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Intel's Humbling

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Re: Intel's Humbling

#261

Post by borissk »

selimthegrim wrote: post #217
borissk wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And furthermore they lost most of their best engineers and scientists during the years that the company was run by the useless MBAs. Now each new technology process is a huge struggle. Intel has secured some of the first new gen EUV machines from ASML, but if they'll have the talent to quickly start using them on scale is not yet clear.

Somebody from Intel who had a PhD from my school and manages a bunch of process engineers was on sabbatical and teaching a class at his old department, some of whose undergrads I taught. I visited an info session he was presenting and pointed out that I had been a green badge in JF5 for Validation and that they had a reputation of not matching ASML and Nvidia offers. He went ballistic on me and told me to go work for…

You're right - this is another problem for Intel. They have a reputation for underpaying engineers, so the best and the brightest go elsewhere.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#262

Post by bux93 »

ffgjgf1 wrote: post #220
nine_k wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> ARM has been really competitive since And a few years prior to that Intel made the most competitive ARM chips (StrongARM). Chances are that an Intel chip would have powered the iPhone had they not scrapped their ARM division due to “reasons”

Intel had purchased/gotten StrongARM from DEC.

DEC had started developing ARM chips as they concluded it was a bad idea to try and scale down their alpha chips to be more energy efficient.

Then, after the success of these ARM chips in the blackberry and most of the palm PDAs as well as MP3 players and HTC smartphones, Intel sells it off, so it could focus on trying to make its big chips more energy efficient, making the mistake DEC avoided.

iPhone was a defining moment, but at the time it was completely obvious that smartphones would be a thing, it's just that people thought that the breakthrough product would come from Nokia or Sony-Ericsson (who were using ARM SoCs from TI and Quallcomm respectively). Selling off the ARM division would not have been my priority?

So it's a string of unforced errors. Nevertheless, Intel remains an ARM licensee, they didn't give that up when selling StrongARM, so it seems some people still saw the future..

Re: Intel's Humbling

#263

Post by ActionHank »

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…

They should have known it was coming because of how many people they were losing to AMD, but there is a blindness in big corps when management decide they are the domain experts and the workers are replaceable.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#264

Post by nottorp »

quatrefoil wrote: post #25
bombcar wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was right but for the wrong reasons. Had Intel figured out hyperthreading security and avoided all the various exploits that later showed up …

Then they would have worse-performing chips and the market wouldn't care about the security benefits. Cloud providers may grumble, but they aren't the most important market anyway.

Has there ever been an exploit in the wild for rowhammer/whatever the other vulnerabilities were?

Re: Intel's Humbling

#265

Post by zeusk »

Mistletoe wrote: post #40
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.

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…

Apple makes 40% of Berkshire's investment portfolio

Re: Intel's Humbling

#266

Post by mike_hearn »

mixedbit wrote: post #258

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…

The software stack co-evolves with the hardware, if the hardware can't do something fast then the software guys can't necessarily even try it out.

People have been trying to break NVIDIA's moat by creating non-GPU accelerators. The core maths operations aren't that varied so it's an obvious thing to try. Nothing worked, not even NVIDIA's own attempts. AI researchers have a software stack oriented around devices with separate memory and it's abstracted, so unifying CPU and GPU ram doesn't seem to make a big difference for them.

Don't be fooled by the name GPU. It's purely historical. "GPUs" used for AI don't have any video output capability. I think you can't even render with them. They are just specialised computers come with their own OS ("driver"), compilers, APIs and dev stack, which happen to need a CPU to bring them online and which communicate via PCIe instead of ethernet.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#267

Post by epolanski »

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…

> I think the market (and analysts like this) are all throwing the towel

1) Intel is up 100% from ten years ago when it was at $ 23. All that despite revenue being flat/negative, inflation and costs rising and margins collapsing.

2) Intel is up 60% in the last 12 months alone.

Doesn't look to me like they throwing the towel at all.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#268

Post by distances »

vineyardmike wrote: post #110
nine_k wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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-...

That was very luck for Apple though. Nokia made deals with Intel to provide the CPU for upcoming phone models, and had to scramble to redesign them when it became clear Intel was unable to deliver.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#269

Post by epolanski »

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 AMD really competitive before Ryzen?

No, but ARM should've rung many bells.

Intel poured tons of billions in mobile.

Didn't understood the future from smartphones to servers was about power efficiency and scale.

Eventually their lack of power efficiency made them lose ground in all their core business. I hope they will get this back and not just by competing on manufacturing but architecture too.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#270

Post by TechnicalVault »

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…

Depends who your user is. From a desktop side you're probably not going to notice because desktop CPU requirements have been stagnant for years, desktop is all about GPU. On the server side Sapphire Rapids and Emerald Rapids is Intel getting back in the game and the game is power and market share.

See there's only 2 or 3 more obvious generations of obvious die shrinks available. Beyond those generations we'll have to innovate some other way, so whoever grabs the fab market for these modes now gets a longer period to enjoy the fruits of their innovation.

Meanwhile server CPU TDPs are hitting the 400W+ mark and DC owners are looking dubiously at big copper busbars, die shrinks tend to reduce the Watts per Calculation so they're appealing. In the current power market, more efficient computing translates into actual savings on your power bill. There's still demand for better processors, even if we are sweating those assets for 5-7 years now.

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