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Intel's disruption is now complete

jamesallworth.medium.com

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Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#491

Post by YZF »

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…

It doesn't help that there's also cultural differences. I've been in a similar turf war between an Israeli team and myself as an ex-Israeli on a different team and there was just a huge gap in how things are done. Both teams could have probably delivered just fine but top management is what really messed things up. So really this is probably mostly lack of leadership, and the turf wars are more of a symptom... The lack of leadership is often not just in being unable to resolve/deal/manage a larger org. but also the hiring of more managers who are unable to do this stuff that eventually get promoted to positions where they end up doing more harm.

I'm not sure the engineers themselves having a big ego is a negative. I'd want a team who thinks they can do anything. But how you manage those guys is the problem...

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#492

Post by airstrike »

Robotbeat wrote: post #486
airstrike wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

They may offer resistance to the control of the second group but they don't fight as hard to take that control (because they focus on doing the work) so are eventually overpowered

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#493

Post by pas »

dboreham wrote: post #476
pas wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at these graphs: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de... The 5 Watt iPhone CPU almost beats the 45 Watt AMD CPU. And the M1 will then simply obliterate the x86 incumbents. Why? The real reason is that Apple had/has the real advantage. It's size, resources, money, strategy, know-how. It's bigger than Intel. It has a better corporate culture than Intel, it has a vertically integrated market…

Well ok but by that theory Dec Alpha or HP PA should have dominated?

Neither had the underlying single enormous vertically integrated market slice.

Apple has and had the iPhone. Apple started using their own chips, the A5, about 10 years ago. (In 2011 March, starting with the iPad 2. And they used ARM before that too.) And since then Apple optimized the "supply chain", incremental steps, but when you are Apple every step can be almost revolutionary (and year after year Steve told exactly that to the believers, and it's basically true, just not on actual feature front, but on hardware and systems level - eg. Gorilla glass for the phones, power efficiency, the oversized battery for the MBP, milling, machining, marketing, design, and so on).

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#494

Post by rasz »

mr_toad wrote: post #464
qppo wrote: 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.

Who said anything about any wars? There are rumors abound about TSMC infrastructure being booby-trapped due to national security concerns. As soon as China reaches 14-28nm and is able to sustain internal needs using home grown foundries an "accident" in TSMC facilities could put mainland in a position of silicon leader for at least half a decade.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#495

Post by mapgrep »

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #264
jack_riminton wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explained somewhat by the nature of the innovators dilemma and the products they're making: - x86 chips for PC were Intel's cash cow so doing anything to disrupt that revenue stream would be fought against - Apple's cash cow is the phone itself so they don't particularly have any dogmatic loyalty to one type of chip as long as the phone sells Now if there were a technology to come up agains the iPhone (glasses anyone…

They did, famously, deliberately kill their own iPod market by introducing the iPhone.

That was completely conventional and expected per the innovators dilemma - they moved to a higher margin product with more features. iPhone was innovative and impressive for many reasons but it did not short circuit innovators dilemma.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#496

Post by SoSoRoCoCo »

jdblair wrote: post #375
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.

Bonnell which became Atom. I was pushing to make XScale be the 1GHz multi-core lead vehicle but was soundly mocked. XScale died on the vine. You're 100% correct, it was a hyuge missed opportunity.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#497

Post by SoSoRoCoCo »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #460
SoSoRoCoCo wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they have been a commodity for a long time. Rephrased, the discussion is similar to, "Will GE make a comeback in the refrigerator market?" Intel isn't going anywhere, they have many, many big customers to satisfy who simply cannot shift to ARM due to ROIs <=0. And after 30+ years of this, I also don' think there's anything new or revolutionary in silicon fabrication on the horizon. I stopped getting excited a…

> I stopped getting excited about CPU tech when AMD crossed the 1GHz barrier in the PC space That was only around 2000. There was a lot for me to get excited about since then: * AMD64 * SMT * Dual-core / multicore * On-chip integrated graphics that weren’t awful (low-end discrete graphics aren’t a thing anymore) * Gigantic L3 and L4 caches (a side-effect of on-chip graphics) * Turbo mode making a comeback (yes, I kno…

ADM64... Aka Yamhill on Intel. Holy shit I had to sign waivers and get a special Unix acount just to ACCESS the RTL model with Intel's 64-bit iHDL.

I kinda laughed when AMD beat Intel to the punch not once, but TWICE. (1GHz, then 64b).

I also worked on the 740, 810 and 815 (both hardware and drivers, oddly, I did a lot of stuff). Game devs HATED us for the 810/815 because it was such huge volume they had to target it as the LCD.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#498

Post by kube-system »

skohan wrote: post #86
kube-system wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is whether you can make a competitive cloud infrastructure service without x86. Imagine that would be a nonstarter for a lot of the market, at least now.

arm in the cloud is already a thing. A lot of companies have been moving towards server-less infrastructure in the past few years, and I can't imagine it makes any difference at all for a large set of use-cases whether you're executing your 50-line go lambdas on x86 or arm.

The vast majority of the potential market is running somewhere between some and all of their stuff on x86 stuff in the cloud. Of course someone could launch an ARM-only cloud. They'd either be severely limiting their potential market, or they'd have to convince prospects to migrate to ARM. Certainly not impossible, but is it competitive?

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#499

Post by SoSoRoCoCo »

BooneJS wrote: post #275
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…

Intel turf wars extend beyond Geos. The 2nd floor and 4th floor of SC12 would tick-tock Xeons and rewrite RTL and verification code just because.

The real action was on the 4th floor. You know, I can tell. :)

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#500

Post by PostOnce »

vslira wrote: post #387
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...

The Boeing of semiconductors

War must always be considered, if you want to keep existing as a nation.

People have been repeating "Si vis pacem, para bellum" for thousands of years for a reason.

Semiconductors and aerospace are important to war efforts, and having domestic manufacturing capability is a big deal if you have serious, wealthy, technically advanced adversaries.

Reality is complicated and many-faceted, and there are a number of reasons to keep Intel alive as far as the govt goes: war, staving off brain-drain, keeping a lot of jobs, etc.

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