well, we'd have to have some understanding of what the purpose of the corporation is. I don't claim to have any special insight into that, I'm just pointing out that claiming that its purpose is maximising shareholder revenue is historically revisionist and inaccurate.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#316

Post by xenocyon »

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... to maximize returns for its investors.

That's a common misunderstanding.

"In nearly all legal jurisdictions, disinterested and informed directors have the discretion to act in what they believe to be the interest of the business corporate entity, even if this differs from maximizing profits for present shareholders. Usually maximizing shareholder value is not a legal obligation, but the product of the pressure that activist shareholders, stock-based compensation schemes and financial markets impose on corporate directors." [1]

[1] https://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/academics/clarke_business_...

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#317

Post by hitekker »

phkahler wrote: post #205
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…

That sounds very interesting. Has there been any update on how successful or not his ideas are in practice?

They're unsuccessful.

His book on Psychopathy was panned on Reddit, as well as on Goodreads:

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4c27ss/im_pieter_hint...

Likewise, the wikipedia article for Social Architecture has been listed "not notable" for the past four years, and hasn't seen any meaningful edits since 2016.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_architecture

With respect to the author, I'm not surprised. Nerds like ourselves enjoy "discovering" ideas, slapping pretentious labels on them, and then evangelizing them to the whole world... without checking if other people know more about those ideas than we do.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#319

Post by goatinaboat »

haramboy wrote: post #201
paganel wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An exception might be SpaceX where you have a strong dictator at the top I think a similar thing is happening at Amazon (the strong dictator stuff, I mean), and it's my hunch that Google has started following Intel's trajectory, they just haven't realised it just yet.

Similarly in US politics. And before we get emotional, how is it different from those examples?

All countries where there is a class of people who go into politics as their only career. The UK is riddled with them.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#320

Post by beagle3 »

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…

Itanium was a really bad architecture for the time (and possibly still is). It was a bet that sufficiently smart compilers would be available, but they weren’t available in time. They aren’t even available today 20 years down the line in a form that would have justified Itanium if they were available then.

It wouldn’t have mattered if Intel controlled the OS or not - it just wasn’t competitive. There’s nothing you can learn from it about Apple - who delivered an ultra competitive, likely even when emulating Intel architecture in software.

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