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Intel Fights for Its Future

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Re: Intel Fights for Its Future

#161

Post by vram22 »

sitepodmatt wrote: post #58
pjmlp wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Europe, where most of us use pre-pay without major subsidies, everyone uses them until they break or get stolen.

I think that very dependent on the target demographic and country. Also definitely some delusion in it too, many people I know will go on about planned obsolescence and so forth in a put the world to right speech and then whip out the latest iPhone or Samsung flagship to call an Uber that they have on contract. Intel gave up too early in my opinion, the Zenfones (pre-Snapdragon) were great phones, I just don't think…

What was the difference between Zenfones pre-Snapdragon and post?

Re: Intel Fights for Its Future

#162

Post by huslage »

There are always missed opportunities in any business. Intel did not capture the mobile market, so what? There is no evidence that ARM-based servers from Qualcomm, or anyone else for that matter, will somehow make a dent in Intel's leadership in that space in the short to mid term. Not to mention that Intel has significantly diversified its product line and will continue to do so.

There is not a world where there will be one processor manufacturer. We will see multiple manufacturers on multiple architectures for as long as things continue to progress.

Intel may have a short-term existential threat, but that threat is minimal.

Re: Intel Fights for Its Future

#163

Post by ZenoArrow »

baybal2 wrote: post #137
ZenoArrow wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "If tomorrow 2 engineers, one from semi side, and one fromwebdev, will knock at the door of CEO with "I found a way to do things A and B 250 times better, but you have to scrap half of your business plan," a webdev will be heard, and semi guys not." What are you basing this assumption on? Have you worked for one of these companies? Do you know anyone that does? Also, regarding Microsoft, any suggestion that they're…

>Do you know anyone that does? Surely do, both MS and Amazon. >What are you basing this assumption on? It takes a giant effort for ordinary managerial cadres to wrap their mind around of what a web company is and learn the whole model of behavior expected from them. The few who manage to learn some basic technical disciplines and go up in ranks tend to overestimate the importance of their experience. You meet such pe…

> "Surely do, both MS and Amazon."

Thanks for confirming.

> "BTW, are you from Microsoft?"

No, I don't work for Microsoft. However, I have enough experience with their ecosystem to suggest that their revenue focus is not in web dev. Other products (such as Windows, Office, Azure and Xbox) are their prime source of revenue. Whilst I don't doubt they have plenty of web devs (TypeScript and VS Code both spring to mind as web-based tech from Microsoft), I wouldn't say that is their core competency, so...

> "a company whose topmost technical expertise is underhanded web programming"

... doesn't ring true. However, if you know people on the inside I'd be interested in knowing how the size of the web dev teams compares to other teams, such as the Xbox division.

Re: Intel Fights for Its Future

#164

Post by dgacmu »

baybal2 wrote: post #142
deepnotderp wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure the novumind chip has hard coded the Winograd 3x3 convolution algorithm.

You seem to be pretty knowledgeable in the subject. Are you someone working in the field? IC designer?

psst, click their username: "Founder of a deep learning chip startup called Vathys.ai (YC Winter 2018)."

:)

(Edited to answer the below question: Dave Andersen - http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dga/

I'm back at CMU full time, but was having too much fun at Google to quit entirely.)

Re: Intel Fights for Its Future

#165

Post by scarface74 »

ryandrake wrote: post #155
simonh wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’re already keeping phones until they break, by handing them down through the family. I’ve bought 5 iPhones and all but 2 of them are still in use. In fact the second one, a 3GS, was only fully retired at the beginning of last year. The upgrade cycle has really just been a process of filling up the market. In fact I’d argue there are still a lot of old devices still in use beyond an ideal lifespan. There’s still go…

Problem with mobile devices is they long outlast their manufacturer's software support. My iPad, for instance. The first device was announced in 2010, and software support ended with 5.1.1 in 2012. Two measly years of updates. This thing has not had an official update (including security updates) in nearly 6 years. Your 3GS hasn't been supported for 4 years. Whereas, I can keep a desktop computer for 20 years and upd…

Keep using a computer for 20 years? A 20 year old computer is not going to run the latest version of Windows.

Now I do have a 10 year old Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz with 4GB RAM, Gigabit Ethernet and a nice 1920x1200 display serving as a Plex Server. In day to day use, the only time I can tell the difference between that and my modern laptop is when I try to run too many things at once and that could be alleviated by upgrading the RAM to 8GB.

As far as the iPad 1st generation, it's true that you can't get software updates -- I have one too -- but you can still download the "last compatible version" of apps for it. I reset mine last year and re-downloaded and ran Netflix, Hulu, Crackle, Google Drive (for reading PDFs), Spotify, Plex, and all of Apple's iWork Suite.

It still supports AirPlay and prints to all of my printers. I can check my Exchange email at work. The browser on the other hand crashes constantly.

Re: Intel Fights for Its Future

#166

Post by flamedoge »

pjmlp wrote: post #148
flamedoge wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a lot of compiler works to enable.. C spec mandates fixed width numerics afaik.. try imagining 64bit division using 32bit.

I don't need to imagine it, I started programming on Z80. EDIT: Forgot to mention that C spec only specifies "at least X" sizes, there is no portability guarantee if the types from stdint.h aren't used. http://en.cppreference.com/w/c/language/arithmetic_types

well there is. if you used <= "at least" sizes.

Re: Intel Fights for Its Future

#167

Post by jcadam »

pjmlp wrote: post #96
golergka wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Singularity for apps has always hinged on write-once-run-everywhere. From app developer perspective, processor architecture is low on the list of the problems you have to solve to run anywhere. User-facing apps aren't written in C or anything that close to metal anymore; I suspect that most of the Java, Kotlin and Swift code is completely architecture agnostic: add new capability to the compiler, change the build c…

Even native languages close to the metal (Ada, Pascal, Basic, ...) don't have any big issue switching processors, unless inline Assembly is used. C and its derivatives (C++ and Objective-C) are the outliers thanks to implementation defined numeric types, the abuse in pointer tricks and casts.

I once had to help port a large system written in Ada from SPARC/Solaris to x64/RHEL. The only issues we rant into were predominately related to the endian difference between the two architectures, and that was really only due to the fact that our code did a lot of low-level bit manipulation :)

Re: Intel Fights for Its Future

#168

Post by slivym »

dmichulke wrote: post #126
hugs wrote: post #105

Years ago, during a fund-raising tour of Silicon Valley VC firms for my previous company, we also pitched Intel Capital (their in-house VC arm). Their feedback to our pitch was that our SaaS service was "too compute intensive" and therefore they passed..... Intel thought we used too many CPUs?! ..... All these years later, I'm still in disbelief. I do realize that VCs often are uncomfortable giving the real reason th…

Maybe the intention of the fund was to diversify - i.e., hedge their huge exposure to the CPU market by investing into totally different things, i.e., not you!

I knew a guy who was a technical advisor to Intel Capital (worked at Intel). They're not there to diversify, they use capital to advance their existing business strategy in key markets. They often take stakes in companies that Intel are partnering with on technical projects in order to gain some level of insight, control, and eventually to acquire the company if there's a strategic argument for it.

For example, a company might be developing some cool new IP that Intel is considering licensing or is licensing. Intel Capital will take a stake in the company, and then eventually might consider acquiring the company if they want to corner the technology or think it's cheaper than a long term licensing agreement.

Re: Intel Fights for Its Future

#169

Post by a1xndr »

vectorEQ wrote: post #59
DocTomoe wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also do not have a product for the server market. Yes, they have server-oriented processor families. No, after the storm that has been Meltdown/Spectre, none of these processor families are still considered "safe enough", even firmware-related fixes won't cut it there because the profitibality of a data center is calculated with TFLOPS/m^2 in mind. Even if profitiability was not an issue (=> government), they wo…

intel is just fine. spectre and meltdown were blown way out of proportion. almost every CPU to date has had similar vectors to exploit them or worse. if intelligence agencies don't know this they have shitty assurance and should get better. most agencies for high integrety systems wont have been using intel/amd as there are cpus out there (ibm for example) which offer much better assurance with regards to memory inte…

I don't see how Spectre and meltdown were blown way out of proportion? Google and Amazon seem to have treated them quite seriously.. Maybe they should have just closed their eyes. The solution to Spectre right now is "Don't do speculative execution". Meltdown exploits a pretty embarrassing bug in the hardware. One has to wonder how it got through all of the testing/review that must happen before a new design is sent off to a fab($$$). Don't forget that there are 30+ class action lawsuits filed against Intel due solely to these bugs.

Re: Intel Fights for Its Future

#170

Post by jcadam »

pjmlp wrote: post #148
flamedoge wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a lot of compiler works to enable.. C spec mandates fixed width numerics afaik.. try imagining 64bit division using 32bit.

I don't need to imagine it, I started programming on Z80. EDIT: Forgot to mention that C spec only specifies "at least X" sizes, there is no portability guarantee if the types from stdint.h aren't used. http://en.cppreference.com/w/c/language/arithmetic_types

Reminds me of the time I had to program a Z80-based controller board. It came with a non-standard C Compiler where integers were 16-bits long. Of course, I didn't realize this at first (I suppose I could have read the documentation, but...), so I had to figure it out for myself while debugging :)

It was my first time programming C on something that wasn't a 32 bit CPU :)

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