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Intel: Winning and Losing

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21–30 of 110 posts

Re: Intel: Winning and Losing

#21

The Atom model was the breaking point for Intel. No one forgives them for wasting their money on Atom-based laptops, which are slower than a tortoise. Never play with the customer's intelligence.

I could tell they were cooked when they bought McAfee.

They what??

Re: Intel: Winning and Losing

#22

The Atom model was the breaking point for Intel. No one forgives them for wasting their money on Atom-based laptops, which are slower than a tortoise. Never play with the customer's intelligence.

I was working as a contractor in this period and remember meeting a thermometer company. They had made the extremely questionable decision to build it with Intel Edison, which used an even lower performance product line called Quark. The Edison chips baffled me. Worse performance than many ARM SoCs at the time, far worse efficiency, and they cost so much. That thermometer had a BOM cost of over $40 and barely enough battery life for its intended purpose.

Re: Intel: Winning and Losing

#23

The Atom model was the breaking point for Intel. No one forgives them for wasting their money on Atom-based laptops, which are slower than a tortoise. Never play with the customer's intelligence.

I could tell they were cooked when they bought McAfee.

yes, this was a direct consequence of the Craig Barrett mentality. Intel wanted a finger in many pies, since it could not predict what would be the next 'thing'. So they went on multiple acquisition sprees hoping to hit gold on something. I can't think of a single post-2000 acquisition that succeeded.

Re: Intel: Winning and Losing

#24

The Atom model was the breaking point for Intel. No one forgives them for wasting their money on Atom-based laptops, which are slower than a tortoise. Never play with the customer's intelligence.

Atom was shit. A desperation move. I was so embarrassed to recommend a Poulsbo laptop to friend, it was the worst machine I have every seen.

Re: Intel: Winning and Losing

#25

I'll give a viewpoint that the article reads like a listing of spec sheets and process improvements for CPUs of that era and not much else. Not really worth reading imho. I'd love some discussion on why Intel left XScale and went to Atom and i think Itanium is worthy of discussion in this era too. I don't really want a raw listing of [In year X Intel launched Y with SPEC_SHEET_LISTING features].

>Itanium

IMO, Intel took us from common, affordable CPUs to high-priced, "Intel-only" CPUs. It was originally designed to use Rambus RAM, and it turned out Intel had a stake in that company. Intel got greedy and tried to force the market to go the way it wanted.

Honestly, AMD saved the x86 market for us common folks. Their approach of extending x86 to 64-bit and adopting DDR RAM allowed for the continuation of affordable, mainstream CPUs. This enabled companies to buy tons of servers for cheap.

Intel’s u-turn on x86-64 shows even they knew they couldn’t win.

AMD has saved Intel’s x86 platform more than once. The market wants a common, gradual upgrade path for the PC platform not a sudden, expensive, single-vendor ecosystem.

Re: Intel: Winning and Losing

#26
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always wondered, how do some smart companies, or smart film directors, or smart musicians can fail so hard? I understand that, sometimes, it's a matter of someone abusing a project for personal gain. Some CEOs, workers just want to pitch, pocket the money, and move on, but the level of absurdity of some of the decisions made are counter-productive the 'get rich quick' scheme too. I think there are self perpetuat…

It doesn’t even have to be that negative. With the best intentions in the world, it’s rare to have a CEO who is fundamentally capable of understanding both the technology and the viable market applications of that technology. Steve Jobs didn’t manage to do it at NeXT.

NeXT was a failed rocket launch (analogous to early rocket failures within SpaceX). A great step forward and a necessary step in the evolution of the PC. I thought NeXT workstations were pretty bad-ass for their time and place. Recall that only 3 years prior to NeXT, was computers like the Atari ST .. what a vast difference!!

Re: Intel: Winning and Losing

#27
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always wondered, how do some smart companies, or smart film directors, or smart musicians can fail so hard? I understand that, sometimes, it's a matter of someone abusing a project for personal gain. Some CEOs, workers just want to pitch, pocket the money, and move on, but the level of absurdity of some of the decisions made are counter-productive the 'get rich quick' scheme too. I think there are self perpetuat…

At some point organizations get taken over by the 9-5 crowd who just want to collect a paycheck and live a nice life. This also leads to the hard-driving talent to leave for more aggressive organizations, leaving behind a more average team. What leaders remain will come up with not so great ideas, and the rank and file will follow along because there won't be a critical mass of passionate thought leaders to find a be…

I wonder if there will be a similar situation at nvidia, which apparently has a challenge with so many of their employees being rich as their stock has rocketed up in value, and then could cause concerns about motivation or if skilled and knowledgeable employees will leave.

Re: Intel: Winning and Losing

#28
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always wondered, how do some smart companies, or smart film directors, or smart musicians can fail so hard? I understand that, sometimes, it's a matter of someone abusing a project for personal gain. Some CEOs, workers just want to pitch, pocket the money, and move on, but the level of absurdity of some of the decisions made are counter-productive the 'get rich quick' scheme too. I think there are self perpetuat…

At some point organizations get taken over by the 9-5 crowd who just want to collect a paycheck and live a nice life. This also leads to the hard-driving talent to leave for more aggressive organizations, leaving behind a more average team. What leaders remain will come up with not so great ideas, and the rank and file will follow along because there won't be a critical mass of passionate thought leaders to find a be…

Disagree. 9-5 working is fine, and probably more efficient long term than permanent crunches.

Organisations fail when the ‘business’ people take over. People who let short term money-thinking make the decisions, instead good taste, vision or judgement.

Think Intel when they turned down making the iPhone chips because they didn’t think it’d be profitable enough, or Google’s head of advertising (same guy who killed yahoo search) degrading search results to improve ad revenue.

Apple have been remarkably immune to it post-Jobs, but it’s clear that’s on the way out with the recent revelations about in-app purchases.

Re: Intel: Winning and Losing

#29
The core problem at Intel is they promoted the myth that ISA has no impact on performance to such a degree they started fully believing it while also somehow believing their process advantage was unassailable. By that time they'd accumulated so many worthless departments that turning it around at any time after 2010 was an impossibility.

You could be the greatest business leader in history but you cannot save Intel without making most of the company hate you, so it will not happen. Just look at the blame game being played in these threads where somehow it's always the fault of these newly found to be inept individuals, and never the blundering morass of the bureaucratic whole.

Re: Intel: Winning and Losing

#30

The core problem at Intel is they promoted the myth that ISA has no impact on performance to such a degree they started fully believing it while also somehow believing their process advantage was unassailable. By that time they'd accumulated so many worthless departments that turning it around at any time after 2010 was an impossibility. You could be the greatest business leader in history but you cannot save Intel w…

https://chipsandcheese.com/p/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-matter
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