Intel could pull themselves back from the brink, if they had a rapidly reconfigurable computing fabric that used RAM instead of FLASH for its gates. It would be a killer product, and could outperform almost anything, given the proper software.
Intel is dying and we can’t save it
171–180 of 268 posts
Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's monopoly power for you. Right now there's competition to Intel again which means processors will probably start getting much faster again. That's one of the few great things about capitalism - competition drives innovation.
> That's one of the few great things about capitalism - competition drives innovation. Just so long as the aforementioned monopolies don't choke out competition. Sadly, we seem to end up with a lot of pseudo-monopolies in the tech industry. I wonder how much more competition we could have with strict monopolies regulation on acquisitions and mergers?
If you let companies acquire close to 100% market share then monopolies are guaranteed to happen because one company is always more cost efficient than two but with the obvious problem that monopolies don't act in the interest of consumers. Limits on company size can definitively prevent monopolies.
Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed, a similar situation happened in the mid 2000's before Intel moved to the Core architecture. I wouldn't be surprised if something like this happened again.
I’m almost positive Intel have tech ready to deploy to be on top again. They will have been developing it... but not needed to use it until they came under competition pressure.
They can do it but will they? Intel isn't known for being a well managed company internally.
Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
That and if you asked 20 years ago what CPUs our desktops will be running, not only would Intel not necessarily have been a popular answer (Many compiler books were written around that time, giving us a guess as to what the academic groupthink was, and they generally treat x86 as a weird ISA soon-to-be obsolete or dead) but Intel's main architectural competitor (ARM) might not've even been mentioned at all.
The answer would have likely been SuperH and Transmeta, both way dead. Things change fast.
I would not have guessed SuperH, but I did not use Dreamcast or Jornada. 32-bit CPU with 16-bit instructions seems weird.
VLIW had a lot of hype. DSPs had already proven it, and Itanium, Transmeta, and various embedded processors were using it.
As a mostly Mac-user back then, I liked PowerPC, and POWER3 was leading the way to 64-bit, but I wasn’t expecting PCs to switch to PowerPC. The RISC systems had not all been executed in the face of the not-yet-released threat of Itanium. I was expecting the diversity to continue, for cross-architecture programming to be the rule and not the exception.
Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious about how Apple "killed Intel's smartphone ambitions"? Otellini on the iPhone: "We ended up not winning it or passing on it, depending on how you want to view it." "At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn't see it. It wasn't one of these things you can make…
"And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought." And in hindsight, he was a moron, unqualified to lead an engineering company. When people point to MBAs ruining Intel. Point to that statement. You could invest in emerging markets. Or rearrange financial statements deck chairs to hit your stock options and roll your eyes at the nerds.
It's easy in hindsight, nobody knew iphone would take off so strongly. Did you sell the house and load up on Apple stock at the time?
Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it
#176Let's all just come to a common agreement: there's no planet on which the US military allows Intel to die. Period. End of story. Having a US based company with fabrication facilities on US soil is vital to national security and will be for the entirety of my lifetime and likely my grandchildren's lifetime (if I ever have any). For all the bluster of the investors wanting to chop Intel up: they will find a swift and f…
This kind of protectionism will only worsen Intels efficiency and will drain taxpayers pockets. Why can’t people learn from all the instances where a government tried to micromanage and horribly failed in the mid/long run?
If you maintain that infrastructure for the sake of national security you are willing to pay a premium. The problem isn't government intervention because that can be done properly.
The bigger problem is that Intel is a company that both designs CPUs and manufactures them. The government isn't actually interested in Intel's CPUs specifically, only the domestic manufacturing capability. Intel has to be split up before the government can get what it wants.
>Why can’t people learn from all the instances where a government tried to micromanage and horribly failed in the mid/long run?
Counter example: Central banks are making lots of money available but the governments are not using it to employ people (either directly or indirectly) so it just fuels a long term asset bubble without achieving the desired economic growth.
Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they're propping Intel up as their last bastion of chip superiority they've already lost. The US knows they need to defend Taiwan with the full weight of their military resources. This means war in the event of an invasion or takeover. If the US loses influence over Taiwan and subsequently TSMC, they've lost. In this phase of global geopolitics, whoever controls the chips has the influence. You can't do anything w…
How important is it, strategically, to have the most advanced process tech? As far as I know, military tech tends to lag commercial significantly.
Old military tech also has a longer shelf life. There are lots of military installations that were built before the internet.
Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The ratio of excellent to useless people I experienced there was 1:40 This has to be hyperbole but the rest of your comment makes me think you're being serious. I have only worked at small companies My guess is you thought those people were useless because you didn't understand the role they played in the company. However, I'll admin again that I don't have first hand experience. I'd genuinely love to hear from oth…
Well if you think about it, it's not that hard to imagine how it happens. First, you have Price's Law [0] which states that half the work is done by the square root of the number of people. This in itself already implies a lot of useless people, especially at a company the size of Intel. You might also have whole orgs/departments where pretty much everyone is phoning it in, so that would drive it up as well. The way…
Interesting. I am pretty sure that it's not a case of individual failure. It has more to do with organizational structure.
Most of the low hanging fruits can be picked by one individual. Instead of trying to pick more apples from the same tree people should make sure that there are not too many people assigned to the same tree.
The article confirms my idea:
>Look at your current profession. Are you in a position to create substantial value? If the answer is no, move on to a different place where you CAN.
Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The ratio of excellent to useless people I experienced there was 1:40 This has to be hyperbole but the rest of your comment makes me think you're being serious. I have only worked at small companies My guess is you thought those people were useless because you didn't understand the role they played in the company. However, I'll admin again that I don't have first hand experience. I'd genuinely love to hear from oth…
Disclaimer: I worked at Intel. Calling them useless may be a bit of a stretch. If you said "mediocre", I'd believe it. Also, in my experience there, the ratio is not uniform - you could go to a department with lots of top notch folks, and then to another department with everyone being mediocre. Some data points: Asked a person in a SW interview to write a function to calculate the factorial. The candidate was repeate…
I work at Intel. Maybe my experiences are not representative, but everyone I've worked with is competent at what they do, and most people are helpful and friendly. But the trouble is that isn't enough. The really effective programmers aren't just good at writing code, they're also good at designing elegant interfaces, and at understanding customer problems, and strategic thinking, and so on. Competent programmers aren't useless if they don't have those skills, but you need some people that do if you want to make great products rather than just check off boxes in feature lists.
Intel doesn't have as many of those great programmers as I would like, but I think their bigger problems are organization rather than individual. There just isn't enough high-level coordination and sharing of information. Every group just kind of does their own thing, and if you want to know how something works you have to know who to ask. Too much tribal knowledge (which often has a short expiration date) and too little writing stuff down in one place where it's easy to find.
It's funny you mention git, because I joined Intel from a startup that used SVN and that was the one bright spot about Intel's technical culture that they used git pretty extensively. I don't think I've ever used a non-git source repo at Intel. I assume that there was some major internal struggle to get to that point, but it was before my time.
Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes I agree. Jim Keller was the canary in the coal mine. When he left without finishing his assignment, after a decades long reputation for excellence at multiple companies, that was a clear signal to sell your Intel stock. Intel could be the new Northern Telecom (though I felt the same way about Microsoft ten years ago and ... it didn't turn out as expected)
I agree. From an investment perspective though, there is enormous potential in Mobileye. They're way off in Israel, so they don't get the attention of the valley SDC companies, but they are way ahead of many, many others.
If so I believe this would be the second time that Israel has saved Intel's bacon. The first time being a microprocessor replacement for the power hungry Pentium III in the early 2000's.