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Intel's Humbling

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Re: Intel's Humbling

#51

Post by dralley »

jomohke wrote: post #37
autokad wrote: 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…

There's definitely a lot that can be critiqued about that period. Famously they divested their ARM-based mobile processor division just before smartphones took off. The new CEO, as the article mentions, seems to have a lot more of a clue. We just hope he hasn't arrived too late.

>Famously they divested their ARM-based mobile processor division just before smartphones took off.

Wasn't that AMD (perhaps also AMD)? Qualcomm Adreno GPUs are ATi Radeon IP, hence the anagram.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#52

Post by timschmidt »

whynotminot wrote: post #45
timschmidt wrote: post #7

Earlier 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…

Intel stopped making good chips for the things Apple cared about: efficient, cool designs that can run well with great battery life in attractive consumer products. Apple "sandbagging" was them desperately trying to get a poor Intel product to work in laptops they wanted to be thin and light. Even today though their designs haven't really changed all that much--in fact the MacBook Air is actually just as thin and now…

Intel makes plenty of chips in the 15W and even 5W envelopes to this day. MSI just built a gaming handheld with one.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#53

Post by doublepg23 »

alwayslikethis wrote: post #23
kristianp wrote: post #8

Earlier 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.

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.

That’s pretty common for modern CPUs. Look at the temps for Ryzen 7xxx series.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#54

Post by tru3_power »

Mistletoe wrote: post #40
this_user wrote: post #26

Intel 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.

Is it just the fate of large successful companies? The parallels with Boeing always come to mind. We’ve seen this play out so many times through history, it’s why investing in the top companies of your era is a terrible idea. https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500_archive/f... I wonder how many of our companies will survive at the top for even 20 more years? https://companiesmarketcap.com/ Berkshire is th…

Market forces are hard to fight sometimes. Look at Meta- they were beaten like hell cuz of their metaverse bet.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#55

Post by orev »

nimbius wrote: post #39

Honestly I think the real deathwatch started during spectre/meltdown. Intel had a real choice. They could own the issue, patch and use it as a chance to retool a largely broken architecture when corporate money was still 0% interest or negative interest. They didnt. Every press conference downplayed deflected and denied the performance issues, every patch to the Linux kernel was "disabled by default." They lied throu…

I think you’re vastly overestimating how much Wall Street cares about technical issues like this. Spectre/meltdown barely registers on the radar of issues that Intel has. People are still mostly buying Intel CPUs in laptops, desktops, and servers, and the N100 seems to be gaining ground in the Raspberry Pi space. Maybe it gave an opening for AMD in some markets, but Intel really hasn’t seen some huge tarnished reputation because of it.

The far greater threats are that they missed the phone market, and are missing the GPU/AI market. Those are entirely new markets where growth would happen, instead of the mostly fixed size of the current CPU market where the same players are just trading small percentage points.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#56

Post by tverbeure »

dralley wrote: post #51
jomohke wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's definitely a lot that can be critiqued about that period. Famously they divested their ARM-based mobile processor division just before smartphones took off. The new CEO, as the article mentions, seems to have a lot more of a clue. We just hope he hasn't arrived too late.

>Famously they divested their ARM-based mobile processor division just before smartphones took off. Wasn't that AMD (perhaps also AMD)? Qualcomm Adreno GPUs are ATi Radeon IP, hence the anagram.

Intel divested their StrongARM/XScale product line.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#57

Post by doublepg23 »

timschmidt wrote: post #7
noopl wrote: 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…

I don’t think that was the case. I believe Apple believed Intels roadmap as much as anyone and them repeatedly not delivering inspired them to move.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#58

Post by whynotminot »

timschmidt wrote: post #52
whynotminot wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel stopped making good chips for the things Apple cared about: efficient, cool designs that can run well with great battery life in attractive consumer products. Apple "sandbagging" was them desperately trying to get a poor Intel product to work in laptops they wanted to be thin and light. Even today though their designs haven't really changed all that much--in fact the MacBook Air is actually just as thin and now…

Intel makes plenty of chips in the 15W and even 5W envelopes to this day. MSI just built a gaming handheld with one.

At those envelopes they are nowhere near as good as what Apple makes.

Even if Intel makes a thing that doesn't mean it's actually any good.

I had some of those Intel ULV parts back in the day. They sucked.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#60

Post by timschmidt »

whynotminot wrote: post #58
timschmidt wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel makes plenty of chips in the 15W and even 5W envelopes to this day. MSI just built a gaming handheld with one.

At those envelopes they are nowhere near as good as what Apple makes. Even if Intel makes a thing that doesn't mean it's actually any good. I had some of those Intel ULV parts back in the day. They sucked.

I'm not sure what you had back in the day, but even Intel's E cores these days are spritely. Gone are the days of slow Atom cores. Pretty sure an equivalently clocked Intel E core of today beats the fastest Intel core ever shipped in an Apple product.
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