Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember when they bought a smart glasses company then refunded every buyer ever the full retail price. There hasn’t been an Intel acquisition that has worked out in some 20 years now it seems. Just utterly unserious people.
Isn't that true for virtually EVERY big tech merger? Like, which ones have actually worked?
Intel's Humbling
201–210 of 414 posts
Re: Intel's Humbling
#202I was a huge Intel fanboy for years...and then I got my first Windows Arm laptop (Lenovo X13s). Intel has a lot of catching up to do.
I have a pile of laptops including the x13s, and that part burns a good ~30W for a couple minutes, while running ~30% (or worse) slower, then thermally throttles and drops another ~30% in performance.
For light browsing it manages to stay under 5W and gets 10h from its 50Wh battery. This is also doable on just about any AMD or Mac laptop. The AMD machine I'm typing this on tells me I have more than 12 hours remaining and i'm sitting at 81% battery (67Wh). And this machine is a good 3x faster compiling code, or running simple benchmarks like speedometer when its plugged in or allowed to burn 35W. Except it also has a fan that turns on when its under heavy load to keep it from thermally throttling.
Yes the x13s is cute, it is a thin/light laptop and is probably the first windows on arm machine that isn't completely unusable. But, its going to take another leap or two to catch-up with current top of the line machines.
Everyone loves geekbench so, here is an obviously unthrottled x13s vs a similarly rated 28W AMD 7840U.
https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/21596449 https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/amd-ryzen-7-7840u
That Amd is 2x the single threaded perf, and 50% faster multithreaded, and anything graphics related is going to look even worse.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're missing the big one: they missed the boat on 64-bits. It was only because they had a licensing agreement in place with AMD that they were able to wholesale adopt AMD's extensions to deliver 64-bit x86 processors.
That's not at all what happened. Intel's 64-bit story was EPIC/IA-64/Itanium and it was an attempt to gain monopoly and keep x86 for the low-end. AMD64 and Itanic derailed that idea so completely that Intel was forced by Microsoft to adopt the AMD64 ISA. Microsoft refused to port to yet-another incompatible ISA. Had Itanium been a success then Intel would have crushed the competition (however it did succeed in killin…
On servers, 32 bit x86 was doing wonders for small workloads. AMD64 quickly chipped away at the places where 1-4 processor SPARC would have previously been used.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#204Intel is a product of corporate cancer that is management consulting.
What does this even mean? (not sarcastic)
Re: Intel's Humbling
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
I got curious about how ARM is doing in the data center and found this: >Arm now claims to hold a 10.1% share of the cloud computing market, although that's primarily due to Amazon and its increasing use of homegrown Arm chips. According to TrendForce, Amazon Web Services (AWS) was using its custom Graviton chips in 15% of all server deployments in 2021. https://www.fool.com/investing/2023/09/23/arm-holdings-data-...
ARM would be even more popular in the datacenter if getting access to Ampere CPUs was possible. I can get a top of the line Xeon Gold basically next day with a incredibly high quality out of band management from a reputable server provider. (HP, Dell). Ampere? Give it 6 months, €5,000 and maybe you can get one, from Gigabyte. Not known for server quality. (yes, I'm salty, I have 4 of these CPUs and it took a really l…
Re: Intel's Humbling
#206I am hoping Intel rights its wrongs so they can stay competitive. It takes a good amount of competition to keep businesses honest.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Was ARM really competitive until recently? Nope. Intel crushed them. Intel never "crushed" ARM. Intel completely failed to develop a mobile processor and ARM has a massive marketshare there. ARM has always beaten the crap out of Intel at performance per watt, which turned out to be extremely important both in mobile and data center scale.
I got curious about how ARM is doing in the data center and found this: >Arm now claims to hold a 10.1% share of the cloud computing market, although that's primarily due to Amazon and its increasing use of homegrown Arm chips. According to TrendForce, Amazon Web Services (AWS) was using its custom Graviton chips in 15% of all server deployments in 2021. https://www.fool.com/investing/2023/09/23/arm-holdings-data-...
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/14/google_prepares_its_o...
Re: Intel's Humbling
#208Everyone acts as though Intel should have seen everything coming. Where was AMD? Was AMD really competitive before Ryzen? Nope. Core 2 series blew them out of the water. Was ARM really competitive until recently? Nope. Intel crushed them. The problem for Intel is the inertia of laziness due to a lack of competition. I wouldn’t count them out just yet, however. The company’s first true swing at modern GPU was actually…
The curse of having weak enemies is that you become complacent. You're right: AMD wasn't competitive for an incredibly long time and ARM wasn't really meaningful for a long time. That's the perfect situation for some MBAs to come into. You start thinking that you're wasting money on R&D. Why create something 30% better this year when 10% better will cost a lot less and your competitors are so far behind that it doesn…
Re: Intel's Humbling
#209Intel's 2010 7.6B$ purchase of mcafee was a sign that Intel doesn't know what its doing. In the CEO's words: The future of chips is security on the chip. I was like no, no its not! I wanted them to get into mobile and GPUs at the time. Nvdia's market cap was about 9B at the time. I know it would have been a larger pill to swallow, and likely had to bid a bit more than 9B, but I thought it was possible for Intel at th…
There's definitely a lot that can be critiqued about that period. Famously they divested their ARM-based mobile processor division just before smartphones took off. The new CEO, as the article mentions, seems to have a lot more of a clue. We just hope he hasn't arrived too late.
a lot that can be critiqued about that period.
Like the time they appointed Will.I.Am?Re: Intel's Humbling
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's definitely a lot that can be critiqued about that period. Famously they divested their ARM-based mobile processor division just before smartphones took off. The new CEO, as the article mentions, seems to have a lot more of a clue. We just hope he hasn't arrived too late.
>Famously they divested their ARM-based mobile processor division just before smartphones took off. Wasn't that AMD (perhaps also AMD)? Qualcomm Adreno GPUs are ATi Radeon IP, hence the anagram.
I remember very well as back then I was working in University porting Linux to an Intel XScale development platform we had gotten recently.
After I completed the effort, Android was released as a public beta and I dared to port it too to that Development Board as a side project. I thought back then Intel was making a big mistake by missing that opportunity. But Intel were firm believers in the x86 architecture, specially on their Atom Cores.
Those little Intel PXA chips were actually very capable, I had back then my own Sharp Zaurus PDA running a full Linux system on an Intel ARM chip and I loved it. Great performance and great battery life.