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Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

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Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#401

Post by microtonal »

epolanski wrote: post #347
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…

> The moat of the two companies together would give the new combined company plenty of time to ramp up their fabs. Doubt. Neither of the companies is particularly competitive on either processor or GPU architecture nor fabrication. A merger of those entities looks like nothing but a recipe for further x86 stagnation and an even quicker death for the entities involved imho. In particular I cannot see what's good in it…

A Broadcom/Apple takeover of Intel sounds much more reasonable.

Out of curiosity, what would make Intel interesting to Apple? Apple already acquired Intel's modem business and they have their own CPU and GPU.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#402

Post by cedws »

kjellsbells wrote: post #78

Sad to see Gelsinger go, but despite the churn, I don't think Intel is doomed. At worst, per their most recent Q3 results, I see $150Bn in assets and $4Bn in outstanding stock, and I see the US Gov (both incoming and outgoing) gearing up for a long war against China where Intel would be an asset of national importance. My back of envelope calculation says Intel should be about $35 a share (150/4). If they stumble whe…

Interested in your opinion, since TSMC has fabs in the US now, are Intel still relevant even in the context of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan?

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#403

Post by redandblack »

J_Shelby_J wrote: post #317
pbalcer wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Apple is your savior if you are looking at it as a CPU/GPU/NPU package for consumer/hobbyists.

I decided that I have to start looking at Apple's AI docs

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#404

Post by alganet »

alganet wrote: post #316
steelframe wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> One of the key reasons why Rosetta 2 provides such a high level of translation efficiency is the support of x86-64 memory ordering in the Apple M1 SOC.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S138376212...

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#405

Post by cogman10 »

bluGill wrote: post #393
cogman10 wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But will IT departments buy them if they are 100, 200, or $400 cheaper than a competing x86 machine? That's the question that remains to be seen.

Can those users get all the software they need? Many users who want a mac are told no because some weird software they need doesn't run on it. Others only get a mac because some executive demanded IT port that software to mac. So long as companies have any x86 only software they won't let people switch. Often "art" departments get a specific exception and they get to avoid all the jobs that require x86 only software…

> Of course these days more and more of that is moving the the cloud and all IT needs to a web browser that works. Thus making their job easier.

This was the point I was going to make. While not completely dead, the days of desktop applications are quickly coming to a close. Almost everything is SAAS now or just electron apps which are highly portable.

Even if it's not saas or electron, the only two languages I'd do a desktop app in now-a-days is C# or Java. Both of which are fairly portable.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#406

Post by ghaff »

orenlindsey wrote: post #389
hedora wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marketing campaigns only go so far. They’ve been riding the “Intel Inside” slogan for 25 years. In the mean time, AMD/ARM already won phones, table and game consoles. Server purchasing decisions aren’t made by everyday people. Intel’s roadmap in that space slipped year for year for at least 10 of the last 15 years. That leaves Intel with the fraction of the non-mac laptop market that’s made up of people that haven’t…

Remember, most people don't care as much as you or I. If they're going to buy a laptop to do taxes or web browsing or something, they will probably be mentally biased towards an Intel-based chip. Because it's been marketed for so long, AMD comparatively seems like a super new brand.

If they don't buy a Mac, they'll be biased to whatever BestBuy sells them.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#407

Post by Wytwwww »

bluGill wrote: post #386
Wytwwww wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did x86 have a monopoly in the 80s to begin with? If there is any period when that was true it would be the 2000s or early 2010s. > intended so they're not making an effective argument To be fair I'm really struggling to somehow connect the "x86 monopoly in the late 80s" with the remainder of their comment (which certainly makes sense).

x86 didn't have a monopoly, but IBM PC clones were clearly what everyone was talking about and there the monopoly existed. There are lots of different also ran processors, some with good market share in some niche, but overall x86 was clearly on the volume winners track by 1985.

> but overall x86 was clearly on the volume winners track by 1985.

By that standard if we exclude mobile x86 has a much stronger monopoly these days than in 1985. Unless we exclude low end PCs like Apple II and Commodore 64.

In 1990 x86 had ~80%, Apple ~7%, Amiga ~4% (with the remainder going to lowend or niche PCs) so again not that different than today.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#408

Post by mylies43 »

microtonal wrote: post #401
epolanski wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The moat of the two companies together would give the new combined company plenty of time to ramp up their fabs. Doubt. Neither of the companies is particularly competitive on either processor or GPU architecture nor fabrication. A merger of those entities looks like nothing but a recipe for further x86 stagnation and an even quicker death for the entities involved imho. In particular I cannot see what's good in it…

A Broadcom/Apple takeover of Intel sounds much more reasonable. Out of curiosity, what would make Intel interesting to Apple? Apple already acquired Intel's modem business and they have their own CPU and GPU.

Maybe for the fabs? It might be attractive for Apple to move production state side via Intels fabs but on the other hand I don't think Intels fabs can do what Apple wants

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#409

Post by kergonath »

kgeist wrote: post #307
Wytwwww wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Individual Russian software developers might be reliable but that's hardly the point. They should've just moved them to US or even Germany or something like that if they were serious about entering the GPU market, though... e.g. There are plenty of talented engineers in China as well but it would be severely idiotic for any western company to move their core R&D there. Same applied to Russia.

Well, Intel Russia opened in 2000 back when USA and Russia were on good terms, and Putin was relatively unknown. Sure it was a mistake in hindsight...

It had been obvious for quite a while even before 2022. There were the Chechen wars, and Georgia in 2008, and Crimea in 2014. All the journalists and opposition politicians killed over the years, and the constant concentration of power in the hands of Putin. The Ukraine invasion was difficult to predict, but Russia was a dangerous place long before that. It’s a CEO’s job to have a strategic vision, there must have been contingency plans.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#410

Post by kbelder »

hedora wrote: post #213
orenlindsey wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Marketing campaigns only go so far. They’ve been riding the “Intel Inside” slogan for 25 years. In the mean time, AMD/ARM already won phones, table and game consoles. Server purchasing decisions aren’t made by everyday people. Intel’s roadmap in that space slipped year for year for at least 10 of the last 15 years. That leaves Intel with the fraction of the non-mac laptop market that’s made up of people that haven’t…

>That leaves Intel with the fraction of the non-mac laptop market that’s made up of people that haven’t been paying attention for the last ten years, and don’t ask anyone who has.

Evidently, that leaves Intel the majority of the market.

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