Humble people don't allude to snake oil when dissing competition's naming scheme.
Edit: relevant video, because whoever downvoted did not get what I was referring to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUT4d5IVY0A
Intel's Humbling
21–30 of 414 posts
Re: Intel's Humbling
#22Intel'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…
MBAs eating the world one acquisition at a time.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
They still do it. Apple silicon macs run at 100+ degrees at load. Apple would rather run their chips hot than turn on the fans, which may or may not be justified. We don't really see chips dying from high temps, especially for typical workloads a casual user would use.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I had never even considered it was deliberate. In hindsight, doing it deliberately seems pretty smart, at least from a “let’s juice the intro” perspective, but that would have been a really big bet.
It's an interesting question right? Do you think Apple never tested multiple configurations of their leading computer (specifically the higher end ones) over multiple generations, or do you think they knew what they were doing?
Re: Intel's Humbling
#25Intel'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…
He was right but for the wrong reasons. Had Intel figured out hyperthreading security and avoided all the various exploits that later showed up …
Then they would have worse-performing chips and the market wouldn't care about the security benefits. Cloud providers may grumble, but they aren't the most important market anyway.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#26Intel has truly been on a remarkable spree of extremely poor strategic decisions for the last 20 years or so. Missed the boat on mobile, missed the boat on GPUs and AI, focused too much on desktop, and now AMD and ARM-based chips are eating their lunch in the data centre area.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#27As 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…
> When properly cooled, the Intel silicon tends to perform a lot better.
Of course, but the average Joe does not want to wear ear protection when running their laptop. Nor do they want the battery to last 40 minutes or have it be huge brick, or have to pour liquid nitrogen on it to not get it to not thermal throttle.
Apple innovated by making chips that fit the form and function most people need in their personal devices. They don't need to be the absolute fastest, but innovation isn't solely tied to the computing power of a processor. It make sense that Intel excels in the market segment where people do need to wear ear protection to go near their products. If they need to crank in an extra 30 watts to achieve their new better compute then so be it.
We don't know the specifics of the conversations between Apple and Intel. Hopefully for Intel it was just the fact that they didn't want to innovate for personal computing processors and not that they couldn't.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#28[dead]
Re: Intel's Humbling
#29Intel'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…
MBAs eating the world one acquisition at a time.
He was a process engineer
Re: Intel's Humbling
#30As 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…
Absolutely ridiculous. No, Apple did not juice the M1 by giving it better cooling than x86. Quite the opposite, they took a big chunk of their design+process wins to the bank and exchanged them for even cooler and quieter operation because that's what they wanted all along. Cool and quiet was a deliverable.
It's absurd to point out that apple could have gotten higher perf from x86 at higher power as if it's some kind of win for intel. Yes, obviously they could have, that's true of every chip ever. They could take it even further and cool every macbook with liquid nitrogen and require lugging around a huge tank of the stuff just to read your email! They don't, because that's dumb. Apple goes even further than most laptop manufacturers and thinks that hissing fans and low battery life are dumb too. This leads them to low power as a design constraint and what matters is what performance a chip can deliver within that constraint. That's the perspective from which the M1 was designed and that's the perspective from which it delivered in spades.