Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

intel.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

751–760 of 777 posts

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#751

Post by seabass-labrax »

sterlind wrote: post #641
seabass-labrax wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Surely there must be an emulator you could use?

Indeed, I could use QEMU to run FreePBX on ARM64. However, the performance penalty would be pretty severe, and there isn't anything inherent to FreePBX that should prevent it from running natively on ARM64. It simply appears that nobody has yet spent the time to iron out any problems and make an official build for the architecture, but unfortunately I think there is still loads of other software in a similar situation.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#752

Post by astrange »

brokencode wrote: post #396
Cumpiler69 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>they could have a line of ARM CPUs now to compete with the onslaught in all major CPU markets. Disagree. Selling ARM chips with high profit margins is tough. There's too much competition from the likes of Samsung, MediaTek and until the US ban, Hi Silicon(Huawei). ARM chips are a race to the bottom in terms of price with a market dominated by companies from Asia. There's no guarantee Intel could have had a competiti…

Well they have to try something and actually invest in it. Every year, it looks more and more like x86 is a sinking ship. Intel and AMD can dominate the x86 market all they want. But x86 has been steadily losing ground every year to cheaper and more power efficient ARM processors. It’s still a big market now, but I don’t think it’s going to be a great business in a decade or two. ARM was just an example. If Intel spe…

Cheap and power efficient is mostly not about the ISA. ARMv8 is designed for efficient fast CPUs and it's good at it, but you could do it with x86 if you tried. Intel doesn't try because they want to make expensive high-power server chips.

Although their latest plan is to turn it into ARMv8 anyway: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...

The main problem with x86 is that it has poor security, not poor performance.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#753

Post by astrange »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #67
Cumpiler69 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think the issue is that Intel has a culture and focus. It is cpus. It is a large company and this is where the revenue comes from and it has momentum. With this logic, Apple should have also stayed with making Macs when it had financial troubles in in 1999, since that's its focus, not venture into making stupid stuff like Mp3 players and phones, everyone knows that's the core focus of Sony and Nokia who will rules…

Yes, Apple succeeded. But the number of companies that attempt such branching out and succeed are few compared to how many try. The CEO of company X may think that he's as talented as Steve Jobs, but is he really?

One way you can look at it is that Apple succeeded at those by taking things that weren't their product (radios, flashlights, calculators, etc) and turning them into their product (computers).

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#754

Post by astrange »

kllrnohj wrote: post #504
lesuorac wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean you can splits hairs about the difference between CPU and GPUs all you want. The overall point is that work is being increasingly done _not_ on the CPU. If your business is CPUs-only then you're going to have rough times as the world moves away from a CPU-centric world. You don't need to predict AI; you just need to see that alternatives are being looked at by competitors and you'll lose an edge if you don't a…

> The overall point is that work is being increasingly done _not_ on the CPU. Eh? GPGPU has been a thing for decades and yet barely made a dent in the demand for CPUs. Heck, CUDA is 17 years old! The world has not budged from being CPU-centric and it isn't showing any signs of doing so. GPUs remain an accelerator for specialized workloads and are going to continue to be just that.

Hmm, this isn't power-efficient thinking. iPhones have lots of accelerators beyond GPUs - not because they're more performant but because they're better at performance/power.

Of course they also add GPU-like things to the CPU too for the same reason: https://developer.arm.com/documentation/109246/0100/SME-Over...

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#755

Post by astrange »

riskable wrote: post #187
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

> Not do stupid GPUs. "Gelsinger said the market will have less demand for dedicated graphics cards in the future." (from: https://www.techspot.com/news/105407-intel-not-repeat-lunar-... ) Gelsinger apparently agreed with you. However, the market very clearly has enormous demand for discreet GPUs. Specifically for AI workloads (not PC gaming). If I was on Intel's board I would've fired him for this statement. The dem…

There's someone else who makes computers with a lot of memory that are good at AI inference but don't have discrete graphics cards.

…Although it looks like Intel tried to go that route without understanding why and got cold feet.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#756

Post by astrange »

centiromi wrote: post #275

Does Nvidia use Intel foundry? No. Does Apple use Intel foundry? No. The two largest fabless companies in the world never used, and have no plans to use Intel foundries. "Intel foundry" as a service is a fiction, and will remain so. Intel can't get others to use their weird custom software tooling.

> The two largest fabless companies in the world never used, and have no plans to use Intel foundries.

Such plans would be something like 4-5 years ahead, so you wouldn't have heard of it yet unless they decided to talk about it. Chip development takes a long time.

Of course, that means you have to expect the foundry to still be there in 5 years.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#757

Post by astrange »

aiinnyc wrote: post #565

What timescale are we looking at to decide if building foundries and manufacturing chips in the States is a good idea? There's an argument that there aren't nearly enough skilled workers to do high tech manufacturing here. Didn't TSMC also struggle to hire enough skilled workers in Arizona?

It's a good idea because otherwise China will bomb your foundry or steal your designs. Besides, you don't ever get skilled workers if you don't try to develop them.

> Didn't TSMC also struggle to hire enough skilled workers in Arizona?

That was mostly marketing so they could ask for more tax credits. In practice it seems to be going okay.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#758

Post by lmm »

mnau wrote: post #339
timschmidt wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

> I don't care if they have to do the development at a loss for half a dozen cycles, And here is the problem. You are discussing a dream scenario with unlimited money. This thread is about how CEO of Intel has retired/was kicked out (far more likely) for business failures. In real world, Intel was in a bad shape (see margins, stock price ect) and couldn't afford to squander resources. Intel couldn't commit and thus i…

Pulling out of a vital long-term project because it can't deliver a short-term return would be a bigger waste. Unless you think Intel is already doomed and the CEO should be pursuing managed decline?

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#759

Post by jimbobbam »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #662
cogman10 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, what both companies would need to be competitive in the GPU sector is a cuda killer. That's perhaps the one benefit of merging Antel can more easily standardize something.

Why doesn’t NVIDIA buy intel? They have the cash and they have the pairing (M chips being NVIDIA and intel’s biggest competitors now). It would be an AMD/ATI move, and maybe NVIDIA could do its own M CPU competitor with…whatever intel can help with.

They don’t need it they have Grace

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#760

Post by alganet »

astrange wrote: post #742
alganet wrote: post #732

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I'm not gonna hear some podcast PR by Apple. I heard their PR already. If most people just use web browsers, why so much effort has been put on Rosetta 2? Sounds very wasteful. Also, A64FX seems to agree with my statement that an ARM with some x86 spice makes a better product than just an ARM. And, if we're talking about making ARM mainstream, Raspberry Pi did more for the platform than Apple and deserves to g…

Dunno, who says a lot of effort was put into Rosetta 2? It's mostly something that was needed in the first few years so you could run Chrome and Photoshop, but those have been ported now. It's mostly useful for running WINE but that's not super common outside games. That said, a binary recompiler has a lot of uses once you have one: https://valgrind.org

Let's not walk around in circles. We already estabilished that the chip was designed to facilitate the transition.

What you're saying is exactly what I'm saying. Having that x86 translation layer helped them sell macs. It doesn't matter if it is not needed now (it is needed now, otherwise it would have been removed).

So, yes. Apple has a popular new band in town. But they still need to play some x86 covers to sell tickets.

As I said, they have a good plan, but they're _not there yet_.

When they'll be? When x86 translation is not shipped anymore. It's rather simple.

Post reply on HN