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Intel's Humbling

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Re: Intel's Humbling

#111

Post by CoastalCoder »

stefan_ wrote: post #88
brutus1213 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember when they did random stuff like the whole IoT push (frankly, their offerings made no sense to humble me .. Microsoft had a better IoT than Intel). They did drone crap .. gave a kick ass keynote at CES I recall .. also .. made little sense. Finally, the whole FPGA thing .. makes little sense. So much value being destroyed :(

I remember when they bought a smart glasses company then refunded every buyer ever the full retail price. There hasn’t been an Intel acquisition that has worked out in some 20 years now it seems. Just utterly unserious people.

> There hasn’t been an Intel acquisition that has worked out in some 20 years now it seems.

Maybe Habana Labs?

I can't really tell if it's working out for Intel, but I do hear them mentioned now and then.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#112

Post by timschmidt »

whynotminot wrote: post #98
timschmidt wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 recogn…

I think a lot has happened in Intel land since Apple folk stopped paying attention, as well. Intel still has a lot of work to do to catch up to AMD, but they have been fairly consistently posting gains in all areas. Apple really doesn't have a power advantage other than that granted by their process node at this point, against either AMD or Intel. AMD has seemingly delayed the Strix Halo launch because it wasn't necessary to compete at the moment. And Qualcomm is taking the same path Apple has, but is willing to sell to anyone, and as a result has chips in all standalone VR headsets other than Apple's.

It remains to be seen if Apple is willing or able to scale their architecture to something workstation class (the last Intel Mac Pro supported 1.5TB of ram, it's easy to build a 4TB Epyc workstation these days).

Re: Intel's Humbling

#113

Post by sam_bristow »

brutus1213 wrote: post #47
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…

I remember when they did random stuff like the whole IoT push (frankly, their offerings made no sense to humble me .. Microsoft had a better IoT than Intel). They did drone crap .. gave a kick ass keynote at CES I recall .. also .. made little sense. Finally, the whole FPGA thing .. makes little sense. So much value being destroyed :(

The Altera (FPGA) acquisition could have made sense, but they never really followed through and now it's being spun off again.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#114

Post by whynotminot »

timschmidt wrote: post #95
whynotminot wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Please correct me then. I'm willing to learn about the Intel laptop chip that Apple could have used to achieve M1 performance and efficiency at the time they switched. You're right that I am not familiar with every one of Intel's SKUs they produced at the time.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#115

Post by _yb2s »

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…

It's not possible to cool those Intel cpus better and still have good battery life, and quiet operation in a compact laptop form factor. The last Intel macbooks would get very hot and very loud when running hard, and kill the battery in minutes... my M1 never makes a sound or feels even slightly warm to the touch when running hard, yet is a heck of a lot more powerful, and can run hard all day long on a single battery charge.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#116

Post by asd4 »

nullhole wrote: post #85
nine_k wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Xeon is not something people normally run on desktops. Datacenters were and still are full of monstrous Xeons, and for a good reason.

> Datacenters were and still are full of monstrous Xeons, and for a good reason. To ask the foolish question, why? My guess would be power efficiency. I've only ever seen them in workstations, and in that use-case it was the number of cores that was the main advantage.

They seem to gate ECC support behind Xeon for higher end processors. You see ECC memory in a lot of workstation class machines.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#117

Post by mise_en_place »

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…

Intel pivoting to GPUs was a smart move but they just lacked the tribal knowledge needed to successfully ship a competitive GPU offering. We got Arc instead.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#118

Post by TylerE »

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.

It's really sort of been downhill since they decided to play the speed number game over all else with the Pentium IV. Even the core i7/i9 lines that were good for a long time have gone absolutely crazy lately with heat and power consumption.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#119

Post by TylerE »

stefan_ wrote: post #88
brutus1213 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember when they did random stuff like the whole IoT push (frankly, their offerings made no sense to humble me .. Microsoft had a better IoT than Intel). They did drone crap .. gave a kick ass keynote at CES I recall .. also .. made little sense. Finally, the whole FPGA thing .. makes little sense. So much value being destroyed :(

I remember when they bought a smart glasses company then refunded every buyer ever the full retail price. There hasn’t been an Intel acquisition that has worked out in some 20 years now it seems. Just utterly unserious people.

Isn't that true for virtually EVERY big tech merger? Like, which ones have actually worked?

Re: Intel's Humbling

#120

Post by timschmidt »

whynotminot wrote: post #114
timschmidt wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Please correct me then. I'm willing to learn about the Intel laptop chip that Apple could have used to achieve M1 performance and efficiency at the time they switched. You're right that I am not familiar with every one of Intel's SKUs they produced at the time.

M1 was released in 2020, that puts it in line with Tiger Lake and Comet Lake, for which I'm seeing 7 different SKUs at 7W TDP. The fastest of which seems to be the Core i7 1180G7, which seems to perform almost as well as the M1 while using about half as much power: https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/intel-core-i7-1180g7-v...

Just the first example I grabbed. Intel made quite a few more chips in the 15W and higher envelopes, still under M1's ~20W TDP.

I didn't check their embedded SKUs yet. Nor enterprise.

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