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Intel's disruption is now complete

jamesallworth.medium.com

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Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#331

Post by bwilliams18 »

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…

Allworth on Exponent and Ben Thompson (his co-host on Exponent) have both explained that Clay was in fact wrong about iPhone being non-disruptive because he didn't understand the ultimate value of the iPhone, and got stuck in the hardwareos as a single point of integration.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#332

Post by Miraste »

jeffbee wrote: post #214
micv wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using a MacBook Pro with an Intel 10nm part in it. The 4 port 13" MBP still comes with one. I think the MacBook Air might have had a 10nm part before it went ARM, too. There are still no 10nm parts for the desktop or the high-end/high-TDP laptops anyway afaik.

Tiger Lake is objectively the fastest thing in any laptop you can buy, regardless of whether its TDP is as high as others. You're right about the lack of desktop parts, though.

It's not faster than the M1, is it?

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#333

Post by wmf »

supernova87a wrote: post #295
hyperpallium2 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, the size of the die isn't really related to the internal structure of a CPU core.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#334

Post by Miraste »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #64
frogblast wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple’s core is very wide. But wide usually means very high power consumption. M1 apparently has much lower power consumption. So something else is going on other than “Apple is willing to spend more to make cores wider”.

> M1 apparently has much lower power consumption. Even compared to similar manufacturing processes ?

There are no similar manufacturing processes, Apple has paid for time-limited exclusivity on 5nm.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#335

Post by samsonradu »

vagrantJin wrote: post #260
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.

Countries with lots of minerals in Africa/ South America can tell you stories about the resource curse.

The 'resource curse' might have the causality wrong though in many circumstances.

Maybe those countries would find themselves in a similarly bad state (or worse) without those resources. Maybe their bad state is due to historical reasons - being former colonies with very little power on the world stage - and resources just couldn't help much.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#336

Post by Miraste »

ivalm wrote: post #179
blinkingled wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this point is being continually missed - having better performance doesn't mean much if you are limited in what you can do by the OS, the ecosystem and the hardware. As it is you can't run another OS or attach external or PCIe GPUs to anything Apple Silicon. So if macOS continues the downward trajectory or if someone else comes up with a better GPU you're stuck unlike with a PC.

I think it is typical of Apple to have feature poor early entrants and then increase feature set with new generations. I am sure in the next few years the GPU/other pcie issues will be resolved.

I'd bet money Apple and Nvidia remain incompatible for the foreseeable future.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#337

Post by sanderjd »

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…

This seems true, but I guess I also have more empathy for decision-makers: to me it seems like it is far from obvious who should take on which projects. Pretty much by definition, the organization is structured so that its current projects have sensible homes, but when a totally new project comes up, it is unlikely to fit perfectly anywhere in that structure. If it did, it wouldn't be totally new!

None of the options for dealing with this seem great. I've seen "internal incubator" type things which are designed to come up with new ideas, but honestly I'm not a fan of these. The structure incentivizes prototyping new "left field" ideas, but those ideas are likely not to gain any traction, and if they do, it is likely to be a mess to transition them into real projects within the more normal operations of the organization. And it does nothing for projects that are clearly important from inception, even if new; the "left field" incubator is not the right place to put something that isn't a crazy idea being tested but something known to be important.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#338

Post by tuatoru »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #64
frogblast wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple’s core is very wide. But wide usually means very high power consumption. M1 apparently has much lower power consumption. So something else is going on other than “Apple is willing to spend more to make cores wider”.

> M1 apparently has much lower power consumption. Even compared to similar manufacturing processes ?

The manufacturing process is TSMC's, so probably not.

To me the innovation is using phone-type SoC technology.

A lot of the power (and die area) demand in modern chips is in the interface circuitry to drive the few centimetres of PCB trace between ICs.

Put the RAM in the same package as the CPU and you eliminate that interface. That gives you die space and power budget for big buffers and lots of parallel execution.

Interface transistors (and wires) are many times larger than the core compute logic transistors (and wires), so there is much more than a one-for-one gain.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#339

Post by jdlshore »

alisonkisk wrote: post #269
viburnum wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think they meant 'tax rates'

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#340

Post by socialdemocrat »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #298
wisty wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 creat…

I think they are doing it wrong then. You do the cheap parts independently. Then you pair down to fewer choices and transfer resources to fewer groups.

You repeat this multiple times depending on your resources. When things get really expensive, you should be down to one idea.

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