Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Intel's disruption is now complete

jamesallworth.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 638 posts

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#371

Post by dmix »

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…

As I've linked to many times on HN:

The Iron Law of Bureaucracy

> 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 farming administration.

> Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

> The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

This (and other organizational failures and technological innovations) is why there will always be startups and small businesses eventually where there was once a big entrenched business or two (or sometimes three).

There is also, of course, whole new industries and niches to be created out of nothing, value and wealth is never a finite pile. It's mostly a matter of human effort to find and break out these new areas. Sometimes just reinventing things as the old talent grows old and dies off, providing value in learning history.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#372

Post by khendron »

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…

I have a similar theory as to why rapidly growing companies become toxic environments (of which politics and turf wars are a symptom). When a company is small and has a low profile, its employees are in it for the company. They believe in the product or service that the company is creating, and but into its mission.

When the company becomes successful and starts to grow, it starts to attract people who don't really care about the company and its mission—they are in it only for themselves. They only want to improve their lot, and are willing to play politics and backstab as required to get ahead..

If the company is only growing slowly, they can weed these types out during the interview process. But if they are growing quickly, they don't have time to interview properly and slowly and surely the company is transformed from a cooperative, mission-driven organization to one where employees are fighting against themselves.

Unfortunately these politically minded types are the ones who quickly rise up the ranks, and once most of the top areas of the company are populated by assholes, there is no cure.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#373

Post by rmk »

romanoderoma wrote: post #199
rmk wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snacks and other tchotchkes have become de rigueur in SV: I haven't had to buy my own lunch or snack for 8+ years now. With the pandemic in force and the prospect of going into an office itself coming into question, companies will have to stop relying on the (lazy but admittedly effective) lure of free snacks and lunch. Good times. On the whole, I agree with you: when I see people crumpled up in bean bags and picking…

To be fair with my employers, they usually paid for my lunches or had a cafeteria, usually not free, but very affordable. It's good to have the option, it's not what drives my decisions. I have no problem with people that see it as a bonus, to each his own, it simply doesn't matter much to me. But maybe SV corporate culture has gone a little bit too far on it.

A lot of the old-school employers run subsidised cafeterias. Cisco used to, back in the day. Pretty decent choices and reasonable pricing, until they started whittling down options making the cafes pretty unattractive compared to surrounding eateries in Milpitas (this was during the '09 recession). I know that Apple still runs them but they are of course notoriously thrifty (I'm pretty sure they don't subsidise as heavily as others). Same with Yahoo. Not sure if we had to pay, but it was pretty reasonable. Soon after that first recession, I started seeing a trend of catered food at smaller places, and completely in-house operations at the larger places. That trend has kept up until the pandemic struck.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#374

Post by stefan_ »

baq wrote: post #17

There’s just one missing detail here: intel was terribly, terribly bad at executing its plan. Tiger lake was supposed to be here on 10++nm or 7nm or whatever much improved process, which would make it extremely competitive if not the absolute best. Intel very well knew they’re in trouble if the expected process upgrades don’t work and they didn’t. It’s not like folks there don’t know how to plot that core vs Apple si…

Did they know that? Like, did the executives know?

They should have been suffocating their R&D with cash, but has that happened? Instead Intel is the world leader in buying companies, dissolving them and EOLing their products. I think on more than one occasion, they bought a customer hardware company and refunded every buyer of whatever gadget that company made.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#375

Post by jdblair »

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…

Are you talking about Atom or XScale? XScale seems the biggest missed opportunity. I can understand the thinking that being just another ARM vendor was a step down from being the owner of an architecture (AMD, and Via, notwithstanding). But with steady improvements and investment, and riding the coat-tails of fabs Intel built, Intel could have been a an actual mobile contender today.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#376

Post by petra »

wmf wrote: post #154
jibcage wrote: post #3

I’m curious to see if Apple will bring anything similarly disruptive to the server market. So far servers haven’t been their strong suit, but a chip this attractive could change things.

Nuvia is basically the server version.

How is Nuvia conncted to Apple?

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#377

Post by Groxx »

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…

I suspect some of it is also driven by 'impact-based rewards', i.e. valuable projects get the team paid more.

It means there's immense incentive for teams to monopolize skill and reduce other teams' value so they get picked. It also encourages posturing as strongly as possible, rather than accurately, since it's all based on perception - it's not like you can prove you'll do a better job than another team. To make it worse, if a highly valuable project seems like it might fail, the company will likely throw more resources at it - the risk to the team for getting in over their head is relatively low (and still looks great on a résumé), compared to the risk to the company.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#378

Post by ajb »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #116
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…

Phone chips are hard not least, or especially, the telecom part. I'm thinking that some companies underestimate the effort. Broadcom also tried and also failed. They came in cocky because they had succeeded in making Wifi chips with a 10-20 people team so thought that 500-ish people was more than enough for cellular even if Qualcomm had 4x that... I would not be surprised if Intel fell into the same trap.

At one point there were around 14 companies going for the mobile chip market. So it was clear there was going to be a massive casualty rate.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#379

Post by phire »

trepetti wrote: post #288
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.

One of the interesting comments in that article was how they pinned limited width of x86 decode implementations on variable instruction length. There are obvious code density benefits to the x86 variable length approach (especially in immediate encoding), but I guess the need for realignment creates long critical paths on the frontend. I wonder if the more constrained variable instruction length of RV64GC (32- and 16…

64bit x86 squanders it's variable length advantage by being a 40 year old design that has been extended over and over again.

Much of the opcode space is wasted with old single byte instructions that are rarely used these days. There are REX prefix bytes required everywhere to access all 16 registers. Modern instructions that are used all the time are hidden away behind prefix bytes.

64bit ARM is a complete redesign of the ARM instruction encoding, and they put a lot of thought into using the instruction space optimally. 32bit ARM also wasted a lot of it's instruction encoding space, but 64bit ARM is a massive improvement. Despite requiring roughly 10% extra instructions on average, the average arm64 is around the same size as the average x86 binary.

Immediates aren't a huge problem. All 32bit immediates and many 64bit immediates can be encoded in 1-2 instructions. Anything that can't should probably just use a PC relative load.

IMO, the much simpler instruction decoding massively outweighs the need for slightly more load bandwidth.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#380

Post by Tempest1981 »

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…

It won't bankrupt you, but it's the company making a statement on how much they value their engineers. And it may provide motivation to put in extra effort.
Post reply on HN