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Intel's Humbling

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Re: Intel's Humbling

#151

Post by inversetelecine »

solarkraft wrote: post #136
mise_en_place wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't Arc actually pretty okay?

It's getting better and drivers are improving all the time. I personally liked the Arc for the hardware AV1 encoding. Quicksync (I use qsvencc) is actually pretty decent for a hardware encoder. It won't ever beat software encoding, but the speed is hard to ignore. I don't have any experience using it for streaming, but it seems pretty popular there too. Nvidia has nvenc, and reviews say it's good as well but I've never used it.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#152

Post by mmaunder »

Intel is just like Boeing: A company with legendary engineering roots taken over by myopic financial engineers who can’t think further than next quarters stock price, which is their only measure, their only target, and to which all their bonuses are attached.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#153

Post by oldgradstudent »

ternaryoperator wrote: post #61
this_user wrote: post #26

Intel has truly been on a remarkable spree of extremely poor strategic decisions for the last 20 years or so. Missed the boat on mobile, missed the boat on GPUs and AI, focused too much on desktop, and now AMD and ARM-based chips are eating their lunch in the data centre area.

You're missing the big one: they missed the boat on 64-bits. It was only because they had a licensing agreement in place with AMD that they were able to wholesale adopt AMD's extensions to deliver 64-bit x86 processors.

They didn't simply miss the boat on 64 bit.

That was an intentional act to force customers into Itanium, which was 64 bit from the outset.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#154

Post by dralley »

solarkraft wrote: post #136
mise_en_place wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't Arc actually pretty okay?

When it works, perhaps

Re: Intel's Humbling

#155

Post by danielmarkbruce »

mmaunder wrote: post #152

Intel is just like Boeing: A company with legendary engineering roots taken over by myopic financial engineers who can’t think further than next quarters stock price, which is their only measure, their only target, and to which all their bonuses are attached.

Good analogy.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#156

Post by danielmarkbruce »

whalesalad wrote: post #67
this_user wrote: post #26

Intel has truly been on a remarkable spree of extremely poor strategic decisions for the last 20 years or so. Missed the boat on mobile, missed the boat on GPUs and AI, focused too much on desktop, and now AMD and ARM-based chips are eating their lunch in the data centre area.

They still dominate PC’s and the server market.

The trend ain't their friend in those markets though. Many folks running server workloads on ARM and their customer base is drastically more concentrated and powerful than it once was. Apple has shown the way forward on PC chips.

They are a dead company walking.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#157

Post by kaliqt »

mmaunder wrote: post #152

Intel is just like Boeing: A company with legendary engineering roots taken over by myopic financial engineers who can’t think further than next quarters stock price, which is their only measure, their only target, and to which all their bonuses are attached.

Funnily enough, this is EXACTLY what has happened to the video game and movie/series industry.

They jump onto the latest trend, e.g. ESG to get in good with the banks and funds without thinking about what long term damage it is doing to their brands and products.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#158

Post by whynotminot »

timschmidt wrote: post #133
whynotminot wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess we're reading different graphs. The one I'm seeing shows Intel producing 70% of the performance with 35% of the power of an M1. That's... checks math... better performance per watt, and lower overall power consumption. If you want more performance, you are free to step up to a 15W version which outperforms the M1 at 70% of it's TDP.

I think I have a better sense of some of the misunderstanding here. I think you're taking Intel's TDP figures as honest and straightforward, when they really truly aren't.

Anandtech has talked about some of Intel's TDP shenanigans before, even for Tiger Lake: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16084/intel-tiger-lake-review...

Re: Intel's Humbling

#159

Post by toast0 »

TylerE wrote: post #118
jomohke wrote: post #37

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.

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.

Intel's market reality is (percieved) speed sells chips.

It's embarassing when they go to market and there's no way to say it's faster than the other guy. Currently, they need to pump 400W through the chip to get the clock high enough.

But perf at 200w or even 100w isn't that far below perf at 400w. If you limit power to something like 50w, the compute efficiency is good.

Contrast that to Apple, they don't have to compete in the same way, and they don't let their chips run hot. There's no way to get the extra 1% of perf if you need it.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#160

Post by mjevans »

mise_en_place wrote: post #117
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.

Arc seems more like, where the GPU will 'be' in another 2-6 years. Where Arc's second or third iteration might be more competitive. Vulkan / future focused, fast enough that some translation layers for old If you're hoping for an nVidia competitor, the units in that market may be more per unit, but there's already an 1-ton gorilla there and AMD can't seem to compete either. Rather, Arc makes sense as an in-house GPU unit to pair with existing silicon (CPUs) and low / mid range dGPUs to compete where nVidia's left that market and where AMD has a lot of lunch to undercut.
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