Intel's disruption is now complete • Hacker News Board

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#621

Post by imakwana » Mon, Nov 16, 2020, 7:25 PM UTC

baybal2 wrote: post #62

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…

> And after 30+ years of this, I also don' think there's anything new or revolutionary in silicon fabrication on the horizon. Why so? Few more material, and device generations are on the way. Litho has went through more generation changes in the last 1 decade, than in any previous one. Whole new device classes are on the way: optics on silicon, new memory, logic in the backend, and logic on package. Semiconductor eng…

> Semiconductor engineering is still a career suicide though, that haven't changed in the last few decades.

This is so true. I am currently a hardware engineer and planning to switch to software. If you are not in Nvidia, Apple or other mega-growth hardware companies, you are suffering atleast 40% paycut compared to software industry and also working about twice as hard, using obsolete tools and flows, and almost no opportunities for technical advancement or significant impact. Meanwhile the annual raises are cost-of-living adjustments. Its truly depressing.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#622

Post by burntoutfire » Mon, Nov 16, 2020, 7:28 PM UTC

khendron wrote: post #372

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…

I have a similar theory as to why rapidly growing companies become toxic environments (of which politics and turf wars are a symptom). When a company is small and has a low profile, its employees are in it for the company. They believe in the product or service that the company is creating, and but into its mission. When the company becomes successful and starts to grow, it starts to attract people who don't really c…

> When a company is small and has a low profile, its employees are in it for the company. They believe in the product or service that the company is creating, and but into its mission.

In the history of the world, 99% of people has been "in it" for the salary. Who gives a rat's ass about the company or the product?

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#623

Post by gabereiser » Mon, Nov 16, 2020, 10:34 PM UTC

intricatedetail wrote: post #204

gabereiser wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recipe for a toxic work culture from day one. Your team should never be your competition. Your company should never be your competition. Meritocracy works only in certain markets. Knowledge-based work isn’t one of them. I really feel for people who are in these companies. Who put in 6+ years of university/higher education and think that “if I could only fight my peers for the top spot” when “top” is relative. To some…

Requirement to be a graduate of a "good" university is not a meritocracy. It's just preferring people who have a diploma, but that doesn't mean the person hired will have other qualities necessary to be effective. Edit: I know some people with diploma who "gamed" the system, e.g. memorized queries for exam without having any understanding of SQL and passed.

>Requirement to be a graduate of a "good" university is not a meritocracy.

I didn't say it was. Meritocracy in this case was in reference to the company's internal competition (organic or not) for top spots at the company.

I completely understand there are certain jobs where you need a degree. Bar even. A lot of software engineering doesn't fit that mold. I'm 100% behind requiring an advanced degree if you're writing software that controls: lives/property/money in any meaningful way. Money in this case being large capital investments, not consumer payments. I'm a big proponent of hiring people who need a second chance, who maybe are down on their luck, or otherwise have a different path than suburban white America or the H1B visa mills they created (caveat, I'm white). I think there are plenty of opportunities for software engineers without degrees to build web apps, mobile apps, services, integrations, automation, etc.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#624

Post by gabereiser » Mon, Nov 16, 2020, 10:43 PM UTC

washadjeffmad wrote: post #234

gabereiser wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recipe for a toxic work culture from day one. Your team should never be your competition. Your company should never be your competition. Meritocracy works only in certain markets. Knowledge-based work isn’t one of them. I really feel for people who are in these companies. Who put in 6+ years of university/higher education and think that “if I could only fight my peers for the top spot” when “top” is relative. To some…

Mutual cooperation is often spurred by personal and professional competition. I know I've been with teams that I had to drag through projects because they "get paid the same" whether or not it ever gets finished, and well-complemented teams where we forgot everything else while we built on each other's achievements. There's selfish, winner takes all competition that creates winners and losers, and then there's health…

Head Fakes. Learning spikes under the guise of competition are amazing tools. Hackathon's, etc. Competition internally with this cut-throat attitude (because so much money, potentially, is on the line) is toxic and can create some serious mental health issues. This isn't a discussion of competition in the markets, free market and all, it's about competition with the people you work with day in and day out. It can create animosity and anxiety at work. I would much rather work with a genius who's humble than an asshole who is just looking for the next promotion.

To truly grow as a company you need to grow as teams. Cooperation, trust, empathy for your customers as well as your coworkers. Positions of leadership should be given to those who show an aptitude to lead through problems to desirable outcomes, regardless of who/where they are. Flatter org structures to prevent this chasm of salary difference which creates this toxicity in competition for those spots.

Netflix pays their engineers a ton, because they provide the value. Everyone is compensated at a level that everyone is happy working there (for the most part, happiness is relative, I digress). Companies should be providing everything they can to those who provide value to the company. If an individual wants more responsibility, they must provide more value as a result.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#625

Post by baybal2 » Tue, Nov 17, 2020, 12:17 AM UTC

eternauta3k wrote: post #556

baybal2 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And after 30+ years of this, I also don' think there's anything new or revolutionary in silicon fabrication on the horizon. Why so? Few more material, and device generations are on the way. Litho has went through more generation changes in the last 1 decade, than in any previous one. Whole new device classes are on the way: optics on silicon, new memory, logic in the backend, and logic on package. Semiconductor eng…

> Semiconductor engineering is still a career suicide though, that haven't changed in the last few decades. Could you go into more detail?

Most of semiconductor jobs are in Asia, and in the same Asian countries, you will get n times less than a software person of the same seniority.

The long term is that the industry will get less, and less labour intensive as more, and more old, labour intensive fabs are retired, and new ones are 100% AMHS.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#626

Post by baybal2 » Tue, Nov 17, 2020, 12:17 AM UTC

ptx wrote: post #573

baybal2 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And they cut the bonus at the same time.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#627

Post by DaiPlusPlus » Tue, Nov 17, 2020, 2:55 AM UTC

SoSoRoCoCo wrote: post #497

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Can you elaborate on all of that? I'm unfamiliar with "RTL", "iHDL", "740", "810", "815", I assume "LCD" is lowest-common-denominator?

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#628

Post by runeks » Tue, Nov 17, 2020, 7:30 AM UTC

hyperpallium2 wrote: post #617

runeks wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here, of course, Apple is unlikely to sell its chips to other manufacturers... How do you gather? I think it'd make sense for Apple to earn more money by acquiring Intel's customers.

Firstly, it's not Apple's way. They favour vertical integration and premium-pricing. Secondly, why have part of the pie when you can have the whole pie? i.e. instead of just acquiring Intel's customers, also acquire their customers, all the way to the end-consumer, gobbling up the margins at each step of the way.

> Secondly, why have part of the pie when you can have the whole pie?

This entails converting all Windows user into macOS users. This is not realistic, in my opinion.

In the end, the question should be what makes the most money: keeping Apple silicon exclusive to Apple (and thus selling more Apple devices) or selling Apple CPUs to competitors (and thus adding a new income stream).

I think option number two would make Apple more money, and therefore shareholders should prefer this approach.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#629

Post by kube-system » Tue, Nov 17, 2020, 1:41 PM UTC

skohan wrote: post #612

kube-system wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What migration? Most of the code I have run in the cloud in the past 5 years has been in the form of managed services. I don't really know or care if AWS is running my code on ARM or x86.

I think you are in the minority. EC2 is popular.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#630

Post by phire » Tue, Nov 17, 2020, 2:20 PM UTC

CalChris wrote: post #581

hajile wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (i…

I agree that they did a fine job given the constraints at the time. But by getting rid of x87, ... they would have used less size, power, R&D. SSE was circa 1999 and they could have just supported that. They being AMD. The counterargument being that if AMD had been too aggressive, Intel could have done something more conservative. However, then there's the cross licensing agreement ... Arggh.

They made SSE and SSE2 extensions part of the core instruction set in AMD64.

But they didn't remove x87. It's not really used, compilers only emit it when code asks for a long double.

Personally, I do think they should have banned x87 from 64bit code. But it wouldn't have allowed them to remove the x87 units from the chip, as every AMD64 chip to this day still supports 32bit compatibility mode, and regularly uses it.