191–200 of 414 posts
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…
And acqu-hired Jensen as CEO.
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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 co…
The difference in performance for 95% of what I do is zero. I even run some (non-AAA) Windows games via crossover, and that's driving a 1440p 165hz display. All while it sits there consuming no more than about 35w (well, plus a bit for all my USB ssds, etc) and I've never seen the thermals much past 60c, even running nastive-accelerated LLMs or highly multithreaded chess engines and the like. Usually sits at about 40c at idle.
It's exactly what almost 40 year old me wants out of a computer. It's quiet, cool, and reliable - but at the same time I'm very picky about input devices so a-bring-your-own peripherals desktop machine with a ton of USB ports is non-negotiable.
Intel is a product of corporate cancer that is management consulting.
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Is it just the fate of large successful companies? The parallels with Boeing always come to mind. We’ve seen this play out so many times through history, it’s why investing in the top companies of your era is a terrible idea. https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500_archive/f... I wonder how many of our companies will survive at the top for even 20 more years? https://companiesmarketcap.com/ Berkshire is th…
Market forces are hard to fight sometimes. Look at Meta- they were beaten like hell cuz of their metaverse bet.
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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 nev…
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Facebook bought Instagram and WhatsApp and they were both home runs. Zuckerberg knows how to buy companies.
That’s a different type of acquisition, right? Buying your competition. If nothing else you’ve wiped out a competitor.
Humble people don't allude to snake oil when dissing competition's naming scheme. Edit: relevant video, because whoever downvoted did not get what I was referring to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUT4d5IVY0A
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The Altera (FPGA) acquisition could have made sense, but they never really followed through and now it's being spun off again.
There were some technical issues with the follow-through that they didn't foresee. CPUs need to closely manage their power usage to be able to extract maximum computing power, and leaving a big chunk of static power on the table in case the FPGA needs it. The idea of putting an FPGA on a die was mostly killed by that. Regarding other plans, QPI and UPI for cache coherent FPGAs were pretty infeasible to do at the slug…
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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…
I applaud Intel for providing fully capable drivers at no additional cost. Combined with better availability for purchase they are competing in the VDI space.
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/discre...
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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?
Apple does really well on its rare acquisitions, but they aren't very public as they get successfully absorbed. PA Semi, Intrinsity, more I can't remember.
ATi and Xilinx have by all accounts worked out really well for AMD.