141–150 of 331 posts
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Why was larrabee considered a fiasco?
Because it failed in its intended goal, which was to create a viable competitor to AMD and Nvidia at the high-end of the GPU market.
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I’m skeptical. Apple’s bread and butter, as far as Macs go, is the MacBook Air. And by all accounts, they sell a lot of those, and will presumably sell even more, with better margins, now that they’ve gone ARM. Do they really want to undercut that with a cheaper laptop? I suppose it’s possible, if the volume/margins works out, but I’d bet they just keep plugging along with $999–$1500 13-inch laptops.
All fair points but I think that with higher margins it tips the balance towards market share growth. Key issues are 1) can they make an acceptable margin on a good $800 laptop and 2) can they genuinely significantly grow market share rather than lowering average selling price - i.e. can they maintain distinction between $800 and $1000 products. Given what we've seen them do on iPhone and iPad I bet then answer is ye…
https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-services/294637-2020-was-... >A few years ago, back in 2016, Intel did a “RIF” (reduction in force) of about 11%. Intel had previously done a significant reduction way back in 2006 of about 10% >In an industry that runs on “tribal knowledge” and “copy exact” and experience of how to run a very, very complex multi billion dollar fab, much of the most experienced, best talent walked o…
Management rule of thumb: For every % you cut from the bottom, you lose from the top. Cut 10% of workforce, and 10% of your best people say "yes" to the next headhunter trying to poach them.
The intuition is that older employees cost more and by cutting them you can reduce your payroll more significantly while doing what looks like smaller employee cuts from the outside. This is often viewed favourably by investors because on paper it doesn't seem as the company is stalling (head count is still high, costs are down). The obvious issue is that these older employees are not easily replaceable and you end up losing more velocity in the long run than originally anticipated.
The above is more applicable to traditional blue-chip businesses where workforce movements are more limited. For software engineering (which Intel is not really) your assumption is correct and once cuts are announced a lot of your great engineers will jump ship.
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First of all, ARM is already dominant on non-laptop mobile. Secondly, ARM is growing rapidly for workloads in places like AWS and many think there will be a lot of growth on-prem as well. Apple's symbolically important for Arm in the sense that it shows switching to a non-x86 architecture for a laptop is possible but they're fairly irrelevant from a volume perspective. If one assumes that x86 remains the dominant arc…
I don't know the history of non-laptop mobile CPUs. I assume they have pretty much almost all always been ARM. Please correct me if I'm misinformed. That hasn't factored into desktop/laptop considerations in the past. Currently, it seems to only factor into Apple's plans for unifying their OS X and iOS stack. ARM is growing in servers, but AMD is as well[0]. It's not clear though how either smartphone or server archi…
All kinds of things over the years. For example, Qualcomm's Snapdragon line.
And Intel was definitely pushing to get into mobile at one point. They made a big deal about processor compatibility from mobile up through the server. I still remember at one IDF, they made a big deal about how you wanted to run Intel for mobile (this was pre-iPhone) so that Flash would run the same everywhere.
I agree that it's hard to make predictions more than a few years out and certainly x86 has a lot of inertia. On the other hand, there's a lot more abstraction than there used to be and we know there's going to be a lot heterogeneity anyway (GPU, DPU, TPU, FPGA, SIMD instructions, etc.) given the slowing down of CMOS process scaling. So I don't think it's too big a stretch to imagine that we'll see a more varied processor landscape. (I expect ARM to gain share although I don't expect it to dominate on servers--though I have colleagues who do expect that to happen.)
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All fair points but I think that with higher margins it tips the balance towards market share growth. Key issues are 1) can they make an acceptable margin on a good $800 laptop and 2) can they genuinely significantly grow market share rather than lowering average selling price - i.e. can they maintain distinction between $800 and $1000 products. Given what we've seen them do on iPhone and iPad I bet then answer is ye…
I think there's an economic principle here (and I don't know the sign), but this is all assuming a frictionless vacuum - in practice, Apple cannot sell 25% more M1 Macs if they lower their price to $800, or whatever, since their marginal costs rise in that case (because TSMC is totally booked!).
Gelsinger was pushed out as CTO after horribly failing to address AMD's competitive threats. I have no idea how he wormed his way back in, but this does not bode well for Intel's future: Gelsinger is proof of the "Peter Principle", being promoted too high. EDIT: I was a bit harsh, toned it down. EDIT 2: This is probably petty, but I can't ignore the fact that there was a significant hubbub at Intel regarding him usin…
I doubt that anyone at Intel might be offended by the blessing of a wafers if it worked xD The stock jumped quite high though. Not sure if its because really bad ceo was replaced with slightly less bad one.
I'm not super sensitive to exactly who replaces Bob, though Pat seems like a decent choice having read about him now.
I will say I was ready to unload the shares if Bob was replaced with another MBA though. Having a non-engineer lead an organization like Intel was a disastrous choice and seriously makes me question the boards judgement.
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I think you are vastly underestimating how hard IT departments will kick you if you request or bring a device that cannot properly execute the company-critical legacy Windows x64 software. Like SAP, for example. (SAP is the largest non-American software company by revenue and does business management, workflow automation, and bookkeeping) My prediction is that outside of hipster startups, M1 will have no effect on bu…
Isn't sap a database? Why would you want users to run db on laptop, especially on windows?
Pat completely missed the boat on building a VMWare cloud when AWS started taking off. Can't say I'm enthused for Intel.
He recovered from the mistake. The drop in VMW share price on news that he's leaving shows what the market thinks of his affect on VMW value.