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What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

pcworld.com

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Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#111

Post by Traster »

gok wrote: post #49

Whining about "MBAs" is almost always technical person speak for general discontent about company direction, often from the non-business parts. You don't see complaints about CEOs of Apple, Google, or Microsoft much, though they all have MBAs.

The reason that people whinge about is MBAs is all in the name Masters in Business Administration. They're great at doing business administration. They can drive SG&A costs down to 7% of revenue or they can optimize your inventory strategy to make sure you've always already sold all your products before you have to pay to have them made. Stuff like that. Which has a role in the business. The problem is that that's not the priority of a business that's growing, that's the priority of a business that is shrinking or declining.

Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#112

Post by ksec »

supernova87a wrote: post #12

This is purely a total outsider's opinion, so I caveat that and please don't get all offended if I'm totally wrong. Sometimes it's really difficult to tell the difference between a crackpot theorist and a good equities analyst. Watching this guy's video, it's hard to tell which he comes off as more. He's just coherent and convincing enough that as an outsider I could believe his collection of observations. But the pr…

This is the same guy who loudly proclaims Apple moved away from Intel because of bugs in Skylake and subsequent (x)lake.

That is um..... a very CPU designer preoperative to say the least. And has been rebutted by other industry experts.

At the end of the day, none of this matters. Would better SMT performance, Single Thread Performance, Higher Clock Speed, AVX512, etc etc matter if Intel cant deliver?

It is also strange that he mentions die area concern. That is the least concern of Intel because they are vertically integrated. The cost accounting is entirely different to TSMC.

But yes, MBAs were the problem. It started when Andy Bryant became the Chairman and the Patrick Gelsinger was pushed out.

Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#113

Post by murgindrag »

Majromax wrote: post #90
murgindrag wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sold, and not sold. Having parsed terabytes of JSON, I was impressed by your work. Regexps and other operations are common-place, and if libraries like yours were in broad use, I could definitely see the appeal. I'm sold on this as a technical pathway to performance. Problem is, I do it in Python. I have a hard time laying out the breadcrumbs between simdjson and hyperscan, and practical, general-purpose code run…

> Where Intel had great theoretical performance, but software didn't keep up? > For this to make a dent, Intel would need to hire a teach of engineers so Firefox and Chrome both took advantage of the new instructions. That's more or less Intel's standard practice with its Intel compiler suite and MKL-and-similar libraries. If there are performance gains from SIMD being left on the table, some of it is on Intel for no…

(1) Most software isn't built with the Intel compiler suite or the MKL-and-similar-libraries.

(2) Even if Firefox/Chrome were built with those, they JIT Javascript. It's the JIT that matters, not what compiles the browser.

Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#114

Post by duhast »

dijit wrote: post #42
BeetleB wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The previous CEO, who was a process engineer, was the one who brought the current CEO to Intel. It is widely believed the reasons for his firing were merely a pretext - they felt he was performing poorly and wanted to find an excuse to get rid of him. His focus definitely wasn't on CPUs - just look at all the acquisitions under his watch, and the focus away from CPUs into everything else (AI, autonomous vehicles, etc…

The previous CEO was trying to diversify the company because CPU dominance has diminishing returns. Obviously this has backfired tremendously, as we now see the rise of ARM in the processor space and even AMD to conquer x86. But intel still make the best consumer networking cards! For whatever that is worth.

> But intel still make the best consumer networking cards! For whatever that is worth.

Could you be more specific?

Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#115

Post by jeffffff »

KMag wrote: post #61
glangdale wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Francois is a smart guy, but there's a range of opinions on the matters he raises. We argue a good deal on Twitter ("constructive confrontation" between former Intel Principal Engineers :-) ). He put together the video pretty quickly so don't dismiss it just for lack of polish. Personally, I argue with him a lot on AVX-512. I think AVX-512 is a Good Thing (or will be shortly - the first instantiation in Skylake Serve…

I've worked on a project to compile a domain-specific description language down to both SIMD (by using Intel SPMD Program Compiler) and GPGPU (by using CUDA and OpenCL) Monte Carlo simulation code. We also have a Scala/Java interpreter for debugging. Are there workloads that benefit from very wide SIMD vectors that aren't good fits for GPGPUs, as long as the GPUs support 64-bit floats close enough to IEEE-754 for you…

simd is a better fit than gpu for a lot of data warehousing workloads where you aren't doing much computation on each individual value and it's not worth the overhead of sending the data to the gpu. also true for search index performance optimization.

Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#116

Post by fomine3 »

dathinab wrote: post #54

I'm not knowing how much of this things are true, but isn't it ironic that AMD has more benefits from SMT because they have less pipeline optimizations (and similar), but exactly this pipeline optimizations (and similar) seem to be at least partially at fault for some of the Specter style attacks and make it harder to put more cores into the system (as this additional optimizations are likely need more silicon space.…

Intel's latest Comet Lake supports per-core HT enable/disable, and supports per-core frequency long before. But I don't know how it works well by cooperating to OS

Re: What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads

#117

Post by markus_zhang »

Jonnax wrote: post #7
ENOTTY wrote: post #2

Link to the video that the article is summarizing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiKjzeLco6c The creator's Twitter can be found here https://twitter.com/FPiednoel

https://twitter.com/FPiednoel/status/1290874265705697280?s=1... Looks like his video is him promoting himself to investors to try to get himself on the Intel board of directors.

That's fair. I mean if he wants to change that he has to be in the board. But I think investors like less risky ways to make revenue (i.e. by cutting costs)
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