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Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

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Re: Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

#161

Post by ncphil »

mrtksn wrote: post #76
okasaki wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're looking for value and durability, you can buy a used business laptop like thinkpad or dell latitude. You can get a used thinkpad with an 8th gen intel and 16gb ram for $200 maybe. Sure the cpu will be slower but with 8gb ram on a mac you're not going to be doing much anyway.

The screen will be terrible, the performance will be 1/3 of the M1 air, the battery life will be useless and the device itself will be heavy. Bad deal overall. At that price I would prefer a Chromebook.

Thing about ThinkPads is that there's almost always a premium option for hardware like screens that can be dropped in with nearly tool-less effort. I have an old X250 that I recently upgraded from the crappy 1366x768 shipping display to a new 1920x1080 for $60. The real problem with that model (besides the ancient 2 core CPU) is there's only a single RAM slot, and anythinng more that 8 GB is hard to find (and way more expensive than warranted).

Re: Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

#163

Post by selectodude »

0zemp2c wrote: post #141
itsoktocry wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> losing market share every year for a decade (Microsoft doesn't even seem to care afaict) Of course they care. Windows, at one point, had 95% market share. Do you believe that to be sustainable? Do we want that? No, in both cases. They are still dominant in desktop computing. > offers 10x the performance the average person will need Why is buying something 10x more powerful than you'd need at 2x the price "good valu…

> Of course they care. for the last ten years Microsoft has pushed all of its effort into Azure, which is coincidentally based on Linux (!) accept it, they gave up on Windows. Windows 11 is my proof...a lame re-skinning which can't even displace Windows 10 > You should have a look at Windows' desktop market share and get back to us. They still own the space. no one under 25 uses Windows! Go look at any college classr…

I am a lifelong Mac user. My work laptop is Windows. Always has been, always will be. My employer probably buys more computers every week than I will buy in my entire life.

Nobody in the space gives a crap what laptops people buy for personal use once every 5-7 years.

Re: Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

#164

Post by beefield »

mrtksn wrote: post #76
okasaki wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're looking for value and durability, you can buy a used business laptop like thinkpad or dell latitude. You can get a used thinkpad with an 8th gen intel and 16gb ram for $200 maybe. Sure the cpu will be slower but with 8gb ram on a mac you're not going to be doing much anyway.

The screen will be terrible, the performance will be 1/3 of the M1 air, the battery life will be useless and the device itself will be heavy. Bad deal overall. At that price I would prefer a Chromebook.

> performance will be 1/3 of the M1 air

I run an old (I think maybe 4 or 5 years) thinkpad with 64GB RAM. I see often these claims of superior performance of new macs, and it leaves me scratching my head. I do not have (almost) any workflows where the performance is not sufficient. For the ones where performance is not sufficient, I am happy to turn on my desktop. So my question is, what are the workflows people have benefit from the superior performance of new macs and at the same time do not justify working on a beefy desktop?

Re: Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

#165

Post by sokoloff »

smolder wrote: post #109
sokoloff wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They wanted to play Valorant with their friends; the anti-cheat code did not work on the 9020 on Windows 10; there was a limited amount of time I was willing to spend to find a cheaper workaround for a machine that’s 9 years old, with the prospect of doing the same again 6 months later. That was the actual driver, though this thread is about OS vendors forcing changes in order to run the latest OS, which is why I foc…

I don't believe you needed to upgrade to windows 11 for valorant compatibility. You just needed to be on a recent build of windows 10, downloaded from windows update.

Maybe. We always have Windows Update turned on, so it was almost surely up-to-date and I spent a period of time over several different evenings trying to get this to work. Whatever error message came up when jumping into the gameplay part of the game led to the TPM issue being the root cause. Ultimately, we'd gotten our 4 years of value out of the Dells (4-ish years old when we bought them) and decided it was reasonable to replace them.

To the point of this sub-thread, it's still an OS vendor forcing a purchase to run the latest OS. 9 year old Macbook running Catalina and 9 year old Dell running Win10, both unable to update to the latest OS seems very close the same to me.

Re: Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

#166

Post by pjmlp »

zpeti wrote: post #27
shortrounddev wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 5 years Because Apple will forcibly kill it after that with incompatible software updates. Windows machines keep going until they physically break. But what everyone here is missing is that the consumer desktop/laptop market is dying itself. Soon it will only be for enterprise uses and gaming. Most people do all their computing through a phone or tablet. I know people who don't own a laptop.

This is the opposite of my experience. My wife still easily uses my old Mac that’s 8 years old. No performance issues. Most windows machines I had worked for around 3 years. 5 max.

All my Windows machines from 2009 are still pretty much ok, while having been upgraded to Windows 10, came with Windows 7, and went through 8 and 8.1 as well.

Re: Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

#167

Post by 0zemp2c »

shortrounddev wrote: post #17
sokoloff wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can buy an M1 8/256 Air at $800 right now. I'd expect to get 5 years out of it minimum (we're buying one shortly to replace a mid-2013 Air). That's less than $15/month if it gets thrown in a bin in 5 years. It's under $20/mo if we bin it in 3.5 years. https://www.bestbuy.com/site/macbook-air-13-3-laptop-apple-m... I feel like the Chromebook on the lower end is great for a lot of uses/people and the Air is an easi…

> 5 years Because Apple will forcibly kill it after that with incompatible software updates. Windows machines keep going until they physically break. But what everyone here is missing is that the consumer desktop/laptop market is dying itself. Soon it will only be for enterprise uses and gaming. Most people do all their computing through a phone or tablet. I know people who don't own a laptop.

> Windows machines keep going until they physically break.

which isn't good for Intel!

cpus are expensive to develop...

Re: Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

#168

Post by karmakaze »

steveBK123 wrote: post #111
jl6 wrote: post #50

I find it kind of amazing that Intel haven't found a way to profit during the global chip shortage. Look at food and energy over the past year or so: supermarket and oil & gas companies are posting record profits. They are riding the wave of price rises and supply constraints. What's different about CPUs?

They missed the boat on 2 biggest growth areas: ARM (mobile) & GPU (gaming, crypto, AI), and screwed up x86 (AMD made some better chips / Apple walked away). Screwing 1 of those up is a problem, screwing up all 3 simultaneously is near-bankrupting.

Their development model was 'tick / tock'[0] with the tick being smaller processes, increased frequency, lower-power. All of those are largely outsourced (or outsourceable) to a fab. The tock step was introduction of new microarchitectures. Intel has been historically hit or miss with this, the default is to take what they did and do more of it rather than come up with entirely new and sound designs. I would say for large established companies the greatest factor in these kinds of differences is how high the engineering culture goes up the reporting chain.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tick%E2%80%93tock_model

Re: Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

#169

Post by rektide »

windowsrookie wrote: post #75
jl6 wrote: post #50

I find it kind of amazing that Intel haven't found a way to profit during the global chip shortage. Look at food and energy over the past year or so: supermarket and oil & gas companies are posting record profits. They are riding the wave of price rises and supply constraints. What's different about CPUs?

At the beginning of the chip shortage, Intel's CPU just weren't very good. AMD was beating them at performance and efficiency. Intel has caught up now, but their chips still use significantly more power than the current AMD chips. Intel spent a lot of time and money developing their new Arc GPUs. They were delayed and they missed the crypto boom. Drivers and GPU performance were disappointing even after delaying the…

To their credit, the gpu drivers have continued getting much much better, much faster.

Intel has long understood the value of drivers, has been one of the primary contributors & drivers of really good open source (albeit with some frustrating areas of sore neglect, like GMA500/Poulso) (But also rip the incredible http://01.org those folks were amazing at finding high value open source work to do!). Im glad to see making an already quite reasonable priced value GPU a lot better.

But yeah the timing is after the GPU craze. And Intel has been tweaking the same way-too-big big core for too too long & is uncompetitive. And they've been hurting to get a 7nm process (Intel 4) going. A lot of change is necessary.

Re: Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

#170

Post by causi »

bane wrote: post #116

Intel and Google share surprisingly similar problems: an almost pathological inability to grow lines of business with new products because they kill them off too early. In Intel's case, it's even worse, they kill them off right before the market would have made them successful. They should own the "things with semiconductors" market, but instead financially engineered their way to focus only on higher profit core chi…

Personally I think Intel lost the plot around the time they killed Atom. Atom launched as a garbage product, then they spent a decade refining it into an incredible combination of price, performance, and power consumption. Then they killed it and replaced it with processors that offered barely 10% better performance per watt at five times the MSRP and they wonder why the Intel tablet market is dead. It's dead because they strangled it in the crib by pretending Pentium Gold Y-series was an adequate successor to Cherry Trail.
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