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Intel's Humbling

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Re: Intel's Humbling

#251

Post by jldugger »

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…

> Was ARM really competitive until recently?

The writing was on the wall 6 years ago; Intel was not doing well in mobile and it was only a matter of time until that tech improved. Same as Intel unseating the datacenter chips before it. Ryzen I will give you is a surprise, but in a healthy competive market, "the competition outengineered us this time" _should_ be a potential outcome.

IMO the interesting question is basically whether Intel could have done anything differently. Clay Christianson's sustaining vs disrupting innovation model is well known in industry, and ARM slowly moving up the value chain is obvious in that framework. Stratechery says they should have opened up their fabs to competitors, but how does that work?

Re: Intel's Humbling

#252

Post by paulmd »

dur-randir wrote: post #231
tgtweak wrote: post #174

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…

>have made some earnest headway in being an actual fab In the terms of end product - not really. Last 3-4 gens are indistinguishable to the end user. It's a combined effect of marketing failure and really underwhelming gains - when marketing screams "breakthrough gen", but what you get is +2%/ST perf for another *Lake, you can't sell it. They might've built a foundation and that might be a deliberate tactics to get b…

raptor lake is the same as coffee lake/comet lake? nah

Re: Intel's Humbling

#253

Post by [deleted] »

katbyte wrote: post #242
eslaught wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’m not so sure, he made a choice purely on “will it make money now” not “well let’s take a chance and see if this pays of big and if not we’ll loose a little money” It’s not like they couldn’t afford it and taking chances is important

[deleted]

Re: Intel's Humbling

#254

Post by bmer »

llamaLord wrote: post #187
mdasen wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To be fair, they should have seen Ryzen coming, any long-term AMD user knew years before Ryzen landed that it was going to be a good core because AMD were very vocal about how badly wrong they bet with Bulldozer (previous core family). AMD bet BIG on the software industry leaning in heavily on massive thread-counts over high throughput, single-threaded usage... But it never happened so the cores tanked. It was never…

(I'm curious about this story, as I am unfamiliar with it.)

Why did that generation of core (Bulldozer) suck?

What was it that AMD needed to do to fix the problem?

(Links to relevant stories would be sufficient for me!)

Re: Intel's Humbling

#255

Post by silvestrov »

FullyFunctional wrote: post #229
mgerdts wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think that Itanium had zero impact on anything (besides draining Intel for money) due to high cost and low performance.

It could not run x86 apps faster than x86 cpus, so it didn't compete in the MS Windows world. Itanium was a headache for compiler writers as it was very difficult to optimize for, so it was difficult to get good performance out of Itanium and difficult to emulate x86.

Itanium was introduced after the dot-com crash, so the marked was flooded with cheap slightly used SPARC systems, putting even more pressure on price.

This is unlike when Apple introduced Macs with PowerPC cpus: they had much higher performance than the 68040 cpu they replaced. PowerPC was price competetive and easy to write optimizing compilers for.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#256

Post by throwaway4good »

tgtweak wrote: post #174

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…

What I worry about with Intel is that they have gotten too much into politics; relying on CHIPS act and other subsidies, encouraging sanctions on Chinese competitors while relying on full access to the Chinese market for sales.

It is not a good long term strategy: The winds of politics may change, politicians may set more terms (labour and environment), foreign market access may become politicized too (US politicians will have to sell chips like they sell airplanes on foreign trips).

So Intel will end up like the old US car makers or Boeing - no longer driven by technological innovation but instead by its relationship to Washington.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#257

Post by rapsey »

RCitronsBroker wrote: post #250
rapsey wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there’s absolut ZERO chance chine can muster up what it takes to hold their own in such a conflict. However China is now a full fledged dictatorship. I'm not sure you can count on them being a rational actor on the world stage. They can do a lot of damage, but would also get absolutely devastated in return. They are food, energy insecure and entirely dependent on exports after all.

True, but the elite class that’s currently profiting from and in control of said country would devastate themselves if they dare. Skepticism about the wests self-inflicted dependency on China is at an all time high. Terms like "on-" or "friend-shoring" are already coming up now. You’re not wrong, maybe all the scaremongering in the west about China overtaking us got them delusional enough in a Japanese nationalist ty…

How much is that elite independent of Xi? A relatively independent elite is probably a more stable system. But a completely subservient elite to the fearless leader is however much more dangerous.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#258

Post by mixedbit »

Isn't the current GPU-based stack which drives the progress of AI an early stage architecture which will become sub-optimal and obsolete in a longer term?

Having separate processors with separate memory and separate software stack to do matrix operations works, but it would be much more convenient and productive to have a system with one RAM and CPUs that can efficiently do matrix operations and would not require the programmer to delegate these operations to a separate stack. Event the name 'Graphics Processing Unit' suggest that the current approach for AI is rather hacky.

Because of this, in a long run there can an opportunity for Intel and other CPU manufacturers to regain the lucrative market from NVIDIA.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#259

Post by cherryteastain »

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…

N7, TSMC's competitor to Intel 7, does not use EUV either.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#260

Post by IndrekR »

_the_inflator wrote: post #211
throwup238 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Yes, I agree. However, I don’t necessarily see this book title as an imperative to innovate. Patent trolling can also be a way to deal with competitors. After all, Apple and ARM came from the idea to have better end user products around softer factors than shear CPU power. Since Intel‘s products aren’t highly integrated Phones nor assembled computer, Intel had no stake directly. It is complex.

Apple came from recreational “there is now a 10 times cheaper CPU than anything else and I can afford to build my video terminal into real computer in my bedroom” and “maybe we can actually sell it?”. [1]

ARM literally came from “we need a much better and faster processor” and “how hard can this be?” [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc.#1971%E2%...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture_family

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