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Intel's disruption is now complete

jamesallworth.medium.com

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Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#571

Post by BoorishBears »

quacker wrote: post #537
BoorishBears wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who said anything about cutting GPU performance? Also your comparisons are quite poor... 2600 shouldn't even be in the running here, the 3070 would be held back from doing the thing it does best, high FPS 1440p (in actual games mind you, not just CS:GO)

I mean, you said I should waste my money on a CPU upgrade that would make no difference in 1440p gaming. That's money I can't spend on a better GPU, which would make a difference in 1440p gaming.

You realize you're mentioning a 2600 right? Which will place a tremendous limit on 1440p gaming?

My suggestion over the included build is spending $10 more on the build and getting a 10600K.

Silicon Lottery has found 100% of 10600ks will do 4.7 Ghz sustained all core.

Even at that number it will easily out perform a 3600 in a meaningful way. Over 70% of them do 4.9 Ghz which where it starts to reach i9 levels of performance in gaming by the way...

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And the cherry on top over the 3600 is you can actually buy the i5 outside of Microcenter. Microcenter is the only place carrying the 3600 for $180... but they also have 10600k on perma-sale for $250.

Meanwhile outside of Microcenter the 3600 is rarer than hen's teeth while the 10600k is widely available at $270. I happen to have 5 microcenters within an hour or so of me, but most people don't have that luxury.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#572

Post by hajile »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #294
aaaxyz wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't TSMC building a fab in AZ? Anyway I'd say the "spice" in semiconductor production is rare earth elements, since the CCP controls most of their extraction (and has artificially lowered exports in the past)

> Anyway I'd say the "spice" in semiconductor production is rare earth elements, since the CCP controls most of their extraction That's really only because of other countries outsourcing to China and not supporting domestic mining. There is no shortage of rare earths in other countries.

That's very true. European countries "go green" by exporting their mining pollution to China. They can then blame China for all the pollution problems.

Brilliant really. Get political points for "lowering emissions", then double dip getting more points for "being hard on China" while at the same time not hugely affecting the economy, jobs, or ticking off industrialists.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#573

Post by ptx »

baybal2 wrote: post #87
eecc wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Semiconductor engineering is still a career suicide though, that haven't changed in the last few decades. Wow, so I need to thank myself for accidentally bumbling towards ops and dev? Meh, for me it’s just that in EU there’s a total dearth of opportunities in the industry

People making WordPress websites are making more than PhD research scientists in Taiwan, and Korea.

TSMC announced that they're raising salaries by 20% across the board, so that should improve things a bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6DaxXukog4

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#574

Post by CalChris »

CalChris wrote: post #487
monocasa wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Variable length CISC is fine." Well, actually, the Anandtech article points out:

"Other contemporary designs such as AMD’s Zen(1 through 3) and Intel’s µarch’s, x86 CPUs today still only feature a 4-wide decoder designs (Intel is 1+4) that is seemingly limited from going wider at this point in time due to the ISA’s inherent variable instruction length nature, making designing decoders that are able to deal with aspect of the architecture more difficult compared to the ARM ISA’s fixed-length instructions."

Given the complexity of x86, it's amazing that Intel+AMD have gotten 4-wide decoders. But the M1 has 8-wide and if they want to go wider, it's linear rather than quadratic in complexity.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#575

Post by hajile »

CalChris wrote: post #487
monocasa wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think they did a fine job considering all the constraints. The ISA was created in 1999, but the first widely used 64-bit OS (vista) didn't release until 7 years later. In truth, I doubt 64-bit systems became more than half of all systems until a couple years after the release of Window 7 in 2009 (a full decade later).

Every transistor used for x86_64 that couldn't also be used for x86 was a competitive liability (increasing size, power, R&D, etc without any real payoff). I think their decisions make a lot of sense given all the constraints.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#576

Post by m4rtink »

evancox100 wrote: post #135
mytailorisrich wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Phone chips are hard not least, or especially, the telecom part. I'm thinking that some companies underestimate the effort. Broadcom also tried and also failed. They came in cocky because they had succeeded in making Wifi chips with a 10-20 people team so thought that 500-ish people was more than enough for cellular even if Qualcomm had 4x that... I would not be surprised if Intel fell into the same trap.

TI was also in the mobile AP space for a while then dropped out

From what I've heard their mobile SoCs were pretty high quality & had superb documentation, running such famous (relatively) open Linux devices such as the legendary Nokia N900. TI dropping out of the mobile game also had a profound effect on the full Maemo/MeeGo saga later on.

I guess even Sailfish OS that came after MeeGo is not really immune to SoC supplier dropping out under it as the first Jolla smartphone with Sailfish OS should have run on a SoC from Sony Ericsson only for SE dropping out of the game as well! And the (in?) famous Jolla Tablet had one of those Intel Atom x86 mobile processor.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#577

Post by deeviant »

vagrantJin wrote: post #567
PostOnce wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reason…

Your praise of war comes off quite naive. Perhaps you figure "war" or violence as viable solutions despite being a much more connected world where diplomacy and fairness can be judges more democratically. Such talk of war is neccesary is an utterance of someone born on the right side of the fence and quite clearly no clue as what they are talking about.

Take this from an extremely liberal and war-abhorring person: If your argument is that a country should not take steps to secure it's supply chains in the event of a war because , then you are the naive one.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#578

Post by lr1970 »

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…

A former Intel engineer here. Paul Otellini -- a non-engineer -- was not a right man for the CEO job. He instilled a bean-counting culture driving technologists out of the decision-making process. It was downhill ever since he became the boss. And as mentioned elsewhere a counter productive and oftentimes adversarial relationships between "sister" design teams (Santa Clara, Jones Farm, Israel, Austin) was a huge drag.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#579

Post by marcus_holmes »

whatifitoldyou wrote: post #536
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…

But isn't apple that's overpassing Intel an equally big organization? How is it exempt from the rules of bureaucracy?

I get the idea that Apple's culture of secrecy applies just as much to internal projects. So while the total headcount is huge, the headcount involved in any given project is small, and unlikely to be affected by the rest of the organisation because they don't know about the project.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#580

Post by boznz »

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…

China Invading Taiwan would be the IT worlds covid moment.
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