31–40 of 331 posts
Is the board leaning into the usual MBA moves 101 and turn Intel into a "services company" gradually going fabless and milking those sweet patents OR will they put the work boots on and start building an actual tech company with the people who actually can save them on the payroll? cutting on the usual contractors meat grinder and invite the vast armies of middle-management and marketing drones to leave?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me this description sounds like a specialist high performance computing company rather than a consumer technology company. That may be a perfectly reasonable market to be in, but is that type of company worth $200bn? I'm not sure. Roughly 40% of their revenue is consumer chips where, apart from some games optimisation, they are no longer standing out from the crowd, and the leader is arguably Apple, with AMD doing…
I agree with your market breakdown, but surely not with your assessment. In the consumer segment, you have regular people trying to make vacation videos with software like Adobe Premiere and Adobe Media Encoder, or Magix. Nvenc quality is bad. AMD is horribly slow. The only fast high quality encode is with Intel's dedicated CPU instructions, which both apps heavily promote to their users. And the 30% that you mention…
I just don't think the market for home devices is thinking about their video encoding time when they buy a laptop, but I do think they'll use an M1 Mac and find it surprisingly fast, or hear from a friend or family member that they are really good.
Intel just haven't been optimising for the main user experience seen by these people, or those writing "normal" server software either. They've been pushing AVX512 instead, which looks good for video or things like that, but not for regular use-cases.
Another good example is how fast the M1 chips (and the A chips in iPhones) perform at Javascript benchmarks. Those benchmarks look a lot more like what most people are doing most of the time than video encoding benchmarks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see much similarity between the story of Intel and the story of Boeing. Boeing made an entire line of defective airplanes that could autonomously kill everyone aboard under normal usage. Then, a respiratory virus hammered the travel industry. In contrast, the semiconductor industry is seeing more demand than ever before, and presently undergoing a shortage. Intel has mismanaged 10nm and 7nm, but the company m…
I think Spectre and related vulnerabilities are directly comparable to the 737 MAX debacle, insofar as they reflect poor engineering decisions made directly against the customer in favor of short-term profit. Of course Boeing’s decision was far more devastating and led to the loss of 346 souls, but the pathology that gave rise to both situations (executive hubris, failure to tackle accumulated tech debt) seems quite…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me this description sounds like a specialist high performance computing company rather than a consumer technology company. That may be a perfectly reasonable market to be in, but is that type of company worth $200bn? I'm not sure. Roughly 40% of their revenue is consumer chips where, apart from some games optimisation, they are no longer standing out from the crowd, and the leader is arguably Apple, with AMD doing…
I agree with your market breakdown, but surely not with your assessment. In the consumer segment, you have regular people trying to make vacation videos with software like Adobe Premiere and Adobe Media Encoder, or Magix. Nvenc quality is bad. AMD is horribly slow. The only fast high quality encode is with Intel's dedicated CPU instructions, which both apps heavily promote to their users. And the 30% that you mention…
They (and AMD) did years ago. Intel VT.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think Spectre and related vulnerabilities are directly comparable to the 737 MAX debacle, insofar as they reflect poor engineering decisions made directly against the customer in favor of short-term profit. Of course Boeing’s decision was far more devastating and led to the loss of 346 souls, but the pathology that gave rise to both situations (executive hubris, failure to tackle accumulated tech debt) seems quite…
Eh. Some of the vulnerabilities in that class were Intel-specific. But there is a whole class of vulnerabilities that potentially can hit any design that has speculative execution--and people just aren't OK with shutting off speculative execution because the performance hit is so big.
[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-amd-mitigations-perf...
This spoils any optimism I may have had for Intel. Reading that this came due to a search for "Strategic alternatives" is damning. Intel is like Boeing. They make one thing and they used to make it very well, silicon. If Boeing told you they were looking into alternatives to making planes would you be optimistic? It feels like they're throwing in the towel on being the leader, giving up on trying to catch up process…
If they were going from a former CTO to a former CFO, I would agree. They are going to a former CTO from a former CFO. How does this make it seem like they are looking to maximize their existing revenue rather than trying to get someone in to "fix" their issues?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see much similarity between the story of Intel and the story of Boeing. Boeing made an entire line of defective airplanes that could autonomously kill everyone aboard under normal usage. Then, a respiratory virus hammered the travel industry. In contrast, the semiconductor industry is seeing more demand than ever before, and presently undergoing a shortage. Intel has mismanaged 10nm and 7nm, but the company m…
I think Spectre and related vulnerabilities are directly comparable to the 737 MAX debacle, insofar as they reflect poor engineering decisions made directly against the customer in favor of short-term profit. Of course Boeing’s decision was far more devastating and led to the loss of 346 souls, but the pathology that gave rise to both situations (executive hubris, failure to tackle accumulated tech debt) seems quite…
Definitely a win for Intel. Pat will be sorely missed at VMware, though.
The trillion dollar question is: Is the board leaning into the usual MBA moves 101 and turn Intel into a "services company" gradually going fabless and milking those sweet patents OR will they put the work boots on and start building an actual tech company with the people who actually can save them on the payroll? cutting on the usual contractors meat grinder and invite the vast armies of middle-management and market…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Gelsinger Not sure what to make of the fact that he wrote two books on balancing work and family life, and makes me wonder if this is the general that will win the silicon war. Time will tell, I suppose.