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's Humbling
71–80 of 414 posts
Re: Intel's Humbling
#72Everyone acts as though Intel should have seen everything coming. Where was AMD? Was AMD really competitive before Ryzen? Nope. Core 2 series blew them out of the water. Was ARM really competitive until recently? Nope. Intel crushed them. The problem for Intel is the inertia of laziness due to a lack of competition. I wouldn’t count them out just yet, however. The company’s first true swing at modern GPU was actually…
Intel never "crushed" ARM. Intel completely failed to develop a mobile processor and ARM has a massive marketshare there.
ARM has always beaten the crap out of Intel at performance per watt, which turned out to be extremely important both in mobile and data center scale.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 kin…
> Absolutely ridiculous. No, Apple did not juice the M1 by giving it better cooling than x86. This is such an uncharitable and adversarial interpretation of parent. Sandbagging intel =/= juicing M1.
The fact that the exact same laptop designs absolutely soared when an M1 was put in them with no changes tells you everything you need to know about how Intel dropped the ball.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 dev…
It seems like you think I'm trying to dunk on Apple. I am not. Apple Silicon is a great first showing for them. Performance simply isn't better than Ryzen APUs running in the same power envelope. And power usage is what you'd expect of silicon running on the latest node. Further, some of Apple's choices - bringing memory on package, only two display outputs - caused regressions for their users compared to the previou…
By this yardstick, nobody in semiconductors has ever innovated.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Neither here nor there--when Apple needed Intel to ship a decent, performant core that didn't overheat and chew through battery life, they could not. Apple switched to their own silicon, and life for their customers has radically improved. Maybe Intel has a great E Core now. Good for them if they do.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#76"Intel’s argument is that backside power will make chips much easier to design, since the power is separated from the communications layer, eliminating interference" That makes a lot of sense to me: that's how and why PCBs are usually designed as they are. How true it that there is an actual advantage vs TSMC?
Intel's roadmap looks great. However, I'm skeptical of whether they're actually meeting that roadmap. Meteor Lake was launched last month using Intel 4, but it looks like Intel 4 has lower transistor density than TSMC's 5nm. Intel 3 is listed on their roadmap as second-half 2023, but we've yet to see any Intel 3 parts.
Realistically, there won't be too much of an advantage for Intel. It's pretty clear that even when Intel ships things, they aren't shipping these new nodes in volume. Intel 4 is only being used for some laptop processors and they're even using TSMC's 5nm and 6nm processes for the graphics and IO on those chips. They canceled the desktop version of Meteor Lake so desktops are staying on Intel 7 for now. Intel's latest server processors launched last month are also Intel 7.
If Intel were able to get a year or two ahead of TSMC, then I could see a nice advantage. However, it looks like Intel's a year behind its roadmap and even being a year behind they're only shipping laptop parts (and not even able to fab the whole chip themselves).
But past success/failure doesn't predict the future. Maybe Intel will be shipping 20A with backside power in 2024 and it'll be 2025 before TSMC gives Apple a 2nm chip with backside power.
But given that we haven't seen them shipping Intel 3 and they haven't taken Intel 3 off their roadmap, I'm going to be a bit skeptical. Intel is doing way better than they had been doing. However, I've yet to see something convincing that they're doing better than TSMC. That's not to say they aren't going to do better than TSMC, but at this point Intel is saying "we're going to jump from slightly worse than 5nm (Intel 4) to 2nm in a year or less!" Maybe Intel is doing that well, but it's a tall ask. TSMC launched 5nm in 2020 and 3 years later got to 3nm. It doesn't take as long to catch up because technology becomes easier over time, but Intel is kinda claiming it can compress 5-6 years worth of work into a single year. Again, maybe Intel has been pouring its resources into 20A and 18A and maybe some of it is more on ASML and maybe Intel has been neglecting Intel 4 and Intel 3 because it knows it's worth putting its energy toward something actually better. But it also seems reasonable to have a certain amount of doubt about Intel's claims.
I'd love for Intel to crush its roadmap. Better processors and better competition benefit us all. But I'm still wondering how well that will go. TSMC seems to be having a bit of trouble with their 3nm process. 2024's flagship Android processors will remain on 4nm and it looks like the 2024 Zen 5 processors will be 4nm as well (with 3nm parts coming in 2025). So it looks like 3nm will basically just be Apple until 2025 which kinda indicates that TSMC isn't doing wonderfully with its 3nm process. Android processors moved to 5nm around 6 months after Apple did, but it looks like they'll move to 3nm around 18 months after Apple. But just because TSMC isn't doing great at 3nm doesn't mean Intel will face similar struggles. It just seems likely that if TSMC (a company that has been crushing it over the past decade) is facing higher struggles at 3nm, it's a bit of wishful thinking to believe Intel won't face similar struggles at 3nm and below.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#77Earlier 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…
It was Apple's decision to put an 8-core i9 in an MBP chassis that was utterly incapable of dealing with the heat. Yes, the M1 is far more efficient and Apple deserves a lot of credit for it, but their last Intel laptops were much worse than they needed to be.
Maybe they were worse than they needed to be, but the best they could have been with Intel would have still left so much to be desired.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Absolutely ridiculous. No, Apple did not juice the M1 by giving it better cooling than x86. This is such an uncharitable and adversarial interpretation of parent. Sandbagging intel =/= juicing M1.
Parent didn't deserve any charity--Apple didn't sandbag anyone. They made the laptop they felt was the future based off a processor roadmap Intel failed to deliver on. The fact that the exact same laptop designs absolutely soared when an M1 was put in them with no changes tells you everything you need to know about how Intel dropped the ball.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Parent didn't deserve any charity--Apple didn't sandbag anyone. They made the laptop they felt was the future based off a processor roadmap Intel failed to deliver on. The fact that the exact same laptop designs absolutely soared when an M1 was put in them with no changes tells you everything you need to know about how Intel dropped the ball.
There must be 20 videos in this series: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=LTT+apple+cooli...
Re: Intel's Humbling
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems like you think I'm trying to dunk on Apple. I am not. Apple Silicon is a great first showing for them. Performance simply isn't better than Ryzen APUs running in the same power envelope. And power usage is what you'd expect of silicon running on the latest node. Further, some of Apple's choices - bringing memory on package, only two display outputs - caused regressions for their users compared to the previou…
> I wouldn't call what Apple did innovation - they followed predictable development trajectories - more integration By this yardstick, nobody in semiconductors has ever innovated.