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Intel's Humbling

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Re: Intel's Humbling

#2
As someone that doesn’t really understand the space and stuff that the article is talking about, I was surprised that “Apple Silicon” didn’t appear here since from my perspective having used both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs, it’s a huge “wow” change. Was Apple leaving and Apple Silicon Macs being so incredibly better than Intel ones not actually a big deal for Intel?

Re: Intel's Humbling

#3
post #2

As someone that doesn’t really understand the space and stuff that the article is talking about, I was surprised that “Apple Silicon” didn’t appear here since from my perspective having used both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs, it’s a huge “wow” change. Was Apple leaving and Apple Silicon Macs being so incredibly better than Intel ones not actually a big deal for Intel?

TSMC manufactures Apple Silicon. It’s a good example of the foundry model that the article is talking about.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#5
Intel's 2010 7.6B$ purchase of mcafee was a sign that Intel doesn't know what its doing. In the CEO's words: The future of chips is security on the chip. I was like no, no its not! I wanted them to get into mobile and GPUs at the time. Nvdia's market cap was about 9B at the time. I know it would have been a larger pill to swallow, and likely had to bid a bit more than 9B, but I thought it was possible for Intel at the time.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#6
post #2

As someone that doesn’t really understand the space and stuff that the article is talking about, I was surprised that “Apple Silicon” didn’t appear here since from my perspective having used both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs, it’s a huge “wow” change. Was Apple leaving and Apple Silicon Macs being so incredibly better than Intel ones not actually a big deal for Intel?

TSMC manufactures Apple Silicon. It’s a good example of the foundry model that the article is talking about.

Not only do they manufacture Apple Silicon, but Apple usually buys out the first runs of their new processes so they have a head-start against even other TSMC customers. I believe every 3nm wafer that TSMC makes is still going to Apple, hence the just-released Qualcomm SD8G3 flagship chip still being made on TSMC 4nm.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#7
post #2

As someone that doesn’t really understand the space and stuff that the article is talking about, I was surprised that “Apple Silicon” didn’t appear here since from my perspective having used both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs, it’s a huge “wow” change. Was Apple leaving and Apple Silicon Macs being so incredibly better than Intel ones not actually a big deal for Intel?

Apple had been sandbagging the Intel chips for several generations of macbook with anemic cooling solutions, poor thermal throttling curves, and fans that wait until the last moment to turn on. To the extent that the fastest CPUs available in Macbook Pros did not outperform lower models, because both became thermally saturated. When properly cooled, the Intel silicon tends to perform a lot better.

Additionally, both Intel and AMD manufacturer CPUs for HEDT and servers which are far beyond anything Apple is fabricating at the moment. Apple has no response to Epyc, Threadripper, or higher end Xeon. Similarly, Apple has no equivalent to Intel, AMD, and Nvidia discrete GPUs.

Apple made a quality cell phone chip, and managed to exploit chiplets and chip-to-chip interconnects to double and quadruple it into a decent APU. But it's still an APU, just one segment addressed by current x86 designs.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#8
post #2

As someone that doesn’t really understand the space and stuff that the article is talking about, I was surprised that “Apple Silicon” didn’t appear here since from my perspective having used both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs, it’s a huge “wow” change. Was Apple leaving and Apple Silicon Macs being so incredibly better than Intel ones not actually a big deal for Intel?

Apple had been sandbagging the Intel chips for several generations of macbook with anemic cooling solutions, poor thermal throttling curves, and fans that wait until the last moment to turn on. To the extent that the fastest CPUs available in Macbook Pros did not outperform lower models, because both became thermally saturated. When properly cooled, the Intel silicon tends to perform a lot better. Additionally, both…

> Apple had been sandbagging the Intel chips for several generations of macbook with anemic cooling solutions

I don't think that was deliberate. Apple has a long history of not cooling their computers enough.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#9
post #5

Intel's 2010 7.6B$ purchase of mcafee was a sign that Intel doesn't know what its doing. In the CEO's words: The future of chips is security on the chip. I was like no, no its not! I wanted them to get into mobile and GPUs at the time. Nvdia's market cap was about 9B at the time. I know it would have been a larger pill to swallow, and likely had to bid a bit more than 9B, but I thought it was possible for Intel at th…

[deleted]

Re: Intel's Humbling

#10
post #5

Intel's 2010 7.6B$ purchase of mcafee was a sign that Intel doesn't know what its doing. In the CEO's words: The future of chips is security on the chip. I was like no, no its not! I wanted them to get into mobile and GPUs at the time. Nvdia's market cap was about 9B at the time. I know it would have been a larger pill to swallow, and likely had to bid a bit more than 9B, but I thought it was possible for Intel at th…

It would have had the same fate as the NVIDIA ARM deal.
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