Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Intel is all-in on backside power delivery

spectrum.ieee.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 166 posts

Re: Intel is all-in on backside power delivery

#111

Post by louissan »

lisper wrote: post #101
bboygravity wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They must have a way to reach and debug the signal layers, at least in the lab? If not, I would intuitively think this whole approach would fail?

Why do you think it's necessary to debug signal layers by physically connecting to them (other than the I/O pins of the chip)? The only time you would actually try to connect to a chip other than through the I/O pins is in an adversarial situation. You might want to read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_for_testing

Pentium 2 cartridge, double-sided in 3, 2 ... 1...

Re: Intel is all-in on backside power delivery

#113

Post by __alexs »

reissbaker wrote: post #63
hn8305823 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel, just like Boeing and to a lesser extent many other F500 companies appear to be fully financialized at this point. Their executives probably wake up each day and think about how much stock to buy back and nothing else. Do they even remember what it is the company used to do for a living?

Intel was this way, but IMO Pat Gelsinger has turned it around — as per this, their surprisingly competitive GPU perf, and hopefully Intel Foundry Services. IDK if it's enough to call it a Satya Nadella-like CEO transition, but I've been pretty impressed watching it happen.

> their surprisingly competitive GPU perf,

I think the only thing Pat Gelsinger deserves credit for when it comes to Arc is firing Raja Koduri.

Whether or not this turns out to actually be good for the company or not remains to be seen. A lot is riding on Battlemage not being a mess like Arc was.

Re: Intel is all-in on backside power delivery

#114

Post by dan-robertson »

hn_thrwn wrote: post #77
wpietri wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. Very helpful. One of the wild things to me is how incredibly elaborate chipmaking as become over the years. Per Wikipedia, the 6502's layout was made with "a very manual process done with color pencils and vellum paper". That's the processor that launched the personal computing revolution, powering the Apple II, Commodore PET and VIC-20, the Acorn, and the BBC Micro. Nearly 50 years later, things have gotten…

Chip making is the first industry that was automates by computers. Much like how steam engines were first used in coal mines.

The discussion around steam engines is generally that coal mines were the appropriate place because early steam engines were very bad and there wasn’t good transport so they could only really go in places with a plentiful local supply of coal. (There is also a requirement that coal be in sufficient demand for the steam engines to be worth it. To some extent, the bad transport meant that a lot of the price of coal was in the transport so the price of the coal for the steam engine was lower as it didn’t include that transport).

I don’t really think chip making is much like that. I wouldn’t say that chip making was the first industry to be automated by computers either.

Re: Intel is all-in on backside power delivery

#115

Post by rcxdude »

bestouff wrote: post #110
nightowl_games wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Chip making is automated." Is not a true statement.

Chip making is in a really sad state of automation. There's lots of money poured into very ingenious products, but the major incumbents have to real incentive to standardize, so you still have some unstructured file formats (SPICE) with different dialects veeery hard to parse correctly, you have ad-hoc APIs depending on vendor and software versions that all try to capture you into their ecosystem, you have half-assed…

Also just the state of highly sophisticated but niche software (ecosystems) in general. It usually winds up super messy and only just put together enough to function for the small number of users.

Re: Intel is all-in on backside power delivery

#116

Post by rcxdude »

lisper wrote: post #101
bboygravity wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They must have a way to reach and debug the signal layers, at least in the lab? If not, I would intuitively think this whole approach would fail?

Why do you think it's necessary to debug signal layers by physically connecting to them (other than the I/O pins of the chip)? The only time you would actually try to connect to a chip other than through the I/O pins is in an adversarial situation. You might want to read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_for_testing

It's not usually necessary, but they do in fact have this capability and do use it for testing and failure analysis (I think it is mostly used for debugging fabrication issues, where physically seeing the construction of the chip is important). The other amazing thing they can do is some level of rework: creating or removing connections to test a change or hypothesis without the expensive process of making a new mask for that layer. There's a video from intel's testing lab where the leader brags he can take a chip with a single failed transistor somewhere in it, and give you a picture of it.

Re: Intel is all-in on backside power delivery

#117

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #53
scrlk wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/sand-won-t-save-yo... All posts under the "Things I Won't Work With" series: https://www.science.org/topic/blog-category/things-i-wont-wo...

Thanks! I was on my phone, and realized I hadn’t bookmarked it. I like all the stuff he did in that series, so the second link is great!

Just FYI, for some reason, the embedded video in this post[0] does not work.

Here it is on YouTube[1].

[0] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/chlorine-trifluori...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4l56AfUTnQ&t=1s

Re: Intel is all-in on backside power delivery

#118

Post by fennecfoxy »

SuperShibe wrote: post #38
TheRealPomax wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does "start leading" even mean? Every CPU launch, AMD is ahead and the Intel beats them or Intel is ahead and then AMD beats them. There is no leading here. There are only wins for people who want CPUs that keep getting faster, cooler, require fewer watts to run, and overall improve generation upon generation.

And meanwhile they're both getting cucked by Apple because the Intel/AMD brand monoliths are too heavy to make any groundbreaking/architectural changes now.

By Apple? Or by ARM?

There's a reason it's an "ARM" processor & not an "Apple" one, even though yes, Apple did contribute a lot of their own design to their specific chip.

Unfortunately, Apple took the shortcut of gaining performance by having memory/SB/NB/kitchen sink all together on the same die, which is very...not scalable. It's a good way to be "top in class" for the class your in, but it comes with a ceiling; you can't hit the higher levels because where competitors can use the whole die for processor, Apple are stuck using only part of the die, the rest being used for memory/controllers, etc.

Absolutely stellar architecture for laptops for sure, but not so great for desktops/servers, imo.

Re: Intel is all-in on backside power delivery

#119

Post by fennecfoxy »

augustl wrote: post #108
paulmd wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

M2 is still quite far ahead in user-interactive tasks like browser and JVM, as shown by actual user experience in battery life. Cinebench isn't exactly the only efficiency test and Anandtech shows AMD still trailing far behind on the SPEC2017 suite (a variety of real-world applications). In desktops (Mac Studio etc) where you can run unlimited watts, yeah Apple doesn't do as well there, but the efficiency is still am…

I'm not sure if I even trust Intel/Windows at this point. The m1 macs are just so much snappier in absolutely every way imaginable than my old 11th gen Dell. My old PC would some times take minutes (!) to fully wake up from sleep, the battery drained in a couple of hours when coding, and it was sluggish the whole time compared to plugged in performance. I plan to see if I can borrow someone's 13th gen PC and use it f…

"My old PC"

Well of course a newer laptop of going to be "snappier" lmao.

"My new car is faster and more fuel efficient than my old car"

Re: Intel is all-in on backside power delivery

#120

Post by robertlagrant »

brucethemoose2 wrote: post #2

Heh, I remember when this was the norm: Samsung, TSMC, and GloFo waiting for Intel to work out the kinks and tooling before implementing it themselves.

(I don't understand why sibling comment was downvoted so much with no comment.)
Post reply on HN