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

501–510 of 638 posts

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#501

Post by jl2718 »

No. Grove never understood disruption. Celeron was a strategic error. Otellini was right in foresight and wrong in hindsight on the iPhone. “Disrupt yourself” is a terrible strategy. That’s the entire point of “The Innovator’s Dilemma”.

Intel’s real disruptive strategy was the Pentium Pro architecture that disrupted the mainframe market, proven by ASCII Red in 1995. But you don’t hear about that because the business leaders didn’t even know it existed (same with multi core btw). The problem with this, as with all disruption, was low margins, so IA-64 was an attempt to enter the mainframe market as a peer of the high-margin encumbents, and was itself disrupted by the broadly inferior but cheaper AMD64. Low-margin ARM disruption also should have been expected as normal and unavoidable.

The big question is what market Intel can disrupt next. I have criticisms I’ve held back on, but one thing I will say is that Intel’s portolio of disruptive technology is greater than I had expected. Leadership has to be able to put together the pieces. NVidia, for example, probably has less core technology, but their direction is more aligned.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#502

Post by andrewjl »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #408
viburnum wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why extremely steep marginal takes rates improve economic efficiency. If you can’t get rich by playing office politics you might as well enjoy making a good product.

> If you can’t get rich by playing office politics you might as well enjoy making a good product. It seems to me this would go the other way. Making a good product (in the sense that it's successful in the market) is what you want a company to do, but that's the thing mostly aligned with the profit incentive. If profits are taxed heavily then spending resources on making a better product so that more people buy it do…

Corporate tax rates can be lower, ideally at 0, but I doubt our current system incentivizes corporations retaining profits. On the contrary, recently many needed to be bailed out because they paid out too much to shareholders instead of saving enough for a rainy day.

Making a better product also doesn't necessarily lead to profits. That's an oversimplified perspective. There's a far greater correlation between monopoly power and profit. In some cases this monopoly status comes from truly groundbreaking work. Not in all cases though.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#503

Post by sundarurfriend »

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.

> one still technically at war with a nuclear-armed hermit kingdom.

If we're going down that route, every country in the world can be described in an equally alarmist manner.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#504

Post by bgorman »

kelnos wrote: post #473
ptx wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TSMC is a Taiwanese company. The world can ensure the supply of its semiconductors by ensuring Taiwan has access to weapons and guarantees of military assistance in case the CCP's benevolence wavers.

If China decides to take Taiwan by force, there is very little the rest of the world can do to stop them.

Nazi Germany attempted to take tiny Malta from the Britsh for two years and failed.

The Japanese held many untenable defensive positions in the Pacific for months.

Unless China is willing to nuke Taiwan, (what would be the point?) a military offensive to take over Taiwan would be extremely unlikely to succeed within a few months - and assuming the US/Australia/UK/Japan/South Korea provide support - almost impossible.

Doing any kind of amphibious landing offensive is incredibly costly and difficult.

China's best hope would be that Joe Biden is under CCP control.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#505

Post by skynetv2 »

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…

Politics at Intel are crippling. Add too that huge egos, arrogance, red tape, terrible managers, all around arrogance, self congratulatory pats on the back, you'd wonder how anything gets done.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#506

Post by alternatetwo »

Denvercoder9 wrote: post #456
jldugger wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What competent government Let me know when you find one.

Just because you think the federal USA doesn't have one, doesn't mean they don't (or cannot) exist. Lots of goverments in northwest-Europe are generally competent. Of course a generally competent government probably wouldn't decide it'd be a good idea to backdoor CPUs, but that's another issue.

The EU is trying to get rid of encryption right now ... So they're just as incompetent.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#507

Post by octoberfranklin »

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…

Absolutely my experience.

However the small companies almost always have VC investors, which brings negative effects which are approximately as awful (just in totally different ways).

If you can find a small self-funded company that isn't gonna get squashed next time Masayoshi Son sneezes, it'll be the best job you've ever had.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#508

Post by cptnapalm »

Balgair wrote: post #468
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…

I had always heard that there are two 'Iron Laws of Bureaucracy': 1. The only thing that matters is the budget. 2. Bureaucracies only grow, never shrink, and the only thing you can control is the rate of growth. Thanks for sharing another one with us!

This reminds me of an observation about the British Empire that the bureaucracy was at its most vast the day it was abolished.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#509

Post by numpad0 »

sangnoir wrote: post #427
simonh wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Apple bought fell for the whole "Post-PC" mirage when the iPhone & iPad were on a tear: the desktop Mac was definitely neglected for years with no advancements while manpower was directed at iOS & iOS devices. What they did come up with, was the form-over-function trashcan Mac "Pro" with severe thermal limitations. They only got it right on their next attempt (some 2+ years later), after being publicly called out for…

The largest issue with the trashcan MacPro6,1 was complete lack of GPU performance. They weren’t even VR capable.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#510

Post by octoberfranklin »

emodendroket wrote: post #434
Spivak wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Less too big to fail, more a national security interest in ensuring the US can make chips during a hypothetical conflict. Great if you’re the company the gov’t blesses for this purpose (like Microsoft) but not so great for their competitors.

I'd probably be nervous about TSMC opening a fab in AZ then

That fab will never open.

Just like Foxconn's plant in Wisconsin.

It'll just keep getting pushed back, and pushed back. Its job is to keep the politicians happy (or at least not angry), and it doesn't need to be built in order to serve that purpose.

That fab will never, ever, ever run a single wafer.

Post reply on HN