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Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

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Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#311

Post by mastax »

Wytwwww wrote: post #233
rwmj wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Intel needed to be split in two as well Wouldn't that just pretty much guarantee that the foundry business would fail since Intel wouldn't have any incentives to shift most of their manufacturing to TSMC? The same thing happened with AMD/Global Foundries..

AMD has a big wafer supply agreement with GlobalFoundries, and has since the spinoff. It was exclusive until the seventh WSA in 2019 which allowed AMD to purchase 7nm and beyond from other suppliers (without paying penalties) which was the only reasonable resolution after GloFo cancelled their 7nm fab (which may have been the best thing to happen to AMD). But AMD increased their GloFo orders in May and December 2021 during the chip crunch to $2.1B total through 2025. If you look at the first WSA amendment from March 2011 it includes AMD agreeing to pay an additional $430M if they get some (redacted) node in production in time.

Anyway, whatever woes GloFo is facing you can’t blame them on AMD. They had an exclusivity deal for a decade which only got broken when it was no longer tenable and AMD still buys a ton of their wafers. I suppose AMD may have bought more wafers if their products didn’t suck for most of that time but it had nothing to do with shifting production to TSMC which only happened after GloFo gave up.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#312

Post by keyringlight »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #13
hbfdhfdhadfhnfa wrote: post #4

This is not good. We already know what happened when CFO took over. It was a time when Intel totaly lost control. They are gona get bought for penies. OMG Instead of saying to AMD they will be in the rearview mirror, they should have been paranoid. Not do stupid GPUs. and destroy others where it mattered

The GPUs are elemental for a shift to APUs - the future as Apple has shown for performance and energy efficiency. Strix Halo will be a game changer, without a GPU Intel has no future on the laptop (and later desktop).

One of the things I was wondering about a few years ago is whether intel would attempt to bid on the Sony/MS console contracts which AMD has had tied up for a long time now and would be a dependable income along with reduced software compatibility concerns compared to the breadth and history of windows games. I don't think they got to the point of having a big iGPU integrated to the extent that AMD has had for years though.

Apparently AMD has at least the Sony PS6 contract now.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#313

Post by rvba »

mnau wrote: post #220
dralley wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth mentioning that IIRC the team responsible for the Arc GPU drivers was located in Russia, and after the invasion of Ukraine they had to deal with relocating the entire team to the EU and lost several engineers in the process. The drivers were the primary reason for the absolute failure of Arc. Intel deserves a lot of blame but they also got hit by some really shit circumstances outside of their control.

He was CEO. Chief executing officer. It's literally his job to execute, i.e. fix that stuff/ensure it doesn't happen. Get them out of Russia, poach new devs, have a backup team, delay the product (i.e. no HVM until good drivers are in sight). That's literally his job. This only reinforces my previous point. He had good ideas, but couldn't execute.

Executive, not executing.

On a side note getting people in russia write your drivers sounds a bit insane. Yea lower cost and probably ok quality, but the risks...

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#314

Post by dv_dt »

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…

If a breakup is in the works for Intel, merger of the foundry side with Global Foundries would make more sense than AMD. Intel's foundries, even in the state they're in would likely be a step up for GF. And given the political sensitiveness, GF already has DoD contracts for producing chips.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#315

Post by tonetegeatinst »

LittleTimothy wrote: post #11

Difficult 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…

Who/what is BK? Are they the previous person who held Pat Gelsingers position?

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#316

Post by alganet »

steelframe wrote: post #287
alganet wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, let's create a monopoly around one of the most valuable commodities in the world. What could go wrong?

I think Apple Silicon has shown us that x86 doesn't have the monopoly potential it once had.

Apple Silicon was designed to be efficient at emulating x86-64.

If you take that away, it becomes irrelevant (like many other ARM-based processors that struggle to be a good product because of compatibility).

Apple has a promising path for x86 liberation, but it is not there yet.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#317

Post by J_Shelby_J »

pbalcer wrote: post #296
gpapilion wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They weren’t interested in creating an open solution. Both intel and AMD have been somewhat short sighted and looked to recreate their own cuda, and the mistrust of each other has prevented them from a solution for both of them.

Disclaimer: I work on this stuff for Intel At least for Intel, that is just not true. Intel's DPC++ is as open as it gets. It implements a Khronos standard (SYCL), most of the development is happening in public on GitHub, it's permissively licensed, it has a viable backend infrastructure (with implementations for both CUDA and HIP). There's also now a UXL foundation with the goal of creating an "open standard acceler…

Neat. Now release 48gb GPUs to the hobbyist devs and we’ll use intel for LLMs!

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#318

Post by timschmidt »

mnau wrote: post #239
timschmidt wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He failed on GPU. The product was substandard. I will never understand this line of reasoning. Why would anyone expect an initial offering to match or best similar offerings from the industry leader? Isn't it understood that leadership requires several revisions to get right?

Oh, poor multi billion company. We should buy its product with poor value, just to make it feel better. Intel had money and decades of integrated GPU experience. Any new entrant to the market must justify the value to the buyer. Intel didn't. He could sell them cheap to try to make a position in the market, though I think that would be a poor strategy (didn't have financials to make it work).

I think you misunderstood me. I wasn't calling for people to purchase a sub-par product, rather for management and investors to be less fickle and ADHD when it comes to engineering efforts one should reasonably expect to take several product cycles.

Honestly, even with their iGPU experience, Arc was a pretty impressive first dGPU since the i740. The pace of their driver improvement and their linux support have both been impressive. They've offered some niche features like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Graphics_Technology#Grap... which Nvidia limits to their professional series.

I don't care if they have to do the development at a loss for half a dozen cycles, having a quality GPU is a requirement for any top-tier chip supplier these days. They should bite the bullet, attempt to recoup what they can in sales, but keep iterating toward larger wins.

I'm still upset with them for cancelling the larrabee uarch, as I think it would be ideal for many ML workloads. Who needs CUDA when it's just a few thousand x86 threads? I'm sure it looked unfavorable on some balance sheet, but it enabled unique workloads.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#319

Post by monooso »

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…

> ...then I don't think Pat gets retired.

This implies that he was pushed out, rather than chose to retire. I can't see anything in the article to suggest this, do you have another source?

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#320

Post by mort96 »

Wytwwww wrote: post #297
mort96 wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems correct from some quick Wikipedia reading, but I don't understand what it has to do with anything?

The existence of an imaginary x86 monopoly in the 80s?

Oh, but xbar's interpretation of the phrase "x86 monopoly" is clearly the x86 architecture having a monopoly in the instruction set market. Under that interpretation, I don't really think it's relevant how many companies made x86 chips. I don't think xbar is necessarily wrong, I just think they're interpreting words to mean something they weren't intended so they're not making an effective argument
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