I was a huge Intel fanboy for years...and then I got my first Windows Arm laptop (Lenovo X13s). Intel has a lot of catching up to do.
Intel's Humbling
91–100 of 414 posts
Re: Intel's Humbling
#92Everyone 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…
> Core 2 series blew them out of the water.
And Sandy Bridge all but assured AMD wouldn't be relevant for the better part of a decade.
It's easy to forget just how fast Sandy Bridge was when it came out; over 12 years later and it can still hold its own as far as raw performance is concerned.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#93Earlier 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…
They didn’t sabotage them. The CPUs just didn’t align with Apple’s goals. It’s not like they gave the M1 CPUs the cooling that Intel didn’t get. My Mac Mini M1 never spins up its fans and everything is fine. I love it. If it did, I’d consider it a downgrade.
I don't think Apple "sabotaged" them but it is true that the M1 series came with very different thermal design parameters than the terminal Intel models. Apple's Intel laptops would ramp chip power to the max as soon as anything happened. Apple's M1 ramps very, very slowly, dwelling for hundreds of milliseconds at each voltage before stepping up. These are decisions that are in the OEM's hands and not dictated by Intel.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#94Everyone 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's flaw was trying to push DUV to 10nm (otherwise known as Intel 7).
Had Intel adopted the molten tin of EUV, the cycle of failure would have been curtailed.
Hats off to SMIC for the DUV 7nm which they produced so quickly. They likely saw quite a bit of failed effort.
And before we discount ARM, we should remember that Acorn produced a 32-bit CPU with a 25k transistor count. The 80386 was years later, with 275k transistors.
Intel should have bought Acorn, not Olivetti.
That's a lot of mistakes, not even counting Itanium.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but the fact is nothing in Intel's lineup at the time was any good for a laptop. Simply false brand-oriented thinking.
Why so defensive about Intel? I think you're the one doing the brand-oriented thinking here.
> nothing in Intel's lineup at the time was any good for a laptop.
You leave no room for nuance here, friend. And somehow I doubt you're familiar with every single one of Intel's tens of thousands of SKUs over decades. Intel has made a lot of CPUs. They're in lots of laptops. You might consider your wording if you're not trying to be corrected.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#96Earlier 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…
Somehow you are comparing Apple’s first gen laptop/iPad chip to a a desktop setup requiring 10x the power consumption and 10x the physical size (for the chips and all the cooling required). The power envelope for these chips is very different and they prioritize different things.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#97My own humble opinion is that Intel has always suffered from market cannibalization. They are a brand I look for but many times the iteration of products will force me to go a generation or two older because I can’t argue with the price and features. By the time I was sold on a NUC they were discontinued. I wanted a discrete GPU when they announced Xe but it has become Xe ARC alchemist, battlemage, celestial, and druid. By the time I’m ready to spend some money it will become something else usually. Also, they should have snapped up Nuvia. I’m still rooting for them but really if they could streamline their products and be willing to take a leap of faith on others in the same space it would help out a lot.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Intel did screw up and get stuck on 14nm for far too long. But then does Apple deserve credit for TSMC's process advantage? AMD was never stuck in the way Intel was, and they have had the performance crown since for most kinds of workloads. I suppose Apple figured if they were going to switch chip vendors again it might as well be to themselves.
True, it's not just a story of Apple besting Intel. AMD has been beating them too.
Rough recent history for Intel.
I agree that Apple figured if they were going to switch, they should just go ahead and switch to themselves. But the choice was really to switch to either themselves or AMD. Sticking with Intel at the time was untenable. 14nm is certainly a big part of that story, and I'm glad you at least finally recognize there was a serious problem.
If Intel had been able to deliver on their node shrink roadmap, perhaps Apple never would have felt the need to switch--or may have at least delayed those plans. Who knows, that's alternate history speculation at this point.
The article in question is about Intel potentially getting back to some level of process parity, perhaps even leadership. I'm looking forward to that because I think a competitive market is important.
But pretending Intel's laptop processors weren't garbage for most of the last 8 or so years is kind of living in an alternate reality.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#99Everyone 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…
> Was ARM really competitive until recently? Nope. Intel crushed them. 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.
I got curious about how ARM is doing in the data center and found this:
>Arm now claims to hold a 10.1% share of the cloud computing market, although that's primarily due to Amazon and its increasing use of homegrown Arm chips. According to TrendForce, Amazon Web Services (AWS) was using its custom Graviton chips in 15% of all server deployments in 2021.
https://www.fool.com/investing/2023/09/23/arm-holdings-data-...
Re: Intel's Humbling
#100Earlier 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…
Somehow you are comparing Apple’s first gen laptop/iPad chip to a a desktop setup requiring 10x the power consumption and 10x the physical size (for the chips and all the cooling required). The power envelope for these chips is very different and they prioritize different things.
That's my point. You got it. Go you.