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Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

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Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#261

Post by etempleton »

maeil wrote: post #152
etempleton wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> IT departments are not going to stop buying x86 processors until they absolutely are forced to. Plenty of them are buying Macbooks. It's definitely a small percentage of the worldwide market, but not entirely insignificant either.

Yes, but that is because users demand it. And they do so begrudgingly. Users are not going to demand an ARM Windows laptop.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#263

Post by mort96 »

TheBigSalad wrote: post #146
CuriousCosmic wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah I wonder if maybe the x86 license is the most valuable art of Intel at this point...

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#264

Post by zarzavat »

etempleton wrote: post #243
vlan0 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I feel like this is a mistake. Pat's strategy is aggressive but what the company needs. He's also 63. Has plenty of money to survive the rest of his life. Has eight grandchildren. There's so much more to life than business. What's to say he doesn't want to simply enjoy life with more connection and community to loved ones around him?

True CEO retirements are announced in advance and do not lead to a strange co-interim CEO situation.

It's possible he's sick. Who could know?

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#265

Post by ryao »

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.

Nvidia's GPUs work well on Linux. A friend and I use them and they are fairly problem free. In the past, when I did have some issues (mainly involving freesync), I contacted Nvidia and they fixed them. More specifically, I found that they needed to add sddm to their exclusion list, told them and they added it to the list after a few driver releases. They have also fixed documentation on request too.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#266

Post by Wytwwww »

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

And then in the 2000s after AMD64 pretty much destroyed all competing architectures and then in the 2010s Intel itself effectively was almost a monopoly (outside of mobile) with AMD being on the verge of bankruptcy.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#267

Post by shrubble »

Here are 2 things I have noticed that seem obvious weaknesses:

1. Looking at the CyberMonday and BlackFriday deals, I see that the 12900K and 14900* series CPUs are what is being offered on the Intel side. Meanwhile AMD has released newer chips. So Intel has issues with either yield, pricing or other barriers to adoption of their latest.

2. The ARC GPUs are way behind; it seems obvious to me that a way to increase usage and sales is to simply add more VRAM to the GPUs - Nvidia limits the 4090 to 24GB; so if Intel shipped a GPU with 48 or 64GB VRAM, more people would buy those just to have the extra VRAM. It would spur more development, more usage, more testing and ultimately result in ARC being a better choice for LLMs, image processing, etc.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#269

Post by Wytwwww »

mort96 wrote: post #237
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…

I believe the "x86 monopoly" was meant to refere to how only Intel and AMD are legally allowed to make x86 chips due to patents. X86 is currently a duopoly, and if Intel and AMD were to merge, that would become a monopoly.

Didn't AMD start making x86 chips in 1982?

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#270

Post by saltminer »

seabass-labrax wrote: post #190
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…

I was only just today looking for low-power x86 machines to run FreePBX, which does not yet have an ARM64 port. Whilst the consumer computing space is now perfectly served by ARM and will soon be joined by RISC-V, if a widely-used piece of free and open source server software is still x86-only, you can bet that there are thousands of bespoke business solutions that are locked to the ISA. A monopoly would hasten migra…

The fact that C++ development has been effectively hijacked by the "no ABI breakage, ever"/backwards compatibility at all costs crowd certainly speaks to this.

https://herecomesthemoon.net/2024/11/two-factions-of-cpp/

There are a lot of pre-compiled binaries floating about that are depended on by lots of enterprise software whose source code is long gone, and these are effectively locked to x86_64 chips until the cost of interoperability becomes greater than reverse engineering their non-trivial functionality.

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