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Intel's Humbling

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Re: Intel's Humbling

#121

Post by BirAdam »

chasil wrote: post #94
BirAdam wrote: post #50

Everyone 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…

Acorn’s original ARM chip was impressive but it didn’t really capture much market share. The first ARM CPU competed against the 286, and did win. The 386 was a big deal though. First, software was very expensive at the time, and the 386 allowed people to keep their investments. Second, it really was a powerful chip. It allowed 11mips vs ARM3’s 13, but the 486 achieved 54mips. ARM6 only hit 28mips. It’s worth noting that the 386 also used 32bit memory addressing and a 32 bit bus while ARM was 26bit addressing with a 16 bit bus.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#122

Post by AtlasBarfed »

BirAdam wrote: post #50

Everyone 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…

If you're process nodes are going wayyyy over schedule, it shouldn't take much intelligence to realize that TSMC is catching up FAST.

You should probably have some intel (haha) on ARM and AMD chips. They didn't care.

Why? It's monopoly business tactics, except they didn't realize they weren't Microsoft.

It's not like this was overnight. Intel should have watched AMD like a hawk after that slimeball Ruiz was deposed and a real CEO put in charge.

And the Mac chips have been out, what, two years now, and the Apple processors on the iPhones at least 10?

Come on. This is apocalyptic scale incompetence.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#123

Post by geerlingguy »

hollerith wrote: post #99
duped wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-...

Oracle, and even Microsoft, have decently large arm64 deployments now too (compared to nothing).

Re: Intel's Humbling

#124

Post by evilduck »

timschmidt wrote: post #75
whynotminot wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It sounds like Apple just wanted to vertically integrate, to me. Which is a fine reason to do something. But doesn't require misrepresenting competitors or constructing a past which never happened. You do you though.

Intel laptops cant even sleep anymore. I have a 11th Gen Intel space heater that invalidates every claim you've made in this thread. People aren't stupid, we've owned these shitty Intel products for years, you're fooling nobody.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#125

Post by oldgradstudent »

> I thought that Krzanich should do something similar: Intel should stop focusing its efforts on being an integrated device manufacturer (IDM) — a company that both designed and manufactured its own chips exclusively — and shift to becoming a foundry that also served external customers.

That would only work if Intel has a competitive foundry. Intel produces very high margin chips. Can it be competitive with TSMC in low margin chips where costs must be controlled?

The rumors I've heard (not sure about their credibility) is that Intel is simply not competitive in terms of costs and yields.

And that's even before considering it doesn't really have an effective process competitive with TSMC.

It's easy to say it should become a foundry, it's much harder to actually do that.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#126

Post by evilduck »

yakz wrote: post #14
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.

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.

Microsoft Surface Laptops were trying for similar form factors and having the same thermal problems at the same time, this isn't a grand conspiracy, all Intel laptops were suffering.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#127

Post by eslaught »

vineyardmike wrote: post #110
nine_k wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ARM has been really competitive since, well, 2007, when the first iPhone hit the market, and when Android followed in 2008. That is, last 15 years or so. Not noticing a hugely growing segment that was bringing insane reams of cash to Apple, and Qualcomm, Samsung and others involved is not something I could call astute. Pretty certainly, Intel is improving, and of course should not be written off. But they did get the…

> Not noticing a hugely growing segment that was bringing insane reams of cash to Apple, and Qualcomm, Samsung and others involved is not something I could call astute. And it's not like they didn't notice either. Apple literally asked intel to supply the chips for the first iPhone, but the intel CEO at the time "didn't see it". https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/16/4337954/intel-could-have-...

I agree mobile was a miss but the linked article actually quotes Intel's former COE making a pretty good argument why they missed:

> "The thing you have to remember is that this was before the iPhone was introduced and no one knew what the iPhone would do... At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn't see it. It wasn't one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought."

In that circumstance, I think most people would have made the same decision.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#128

Post by whynotminot »

timschmidt wrote: post #120
whynotminot wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Did you make a mistake in your comparison link? Because I've been looking at it for a few minutes now and I don't get it.

It doesn't support your contention that Intel was making comparable chips at the time to the M1, I'll say that at the least.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#129

Post by mjevans »

Wasn't the region around 12-7nM around where flash and RAM style memory were more reliable? If the new process works well for those but is cheaper that could be very good for bulk (value focused) non-volatile and volatile memory.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#130

Post by scrubs »

BirAdam wrote: post #50

Everyone 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…

Well, yes.

Look at Japan generally and Toyota specifically. In Japan the best award you can get for having an outstanding company in terms of profit, topline, quality, free-cash, people, and all the good measures is the Deming Award. Deming was our guy (an American) but we Americans in management didn't take him seriously enough.

The Japanese to their credit did ... ran with it and made it into their own thing in a good way. The Japanese took 30% of the US auto market in our own backyard. Customers knew Hondas, Toyotas cost more but were worth every dollar. They resold better too. (Yes some noise about direct government investment in Japanese companies by the government was a factor too, but not the chief factor in the long run).

We Americans got it "explained to us." We thought we were handling it. Nah, it was BS. But we eventually got our act together. Our Deming award is the Malcolm Baldridge award.

Today, unfortunately the Japanese economy isn't rocking like it was the 80s and early 90s. And Toyota isn't the towering example of quality it once was. I think -- if my facts are correct --- they went too McDonalds and got caught up in lowering price in their materials, and supply chain with bad effects net overall.

So things ebb and flow.

The key thing: is management through action or inaction allowing stupid inbred company culture to make crappy products? Do they know their customers etc etc. Hell, mistakes even screw-ups are not life ending for companies the size of Intel. But recurring stupidity is. A lot of the times the good guys allow themselves to rot from the inside out. So when is enough enough already?

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