Boycott Intel
Intel's Humbling
141–150 of 414 posts
Re: Intel's Humbling
#142Earlier 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.
It's a compact package with many cores, lots of cache memory, lots or RAM lanes, and lots of PCI lanes. All within a large but manageably hot crystal.
Space and power in datacenters are at a premium; packing so many pretty decent cores into one CPU allows to run a ton of cloud VMs on a physically compact server.
AMD EPYC, by the way, follows the same dtatcenter-oriented pattern.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Google built its core advertising ecosystem on acquisitions (Applied Semantics, DoubleClick, AdMob, etc) and extended it into the mobile space by buying Android.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#144Boycott Intel
Why
Re: Intel's Humbling
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Facebook bought Instagram and WhatsApp and they were both home runs. Zuckerberg knows how to buy companies.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#146Everyone 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…
The curse of having weak enemies is that you become complacent. You're right: AMD wasn't competitive for an incredibly long time and ARM wasn't really meaningful for a long time. That's the perfect situation for some MBAs to come into. You start thinking that you're wasting money on R&D. Why create something 30% better this year when 10% better will cost a lot less and your competitors are so far behind that it doesn…
> It's that Intel should have understood that just because you have weak enemies today doesn't mean that you have an unassailable castle.
Their third employee that later went on to become their third CEO and guide Intel from the memory to processor transition literally coined the term and wrote a book called "Only the Paranoid Survive" [1]. It's inexcusable that management degraded that much.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Grove#Only_the_Paranoid...
Re: Intel's Humbling
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It's hard for me to square your statements with actual real world products. The Core i7 1180G7 was the CPU in the ThinkPad X1 Nano Gen 2 (IIRC), and that laptop got half the battery life of an M2 Pro and a third of the battery life of the M1 air. TDP doesn't seem to be the whole story - the datasheet is one thing, but I've yet to see a reviewer get 30 hours from an Intel laptop.
For sure there's interesting stuff to talk about here. Intel allows OEMs a lot of configuration with regard to TDP and various ways to measure chip temp accounting for thermal mass of the cooling solution and skin temperature of the device. Many OEMs screw it up. Even the big ones. Lenovo and Apple included.
Screen backlight usually has as much to say about battery life as the CPU does. And it's hard to deny Apple's advantage of being fully vertically integrated. Their OS only needs to support a finite number of hardware configurations, and they are free to implement fixes at any layer. Most of my PC laptops make choices which use more power in exchange for modularity and upgradeability as well, like using SODIMMs for ram, and m.2 or SATA removeable storage, all of which consume more power than Apple's soldered on components.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#148My 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 dru…
I felt that way about their Optane persistent RAM memory (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/05/intel-finally-announ...).
Re: Intel's Humbling
#149Good. Evolution! Competition still works and regulatory capture can’t help every corp.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 o…
Kind of speaks to how Intel was not competitive in the space at all. If it was truly that the marginal cost per part was higher than the requested price, either Apple was asking for the impossible and settled for a worse deal with an ARM chip, or Intel did not have similar capabilities.