Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger • Hacker News Board

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#621

Post by PaulHoule » Tue, Dec 03, 2024, 1:57 AM UTC

selimthegrim wrote: post #567

PaulHoule wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does 4k matter? I was doing a11y work for an application a few months back and got interested into the question of desktop screen sizes. I see all these ads for 4k and bigger monitors but they don't show up here https://gs.statcounter.com/screen-resolution-stats/desktop/w... And on the steam hardware survey I am seeing a little more than 5% with a big screen. Myself I am swimming in old monitors and TV to the point w…

Curious to hear more about the a11y work.

Run of the mill.

A complex desktop web form with several pages, lots of combo boxes, repeating fields, etc. I cleaned up the WCAG AA issues and even the S, but the AAA requirement for click targets was out of scope but had me thinking that I wanted to make labels (say on a dropdown menu bar) as big as I reasonably could and that in turn got me thinking about how much space I had to work with on different resolution screens so I looked up those stats and tried to see what would fit in which constraints.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#622

Post by shiroiushi » Tue, Dec 03, 2024, 2:08 AM UTC

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…

>In particular I cannot see what's good in it for AMD. The fabs have no use/clear path forward. Their processors/gpu either match our outmatch the Intel offering.

I can, but it's not technical. Intel has a huge advantage in several markets, and has strong relationships with many OEMs like Dell. Intel, even though their market cap is now a fraction of AMD's, still has a huge lead in marketshare in OEM systems and servers. (Several other posts in this thread have real numbers.)

If AMD bought out Intel, it would now get all of that, and be able to push all these OEM and server customers into AMD's solutions instead.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#623

Post by shiroiushi » Tue, Dec 03, 2024, 2:16 AM UTC

lotsofpulp wrote: post #337

rvba wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you need to use Excel at work, you need x86 since Excel for Mac is a gutted toy (MS wants your company yo buy / subscribe to windows too). And google sheets in my opinion is not good for complicated stuff - the constant lag..

I would bet 95%+ of people who use Excel are not affected by any difference between Excel for macOS versus Windows.

95% of people who use Photoshop would probably be served just fine by Krita, or even GIMP if they learned the somewhat wonky UI, and would save a ton of money in the process. However, people usually want to use the "standard" because of some vague fear that the alternative isn't 100.00% compatible, or that it won't have some obscure feature that they don't even know about yet, etc. I think Excel is exactly like this today, and so is Word. There are many alternatives that are just as good (and much cheaper) for 99% of users, but people still want to stick with "the standard" instead of taking a small risk on something different.

Maybe in the coming Great Depression of 2025, people will think differently and start looking at cheaper alternatives.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#624

Post by MPSFounder » Tue, Dec 03, 2024, 2:18 AM UTC

osnium123 wrote: post #582

MPSFounder wrote: post #499

I worked for 3 months for Intel. I can genuinely say that there is no saving that company. Recently, they are hiring many PhDs from various US universities (particularly Indians) to try to compensate (they offer generous stocks and are hiring like crazy right now). There are two major problems I saw: lack of genuine interest in fabs (most people are there for the Intel name and then leave or in the case of Indians, t…

Were you working on the fab side of things?

Don't want to dox myself, but I worked at one of the fabs (Fab11X)

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#625

Post by HeatrayEnjoyer » Tue, Dec 03, 2024, 2:18 AM UTC

jamesy0ung wrote: post #536

hn3er1q wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the one hand I do get the concern, on the other there’s never been a better time to be a hardware hacker. Cheap microcontrollers abound, raspberry pi etc, cheap fpgas, one can even make their own asic. So I just can’t get that worked up over pc architectures getting closed.

You can't really build a PC with parts other than x86. The only other platform you can really build from parts is Arm, with the high end Ampere server chips. Most other platforms are usually pretty highly integrated, you can't just swap parts or work on it.

Why not? Ram is ram, storage is storage.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#626

Post by sterlind » Tue, Dec 03, 2024, 2:21 AM UTC

jamesy0ung wrote: post #536

hn3er1q wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the one hand I do get the concern, on the other there’s never been a better time to be a hardware hacker. Cheap microcontrollers abound, raspberry pi etc, cheap fpgas, one can even make their own asic. So I just can’t get that worked up over pc architectures getting closed.

You can't really build a PC with parts other than x86. The only other platform you can really build from parts is Arm, with the high end Ampere server chips. Most other platforms are usually pretty highly integrated, you can't just swap parts or work on it.

What about the POWER9-based Talos II systems? Extraordinary niche, I know, but aren't they PC-ish?

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#627

Post by MPSFounder » Tue, Dec 03, 2024, 2:22 AM UTC

AdrianB1 wrote: post #554

MPSFounder wrote: post #499

I worked for 3 months for Intel. I can genuinely say that there is no saving that company. Recently, they are hiring many PhDs from various US universities (particularly Indians) to try to compensate (they offer generous stocks and are hiring like crazy right now). There are two major problems I saw: lack of genuine interest in fabs (most people are there for the Intel name and then leave or in the case of Indians, t…

A few years ago a CEO of Intel (not Gelsinger) said something like "our CPU architecture is so well-known every college student can work on it". A friend working at Intel at that time translated it to me: "we will hire cheap students to work on chips and we will let the expensive engineers leave". At least in his department the senior engineers left, they were replaced by fresh graduates. It did not work, that depart…

Funny you mention this. In my brief stint there, I saw a fresh college graduate get promoted to a lead for a Scanning Unit simply because the current lead was retiring (I was actually offered that position, but I was leaving and turned it down). They were trained in less than a month by shadowing the lead on-the-verge-of-retirement. The engineer who got promoted was at Intel less than a year, and had no prior internship experience (they were hired in 2021 when chips were in desperate need of talent. You might recall the chip shortage that affected cars etc.)

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#628

Post by wlesieutre » Tue, Dec 03, 2024, 2:27 AM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #481

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…

Intel GFX held back the industry 10 years. If people thought Windows Vista sucked it was because Intel "supported" it by releasing integrated GPUs which could almost handle Windows Vista but not quite. The best they could do with the GFX business is a public execution. We've been hearing about terrible Intel GFX for 15 years and how they are just on the cusp of making one that is bad (not terrible). Most people who'v…

For a smaller gripe: they also bought Project Offset, which looked super cool, to turn into a Larabee tech demo. Then they killed Larabee and Project Offset along with it.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#629

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Dec 03, 2024, 2:28 AM UTC

Rychard wrote: post #591

PaulHoule wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does 4k matter? I was doing a11y work for an application a few months back and got interested into the question of desktop screen sizes. I see all these ads for 4k and bigger monitors but they don't show up here https://gs.statcounter.com/screen-resolution-stats/desktop/w... And on the steam hardware survey I am seeing a little more than 5% with a big screen. Myself I am swimming in old monitors and TV to the point w…

All the browsers on my machine report my resolution as 1080p despite using 4k. I assume this is because I run at 200% scaling (I believe this is relatively common among anyone using a 4k resolution) If the above-linked website uses data reported by the browser, I wonder how this scenario might be taken into consideration (or even if such a thing is possible)

[deleted]

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#630

Post by alephnerd » Tue, Dec 03, 2024, 2:29 AM UTC

hintymad wrote: post #532

alephnerd wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

0-to-1-ing a company is different muscle from managing an established company. Revenue expectations, margins expectations, and investors are entirely different between the two. This is why most founder CEOs tend to either get booted out or choose to keep their companies private as long as possible.

Given the average shelf life of S&P companies, I assume that even an established company needs to go through 0-to-1 all the time. The aforementioned companies all reinvented themselves multiple times. > Revenue expectations, margins expectations, and investors are entirely different between the two. Yeah, it's hard. How the great CEOs achieve their successes are beyond me. I was just thinking that a great CEO needs t…

> I assume that even an established company needs to go through 0-to-1 all the time

Not significantly. Massive product and strategy pivots are rare because they can fail horribly (eg. For every turnaround like Apple there's a failure in execution like Yahoo)

> How the great CEOs achieve their successes are beyond me

Luck in most cases.

I've worked with plenty of CEOs and in most cases, most people at the C-Suite and SVP level of large organizations are comparable to each other skills and intellect wise.

Administration/mid-level management buy-in is also critical. C-Suite doesn't have much visibility into the lower levels of an organization (it's unrealistic), so management is their eyes and ears.