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Intel: Winning and Losing

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Re: Intel: Winning and Losing

#71

Post by scrubs »

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…

In 80s-1995 spc, tqm, lean engineering where a thing ... think demming award or Malcolm baldridge national award. That thinking deals squarely with the morass.

Unfortunately business management succumbs too easily to short term profit (b/c of a tunnel vision on shareholder return) and trendiness. There are people in fashion who say of business: geez you gotta stand for something for more than 10 minutes. Get some class!

Re: Intel: Winning and Losing

#72

Post by scrubs »

bsder wrote: post #47
Demiurge wrote: 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…

> This is probably why having some churn with the outside world, and also understanding what is the periphery of the outside, unbiased opinion is, is very important. Maximally efficient is minimally robust. Squeezing every penny out of something means optimizing perfectly for present conditions --no more, no less. As long as those conditions shift slowly, slight adjustments work. If those conditions shift suddenly th…

Really love this point. Perfect optimization depends on maximal content knowledge which by construction we can only know what we know now.

Re: Intel: Winning and Losing

#73

Post by ryao »

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…

Your use of straw man arguments in response to a straightforward historical description is both inappropriate and condescending. You may think IBM’s executives were naïve, but that does not change the actual history of the IBM PC. IBM prioritized time-to-market by using off-the-shelf components and assumed their control of the BIOS would prevent compatible clones. That assumption was proven wrong when Compaq successfully did a clean-room implementation of the PC BIOS, without violating IBM’s IP. This is a well-documented part of computing history.

Re: Intel: Winning and Losing

#74

Post by scrubs »

aurizon wrote: post #18

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

Well not quite... Apple/next spent plenty of years not making money ... their major markets where students and graphics design which don't spent huge. Microsoft world was making piles of $ selling business apps.

Yes, they eventually got it right post-Newton after spending a lot of time on the outside of the sp500.

Re: Intel: Winning and Losing

#75

Post by rubatuga »

ethan_smith wrote: post #66
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.

Actually atom was very efficient, but they tended to pair it with a horribly inefficient southbridge that would idle at many times the full CPU power draw (2-3W or more)

Re: Intel: Winning and Losing

#76

Post by inkyoto »

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…

> […] they promoted the myth that ISA has no impact on performance […]

Once instructions get past the instruction decoder, they have not been x86 since Pentium Pro on the server and Pentium II on the desktop. AMD has made great strides in optimising the instruction decoder performance to minimise the translation overhead on most frequently used instructions, and the pathological cases such as 15-byte-long instructions are no longer in active use anyway. There are legacy instructions that are still there, but I don't think they affect performance as they are mere dead silicon that is getting rationalised with X86S, which culls everything non-64-bit.

A more solid argument can be made that x86 is register-starved with great implications for performance, and that is true, especially for 32 bits. It is true to a certain extent with the 64-bit ISA (32 GPR's is still better than x86-64’s 16 GPR's), but various SIMD extensions have ameliorated the pain substantially. The remaining stuff, such as legacy CISC direct memory access instructions… compilers have not been emitting that stuff for over twenty years, and they just take up space in the dead silicon, lonely waiting, and yearning for a faithful moment of somebody finally giving them a tickle, which almost never comes, so the legacy instructions just cry and wail in defeaning silence.

An ISA was a decisive and critical factor from the performance perspective in the 1970s-80s, and, due to advances in the last few decades, including in-core instruction fusion, register renaming, coupled with enormously large register files, out-of-order, as well as speculative execution, etc., it is no longer clear-cut or a defining feature. We now live in the post-RISC era where old and new approaches have coalesced into hybrid designs.

Personally, I have never been a fan of the x86 ISA, although less from the technical perspective[0] and for a completely different reason – the Wintel duopoly had completely obliterated CPU alternatives, leading the CPU industry to stagnate, which has now changed and has given Intel a headache of epic proportions and haemorrhoids.

[0] The post AVX-2 code modern compilers generate is pretty neat and is reassonably nice to look at and work with. Certainly not before.

Re: Intel: Winning and Losing

#77

Post by inkyoto »

phire wrote: post #67
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 p…

> In fact, I actually think need to continue supporting the legacy x86 ISA was a massive advantage to Intel.

I think this is a myth that Intel (or somebody else) has invented in an attempt to save face. Legacy x86 instructions could have been culled from the silicon and implemented in the software as emulation traps – this has been done elsewhere nearly since the first revised CPU design came out. Since CPU's have been getting faster and faster, and legacy instructions have been used less and less, the emulation overhead would have been negligible to the point that no one would even notice it.

Re: Intel: Winning and Losing

#78

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Intel: Winning and Losing

#79

Post by ewoodrich »

acroyear wrote: post #45
zozbot234 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

about a year after 'netbook's came out, the iPad was in the wild and it destroyed any chance of these ever catching on.. sure, they were cheaper, but the user experience on a tablet was just so much better. (and tablets got cheaper fast)

I basically only see them referenced mockingly these days but man I loved the netbook era. A 200 dollar computer dual booting Ubuntu and Windows XP (just to play Counter Strike 1.6 and Age of Expires) was a dream come true for high school me.

I got the original iPad as a graduation present and as futuristic as it was ended quickly lost its lustre for me thanks to Apple's walled garden.

Took a few more years until I was rocking Debian via Crostini on the first Samsung ARM Chromebook to scratch that low cost Linux ultraportable itch again (with about triple the battery life and a third as thick as a bonus).

Re: Intel: Winning and Losing

#80

Post by jbverschoor »

BirAdam wrote: post #50
jbverschoor wrote: post #5

Their domain name is probably most of their market cap

"They" in this case is just me, and I make very little money off of my writing. I write tech history because I want to, and there's little other reason.

Oh I meant Intel :)

Sorry for the confusion.

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