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Intel's Humbling

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221–230 of 414 posts

Re: Intel's Humbling

#221
post #72
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…

> 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.

> Intel never "crushed" ARM.

They certainly tried selling their chips below cost to move into markets ARM dominated, but "contra revenue" couldn't save them.

> Intel Corp.’s Contra-Revenue Strategy Was a Huge Waste of Money

https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/04/21/intel-corp...

Re: Intel's Humbling

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When properly cooled, the Intel silicon tends to perform a lot better. Of course, but the average Joe does not want to wear ear protection when running their laptop. Nor do they want the battery to last 40 minutes or have it be huge brick, or have to pour liquid nitrogen on it to not get it to not thermal throttle. Apple innovated by making chips that fit the form and function most people need in their personal dev…

It seems like you think I'm trying to dunk on Apple. I am not. Apple Silicon is a great first showing for them. Performance simply isn't better than Ryzen APUs running in the same power envelope. And power usage is what you'd expect of silicon running on the latest node. Further, some of Apple's choices - bringing memory on package, only two display outputs - caused regressions for their users compared to the previou…

>Apple Silicon is a great first showing for them. Performance simply isn't better than Ryzen APUs running in the same power envelope. And power usage is what you'd expect of silicon running on the latest node.

Do you have source for this other than Cinebench R23, which is hand optimized for x87 AVX instructions through Intel Embree Engine?

From all sources, Apple Silicon has 2-3x more perf/watt than AMD's APUs in multithread and a bigger gap in single thread.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#223

I'm kind of bullish on Intel right now. They've moved up so many process nodes so quickly and have made some earnest headway in being an actual fab. Let's ignore the elephant in the room which is taiwan and it's sovereignty, and only focus on the core r&d. Intel flopped so hard on process nodes for 4 years up until Gelsinger took the reigns... it was honestly unprecedented levels of R&D failure. What happened over th…

I appreciate the deep cut. I definitely do not follow companies internally closely enough to see this coming.

> (samsung or tsmc) both within a 500 mile radius circle in the south china sea.

Within 500 mile radius of great power competitor, perhaps. The closest points on mainland Taiwan and Korea are 700 miles apart. Fabs about 1000 miles, by my loose reckoning.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#224

I'm kind of bullish on Intel right now. They've moved up so many process nodes so quickly and have made some earnest headway in being an actual fab. Let's ignore the elephant in the room which is taiwan and it's sovereignty, and only focus on the core r&d. Intel flopped so hard on process nodes for 4 years up until Gelsinger took the reigns... it was honestly unprecedented levels of R&D failure. What happened over th…

[flagged]

Re: Intel's Humbling

#225
post #94
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…

> Intel should have bought Acorn, not Olivetti.

Intel had StrongARM though. IIRC they made best ARM cpus in the early 2000s and were designing their own cores. Then Intel decided to get rid of it because obviously they were just wasting money and could design a better x86 mobile chip…

Re: Intel's Humbling

#226
post #62
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…

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…

Apple has been working with Arm since 1987, when work on the Apple Newton started: https://www.cpushack.com/2010/10/26/how-the-newton-and-arm-s...

Re: Intel's Humbling

#227

I'm kind of bullish on Intel right now. They've moved up so many process nodes so quickly and have made some earnest headway in being an actual fab. Let's ignore the elephant in the room which is taiwan and it's sovereignty, and only focus on the core r&d. Intel flopped so hard on process nodes for 4 years up until Gelsinger took the reigns... it was honestly unprecedented levels of R&D failure. What happened over th…

[flagged]

Intel is recipient #1 of CHIPS and similar EU initiatives - and the government may pressure nvidia and other US companies (ie: apple) to move their procurement domestically. Intel being the only player outside of taiwan and south korea to have the capital and capacity to supply that.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#228
post #223

I'm kind of bullish on Intel right now. They've moved up so many process nodes so quickly and have made some earnest headway in being an actual fab. Let's ignore the elephant in the room which is taiwan and it's sovereignty, and only focus on the core r&d. Intel flopped so hard on process nodes for 4 years up until Gelsinger took the reigns... it was honestly unprecedented levels of R&D failure. What happened over th…

I appreciate the deep cut. I definitely do not follow companies internally closely enough to see this coming. > (samsung or tsmc) both within a 500 mile radius circle in the south china sea. Within 500 mile radius of great power competitor, perhaps. The closest points on mainland Taiwan and Korea are 700 miles apart. Fabs about 1000 miles, by my loose reckoning.

A 500 mile radius circle has a diameter of 1000 miles, so you're both correct.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not at all what happened. Intel's 64-bit story was EPIC/IA-64/Itanium and it was an attempt to gain monopoly and keep x86 for the low-end. AMD64 and Itanic derailed that idea so completely that Intel was forced by Microsoft to adopt the AMD64 ISA. Microsoft refused to port to yet-another incompatible ISA. Had Itanium been a success then Intel would have crushed the competition (however it did succeed in killin…

I don’t think it was Itanium that killed SPARC. On workstations it was improved reliability of Windows and to some extent Linux. Sun tried to combat this with lower cost systems like the Ultra 5, Ultra 10, and Blade 100. Sun fanatics dismissed these systems because they were to PC like. PC fanatics saw them as overpriced and unfamiliar. With academic pricing, a $3500 Ultra 10 with 512 MB of RAM and an awful IDE drive…

Fair point, Itanium's impact on SPARC might be less than I stated, but Alpha is very clearly documented.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#230
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

ARM would be even more popular in the datacenter if getting access to Ampere CPUs was possible. I can get a top of the line Xeon Gold basically next day with a incredibly high quality out of band management from a reputable server provider. (HP, Dell). Ampere? Give it 6 months, €5,000 and maybe you can get one, from Gigabyte. Not known for server quality. (yes, I'm salty, I have 4 of these CPUs and it took a really l…

HPE has an Ampere server line that is quite good, especially considering TCO, density, and the IO it can pack. But yeah you'll have to fork some cash.
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