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Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
711–720 of 777 posts
Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
#712Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
My understanding is that most of the complaints about Vista being unstable came from the nvidia driver being rather awful [1]. You were likely to either have a system that couldn't actually run Vista or have one that crashed all the time, unless you were lucky enough to have an ATI GPU. [1] https://www.engadget.com/2008-03-27-nvidia-drivers-responsib...
Parent talks about GMA900 from i910 series chipset.
It wasn't fully WDDM compatible for a quite minor (overall) part, but the performance were awful anyway and lack of running in the full WDDM mode (ie Aero) also didn't help too, partly because running in Aero was faster.
Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
#713I 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…
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Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
#714I 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.
I dunno, I've seen more and more people referencing the crash bugs in the latest gens and how Intel lied about it through their teeth. And Intel having lost to Apple on the CPU front, never having caught up to Nvidia on the GPU front, and basically just not doing anything for the last decade certainly hasn't helped their reputation.
Let them die. Maybe we'd actually see some new competition?
Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
#715Earlier 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.
Hacking on that level is very different from building and upgrading PCs, being able to mix and match components from a wide range of different manufacturers. You won’t or can’t build a serious NAS, Proxmox homelab, gaming PC, workstation, or GPU/compute farm from Raspberry Pis or FPGAs. We are really lucky that such a diverse and interoperable hardware platform like the PC exists. We should not discount it, and inste…
Today sure. If you want to custom make "serious" system then x86 is likely your best bet. But this isn't about today, you can have that system right now if you want, it's still there, so this is about the future.
All the use cases, except gaming PC, have "less serious" solutions in Linux/ARM and Linux/RISCV today, where I would argue there is more interoperability and diversity. Those solutions get better and closer to "serious" x86 solutions every day.
Will they be roughly equivalent in price/performance in 5 years... only time will tell but I suspect x86 PC is the old way and it's on it's way out.
Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
#716Earlier quoted context omitted.
The market does whatever makes the market the most money. That is frequently not the best thing for you or your country.
That is still better than seeing my (our) tax dollars thrown down the figurative drain.
This is a very short-sighted point of view. $8B is about $50 per taxpayer; keeping the US semiconductor industry alive is a better investment - and more important - than whatever you'd spend it on.
Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
#717Earlier 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…
> x86 monopoly Wintel was a duopoly which had some power: Intel x86 has less dominance now partly because Windows has less dominance. There are some wonderful papers on how game theory and monopoly plays out between Windows and Intel; and there's a great paper with analysis of why AMD struggled against the economic forces and why Microsoft preferred to team up with a dominant CPU manufacturer.
Ooh got links?
Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
#718Earlier quoted context omitted.
License for what? The patents have expired.
The colliquial "x86 License" is the AMD-Intel Patent cross-licensing agreement. i.e. All patents related to x86 or any extensions of the ISA are automatically cross-licensed between the companies. While in the past the ISA patent story mostly was leaning in Intel's favor, since AMD64/x86_64 really took off, ISA innovation really became a delicate stack of cards interwoven between Intel and AMD. So if Intel sells, eve…
So for the 2009 cross licensing agreement, change of control terminates the cross licensing for both parties[0]. Since there are far more Intel x86 patents in the last 20 years than AMD, sounds like AMD would be the one more at risk, which I think agrees with what you say. In practice, any anti-trust review if Nvidia is the buyer would prevent Nvidia from using it to harm AMD's business.
[0]https://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/amd-clar...
Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
#719Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Didn't the US government just give Intel $7b on the condition they don't spin off the foundry business? https://finance.yahoo.com/news/intels-7-86-billion-subsidy-0...
I think you would have to go through the specific conditions - they put up restrictive conditions but does not seem impossible to work with
Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
#720If AMD can come back from the brink of bankruptcy, then Intel can too. I believe. [Edit]: Though it might have to be that Intel literally has to come to the brink of bankruptcy in order for that comeback to happen.
AMD had Lisa Su, who does intel have?
Didn’t they get Jim Keller to design Zen?