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Intel is dying and we can’t save it

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Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#201

Post by dghlsakjg »

danijelb wrote: post #190
tw04 wrote: post #84

Let'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 is very US-centric view. Most countries in the world don't have chip fabrication facilities in their country and they do just fine. Sure, US is currently a superpower whose influence is felt across the world so having chip manufacturing locally is very important, but in a scenario where US would lose some influence that would no longer be an issue, same as it is not an issue for Canada, Germany or Russia.

Canada and Germany aren't bothered about it because they have allies that ARE worried about it.

Taiwan isn't under Chinese control, but if there was an escalating situation, you would assume that it would fall under Chinese control VERY quickly.

Up here in Canada, there is no need for fabs as long as the US has them. Canada has no real choice but friendly relations with the US (geography forces this), the upside is that many of the strategic resources belonging to the US are available to Canada.

Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#202

Post by oatmeal_croc »

tw04 wrote: post #84

Let'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…

I don't think the military alone can sustain Intel's R&D division, which has proven to be lacking compared to the competition.

Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#203

Post by morsch »

danijelb wrote: post #190
tw04 wrote: post #84

Let'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 is very US-centric view. Most countries in the world don't have chip fabrication facilities in their country and they do just fine. Sure, US is currently a superpower whose influence is felt across the world so having chip manufacturing locally is very important, but in a scenario where US would lose some influence that would no longer be an issue, same as it is not an issue for Canada, Germany or Russia.

The EU is worried about it to the tune of 145bn EUR...

https://www.eetimes.eu/eu-signs-e145bn-declaration-to-develo...

Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#204

Post by kryptiskt »

A company losing their moat isn't the prelude to death, it's market economy functioning like it's supposed to. If Intel can't handle the newly competitive environment, then they will get swallowed up, for sure. But I hope they hang around and put out great product for competitive prices, so we get to enjoy the competition for longer.

Now, let's take a sledgehammer to some other moats and make the rent seekers work a little for their profits.

Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#205

Post by l33tman »

thisisnico wrote: post #85
icedchai wrote: post #53

Earlier 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.

The Core Architecture in the mid 2000's was such an incredible shot back to the top. I remember seeing the benchmarks absolutely dominate AMD on every level, power, performance, TDP, Cost, etc. etc. This is almost immediately after Athlon 64 and the Athlon 64X2 started to gain market share, spanking Intel's Pentium 4 at the time. IIRC Intel ended up dropping the Prescott architecture, moving to the Pentium M architec…

I retired my Q6600 a few weeks ago, because CyberPunk 2077 couldn't run on it (lacking AVX instructions). Worked fine up until then in my gaming rig :)

I still have my Core2 Duo in my HTPC... it's starting to feel doggy though.

Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#206

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

tw04 wrote: post #84

Let'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…

The military doesn't need cutting edge foundries. They are a liability when you need robust ICs that can operate in extreme temperatures and radiation exposure.

Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#207

Post by SoSoRoCoCo »

userbinator wrote: post #90
SoSoRoCoCo wrote: post #5

Intel innovates in process. Everything else is ruled by backwards compatibility and frenetic management scared to stay the course. (The vast majority of projects are killed if they don't tape out in ~2 years.) Intel will shift to a TSMC model. They have the best fabs on the planet, and the best fab engineers. I believe it is something like a 3 millions dollars lost per minute if they are idle. They have already start…

Everything else is ruled by backwards compatibility That's one of the biggest reasons to choose them. If Intel's "x86" stops being x86 , they'll lose one of their biggest competitive advantages. See the first comment here, for example: http://www.os2museum.com/wp/vme-broken-on-amd-ryzen/

This question has raged since the 90's. I worked on the Itanium (Madison and McKinley), and the VLIW architecture was brilliant. This was during the time of the Power4 and the DEC ALPHA, two non-x86 competing architectures that were dominating the "Workstation" market (remember that term?). It looked like the server world was going to have three architectural options (Sun was dying, and Motorola's 68000 line wasn't up to the task.)

Microsoft even had a version of NT3.5 for The Itanic. It seemed we were just about to achieve critical mass in the server world to switch to a new architecture with huge address space, ECC up the wazoo and massive integer performance.

Then the PC revolution took off with Win95, and the second war with AMD happened (and NexGen sorta). This couldn't be solved with legal battles. This put all hands on deck because there was SO much money to be made with x86 compatibility. The presence of x86 "up and down" AMD & Intel's roadmap took over the server market as well: it was x86 all over the place.

And that, chil'ren, is why x86 was reborn in the 90's just as it was close to being wiped out.

Now Apple has proven you can you seamless sneak in a brand-new architecture, get hyooj gainz, and we are none the wiser. This is fantastic news. I think we are truly on the cusp of x86 losing its dominance in the consumer space after almost 35 years of dominance.

Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#208

Post by zahrc »

kilburn wrote: post #127
nwmcsween wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This just puts into perspective how stagnate cpus have been, ~14 years and we are just starting to move to more than 4 core processors on prosumer systems.

To be fair, the move started a while back (arguably in 2017 with the introduction of the Ryzen CPUs). For instance, Steam's hardware report indicates that 1/3 of their install base already has 6 cores or more [1]. [1] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/cpus/

Before Ryzen even, FX-6300 and -8350 series (6-core and 8-core respectively) were used heavily in cheap pre-builts and beginner PC bulding during early 2010+

Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#209

Post by api »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #40
SoSoRoCoCo wrote: post #5

Intel innovates in process. Everything else is ruled by backwards compatibility and frenetic management scared to stay the course. (The vast majority of projects are killed if they don't tape out in ~2 years.) Intel will shift to a TSMC model. They have the best fabs on the planet, and the best fab engineers. I believe it is something like a 3 millions dollars lost per minute if they are idle. They have already start…

In fairness, Intel probably has enough people left who remember Itanium and are scared of trying big new innovation for an honestly legitimate reason.

Lately I've started to wonder if Itanium wasn't a good idea badly executed. I wonder if you went back in time and invested more in compilers and ecosystem if it could have succeeded? VLIW could really reduce complexity by dumping a lot of instruction re-ordering stuff and eliminating the need for tons of baroque vector instructions for specific purposes.

The biggest thing Intel didn't do with Itanium was release affordable AT/ATX form factor boards. They priced it way, way too high, chasing early margins in "enterprise" without realizing that market share is everything in CPUs. This is the same mistake that Sun, DEC, and HP made with their server/workstation CPUs in the previous era. With a new architecture you've got to push hard for market share, wide support, and scale.

If I'd been in charge I would have priced the first iterations of Itanium only a little above fab cost and invested a lot more in compiler support and software.

Edit: also whatever happened to the Mill? The idea sounded tenable but I have to admit that I am not a CPU engineer so my armchair take is dubious.

Anyway the ship has sailed. Later research in out of order execution has yielded at least similar performance gains and post-X86 the momentum is behind ARM and RISC-V.

Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#210

Post by jjice »

dathinab wrote: post #28

I see Intel not being dominant, having to take a back seat, shrinking a bit. But dying?? Nup, I'm not seeing this at all. I mean AMD for years survived in a situation much worse then Intel currently is. Intel's productions nodes might be behind TSMC's but they are still quite valuable, not all chips need 5nm processes. Heck we could say most chips don't need it. Intel is still innovating, just because they currently…

> I mean AMD for years survived in a situation much worse then Intel currently is.

Yeah, a lot of people seem to ignore the fact that AMD was not killing it in the CPU market for a while a few years back. I wouldn't be surprised if Intel makes a comeback eventually. It's not a huge deal to me who's in the lead at any given time, I'm more interested in competitive CPUs.

I'm most interested in the future of x86 as a whole. It's definitely got a while left, but I wonder how much market share will start to be taken by ARM (and hopefully RISCV).

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