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Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
141–150 of 777 posts
Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
#142I feel like this is a mistake. Pat's strategy is aggressive but what the company needs. Intel's stock is jumping at this announcement, but I look at it as a bad signal for Intel 18a. If 18a was looking to be a smash hit then I don't think Pat gets retired. If 18a is a success then it is an even more short-sighted decision by the board. What this likely means is two-fold: 1. Intel 18a is being delayed further and/or t…
> The moat of the two companies together would give the new combined company plenty of time to ramp up their fabs. I'm not convinced of this. Fabs are incredibly expensive businesses. Intel has failed to keep up and AMD spun off their fabs to use TSMC. There is also ARM knocking at the door for general computing. It's already gaining traction in previously x86 dominated markets. The model for US based fabbing has to…
Honestly, I wouldn't put it behind IBM to turn it around with POWER revival. They'd been doing some cool stuff recently with their NorthPole accelerator[1], and using 12nm process while at it, indicating there's much room for improvement. It could eventually become a relatively open, if not super affordable platform. There's precedent with OpenPOWER! And not to mention RISC-V, of course, championed by Jim Keller et al (Tenstorrent) but it's yet to blossom, all the while pppc64el is already there where it matters.
I say, diversity rules!
[1]: https://research.ibm.com/blog/northpole-llm-inference-result...
Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would the US govt allow a merge with AMD? Sure they won't allow Intel to be bought by a foreign company, but surely everyone would much rather see Intel being bought by literally any other company than AMD and Nvidia.
What other US companies are equipped and interested in running a giant chip design/fab? NVIDIA and AMD are likely the only two candidates.
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Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are those GPUs really stupid? They seem like a great price for performance devices when ultra high level gaming is not the priority. EDIT: I personally always liked intel iGPUs because they were always zero bullshit on Linux minus some screen tearing issues and mumbo-jumbo fixes required in X11.
Another nice thing—it looked like Intel was lagging AMD in PCIe lane counts, until somewhat recently. I suspect selling GPUs has put them in the headspace of thinking of PCIe lanes as a real figure of merit.
AMD AM5 are also not great at having enough PCIe lanes, hence at most one connected PCIe5 x16 GPU, if you need more it's x8 for 2 GPUs and so on, and that's before we connect fast M2 storage, fast USB4 slots etc. If you need more PCIe lanes, you have to buy a Threadripper or Epyc and that's easily 10 times the price for the whole system.
Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The moat of the two companies together would give the new combined company plenty of time to ramp up their fabs. I'm not convinced of this. Fabs are incredibly expensive businesses. Intel has failed to keep up and AMD spun off their fabs to use TSMC. There is also ARM knocking at the door for general computing. It's already gaining traction in previously x86 dominated markets. The model for US based fabbing has to…
They would have at least 5 years to figure it out before ARM becomes viable on desktop assuming there continues to be movement in that direction. There is so little incentive to move away from x86 right now. The latest Intel mobile processors address the efficiency issues and prove that x86 can be efficient enough for laptops. IT departments are not going to stop buying x86 processors until they absolutely are forced…
> There is so little incentive to move away from x86 right now.
> IT departments are not going to stop buying x86 processors until they absolutely are forced to.
IT departments are buying arm laptops, Apple's.
And there is an incentive to switch, cost. If you are in AWS, you can save a pretty penny by adopting graviton processors.
Further, the only thing stopping handhelds from being arm machines is poor x86 emulation. A solvable problem with a small bit of hardware. (Only non-existent because current ARM vendors can't be bothered to add it and ARM hasn't standardized it).
Really the only reason arm is lagging is because the likes of Qualcomm have tunnel vision on what markets they want to address.
Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nvidia makes a lot more sense than AMD; it is better for the market (preserving some competition in x86), and at least Intel does something Nvidia doesn’t.
What do they do that Nvidia doesn't (and that Nvidia would care about)? They already do networking, photonics, GPUs, high speed interconnects, and CPUs. They are planning on selling their FPGAs (the Altera acquisition) to Lattice. The only things left are their fab ops, thunderbolt/usbc, wifi, and ble. Their fab ops would take over a decade of heavy investment to catch up to TSMC or Samsung and idk if even Nvidia is…
x86 CPUs.
Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ...the best case scenario for Intel is a merger with AMD... Why would AMD want a merger? They aren't a charity, and certainly don't need the distraction.
Well, for at least a time they would have the entire x86 market. That is not nothing. Also AMD may want to get back into the fab business. Without competition in x86 why not use Intel's fabs?
And everyone would rush to migrate away from x86.
Having a sole supplier for CPUs is a bad strategy.
Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
#148Difficult to see how this is anything other than a failure. I had high hopes when Gelsinger returned, but it seems that BK had done too much damage and Gelsinger didn't really get a grip on things. One of the things I heard that really highlighted the failure of this recovery was that BK had let Intel balloon in all sorts of ways that needed to be pared back and refocused, but head count under Gelsinger didn't just s…
Intel needed to be split in two as well, which Gelsinger only half-heartedly did. He split the company into two functions - foundry and design, but didn't take that to its logical conclusion and split up the company completely.
Agree with OP that Intel was probably too deep into its downward spiral. While it seems Pat tried to make changes, including expanding into GPUs, it either wasn't enough or too much for the Intel board.
Splitting Intel is necessary but probably infeasible at this point in the game. Simple fact is that Intel Foundry Services has nothing to offer against the likes of TSMC and Samsung - perhaps only cheaper prices and even then it's unproven to fab any non-Intel chips. So the only way to keep it afloat is by continuing to fab Intel's own designs, until 18A node becomes viable/ready.
Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would the US govt allow a merge with AMD? Sure they won't allow Intel to be bought by a foreign company, but surely everyone would much rather see Intel being bought by literally any other company than AMD and Nvidia.
What other US companies are equipped and interested in running a giant chip design/fab? NVIDIA and AMD are likely the only two candidates.
I do not at all think it will happen, nor does it make any sense at all but the rumours of Apple seemingly being interested in buying out Intel dont seem to be going away.
I can see them wanting certain parts of the business (GPU mainly) but on a whole it doesn't make a lot of sense.
I don't see Intel as a single entity being valuable to any US business really. You're essentially buying last years fall line, theres very little use for Intel's fabs without a huge amount being spent on them to get them up to modern standards.
It'll all come down to IP and people that'll be the true value.
Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ...the best case scenario for Intel is a merger with AMD... Why would AMD want a merger? They aren't a charity, and certainly don't need the distraction.
Well, for at least a time they would have the entire x86 market. That is not nothing. Also AMD may want to get back into the fab business. Without competition in x86 why not use Intel's fabs?
They dont need to merge with intel to get the entire x86 market, they'll be getting that anyway if Intel folds.
Even if Intel gets bought out, it'll be in pieces. Nobody wants to enter the x86 market, but there may be smaller segmenrs of the business that can help an ARM based business, or someone looking to get into GPU's.