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Intel: Winning and Losing

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Re: Intel: Winning and Losing

#61

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #40
acroyear wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The early Atoms had pretty good performance per watt compared to Intel's other offerings. The whole 'netbook' and 'nettop' market segment was pretty much enabled by the Atom chips, and similar machines are still around nowadays. The E-cores found in recent Intel generations are also very Atom-like.

I feel like the 2012 atoms made some sense. What baffles me is that atom was complete shit until 2020. Intel sold laptop chips in 2022 that didn't support FMA or AVX2 because they used an atom designed e-core that didn't support them.

Re: Intel: Winning and Losing

#62

Post by gopherloafers »

I started at intel in 1988 and loved working there up until about 2005. The author of this article did a fantastic job enumerating the number of launched products, but there were twice as many that were cancelled. It became such a clusterfuck of leaders vying for promotion to bigger projects and taking over flailing ones only to can them after a year. The 80s and 90s were hyper efficient and focused on churning out clear roadmaps. But the fragmentation of the market was something intel couldn’t handle: its platform didn’t cover all segments no matter how hard it tried it couldn’t do everything. I think the market is still reconverging after all the segmentation. The term “ubiquitous computing” was thrown around a lot in 2000, and it finally happened but it is arm that won. I think there will be a reconvergence of personal computing platforms and I can’t wait to see who vacuums up all the little guys. But after reading this, damn I missed launching the 486 and Pentium. Those were some of the best days of my career.

Re: Intel: Winning and Losing

#63

Post by musicale »

ryao wrote: post #60
aurizon wrote: post #18

Intel is a failed monopolist, unlike Apple! So is IBM with MCA, micro-channel-architecture

I would argue that IBM failed with the BIOS, since they assumed nobody could make a compatible machine without their authorization since they controlled the BIOS and the idea of a clean room reimplementation never dawned on them. It did dawn on Compaq. MCA came afterward.

> they assumed nobody could make a compatible machine without their authorization since they controlled the BIOS and the idea of a clean room reimplementation never dawned on them

So you're saying that they were somehow unaware of how new BIOS implementations were used in CP/M to port it to new systems?

And that they distributed the BIOS source code with every IBM PC... to make it harder for competitors to build compatible machines due to copyright claims?

And that they were somehow unaware DOS had largely reimplemented the CP/M design and API? (Though DOS's FAT filesystem was a successor to FAT8 from Microsoft's Disk BASIC rather than CP/M's filesystem.)

Re: Intel: Winning and Losing

#64

Post by ryandrake »

georgeburdell wrote: post #53
mattkevan wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yah…

Nah I’ve been on both sides of the fence. 9-5ers may reliably accomplish tasks through superior discipline, but they don’t do the heroics that really move individual teams forward.

Relying on "heroics" often indicates a process problem. This thread is kind of giving me a "Grindset / HustlePorn" vibe. With good decision making, focus, and discipline, 9-5 employees absolutely can make great things. And history is littered with the burnt-out husks of "hero" engineers working 120 hour weeks only to have their company fail and get sold for pennies on the dollar.

Re: Intel: Winning and Losing

#65

Post by kevvok »

acroyear wrote: post #16

Mr. Magoo-ism galore. Intel had constantly try to bring in visionaries, but failed over and over. With the exception of Jim Keller, Intel was duped into believing in incompetent people. At a critical juncture during the smart-phone revolution it was Mike Bell, a full-on Mr. Magoo. He never did anything after his stint with Intel worth mentioning - he was exposed as a pretender. Eric Kim would be another. Murthy Rendu…

> Murthy Renduchintala

He was a joke at Qualcomm before he went to Intel too. That Intel considered snagging him a coup was a consistent source of amusement.

Re: Intel: Winning and Losing

#66

Post by ethan_smith »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #6

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].

Intel selling XScale to Marvell in 2006 was their pivotal strategic error - they abandoned a viable ARM-based solution right before the smartphone explosion, betting everything on x86 compatibility. Atom's power inefficiency compared to ARM designs then left them completely unprepared for the mobile revolution, costing them the entire smartphone/tablet market.

Re: Intel: Winning and Losing

#67

Post by phire »

fidotron wrote: post #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 w…

> is they promoted the myth that ISA has no impact on performance

IMO, Intel (and AMD) did prove the impact of a legacy ISA was low enough to not be a competitive disadvantage. Not zero, but close enough for high-performance designs.

In fact, I actually think the need to continue supporting the legacy x86 ISA was a massive advantage to Intel. It forced them to go down the path of massively out-of-order μarches at a point in history where everyone else was reaping massive gains from following the RISC design philosophy.

If abstracting away the legacy ISA was all the massive out-of-order buffers did, then they would be considered to be nothing more than overhead. But the out-of-order μarch also had a secondary benefit of hiding memory latency, which was starting to become a massive issue at this point in history. The performance gains from this memory latency hiding were so much higher than the losses from translating x86 instructions, which allowed Intel/AMD x86 cores to dominate in the server, workstation and consumer computing markets in the late 90s and 2000s, killing off almost every competing RISC design (including Intel's own Itanium).

RISC designs only really held onto the low power markets (PDAs, cellphones), where simplicity and low power consumption still dominated the considerations.

------------------

What Intel might have missed is that x86 didn't hold a monopoly on massively out-of-order μarch. There was no reason you couldn't make a massively out-of-order μarch for a RISC ISA too.

And that's what eventually happened. Starting in the mid 2010s. We started seeing ARM μarchs (especially from Apple) that looked suspiciously like Intel/AMDs designs, just with much simpler frontends. They could get the best of both worlds, taking advantage of simpler instruction decoding, while still getting the advantages of being massively out-of-order.

------------------

You are right about Intel's arrogance, especially assuming they could keep a process lead. But the "x86 tax" really isn't that high. It's worth noting that one of the CPUs they are losing ground too, is also x86.

Re: Intel: Winning and Losing

#68

Post by duskwuff »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #22
igtztorrero wrote: post #3

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…

Quark/Edison was a truly inexplicable product offering. I have to wonder if Intel believed there was a market opportunity for "we want to build an embedded system, but all our existing code is on x86 and we don't want to port to ARM". (There wasn't - especially not as late as 2014.)

Re: Intel: Winning and Losing

#69

Post by [deleted] »

musicale wrote: post #63
ryao wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that IBM failed with the BIOS, since they assumed nobody could make a compatible machine without their authorization since they controlled the BIOS and the idea of a clean room reimplementation never dawned on them. It did dawn on Compaq. MCA came afterward.

> they assumed nobody could make a compatible machine without their authorization since they controlled the BIOS and the idea of a clean room reimplementation never dawned on them So you're saying that they were somehow unaware of how new BIOS implementations were used in CP/M to port it to new systems? And that they distributed the BIOS source code with every IBM PC... to make it harder for competitors to build comp…

[deleted]

Re: Intel: Winning and Losing

#70

Post by mattkevan »

georgeburdell wrote: post #53
mattkevan wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yah…

Nah I’ve been on both sides of the fence. 9-5ers may reliably accomplish tasks through superior discipline, but they don’t do the heroics that really move individual teams forward.

Confirmation bias. We only hear about the heroics that worked. Plenty of heroes end up in unmarked graves. Teams move forward through trust, clear goals and good processes. Individuals may want to be heroic once those elements are in place but it’s not going to work without.

Companies die when the sort of managers take over who see their job as to manage, taking pride in not knowing about the product or customers, instead of caring deeply about delivering a good product. The company may continue for years afterwards, but it’s a zombie, decaying from the inside.

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