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Intel's Humbling

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Re: Intel's Humbling

#341

Post by Night_Thastus »

wolfspider wrote: post #97

My own humble opinion is that Intel has always suffered from market cannibalization. They are a brand I look for but many times the iteration of products will force me to go a generation or two older because I can’t argue with the price and features. By the time I was sold on a NUC they were discontinued. I wanted a discrete GPU when they announced Xe but it has become Xe ARC alchemist, battlemage, celestial, and dru…

>I wanted a discrete GPU when they announced Xe but it has become Xe ARC alchemist, battlemage, celestial, and druid.

They've made this situation fairly clear, in my eyes.

Alchemist is the product line for their first attempt at true dedicated GPUs like those Nvidia and AMD produce. It's based on Intel Xe GPU architecture.

It's done decently well, and they've been very diligent about driver updates.

Battlemage is the next architecture that will replace it when it's ready, which I believe was targeted for this year. Similar to how the Nvidia 4k series replaced the 3k before it. Celestial comes a couple years later, then druid a couple years after that, etc. They don't exist simultaneously, they're just the names they use for generations of their GPUs.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#342

Post by davidy123 »

throwaway4good wrote: post #337
davidy123 wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This investment, at a time when … wages war against utter wickedness, a war in which good must defeat evil, is an investment in the right and righteous values that spell progress for humanity" That is not a partner for creating logical systems. Very clear their current decisions are political.

That bananas quote is from an Israeli minister. Imagine what it would do if Intel became strongly associated with one side in the Israel-Palestine conflict. It could really hurt their business. Usually business leaders are smart enough to stay out of politics.

Apparently they have become strongly associated since that quote is part of the release for their new plant. It is sickening to me this kind of hard-right religious zealotry is part of decisions of tech companies. I am avoiding Intel as much as possible now, I hope others will consider this too.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#343

Post by King1st »

bmer wrote: post #254
llamaLord wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!)

The Bulldozer design had a few main issues.

1.Bulldozer had a very long pipeline akin to a Pentium 4. This allows for highclocks but comparatively little work being done per cycle vs their competition. Since clocks have a ceiling around 5GHz they could never push the clocks high enough to compete with intel. 2.They used a odd core design with 1 FPU for every 2 integer unit instead of the normal 1:1 that we have seen on every x86 since the i486. This leads to very weak FPU performance needed for many professional applications. Conversely it allowed for very competitive performance on highly threaded integer applications like rendering. This decision was probably under the assumption APUs would integrate their GPUs better and software would be written with it in mind since a GPU easily out does a CPUs FPU but it requires more programming. This didn't come to be. 3. They were stuck using Global Foundries due to previous contracts when they spun it off requiring AMD use GloFlo. This became a anchor as Gloflo fell behind market competitors like TSMC. Leaving AMD stuck on 32nm for a long while, until gloflo got 14nm and eventually AMD got out of the contract between zen 1-2.

bonus: Many IC designers have bemoaned how much of bulldozers design was automated with little hand modifications which tends to lead to a less optimized design. 3. 3.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#344

Post by mmaunder »

kortilla wrote: post #185
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.

This is oversimplified and actually underplays how serious the issue is. These companies didn’t fail because of myopic financial engineers. The ones focused on quarter to quarter tend to bomb the company relatively quickly and do get flushed out. These companies failed because of long term financial visionaries. These are the worst because they are thinking about how the company can capture markets at all costs, dive…

> These companies failed because of long term financial visionaries. These are the worst because they are thinking about how the company can capture markets at all costs, diversify into all adjacent markets, etc.

Long term financial visionaries? No they’re simply plundering the business to reward shareholders and executives through buybacks and dividends. They rationalize this as “maximizing shareholder value” but it is destroying long term value, growth and innovation.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#345

Post by nsteel »

TylerE wrote: post #119
stefan_ wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Broadcom is a good example of successful mergers.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#346

Post by UberFly »

davidy123 wrote: post #342
throwaway4good wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That bananas quote is from an Israeli minister. Imagine what it would do if Intel became strongly associated with one side in the Israel-Palestine conflict. It could really hurt their business. Usually business leaders are smart enough to stay out of politics.

Apparently they have become strongly associated since that quote is part of the release for their new plant. It is sickening to me this kind of hard-right religious zealotry is part of decisions of tech companies. I am avoiding Intel as much as possible now, I hope others will consider this too.

That quote didn't come out of Intel's mouth.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#347

Post by andrewflnr »

dgroshev wrote: post #332
RCitronsBroker wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think Xi is as independent as you believe, but that’s a matter of personal opinion. I just don’t think it’s very likely for just about any leader putting themselves into the position you are describing. This is a reoccurring narrative in western media, and I’m not here to defend dictators, but i feel like reality is less black and white than that. Many of the "crazed leaders" we are told are acting irrational…

Problem is, "rational" is not objective. "Rational" is more like "consistent with one's goals (subjective) under one's perception of reality (subjective)". When you're saying "Putin invaded Ukraine irrationally" you're implicitly projecting your own value system and worldview onto him. Let's take goals. What do you think Putin's goals are? I don't think it's too fanciful to imagine that welfare of ordinary Russians i…

I don't accept the subjectivity w.r.t. "perceived reality". Russia's military unreadiness was one of the big reasons I consider the invasion irrational, and I put the blame squarely on Putin because he could have gotten accurate reports if he wasn't such a bad leader. You are responsible for your perceived reality, and part of rationality is acting in a way that it matches real reality.

(But yeah, clearly his actual goal was to increase his personal prestige. Is that not common knowledge yet?)

Re: Intel's Humbling

#348

Post by StuffMaster »

bmer wrote: post #254
llamaLord wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!)

I thought it was a bad idea when I first read of it. It reminded me of Intel's Netburst (Pentium 4) architecture.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#349

Post by sentinalien »

davidy123 wrote: post #312
throwaway4good wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"This investment, at a time when … wages war against utter wickedness, a war in which good must defeat evil, is an investment in the right and righteous values that spell progress for humanity" That is not a partner for creating logical systems. Very clear their current decisions are political.

Basically all the big semiconductor companies do R&D in Israel

Re: Intel's Humbling

#350

Post by bee_rider »

moffkalast wrote: post #292
bee_rider wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel should have bought Nvidia. And acqu-hired Jensen as CEO.

Would that make them Ntel or Invidia?

Invidia is sort of how nvidia gets pronounced anyway, so I’d go with that one. Ntel sounds like they make telecommunications equipment in 1993.
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