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Intel's disruption is now complete

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Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#391

Post by ckemere »

systemvoltage wrote: post #97
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…

You put it so well, having worked in both large and small companies - I can attest to this theory. An exception might be SpaceX where you have a strong dictator at the top and any annoyances of tribal war get direct authoritarian spanking.

Despite their size, I think they're still in the startup phase where they have a large number of starry-eyed (pun intended) folks coming in because of the mission. That really is Musk's secret - you can get a lot done churning through people.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#392

Post by CharlesHorsey »

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.

Thank you for the link. That article says the cpu has a 630 op reorder buffer. Does that mean it has to throw out up to 630 instructions on a mispredict? That sounds huge, so I wonder if I’m misunderstanding.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#394

Post by imhoguy »

nickik wrote: post #355
imhoguy wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is not really the case. Most Intel servers run linux, Intel has nearly complete control over linux in a practical sense. They can put developers in it and update the OS and unless its a very user hostile feature it will go into the mainline kernel and be everywhere. The same goes for compiler and so on. Intel could easily open up their boot and make the store there much better. The don't quite have the vertical…

Unlikely. There is more Linux devices running as Android on ARM than any other processors. You I can run Termux on ARM Android with complete set of of GNU tools. Also ARM is supported natively by Debian and Ubuntu [1].

Once devs will sort out their new shiny ARM Macs whoes (Docker, other tooling) I smell there may be ARM server market rising soon.

[1] https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/installation-guide/armhf/ch02s01...

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#395

Post by pjmlp »

tjoff wrote: post #383
pjmlp wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try to use anything other than Windows or ChromeOS on such laptops, with 100% support of underlying hardware.

Many of us are? And we can replace parts from third parties. It is getting more and more integrated though which makes it hard to replace parts. But that has more to do with greed and size requirements than vertical integration, a soldering iron can amend some of that. Driver situation isn't by any means something new or necessarily an indication of vertical integration either.

Looking at my Asus sold with Linux "support" I doubt it, hence why I explicility stated 100%.

As for the rest, nothing that regular consumers would ever bother with.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#396

Post by Baeocystin »

simonh wrote: post #359
Baeocystin wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, I think many of their Mac-related problems over the past few years are a result of no one being able to defend the line internally, too. Management is a difficult problem.

I think this is a misunderstanding. The problems with the Mac have not been due to neglect, but due to very aggressive forward looking and innovative advancements of the platform some of which just failed. You don’t develop all new low profile keyboard technology, an original touch sensitive display interface system, a new hinge mechanism, a custom integrated security and image processing chip (T2), and a unique 5k d…

Perhaps we just have a different opinion, and that's OK. I don't work at Apple, so I have no deeper insight, other than to me, it looks like the Mac branch has been flailing with no clear direction for some time now. They may have the money to try things, but there no one steering the ship, so to speak.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#397

Post by sizt »

tobmlt wrote: post #386
dmix wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 agricu…

Thanks for making me aware of this. I’m interested in finding the derivation of this law. Intuitively it sounds sort of like Grisham’s law were bad money drives out good, but it can’t be quite that simple, can it? Is it more of an empirical thing? I know I am being lazy just asking but a quick search turns up only statements of the law. I can make up my own thinking behind it but I’d like to get it from Pournelle if…

Turf wars are a symptom of thinking you are smarter than everyone else ... and what group makes the greatest effort in this counter-productive egotistical exercise? Silicon design engineers.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#398

Post by andor »

frogblast wrote: post #33
jeffbee wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still waiting for my M1 to show up but from studying the details that other people have commented on, it's clear that Apple is slathering on the microarchitectural resources that both Intel and AMD are stingy with. Their core has a gigantic L1 instruction cache, rather a lot of L1 TLB entries (4x more than Intel), large(r) pages by default, and many other aspects. L1 TLB entries in particular are a well-known pro…

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”.

Not a chip designer, but I think it could lead to a more efficient use of the functional units.

With more instructions decoded per clock and a larger reorder buffer, the core should be able to keep its units busier, i.e. not wasting energy without producing valuable output.

This efficiency gain of course needs to outweigh the consumption of the additional decoders. This part is easier with ARM as decoding x86 is complicated.

In addition to higher unit utilization, the increased parallelism should also be an advantage in the "race to sleep" power management strategy.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#399

Post by sizt »

texasbigdata wrote: post #247
sjansen wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Normally the people who rise up the ranks are the politically astute Don't discount Nadella's political astuteness. I think it would be more accurate to say he is not merely politically astute, but instead able to combine his skill at internal politics with customer empathy and technical intelligence.

The conversation in Satyas own book of the trip to try to recruit some HP exec with Balmer where Satya pushed to take over some division and Balmer reluctantly agreed on the flight down to SF but told Satya he better be able to execute and quickly or he should work on his parachute skills, alone is hilarious when viewed through the lens you describe.

Balmer is not an intelligent person.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#400

Post by qppo »

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…

> TMSC will make us suffer due to monopoly

The fears have less to do with TSMC the company and more the fact it's a pawn in the geopolitical chess game between the US (and her pacific allies) and China.

The issues with supply chains through Taiwan have little to do with whether gamers are buying their CPUs from AMD or Intel, but the fact that a critical piece of infrastructure in the Western economy is very precariously located, and in the event of war or political strife is not going to be able to be mobilized for domestic (or even friendly-allied) production.

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