Is it just me or the latest chips from Intel look relatively better? I meant the Ultra Core 1 and 2.
It's because the 'core' compute part of the chip is actually made by TSMC. The surroundings are made by Intel it's own fab.
Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
761–770 of 777 posts
Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
#762Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I would wholeheartedly agree with you if my tax dollars were going to keeping the US semiconductor industry alive.
Instead we fed however many CHIPS' and other grants' billions of tax dollars to Intel and all we got were five digit layoffs and the ouster of the one CEO who ostensibly had the right idea.
Naw, fuck that. I want my tax dollars spent on anything else other than that or more wars.
Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
#763Earlier quoted context omitted.
> only grown semiconductor fabs left on US soil not sure what a "grown" semiconductor fab is but follow this link and sort by location https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat... The number of homegrown companies with fabs is greater than 1
Since HN generally considers everything older than two nodes completely irrelevant, all of those fabs except for Intel are completely irrelevant.
because other company that still run is so small in terms of marketshare even when they bankrupt tomorrow, it wouldn't make market shakes
but intel going bankrupt would change market permanently
Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
#764Earlier quoted context omitted.
The original "5 Nodes in 4 Years" roadmap released in mid 2021 had 18A entering production 2H 2024. So it's already "delayed". The updated roadmap has it coming in Q3 2025 but I don't think anyone ever believed that. This after 20A was canceled, Intel 4 is only used for the Compute Tile in Meteor Lake, Intel 3 only ever made it into a couple of server chips, and Intel 7 was just renamed 10nm.
The first iteration of Intel 10nm was simply broken -- you had Ice Lake mobile CPUs in 2019 yes but desktop and server processors took another two years to be released. In 2012 Intel said they will ship 14nm in 2013 and 10nm in 2015. Not only they did fail to deliver 10nm Intel CPUs but they failed Nokia server division too, nearly killing it off in 2018, three years after their initial target. No one in the industry…
Ice Lake wasn't the first iteration of 10nm - that was the disastrous Cannon Lake in 2018.
Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
#765Earlier quoted context omitted.
The first iteration of Intel 10nm was simply broken -- you had Ice Lake mobile CPUs in 2019 yes but desktop and server processors took another two years to be released. In 2012 Intel said they will ship 14nm in 2013 and 10nm in 2015. Not only they did fail to deliver 10nm Intel CPUs but they failed Nokia server division too, nearly killing it off in 2018, three years after their initial target. No one in the industry…
Ice Lake wasn't the first iteration of 10nm - that was the disastrous Cannon Lake in 2018.
Yes, yes, yes, of course, the infamous CPU released just so Intel middle managers can get their bonus. GPU disabled, CPU gimped, the whole thing barely worked at all. Let's call it the 0th iteration of 10nm , it was not real, there was like one laptop in China, the Lenovo IdeaPad 330-15ICN, which paper launched.
Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
#766Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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...
That's orthogonal. Fixed-function hardware has a power efficiency advantage over programmable hardware. This isn't new or surprising, but it's also unrelated to CPU vs. GPU. Both CPU & GPU are programmable, so that's not relevant.
Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
#767I am old enough to remember when AMD was nowhere, and Intel was the only game in town for both consumer and server chips, laptop and desktop. I think it was 2011. Then 2013 rolled around and I built a desktop with an AMD processor, because it was dirt cheap. I remember people saying that they were excited and looking forward to the upcoming AMD architectures and roadmap. I couldn't understand how AMD could possibly h…
AMD doesn't have the burden of capital expense that a fab is. It did take several years for AMD to capitalize on the freedom this enables though. As far as I know Intel is the only company left that is vertically integrated. This might be the last domino to fall. Arrow Lake uses TSMC heavily. Maybe that's a sign of things to come. Andy Grove said only the paranoid survive. It didn't seem like Intel management was that paranoid. They didn't invent 64bit x86, had to license it from AMD. Spent so much money on stock buy backs, when it should have been funneled back into the fab, getting yields up on the next process node. It's easy for me to be an armchair quarterback though, I'm not aware of everything that happened behind the scenes. I saw D1X being built, and the future seemed bright.
Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
#768I am perhaps one of Pat's biggest fan. Was in tears when I knew he is back at Intel [1]; > "Notable absent from that list is he fired Pat Gelsinger. Please just bring him back as CEO." - 2012 on HN, when Paul Otellini Retired. > "The only one who may have a slim chance to completely transform Intel is Pat Gelsinger, if Andy Grove saved Intel last time, it will be his apprentice to save Intel again. Unfortunately give…
I hope they sell off some more distracting/minor parts of the business, and then work with a fund to take the company private. Similar to Yahoo a number of years ago, there's some real business still there, they just need to remove the expectation of constant quarterly calls and expectations and make long term, consistent investments again.
Yahoo's acquisition by Verizon was a tire-fire train wreck of epic proportions. In no universe is this something to emulate. There's a good reason every single Verizon exec involved in that deal was gone relatively shortly after this disaster.
They basically incinerated $5 billion in the process of buying Yahoo, merging it with AOL to form "Oath", doing many rounds of layoffs with extremely overgenerous severance packages, strip-mining the business units in ill-conceived deals (often in exchange for stock in absurd companies like MoviePass and Buzzfeed), and then eventually dumping the remainder on a PE firm at a huge loss.
Or, as Wikipedia succinctly summarizes these events, "the integration did not deliver the expected value".
Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
#769Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some were straight second sources but they all had the license to do what NEC, AMD, and OKI did, which is alter the design and sell these variants. They all started doing that with the 8086. There were variants of the 8086, 8088, and 80186, I'm unaware of variants of the 80188, or 80286 although there were still multiple manufacturers, I had a Harris 286 at 20MHz myself. Then with the 386 there were more custom varia…
At what point do we call a tweak to an original design different enough to count it... K5 and K6 where clearly new designs. The others were mostly intel with some changes. I'm going to count the rest as minor tweaks and not worth counting otherwise - but this is a case where you can argue there the line is and so others need to decide where they stand (if they care)
The NEC V20/30 series were significant advances over their Intel equivalent (basically all the 186 features plus more in an 8086/8 compatible package).
C&T had some super-386 chips that apparently barely made it to market (38605DX), and the Cyrix 5x86 (most of a 6x86) is substantially different from the AMD one (which is just a 486 clock-quadrupled)
Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
#770Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
That's orthogonal. Fixed-function hardware has a power efficiency advantage over programmable hardware. This isn't new or surprising, but it's also unrelated to CPU vs. GPU. Both CPU & GPU are programmable, so that's not relevant.
Those aren't useful distinctions. You might as well say the ALUs in a CPU aren't programmable because they aren't the instruction decoders.