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Intel's Humbling

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Re: Intel's Humbling

#391

Post by tgtweak »

lr1970 wrote: post #323
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…

The biggest Intel's problem is that a lot of good people left over the previous years of shitty management. Pouring money into R&D certainly helps but with wrong people in key positions the efficiency of the investments will be low.

Gelsinger put a $4BN compensation package in effect for securing and retaining talent within his first 6 months of taking the role, one of the first things noted was brain drain to competitors.

>Intel Poaches Head Apple Silicon Architect Who Led Transition To Arm And M1 Chips. Intel has reacquired the services of Jeff Wilcox, who spearheaded the transition to Arm and M1 chips for Apple. Wilcox will oversee architecture for all Intel system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs

note re-acquired.

Raja Koduri also came back to Intel (from AMD Radeon) and only recently left to dabble in VFX, as opposed to working for a competitor to Intel.

Anton Kaplanyan (father of RTX at nvidia) is at Intel now.

I think people are not checking linkedin when they make the claim that Intel's talent has been drained and there is nobody left at home. Where there is remuneration and opportunity you will find talent. I think it's safe to say no industry experts have written down Intel.

edit: first foundry customer online in New Mexico fab: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/intel-...

Re: Intel's Humbling

#392

Post by Jensson »

tgtweak wrote: post #390
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This sudden shock of "we're going to invest everything in R&D and catch back up" was news that a lot of intel shareholders didn't want to hear. They dumped the stock and the price adjusted in kind. Why the fuck are shareholders often so short-sighted? Or do they just genuinely think the R&D investment won't pay off?

They bought the stock on the principle that it was going to pay a consistent 5% dividend every year and weren't looking for moonshots at the cost of that consistent revenue.

Yeah, just look into any investment thread on HN to see how shareholders thinks, nobody recommend investing in unconventional things. Shareholders are your everyday guy who decides where to put his pension, and that guy picks the safe bet with good returns.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#393

Post by Boatfaceing »

JonChesterfield wrote: post #380
bpt3 wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not under the Intel corporate logo. It's a personal account. His comments aren't my cup of tea but they certainly aren't generally offensive.

It has implications for his decision making process though. Christianity requires comfortably handling internally inconsistent information and taking a superficial approach to evidence. Whether that is an advantage in a CEO is unclear. It probably helps him remain confident in Intel's outlook.

[dead]

Re: Intel's Humbling

#394

Post by Mawr »

timschmidt wrote: post #120
whynotminot wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please correct me then. I'm willing to learn about the Intel laptop chip that Apple could have used to achieve M1 performance and efficiency at the time they switched. You're right that I am not familiar with every one of Intel's SKUs they produced at the time.

M1 was released in 2020, that puts it in line with Tiger Lake and Comet Lake, for which I'm seeing 7 different SKUs at 7W TDP. The fastest of which seems to be the Core i7 1180G7, which seems to perform almost as well as the M1 while using about half as much power: https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/intel-core-i7-1180g7-v... Just the first example I grabbed. Intel made quite a few more chips in the 15W and higher…

Ah, taking manufacturer-provided TDP numbers at face value. So much for all the pretending you know anything about CPUs.

Your very own source gives the M1 a 75 vs 59 score on power efficiency. They don't seem to provide a benchmark for it, but it should have been a clue regardless.

Here's the first result on M1 power efficiency I found https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc... :

"In single-threaded workloads, Apple’s showcases massive performance and power advantages against Intel’s best CPU. In CineBench, it’s one of the rare workloads where Apple’s cores lose out in performance for some reason, but this further widens the gap in terms of power usage, whereas the M1 Max only uses 8.7W, while a comparable figure on the 11980HK is 43.5W.

In other ST workloads, the M1 Max is more ahead in performance, or at least in a similar range. The performance/W difference here is around 2.5x to 3x in favour of Apple’s silicon.

In multi-threaded tests, the 11980HK is clearly allowed to go to much higher power levels than the M1 Max, reaching package power levels of 80W, for 105-110W active wall power, significantly more than what the MacBook Pro here is drawing. The performance levels of the M1 Max are significantly higher than the Intel chip here, due to the much better scalability of the cores. The perf/W differences here are 4-6x in favour of the M1 Max, all whilst posting significantly better performance, meaning the perf/W at ISO-perf would be even higher than this."

(as if we all didn't already know this)

Re: Intel's Humbling

#395

Post by mike_hearn »

drBonkers wrote: post #359
mike_hearn wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How do the new “TPUs” and “NPUs” slot into your perspective of GPUs? Just nomenclature catching up to describe matrix math, ML GPUs without video output?

TPU is a Google thing. It shows how far NVIDIA has gone from classical GPUs that Google made ML specific silicon and it's not a clear winner over NVIDIA chips (or in some cases is a clear loser, from what I understand).

I don't know about NPUs. Do you mean Apple? Apple silicon is interesting because of the unified memory architecture, but beyond letting you save RAM by using it for both graphics and app code simultaneously I'm not sure it has much benefit. Certainly, datacenters will remain on NVIDIA for the time being unless AMD manage to catch up on their software stack. Intel is the dark horse here. I hear rumblings that their first offering is actually quite good.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#396

Post by TylerE »

ColonelPhantom wrote: post #384
TylerE wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's overly reductionist. Conroe topped out at around 3 GHz, compared to its predecessor Presler achieving 3.6 GHz. I think Netburst mostly came from a misguided place where Intel thought that clock frequency was in fact the holy grail (and would scale far beyond what actually ended up happening), and that all the IPC issues such as costly mispredicts could be solved by e.g. improving branch prediction.

It is exactly that short sited mhz over all else attitude im referring to as a fatal mistake.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#397

Post by RCitronsBroker »

maxglute wrote: post #334
RCitronsBroker wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

none or VERY few are even remotely close to the impact a potential breach of the three gorges dam would have. [1] Seriously, it’s worth reading up on, it’s genuinely hard to overstate. [1]: https://www.ispsw.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/718_Lin.pdf "In this case, the Three Gorges Dam may become a military target. But if this happens, it would be devastating to China as 400 million people live downstream, as well as…

It's grossly overstated because TW doesn't have the type or numbers of ordnance to structurally damage gravity dam the size of three gorges. And realistically they won't because the amount of conventional munitions needed is staggering, more than TW can muster in retaliatory strike, unless it's a coordinated preemptive strike, which TW won't since it's suicide by war crime. The entire three gorges meme originated fro…

i seem to have been throughly wrong about the three gorges dam. But i think you also have misunderstood the scenario i was imagining. I was actually entirely unaware of there being a meme about the thing collapsing on its own. I was strictly referring to its viability as a strategic target for infrastructure terrorism if that’s the term to use here. I was imagining a scenario where the US is going to town in support of TW, as has been theorized by just about every media pundit in existence right now. I may be wrong about the state’s willingness to commit war crimes, but i just watched IDF, dressed up as civilians, sneaking into a hospital to shoot unarmed patients, alleged to be Hamas members. Or the lack of care over Gaza being white phosphorous'd.

But, as it seems, i vastly underestimated the effort needed to cause my theorized catastrophe. I’m entirely open to admit being wrong about that, always good to learn.

Also, correct me if I’m wrong, but afaik, the viability of nuclear plants as strategic targets has been vastly overblown. I’ll go read up on it, but i don’t think it’s that big of a risk.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#398

Post by RCitronsBroker »

bigbillheck wrote: post #365
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…

> the way the borders of Iraq were re-drawn, Iraq was completely cut off from any sources of fresh water. In the geography which with I am familiar, Iraq has two incredibly famous rivers and the Persian Gulf is actually salt water.

https://www.csis.org/analysis/local-global-tensions-course-t...

Turkey, Iran and Syria can and have caused horrible water shortages in Iraq.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#399

Post by tgtweak »

adrian_b wrote: post #307
ajross wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Meteor Lake CPU [...] has obvious difficulties in reaching high clock frequencies, Not sure where that's coming from? The released parts are mobile chips, and the fastest is a 45W TDP unit that boosts at 5.1GHz. AMD's fastest part in that power range (8945HS) reaches 5.2GHz. Apple seems to do just fine at 4GHz with the M3. I'm guessing you're looking at some numbers for socketed chips with liquid cooling?

The 5.1 GHz Intel Core Ultra 9 processor 185H is the replacement for the 5.4 GHz Intel Core i9-13900H Processor of previous year. Both are 45-W CPUs with big integrated GPUs and almost identical features in the SoC. No liquid cooling needed for either of them, just standard 14" or 15" laptops without special cooling, or NUC-like small cases, because they do not need discrete GPUs. Both CPUs have the same microarchite…

You can't compare optimized clock frequencies on 2 year mature process with first run on a new process... AMD and Nvidia both improve stable frequencies with process improvements at TSMC even on the same nodes over time (RTX 4060 TI, tsmc N4, 2.31ghz base, 2.54ghz boost vs RTX4060 - TSMC N4, 1.83ghz base, 2.46ghz boost).

Most chipmakers saw gains moving from n5 to n5p at tsmc, which wasn't even a process jump simply maturity and optimization on the existing node.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#400

Post by tgtweak »

epolanski wrote: post #267
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.

Intel was literally at $25 in February last year, that's the 10-years-ago stock price.

Intel's P/E was about 50 at that time, AMD was over 1000. That's "throwing in the towel" in as pointed of a way that the market can possibly do.

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