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Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

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Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#201

Post by riskable »

leeman2016 wrote: post #59
merpkz wrote: post #9

Earlier 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.

I am basically biased towards discrete GPU = asking for trouble in Linux. Driver stability, less heat and fan noise, battery life is almost assured in the Intel iGPU.

Nah. AMD discreet GPUs are fantastic in Linux these days. You don't need to install a proprietary driver! They just work. It's really nice not having to think about the GPU's drivers or configuration at all.

The only area where AMD's discreet GPUs are lagging behind is AI stuff. You get a lot more performance with Nvidia GPUs for the same price. For gaming, though AMD is the clear winner in the price/performance space.

Of course, Nvidia is still a bit of a pain but it's of their own making. You still need to install their proprietary driver (which IMHO isn't that big a deal) but the real issue is that if you upgrade your driver from say, 550 to 555 you have to rebuild all your CUDA stuff. In theory you shouldn't have to do that but in reality I had to blow away my venv and reinstall everything in order to get torch working again.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#202

Post by tivert »

mepian wrote: post #48
Dalewyn wrote: post #40

[flagged]

The market already figured out that it doesn't want leading edge manufacturing in the US.

> The market already figured out that it doesn't want leading edge manufacturing in the US.

Exactly. The market figured out there's a lot of short-term profit to be made for shareholders in selling off the nation's industry, and moving it down the value chain. They're running the country like a legacy business they're winding down.

Give Wall Street a few more decades, and the US will have an agriculture and resource extraction economy.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#203

Post by Wytwwww »

esskay wrote: post #150
etempleton wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> they'll be getting that anyway if Intel folds.

Why would Intel "fold"? Their revenue is still 2x higher than AMDs... I mean obviously they are not doing great but its silly to say something like that at this point.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#205

Post by mattlondon »

KETHERCORTEX wrote: post #164
csdreamer7 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much fair game for speculation. The only way this is not bad for the tech industry was if he resigned due to medical or age reasons. That would not be unexpected. Doubtful that is the issue with Intel's track record. Curious when we will know if 18A is competitive or not. > If 18a is not ready I think the best case scenario for Intel is a merger with AMD. The US Govt would probably co-sign on it for national s…

> If A-tel (Amd-inTEL) can not sell to the EU the merger will not happen. What the EU gonna do then? Stop buying computers? Perform rapid continental ARM transition for mythical amount of money?

Just stop buying new intel chips, and continue buying Arm chips. Its not like every single existing x86 CPU would need to be taken away and destroyed.

Apple has made it fairly obvious, even if it was not already with smartphones and chromebooks, that Arm is a viable, realistic, and battle-tested alternative for general purpose computing. Windows 11 even runs on Arm already.

It would not happen "tomorrow" - this would be years in court if nothing else. This would give Dell/HP/Lenovo/whoever plenty of time to start building Arm laptops & servers etc for the European market.

And who knows what RISC-V will look like in a few more years?

The EU has done a bunch of stupid anti-consumer shit in tech already (hello cookie warnings that everyone now ignores), so I would not be surprised if this happened.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#206

Post by menaerus »

orenlindsey wrote: post #173
etempleton wrote: post #64

I 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…

A lot of people on this thread are underestimating how much of a hold Intel has on the chips industry. In my experience, Intel is synonymous with computer chip for the average person. Most people wouldn't be able to tell you what AMD does differently, they'd just say they're a knockoff Intel. Technologically, both companies are neck and neck. But for the average person, it's not even close.

Last report I read it was ~80% (Intel) vs ~20% (AMD) for PC market. And ~75% (Intel) vs ~25% (AMD) for data center servers.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#207

Post by burnte »

xbar wrote: post #153
phkahler wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> If 18a is not ready I think the best case scenario for Intel is a merger with AMD. Aside from the x86 monopoly that would create, I don't think Intel has much of value to AMD at this point other than the fabs (which aren't delivering). IMHO if Intel is failing, let them fail and others will buy the pieces in bankruptcy. This would probably benefit several other companies that could use 22nm and up fab capacity and…

I'd like to address the aside for completeness' sake. An x86 monopoly in the late 80s was a thing, but not now. Today, there are sufficient competitive chip architectures with cross-compatible operating systems and virtualization that x86 does not represent control of the computing market in a manner that should prevent such a merger: ARM licensees, including the special case of Apple Silicon, Snapdragon, NVIDIA SOCs…

> An x86 monopoly in the late 80s was a thing, but not now.

Incorrect, we have an even greater lack of x86 vendors now than we did in the 80s. In the 80s you had Intel, and they licensed to AMD, Harris, NEC, TI, Chips & Technologies, and in the 90s we had IBM, Cyrix, VIA, National Semi, NexGen, and for a hot minute Transmeta. Even more smaller vendors.

Today making mass market x86 chips we have: Intel, AMD, and a handful of small embedded vendors selling designs from the Pentium days.

I believe what you meant was that x86 is not a monopoly thanks to other ISAs, but x86 itself is even more of a monopoly than ever.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#208

Post by mnau »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #101
Cumpiler69 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Intel just has to make a decent/mediocre GPU with 64GB+ memory at a $500 price point and they will instantly become the defacto local LLM leader Intel should have appointed people form the HN comment section as their CEO, as they clearly know more about running a giant chip design and fabrication company than the guy who worked there for 10+ years.

I actually did email Deepak Patil (head of Intel Graphics division) about this around a year ago, haha. Never did get a response though. It is something that is easy to miss if you are just looking at typical business strategy and finances. A high memory consumer GPU would undercut their server GPUs, which are presumably higher margin intended golden geese. It's easy to see them chasing server markets and "gamers" be…

> ..open source AI tooling for it will start sprouting...

AMD has tried this for many of its technologies and I don't think it is working. Granted, they suck at open sourcing, but a shitload of it was open sourced. See TinyGrad voyage into the Red Box driver (streams on youtube).

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#209

Post by bane »

Octoth0rpe wrote: post #170
xbar wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to address the aside for completeness' sake. An x86 monopoly in the late 80s was a thing, but not now. Today, there are sufficient competitive chip architectures with cross-compatible operating systems and virtualization that x86 does not represent control of the computing market in a manner that should prevent such a merger: ARM licensees, including the special case of Apple Silicon, Snapdragon, NVIDIA SOCs…

> An x86 monopoly in the late 80s was a thing, but not now. I think you're off by 20 years on this. In the 80s and early 90s we had reasonable competition from 68k, powerpc, and arm on desktops; and tons of competition in the server space (mips, sparc, power, alpha, pa-risc, edit: and vax!). It wasn't till the early 2000s that both the desktop/server space coalesced around x86.

Thank you for saying this. It's clear that processors are going through something really interesting right now after an extended dwindling and choke point onto x86. This x86 dominance has lasted entire careers, but from a longer perspective we're simply seeing another cycle in ecosystem diversity, specialized functions spinning out of and back into unified packages, and a continued downward push from commoditization forces that are affecting the entire product chain from fab to ISA licensing. We're not quite at the wild-west of the late 80s and 90s, but something's in the air.

It seems almost like the forces that are pushing against these long-term trends are focused more on trying to figure out how to saturate existing compute on the high-end, and using that to justify drives away from diversity and vertical integrated cost/price reduction. But there are, long-term, not as many users who need to host this technology as there are users of things like phones and computers who need the benefits the long-term trends provide.

Intel has acted somewhat as a rock in a river, and the rest of the world is finding ways around them after having been dammed up for a bit.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#210

Post by Wytwwww »

KETHERCORTEX wrote: post #197
KeplerBoy wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And everyone would rush to migrate away from x86. Having a sole supplier for CPUs is a bad strategy.

Yet everyone is okay with a de-facto single supplier of CUDA capable AI GPUs.

Perhaps not. But (unlike in this hypothetical situation) nobody besides AMD and Intel can do much about that...
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