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Intel's disruption is now complete

jamesallworth.medium.com

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Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#251

Post by djmips »

whack wrote: post #194

This is a controversial opinion, but I don't agree with the idea that big corporations should make an entry into every single adjacent market. If the company has core expertise and advantages that can deliver a decisive win in a known-lucrative market, then it's a no brainer. But if that's not the case, why run around chasing shadows everywhere, instead of focusing on harvesting the markets where you're already winni…

Hmmm. I do not agree because this is very much an unless they succeed kind of parable and then you can spin it another way. Apple is now a chip company? I guess avoid apple because them re-inventing themselves all the time is your worst nightmare as an investor.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#252

Post by CountSessine »

p_l wrote: post #61
_0w8t wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Samsung has the same incentives. But their CPUs are far behind Apple.

Samsung chip division doesn't have guaranteed "buyer" or option to build SoC specifically for given product (even if usually you can bet on next generation Galaxy device as your target, you still have to design as if you were selling to open market - and that means less option to, for example, throw a lot of memory/cache resources that have been the main differentiator of Apple chips - which started from the same des…

which started from the same design as Exynos

Apple was actually the one designing those cores in the Exynos - up until and including the Exynos 4000. That was when Apple decided to sever ties with Samsung and stopped designing cores for them and Samsung had to go back to stock ARM designs with the Exynos 5000. That was why the 5000 series sucked so badly - Samsung lost access to those Apple/Intrinsity juiced cores. It’s also what prompted Samsung to open SARC in Austin.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#253

Post by BurningFrog »

VHRanger wrote: post #121
notSupplied wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a theory about why turf wars like this happens: the more successful and wealthy an entity, the greater opportunity there is for a manager to take wealth instead of make it. When you’re scrappy and broke, the only path to success is to make the company successful. When the company is rich and multitudinous, an individual can gain more from politics and turf wars rather than actually trying to push an already hi…

That's more dependent on a firm's monopoly power than scale or wealth. If you're in a competitive market you're forced to innovate. If you're a monopolist you can just sit there and extract wealth. Which Intel was for a while. By the way, your little theory has support and a name, it's the resource curse in political economics.

Also wanted to mention the resource curse.

When billions are raining from the sky, whether you do good work or not, the rational plan is to fight over those free resources, rather than work to create new ones.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#254

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

djmips wrote: post #240
notSupplied wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a theory about why turf wars like this happens: the more successful and wealthy an entity, the greater opportunity there is for a manager to take wealth instead of make it. When you’re scrappy and broke, the only path to success is to make the company successful. When the company is rich and multitudinous, an individual can gain more from politics and turf wars rather than actually trying to push an already hi…

I agree with you and a lot of the things people who are responding are saying but the one thing that keeps popping in my head is that Apple who is disrupting in this case isn't exactly the lightweight scrappy contender as put forth in the parables and anecdotes. If the hypothesis is true for Intel why is giant Apple not suffering from the same mercenary middle management / toxic political BS?

While Steve Jobs was alive, he served as Apple's lodestone and BDFL. It's only been 9 years since his passing, so any rot that might exist probably wouldn't have grown enough (taking into account their culture of secrecy as well) to be externally visible.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#255

Post by fsloth »

haramboy wrote: post #201
paganel wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An exception might be SpaceX where you have a strong dictator at the top I think a similar thing is happening at Amazon (the strong dictator stuff, I mean), and it's my hunch that Google has started following Intel's trajectory, they just haven't realised it just yet.

Similarly in US politics. And before we get emotional, how is it different from those examples?

A company and a sovereign state are completely different things.

Both have politics since they are structures made of humans.

But they are completely different.

A company is a legal entity functioning within the framework of the legislation of a state, to start with.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#256

Post by my123 »

raverbashing wrote: post #52
jeffbee wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still waiting for my M1 to show up but from studying the details that other people have commented on, it's clear that Apple is slathering on the microarchitectural resources that both Intel and AMD are stingy with. Their core has a gigantic L1 instruction cache, rather a lot of L1 TLB entries (4x more than Intel), large(r) pages by default, and many other aspects. L1 TLB entries in particular are a well-known pro…

Interesting that you mention page size, IMHO 4k was small even 10 years ago. Though of course the next bump is 4M which I think might be too big for most apps Apparently ARM supports 4KB, 64KB and 1MB (I just googled that) Also maybe all the x86 crud might be finally taking its toll (and not just the ISA but all the cruft that got on top of it for 40yrs+ like legacy buses and functionalities, ACPI, or even the overen…

16KB page size is what arm64 macOS and iOS on Apple A9 onwards use.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#257

Post by alisonkisk »

texasbigdata wrote: post #242
ben_w wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been thinking similar thoughts about politics. Normal countries can turn into superpowers, and then it looks (from my non-politically astute eyes) as if politicians fight for power over the nation at the expense of the nation itself, and in so doing turn the superpower back into a normal nation.

An additional set of guesses to add on: some individuals are temperamentally better at the extraction than production, prefer it, are more able to exercise deceit, and have less regret or self shame.

That's obvious but doesn't explain why some organizations are vulnerable to it while others aren't.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#258

Post by texasbigdata »

whycombagator wrote: post #37
SoSoRoCoCo wrote: post #20

As someone who worked on Intel's phone chip: we definitely didn't win it. We fucked it up twelve ways to Sunday. Why: giant egos. There were turf wars between Austin, Santa Clara and Israel over who would design it, and the team that won out had long since lost its best principle engineers and had no clue how to spin the architecture to meet the design win. Otellini's hindsight hedge is pure spin: we knew the landing…

> There were turf wars between Austin, Santa Clara and Israel over who would design it, and the team that won out had long since lost its best principle engineers So which team/location ended up winning?

Wherever the teams at AMD, NVIDIA, Appme and TMSC work out of.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#259

Post by CountSessine »

dboreham wrote: post #2

What's the real reason Apple can design a higher performance device? Better fab process? ARM ISA is fundamentally faster? Graph conveniently omits AMD who now beat Intel using the same ISA but different process.

Part of it is just that Apple spent a bunch of time hiring the right people and making the right acquisitions.

Another part of it is just that designing a CPU with good single threaded performance is hard and costs a lot of die area and no one else in the ARM world was incentivized to do this - who needs a smartphone with that kind of performance (I know, I know - all of us, now)? But Apple also makes IPads which are kind of a bridge device - mobile and battery-powered, but also big and something people might want to do real work on.

I’m also going to say that I think Apple is still alone among the phone manufacturers in recognizing that smartphones are software platforms, not simply hardware devices. I think they have a special appreciation for the enabling power of a more capable CPU.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#260

Post by vagrantJin »

VHRanger wrote: post #121
notSupplied wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a theory about why turf wars like this happens: the more successful and wealthy an entity, the greater opportunity there is for a manager to take wealth instead of make it. When you’re scrappy and broke, the only path to success is to make the company successful. When the company is rich and multitudinous, an individual can gain more from politics and turf wars rather than actually trying to push an already hi…

That's more dependent on a firm's monopoly power than scale or wealth. If you're in a competitive market you're forced to innovate. If you're a monopolist you can just sit there and extract wealth. Which Intel was for a while. By the way, your little theory has support and a name, it's the resource curse in political economics.

Countries with lots of minerals in Africa/ South America can tell you stories about the resource curse.
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