Intel's disruption is now complete • Hacker News Board

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#411

Post by monocasa » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 10:45 PM UTC

phire wrote: post #379

trepetti wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

I've heard that there's other benefits, like the fact that memory RMW instructions are essentially a fairly clean way to address physical registers without using any architectural registers.

I'd love to see what a CISC-V ISA without the 40 years of baggage looks like (like jeeze, the hlt instruction gets a single byte on x86?)

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#412

Post by seph-reed » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 10:45 PM UTC

dmix wrote: post #371

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…

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…

This law is the reason term-limits and liquid-democracy are such strong tools.

Term limits are best implemented where someone must take on a different job every x years. This doesn't solve the problem of entrenched vampiric bureaucrats entirely, but it at least pushes them towards the chopping block.

Liquid democracy is a type of democracy where people give their voting power for particular issues to whoever they trust most for that topic. Then that person may pass the cumulative votes onto someone they trust and believe in. The point of liquid democracy is to empower people who are actual experts in a subject. Rather than having laymen vote in ways that just empower the most socially adept.

The entire skillset involved with gaining power is so time-consuming, it's incredibly rare for someone to have it and an actual technical skill at the same time.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#413

Post by qchris » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 10:46 PM UTC

socialdemocrat wrote: post #340

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd imagine that this can be pretty tricky with more complex systems, where the buy-in for even getting off the ground can be pretty high. In software, that's usually not the case, but I can imagine a number other instances where it wouldn't work. This seems like it would show up the most when the problem isn't a greenfield where getting the first 90% working is the hard part, but on the other end, where the difference comes from optimizing the last 10%, which can be really expensive (i.e. figuring out how to profitably and effectively take production from 1000 parts to 10,000 parts can be much more difficult and costly than moving from 100 to 1000).

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#414

Post by texasbigdata » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 10:48 PM UTC

lijf wrote: post #351

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…

Part of this comment made me think of Albert Hirschman's 'Exit, Voice, and Loyalty' [1] - at least as I have understood the argument, comparing the 'standby passive observer' to the 'loyalty' standpoint, and the commenters as having chosen the 'exit' option. Hirschman's book is still on my reading list though, together with his 'The Passions and the Interests' - my impression of his work is mostly based on the episod…

Thank you!!! Will Amazon. This is one of those back burner questions that festers and your material seems like it might lead to an unlock! Appreciate it.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#415

Post by dmix » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 10:52 PM UTC

galaxyLogic wrote: post #406

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…

That sounds like an ironclad law. But is there empirical evidence for it? And a rational explanation behind it? I mean it's very strict as a rule: "in EVERY case the second group ... ". Strong claims like that require strong evidence and a theory of WHY that would (always) be the outcome. I'm thinking of society as large. That is an organization too. Are we doomed by bureaucracy?

I don’t really believe you could do such a thing empirically. I mean it just depends on scale as you indicated. I have never been a fan of ‘social’ sciences either.

Just like Christensen’s Dilemma books are mostly just anecdotes combined with patterns in history. As many such business books are.

But in my short time on this planet I’ve seen it in countless forms where I strongly believe it deserves such a title as “iron law”.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#416

Post by dodobirdlord » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 10:53 PM UTC

raziel2701 wrote: post #354

systemvoltage wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am afraid, they're going to be using US gov as their wheelchair to survive a few more decades: https://newsroom.intel.com/news/intel-wins-us-government-adv...

So it's gonna be another too big to fail thing again.

In this case it’s a legitimate national security subsidy. Even if it’s perpetually a few nodes behind, the US military needs a high-tech fab company headquartered in America, staffed mostly with Americans, that does at least some of its manufacturing in the geographic United States.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#417

Post by dodobirdlord » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 10:55 PM UTC

qppo wrote: post #400

mrtksn wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 precariou…

And moreover, is going to be instantly destroyed and unrepairable.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#418

Post by kanox » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 10:56 PM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #389

“The Innovator’s Dilemma” has a rather terrible track record as a handbook for tech corporations. Nokia’s leadership was also big fans of this book in 2000-2010. They saw themselves as the nimble disrupters, eventually eating away all computing markets with their cheap plastic phones and a smartphone OS derived from embedded systems. If Nokia would just keep adding features, the Christensen theory promised that they’…

This is a very interesting take. In Nokia's defense the incumbent leader of the PC market was Microsoft Windows and their phone efforts were not successful.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#419

Post by ineedasername » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 10:56 PM UTC

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 seem to recall Intel was working on a few mobile chips over the past ~15 years. Or was it all part of the same drawn-out failure?

I also seem to remember shopping around for a new phone a few years back and coming across android phones running on what seemed like a Frankenstein Atom processor. At the time I thought it was a promising concept, though benchmarks weren't flagship quality. But I'd hoped to eventually see dual-boot phones I could slot into a shell of a laptop to have access to a an ultraportable low-end windows box when needed. I'm kind of disappointed that never came about. (I know there's some promising "shells" for android phones, but I'd really like an OS I can fully control for my desktop experience, and Linux phones don't quite seem mature enough)

Anyway, any insight on the above from your unique perspective would be welcome.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#420

Post by dodobirdlord » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 10:57 PM UTC

T-A wrote: post #404

chorsestudios wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, don't underestimate Samsung - they have top tier fabs and manufacture a lot of chips. If the world has all their eggs in the basket of one company that company is ASML.

Right, so our eggs are not all in one basket, but in two. One claimed as rebel territory by the CCP and one still technically at war with a nuclear-armed hermit kingdom.

Fortunately ASML is in the Netherlands.