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Intel's disruption is now complete

jamesallworth.medium.com

481–490 of 638 posts

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#481
post #422
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…

Wouldn't most employees fall under the first category, and managers and executives the next? And employees are paid to carry out goals. while employers take care of the organization and set the goals. With this modeling of the situation, the second group always had control to begin with. They're management. And there's always corruption and politics where there are humans, be it in the mailroom or the boardroom.

> Wouldn't most employees fall under the first category,

Tell that to any college/university in the western world!

There's a reason tuitions have risen so high and it's largely been cited as the ratio of admins to teachers as being at least 10:1 when it used to be much closer.

I personally blame cheap gov subsidized credit for this quickly forming trend, which only took ~2 decades to have a devastating effect on students who come out of school without a degree which can somehow pay back such debt (which we in STEM are fortunate and I personally dropped out early).

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#482
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?

There will be a lot of datapoints supporting that “law”... the problem is that it’s subjective.

Everyone hates “education bureaucrats”, but if the mission is educating children, at some level the state of the institution is critical to that mission.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#483
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm currently reading High Output Management which is 25 years old. So your comment addresses the time where the book was written. Grove certainly sends quite utilitarian vibes. He also says that a collaborative culture is important. Your comment suggests that neither he nor his successors managed to make Intel's culture collaborative enough. Higher management is probably often an iterated prisoners dilemma. Collabor…

Is is a good book you'd recommend otherwise?

Not the parent, but I read the book, and the principles have become so common nowadays that I never really had a wow moment. It was more like "Yeah, this guy is telling me things I already know." It is nice to see the common knowledge built up from scratch, rather than just automatically accepted the way it is, but I wouldn't consider the value you get from the book worth the time, today.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You have any concrete examples of both type of countries?

"Same rules for everyone" countries: the archetype would be England after the civil war, where it became established that it didnt' matter if you were related to the King (or were the King), the law applied to you also.

(Of course there are varying values of "everyone." Most countries pretty much excluded half of the adult population until recently.)

For "family first" countries: this is the default mode for humans, so pretty much every country at one point or another. Nigeria and India would be two ountries where it's important to be related to the right people. India's caste system further reduces opportunities for many, perhaps most, people. For more extreme examples: Yemen, Afghanistan.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#485
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, for we computer geeks are known for our lack of ego...

Absolutely, not. Seeing my 4 years old son experiment with social skills I’m learning soo much about the most inexplicable conflict situations I’ve been through in 15 years of IT

Same observation, from my cats, as I do not have kids. Whenever they come, the cats will meaow right away, as they do not have delayed gratification. They also want fairness, otherwise they will attack each other. The food has to be given at the same time and same portion to each of the three cats.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> But is there empirical evidence for it? And a rational explanation behind it? I don't have empirical evidence for it, but I can take a stab at a rational explanation. The second group faces no opposition in their pursuit for control of the organization and its processes. At best, members of that group will fight among themselves, but certainly won't find resistance from the first group. Control over various parts o…

Workers may, indeed, offer resistance against the second group.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#487
post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?)

Agreed. AMD didn't throw enough away when they moved X86 to 64bits. They also didn't add enough registers. Variable length CISC is fine. They should steal the bit manipulation instructions from ARMv8 and the vector extensions from RISC-V.

They won't.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#488

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…

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Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#489

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…

Essentially what Steve Jobs said about product vs sales & marketing people and Xerox, but more regional/department version.

https://youtu.be/P4VBqTViEx4

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#490
post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It would have to be quite a long war where the military couldn’t rely on existing equipment and inventories of chips for a while. It’s not like most military equipment uses the latest CPUs anyway. And if a war did drag on for years there would be opportunity to switch suppliers and manufacturers or build new infrastructure.

Some industries take decades to establish, you don't have 5-year stock of CPUs and you will probably be left high and dry if the supply is cut off by a natural disaster or something.

Where do you even get people with the knowledge required to run the 5nm fabs, there night be none at all on thr continent.

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